The Rise of the Hotel Dumort by Cassandra Clare

Author:Cassandra Clare
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781442495609
Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books
Published: 2013-08-20T20:28:08+00:00

Before going to the Institute, Magnus had been resolved to do nothing. Just pass on the information and get on with his endless life. But Edgar’s dismissal of his concerns motivated him. Aldous said the Hotel Dumont was on 116th Street, which wasn’t far at all. That was just up in Italian Harlem, perhaps a twenty-minute walk away. Magnus set his course northward. New York was a place that changed very abruptly from neighborhood to neighborhood. The Upper East Side was moneyed and dignified to the point of pain. But as he went up, the houses got smaller, the driving more aggressive, and the horse carts more frequent. Above 100th Street, the children got more boisterous, playing stickball in the street and chasing one another as mothers shouted through windows.

The feeling on these streets was altogether more pleasant. There was more of a family atmosphere, with good smells coming from the windows. And it was nice to see a neighborhood where not everyone had white skin. Harlem was the center of black culture and the best music in the entire world. It was the hottest, most cutting-edge place to be.

Which, he supposed, was why someone had plopped down this grand monstrosity of a hotel. The Dumont didn’t quite fit in with the brownstones and the shops and restaurants, but the Dumont didn’t look like the kind of place that cared if its neighbors liked it or not. It sat back a bit, on a small side street that may very well have been custom-made for it. It had a great colonnaded front with dozens of sash windows, all with drawn curtains. A pair of heavy metal doors were firmly closed.

Magnus sat in the soda fountain across the street and decided to watch and wait. What he was waiting for, he wasn’t sure. Something. Anything. He wasn’t really sure that anything would happen at all, but he was now set on his course. The first hour or so was deadly dull. He read a newspaper to kill time. He ate a sardine sandwich and had some coffee. He used his power to retrieve a lost ball for some kids across the street, who had no idea he was doing so. He was almost ready to give up when a parade of extremely expensive automobiles began to roll up to the front of the hotel. It was like seeing a showing of the grandest cars in the world—a Rolls-Royce, a Packard, a few Pierce-Arrows, an Isotta Fraschini, three Mercedes-Benzes, and a Duesenberg—all polished to such a high degree that Magnus could hardly see them in the dazzling glow of the sunset. He blinked his watering eyes and observed driver after driver opening doors and releasing the cars’ passengers.

These were most certainly wealthy people. The rich bought wonderful clothes you recognized. The richest had their people go to Paris and buy the entire new collection that no one outside of the fashion house had seen. These people belonged to the latter group. They were all, Magnus noted, between forty and sixty years of age.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.