The Midnight Heir by Cassandra Clare

Author:Cassandra Clare
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Walker Books

It was not the first time Magnus had made his way from London to Chiswick to visit Lightwood House. Benedict Lightwood’s home had often been thrown open to Downworlders who’d been amenable to his idea of a good time.

It had been a grand manor once, the stone brilliant white and adorned with Greek statuary and too many pillars to count. The Lightwoods were proud and ostentatious people, and their home, in all its neoclassical glory, had reflected that.

Magnus knew what had become of all that pride. The patriarch, Benedict Lightwood, had contracted a disease from consorting with demons and had transformed into a murderous monster that his own sons had been forced to slay, with the assistance of a host of other Shadowhunters. Their manor had been taken away by the Clave as punishment, their monies confiscated, and their family had become a laughingstock, a byword for sin and a betrayal of all that the Shadowhunters held dear.

Magnus had little time for the Shadowhunters’ overweening arrogance, and usually enjoyed seeing them taken down a peg, but even he had rarely seen a family fall so far so terribly fast. Gabriel and Gideon, Benedict’s two sons, had managed to claw their way back to respectability through good behavior and the graces of the Consul, Charlotte Branwell. Their sister, however, was another matter entirely.

How she had managed to get Lightwood House back into her clutches, Magnus did not know. As mad as a mouse trapped in a teapot, Will had said of her, and knowing of the family’s disgraced state, Magnus hardly expected the grandeur of Benedict’s time. Doubtless the place would be shabby now, dusty with time, only a few servants left to keep it up and in order—

The carriage Magnus had hired came to a stop. “The place looks abandoned,” opined the driver, casting a doubtful eye over at the iron gates, which looked rusted shut and bound with vines.

“Or haunted,” Magnus suggested brightly.

“Well, I can’t get in. Them gates won’t open,” said the driver gruffly. “You’ll have to get out and walk, if you’re that determined.”

Magnus was. His curiosity was alight now, and he approached the gates like a cat, ready to scale them if need be.

A tweak of magic, a bit of an opening spell, and the gates burst wide with a shower of rusted metal flakes, onto a long, dark overgrown drive that led up to a ghostly manor house in the distance, glimmering like a tombstone under the full moon.

Magnus closed the gates and went forward, listening to the sound of night birds in the trees overhead, the rustle of leaves in the night wind. A forest of blackened tangles loomed all about him, the remains of the famous Lightwood gardens. Those gardens had been lovely once. Magnus distantly recalled overhearing Benedict Lightwood drunkenly saying that they had been his dead wife’s joy.

Now the high hedges of the Italian garden had formed a maze, a twisted one from which there was clearly no escape. They had

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