Chapter Text
Saturday November 3, 1979
What a waste of a cold Pepsi, Magnus thought, as he sipped his own soda. Currently, against the backdrop of a blisteringly sunny afternoon, sickly sweet soda syrup was quickly drying on the head of some poor man.
Some poor man who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Some poor black man…… which apparently justified some white guy’s desire to dump his 29 cents cup of soda on the man’s head.
“What do you think you’re doing in here, you colored swine. Don’t you got your own milkshake bars to stink up?”
The white man was growling over the still-dripping stranger. Though both were furious, neither made a gesture. The tension in the air bound everyone with ropes, even the spectators. Magnus had a desperately bubbling desire to mention to the man that this was not technically a milkshake bar. He’d frequented this establishment a few times since entering Greensboro, North Carolina. It only served your standard three flavors.
Just before Magnus could say anything, which would’ve irrevocably made the entire situation worse, some friends of the soda-throwing-man burst through the door. “What we got in here? Some black man who thinks we want his damn money?”
The newcomer sported a tuff of red hair, a vibrant color, that only 200 years earlier, would’ve labeled him as the minority. Ireland had only recently shed its prejudiced labels.
“I didn’t mean nothing by it,” the man said. It was a perfect combination of monotony and cowering. Obviously theatrical, but it was how it was in the United States. Black men faked fear and white men fake superiority. “I just wanted a nice lunch before my shift at the Factory.”
“Yeah, but ain’t there plenty of old diners down by the rail? Why you come all the way up here?”
The man, his skin prematurely aged from poorer living conditions, gestured to the senior woman beside him. “I came to eat with my mama. She’s employed by a family up the road, just someone to help with the laundering and such.”
The wrinkled woman, much too old to be working full hours, or at least in Magnus’s opinion, never spoke. She kept her head down on her cracked hands, scarred from washing other’s clothes and raising other’s babies.
The man dripping with Irish heritage clapped his buddy on the shoulder. “I bet he’s lying. I bet he came up here to flirt with the waitress. You know how them type are. Cain’t keep their hands to their own women.”
As if summoned by angelic divinity, the one waitress came out of the kitchen, balancing a plate of chicken tenders and a large serving of collard greens.
“Hey, Angie, this N***** been bothering you?”
“Buster, why you here? I told you last time to get out and stop bugging me while I’m at work.” Angie ceased her pursuit to the corner of the room, where Magnus waited not-so-patiently for his chicken tenders and collards. This spurred a whole hullabaloo of flirting and fighting. Buster making comments about Angie’s skirt. Angie trying to defend that the gentleman still covered in soda hadn’t done anything wrong. Irish refugee laughing and tripping the ancient woman as she got up to depart.
Magnus sighed. He’d accepted he’d never get his meal about five minutes ago. It didn’t make watching this endeavor any easier. He finally just agreed with himself that the best solution would be to just slip past the event and continue on with his day.
Magnus wasn’t completely sure how he ended up in the middle of North Carolina. There had definitely been alcohol involved at some point, probably an aged brandy, hopefully, a French aged brandy. Those could get Magnus to go just about anywhere. He remembered taking a train out of Penn Station, a rickety sleeper car transfer at Union Station. And voilà, arrival in Greensboro, North Carolina, a booming warehouse town, filled with everything one could expect from a pocket of Southern American. Good food, loud church bells, and enough racial tension for the entire continent. Not that the Northern cities were much better. He’d seen racial discrimination dictate those places just as much. Magnus had lived in New York for over a century, with occasional trips to London to spy on the Herondale family. Though, he’d never admit it to Tessa. Little Stephen Herondale was growing up to be a charmer, just like all the other Herondales before him.
“No colored patrons.”
Magnus turned to address the woman at the front desk of his bread and breakfast. He’d run into the same problem when he stumbled in here two days ago, still smelling of that fine brandy. Or maybe it had been whisky? One would never know.
He gave a glittering smile to the desk attendant, a younger woman with wire-rimmed glasses and a pudgy nose. “I’m white, ma’am.”
She scoffed, obviously neither charmed nor gullible. “What you think I am? Blind? I can see you ain’t.”
“My father was white.” Step father, to be more precise, but inside every half lie was a half-truth. Besides, his biological father could change his race, shape, and probably dick size at will. It’s very possible his father had been a boring white man when Magnus was conceived.
“Well that’s nice for you Sir, but your mama sure wasn’t.”
Magnus could argue this. Fight with the woman who was just doing what she was paid to do. As someone who was half-Asian, Magnus fell onto a weird grey area in this whole race debacle. Some people thought he was white. Some people didn’t. Some people thought he was from countries that didn’t even exist. Those were Magnus’ favorite people, who would listen to him craft elaborate farces about a fake Eurasian country, nestled between Andorra and Tajikistan. But Magnus was tired. He’d gotten little sleep the night before, and without his chicken tenders, he hadn’t eaten since the night before too. So, with one hand behind his back, Magnus flicked his fingers, just enough that minuscule blue sparks burned from his fingertips, casting a gentle glamor over himself while clouding the mind of the secretary.
“Are you sure?” Magnus asked the woman.
She gave a few shakes of her head, but finally with a heartfelt apology, she allowed Magnus to proceed to his room. He could hear her continued regret at misidentifying Magnus as a nonwhite, but that only made him more exhausted. When she’d thought he was partially black, it had been nothing but animosity. Now that she thought he was white, she was ready to kowtow and spit shine his retro saddle oxfords.
The South wasn’t stereotyped for being an exhausting place, but Magnus figured that at least Greensboro needed to update their tourism pages. The place was a headache inducing explosion waiting to happen.
After a proper rest and filling breakfast of grits and eggs, Magnus felt a cheerier mood the following Saturday morning. He’d gotten up with the sunrise, very much out of his usual, which was predominantly dictated by going to sleep when the sun rose, not waking up. Still, a hot breakfast and a morning walk could do a man wonders.
“I really must make a habit of this,” he said to himself. He’d followed no path, as he possessed no map of the city, and was just content to breathe the autumn air.
A frolic of teenage girls suddenly pushed past him, running with their skirts trailing behind. They chattered as they gapped, and one turned around to shout an apology to Magnus, for bumping into him, before turning back to her giggling friends.
“Ahh to be young again,” Magnus said, chuckling at his own joke. He could barely remember when he’d been a literal teenager.
“Ain’t that the truth?” called an old man, rocking on a porch chair.
Magnus had come through some smaller shops into a tightly packed residential area. Lined row houses curved with the streets, painted in simple tan hues, spotted with the occasional canary shutters and robin’s egg curtains. An elder gentleman, a jar of sweet tea balanced on the arm of his rocker, gestured to the gaggle of girls growing smaller in the distance.
“I remember being like them, off to get into all kinds of trouble, ignoring my mama and daddy, tossing aside those books for a good time on a Saturday.”
“If only we appreciated our youth while we had it,” Magnus said, sharing a jovial smile with the man. It was a good joke for them both, as the old man didn’t see Magnus as much older than those girls, and Magnus knew he was older than the man could ever fathom.
“Yeah, but them girls are using their youth a bit differently than I did. And good on them for that. They gonna make a difference this time around.”
Magnus raised a questioning eyebrow, which in turn, made the man gape.
“You ain’t seen all those flyers being passed around?”
And just as the man asked, he reached for the stack of newspapers at his side, joints popping as he took hold of thin flyer and held it out for Magnus to read. It wasn’t much, in the way of graphic design. Magnus had viewed grander creations back during his life in Paris. Or, lives as he should say. He lived far too many in that city of light and love. The flyers for the salons had been fabulous, decorated in swirling inks that he knew for a fact had inspired Picaso. The man had said as much when he dined with Magnus in Amsterdam a decade back.
The words, “Death to the Klan” lined the top of the flyer, printed in blocky bold letters. Two pictures of protesters nested in the middle, with details sprinkled around the sides like a clock. It formed a menacing cascade of information.
“It’s today,” Magnus said, more to himself than to his new companion.
“That’s right. It’s what them girls were in a hurry to go see. It’s just right up the road here. Just take a left up by the All Nation Pentecostal Holiness Church and you’ll be right in the ruff of it.”
It was then that Magnus actually decided to study his surroundings. He’d contently wandered, nonchalantly humming a tune that no one besides himself would’ve been familiar with. Who needed to notice details when one was busing enjoying the moment of their life? Well, Magnus noticed now. He was in the midst of an African American housing district, obvious from both the old man and the group of girls. All the neighboring peoples were African American, from the woman tending to her flower patch to the boys playing with toy stick swords in the road. And since Magnus had wandered in here with no concern to glamour his appearance, those around him must just have perceived him as a light-skinned black man. Albeit, with cat eyes, dazzling cat eyes if Magnus did say so himself, but cat eyes nonetheless.
Flicking his fingers into his pockets for the briefest of seconds, he faded his pupils to a human hazel shading, hoping the old man’s own eyesight wasn’t good enough to note the transformation.
“I didn’t even know. I’m from out of town.”
Protests weren’t uncommon in the tension of America. The 1960’s had been a rakish explosion of blood and discrimination that had wracked every city in the United States. He knew it from his own New York City, and as sad as it was, it wasn’t a new occurrence. Race riots had been occurring in American since its birth, the spirit of Nat Turner fighting even after death. Though, Magnus meant that very literally. Traveling through Virginia, Magnus had made a point to visit old Nat. He had eyes all over that Shadow Market. If you were looking to purchase right hands of avenged murderers, he was the ghost with the most, as Magnus liked to say.
“Well you better make a point to check it out. I’d go myself if my left knee won’t so banged up. My son took his wife today. Made a date of the whole ordeal. It makes me proud, seeing them young’uns marching for our rights.”
Thanking the man for his company, as well as the flyer, which he insisted Magnus keep, Magnus headed on his way. Only after just a block, the crowd began to thicken, flowing like a river into densely packed throngs of protesters. Children stood on lawns, clinging to the legs of their aunts and mothers, while older teenagers and men with curved backs and canes flowed into the streets. Phrases erupted into the air, pushing past the incessant chatter.
Death to the Klan
Rights for all Blacks
Workers for Unions
Many yelled the words with such force it felt like the concrete shook under Magnus’s heels. Others whispered them as softly as a prayer, hoping their god would hear and aid them. A few protesters lugged signs, plasterboard nailed to rail thin poles, declarations of freedom and socialism painted in reds and blacks. Men, as well as women, marched in groups, led by organizers with white banners advocating for the Workers’ Viewpoint Organization. The energy crackled through the air like live electric wires, left open to the rain. Amplified by broken hearts, broken backs, and broken shackles, the crowd stomped in unison. Towards the front of the riot stood two individuals, as stern as they were proud. A man and a woman, each brandishing a sign. They called the crowd to order with chants of unions and equality. Both revealed no fear. Their eyes glistened with true belief in their cause.
“Even Lilith’s own joined us?”
Magnus turned his chin, just so slightly that he could glance at the man who’d come up behind him. He was often required to look down to meet another man’s gaze. He’d inherited his grand-father’s gape and height, but even still, this man was rather short of stature.
“You Nephilim can’t keep all human affairs to yourself,” he said with a grimace, turning away from the recently appeared Shadowhunter. Wiggling his elbow awkwardly between the men in front of him allowed Magnus to flow upstream through the crowd.
“No interest in chatting Warlock?”
Magnus sighed, pivoting and allowing his coattails to swirl impressively. As the silk settled at his waist, he studied the Shadowhunter who’d managed to follow his ascent through the crowd. Truly this had been Raziel’s intent, grace-gifted Nephilim stalking warlocks through riot-rushed streets.
“I’ve often found that discourse with Shadowhunters leads to more headaches than not.”
The man shrugged. “We can agree to disagree, but let’s just say I’m off duty today.”
Magnus scoffed, so loud the woman in front of him glared at the speech that had interrupted the speech of the leading protester. “Shadowhunters are never off duty. Oddly enough, you all seem to be the worst at honoring religious holidays. I’ve seen packs of you mow down Morax demons on Christmas Eve, and two parabatai team up against a Du'sien on the first night of Ramadan. You should file a complaint with the hire ups, maybe form a union of sorts. They’re quite popular nowadays.”
Though, they’d been much more celebrated during the early 1900’s. Not that Magnus remembered much of those years. He’d only arrived in New York a decade prior, with frequent trips to assess the health of a certain annoying and handsome London Shadowhunter. One of his first decisions had been proprietor of a speakeasy. Absinthe had been his loving mistress then.
The Shadowhunter rolled his eyes but remained in his tense posture. From the tight t-shirt to the loose denim overalls, he exuded the air of “100% confident I could kill you.” Even the bulge of a stele was easily noted in the front pocket of the overalls. There was no doubt he also carried an array of seraph blades.
“Why you think I’m here? Look around. Today, we are making history.”
Despite the little space offered in the crowd, the man spread his arms wide, turning his face up towards the sun. “I used to sit on my father’s knee, just as he sat on his father’s knee, and hear stories of freedom, always coming, always right around the corner. When we’d visit Idris, it was like peering into Paradise. No one noted the comings and goings of the Strifecounte family. No one gave a hoot if my dad spoke openly during Council, if my mom chaperoned my sister and one of the white Penhallow sons.” He dropped his arms to his side, both hands tightening into fists right as the roar of the crowd rang in chorus.
Death to the Klan
“I want America to be Idris, and I refuse to put my future son on my knee with false promises I cain’t honor.”
Unite the unions
Possessed by crowd mentality, both the Shadowhunter and various members of the crowd tossed their Newsboys hats into the air, both chant and speech climaxing at the same moment.
Until the crowd silenced under the roar of an engine.
Magnus turned just in time to witness a red pickup truck pulling in front of the crowd. Hoisted on either side of the truck bed were two blazing Dixie flags. Making a rather dangerous sharp turn, considering there were multiple patrons in the bed of the truck as well as how close the tires came to the front row of the protesters, the truck erupted in honks.
“What’s going on you N*****? Get the hell back to work!” One of the men in the bed of the truck, coincidentally enough the same man Magnus had noted in the diner who’d favored his Irish heritage, laughed.
“We ain’t gonna give you no handouts when you all broke and poor.”
His buddy clapped him on the shoulder. “It’s not like they need money anyhow. They just gonna waste it on booze and cigarettes,” the friend said, gripping the pole of the closest Dixie flag.
“We have a permit to be here.”
The stern leader, this protest having been born of his own dreams and acts, looked up into the eyes of the two in the truck bed. His chin was steady as he lifted a copy of his police filing. “Read it if you want, but we have God’s right to be here, meeting and talking with our own. This isn’t a place for you.”
The passenger window rolled down, thought the face of the ones inside were unknown to Magnus. The Shadowhunter beside him spit, mumbling something about that “damn Elsner boy.”
“You ain’t got God’s right to do nothing! Now go home before we run your asses over!”
The timid mumbles of the crowd transformed, quickly erupting into bulwark. It was a bustling of noise, eclipsing any possibility for Magnus to discern one comment from another.
“We read your damn flyers,” the Irish guy finally yelled, the elevation of the truck bed giving him the advantage to be heard. “You called for people to kill! Death of the Klan. That’s what it says, for all your N**** who cain’t read. That’s threat of murder, meaning we have the right to protect ourselves.”
A small fleet of vehicles crawled into the alley at snail’s pace. Two unmarked white vans and another truck brandishing a Dixie flag stickered the length of the rear window. They pulled up behind the red truck. The smoke of idling engines made the air taste of dirt and fire. A man stood in the truck bed, arms crossed over his broad chest, the glittering of a gold cross necklace reflecting in the late morning sunshine.
The protest leader’s posture never faltered. It was if he hadn’t even noted the arrival of more adversaries. “We submitted our protest route to the police. They saw our flyers. We abided by the proper rules. You can’t stop us.” He attempted to retain order, despite the fact the original truck was arm’s reach from his chest. He bore into the blue and green eyes of the rogue Klansmen, now a caravan instead of a single vehicle, holding up what had been intended as a peaceful protest.
“Oh yeah?” Called a voice from inside one of the vans, “You asked for the Klan. Now you got ‘em!”
Gunfire rebounded across the townhouses, white haze like overcast around the first leg of protesters. Screams, as piercing as the gun shots that continued to erupt, intermingled with calls of fleeing. Mothers scooped up the little ones, shoving them behind bushes and dumpsters. Men and women alike clawed at every townhouse door, whether they lived there or not, hasty lines rubbernecking as hoards of civilians invaded homes of friends and family to cower under kitchen tables.
Raising a left hand to his chest, blue sparks jumped between Magnus’s pinky and index finger. Instantly, the smoke cleared. In its stead, a bloody trail painted itself. Men, women, children, all wailing. A black man, as bulky as an ox, tackled the Irish guy, pulling him from the truck bed. Two punches to the head was all it took for the man to pass out, but no one brings fists to a gun fight. A rifle poked out of the crack of the driver’s side window, aiming with the humongous man’s temple. One shot was all it took to promise that ox of a man would never again wake up.
“Where are the demons?”
The Shadowhunter crouched at Magnus’s side as the protesters parted around them like a rushing river. “There have to be demons involved in this. The Klan did some black magic to summon Agramon, or perhaps Moloch.” His hand twitched to his back pocket, where Magnus would’ve bet money he housed a multitude of creative and arcane weapons.
The wind blew Magnus’s hair, wind mixed with gun smoke and blood. There were so many substances that weren’t meant to live on the winds. Despite how deeply Magnus wished for demonic activity to explain this, he knew the reality.
“There’s no demonic magic here. I would be able to sense it. This isn’t the work of demons. This, dear Angel, is the work of the people you’re charged with protecting.”
Another wave of gunfire burst from the truck window. One of the men must have reloaded. Using the same trick, Magnus cleared the air of smoke. He almost regretted doing so, when he revealed a middle-aged man, wisps of grey edging his hairline, clutching a teenage girl in his arms.
Holes littered her back as chunks of her lungs and diaphragm oozed onto the grieving father’s white button-down.
The Shadowhunter man, just barely old enough to be considered one, raced forward. Seraph blades wouldn’t help. And pulling a broadsword from his pantleg would be near unexplainable, but he was the Angel’s chosen. That came with some gifts.
As another gun barrel revealed itself out of the passenger window of a van, the Shadowhunter dived just in time to knock a woman to the ground, two bullets searing into his forearm. The woman squealed, but gratefully took off running to the nearest house, where a woman sharing her likeness beckoned to her from a second story window.
“Where’s your police approval now!?” Screamed the only man left in the bed of the truck, one of the flags fluttering in his grip.
Not here.
That was the answer, Magnus realized. The organizer of the protest had painstakingly gone through all the correct channels to get approval for this march. There’d been no violence planned. There’d been no weapons of any kind allowed. It was intended as a gathering of black men and women, all aching for equality, all of whom were now fleeing for their lives. The police had a legal obligation to protect approved protests.
The police were notably absent.
As Klansmen safe inside a vehicle fired on a crowd of unarmed men, women, and children.
The Shadowhunter finally arrived at the edge of the worst chaos, where those who had chosen to fight were gathered, so the rest could flee. Partnering next to humans, he acted as the shield his body allowed him to be. Gunshots still hurt Nephilim, but he’d recover. A few iratze, maybe an appointment with a Silent Brother. He’d heal by the end of the week.
It was why he took the responsibility of reaching inside the truck. His hand clasped onto the barrel of the rifle, ripping it out of the arms of the Klan. He struck the metal against the tire rim, dinting the barrel into an unusable husk.
Another individual, a young man with coal-stained hands, gripped the edge of the remaining flag pole. He yanked it out of its holster, letting the Dixie flag flutter to the blood-streaked roadway.
“Damn, these N****** be crazy,” yelled the man in the truck bed, huddling in the center as hands reached for him from all sides. The scene reminded Magnus of a painting he’d once gleamed on the streets of Milan, being auctioned by one of the favored painters of the House of Stforza. A man had stood on hardened lava, naked and reaching for the dissipating holy light as devilish hands burst forth from the ground to clamp onto the man’s ankles.
The kickback of the engine was a bizarrely normal sound amongst the still resonating wails. The truck accelerated in reverse, nearly taking out the closest of the two vans, then turned with precision to fly off down the highway. Without any encouragement, the other drivers threw their gears into drive to join their retreating leader. The grey gust of burnt petrol was the only lingering presence of the Klan.
People continued to howl, some in heartbreak, some frantically seeking out others, some because their arms were partially severed from their body.
“If Catarina was here…” Magnus mumbled to himself, kneeling down to help one such man. His shoulder was disjointed into bone splinters, the whole area from chest to elbow somewhere between the texture of mashed potatoes and child’s molding clay. Boot prints coated his shirt. He’d been unable to keep up with the initial mob, having fallen under the hooves of fleeing protesters who hadn’t even noted the man they’d all accidentally doomed.
Without a concern for who saw him, Magnus placed one hand on the man’s neck and one on the shoulder. The man grit his teeth, but as soon as the sparks began to glow around Magnus’ fingers, the man’s complaints quieted. He wasn’t as good a healer as Catarina, or even Tessa, who’d recently manifested a gift for healing alongside her shapeshifting prowess. He was maybe 60% sure he’d reconstructed the man’s shoulder correctly. It was better than a mundane doctor could’ve done.
Magnus went around, maneuvering through the chaos as comfortably as a salmon jumps up an Alaskan waterfall. He’d had enough practice with similar scenes. Though, he usually preferred to avoid the suffering humans cursed on themselves. Most of the injured weren’t from the actual blind gunfire, but from the stampede. Magnus reattached a few wrists, applied some hasty blue, spark stitches to a barrage of scrapes, even successfully removed a bullet wound while repairing a collapsed lung. Catarina would’ve even been impressed with that one.
Clutching a little girl in his arms, one who thankfully sustained nothing more than a broken leg, he led her from door to door, inquiring of anyone who knew her. When finally, a woman nearly tackled him to the petite garden, he was able to handoff the girl to a sobbing relative.
“Hey Warlock, I see you helping out.”
Magnus turned, spotting the Shadowhunter on the edge of the lawn. A multitude of blood-soaked bandages lined his arms and torso, but he managed a cocky grin, nonetheless.
“You going to report me?” Magnus asked, thinking of the Accords that supposedly acted to protect his own. So openly performing magic, even healing magic, could come with a price.
The Shadowhunter’s grin drooped into a scowl. “How about we make a deal? If the police actually punish the Klan for what all happened here, then I’ll have all the time I need to file an official report with the local Institute. If the police do nothing and let this attack get forgotten, then I won’t have no time to report you. How’s that sound?”
“Sounds like I won’t need to worry about the Nephilim bothering me then.”
And yet, Magnus went to bed that night hoping he’d be awoken to Shadowhunters beating down his hotel door. A day passed. Then a week. Then a month.
No Shadowhunter ever came to arrest him.