Saving Raphael Santiago

Page 3

Etta’s verdict was that nothing razzed that kid’s berries.
Etta and Raphael were distant with each other. Raphael was openly and insultingly surprised that Magnus had a lady friend, and Etta, though she knew of Downworld, was wary around all Downworlders but Magnus. Chiefly Raphael stayed out of the way when Etta came by.
They had met at a club fifteen years before, Etta and Magnus. He had convinced her to dance with him, and she said she had been in love by the end of the song. He told her he had been in love before the beginning.
It was their tradition that when Etta came in after a late night during which Magnus had not been able to join her—and Magnus was missing many nights, because of Raphael—Etta would kick off her high heels, feet aching from a long night, but keep her fancy beaded dress on, and they would dance together, murmuring bebop into each other’s ears and competing as to which tune they would dance to the longest.
The first time Etta encountered Raphael, she was a little quiet afterward.
“He was made a vampire only a few days ago,” she said eventually, when they were dancing. “That’s what you said. Before that he was just a boy.”
“If it helps, I have a suspicion that he was a menace.”
Etta did not laugh. “I always thought of vampires as so old,” she said. “I never thought about how people can become them. I guess it makes sense. I mean—Raphael, the poor kid, he’s too young. But I can see how people might want to stay young forever. The same way you do.”
Etta had been talking about age more and more in the last few months. She had not mentioned the men who came to hear her sing at clubs, who wanted to take her away and have children with her. She had not had to.
Magnus understood, could read the signs like a sailor knew which clouds in the sky would bring a storm. He had been left before, for many reasons, and this one was not unusual.
Immortality was something you paid for, and those you loved paid for, over and over again. There had been a precious few who had stayed with Magnus until death had parted them, but come death or a new stage of their lives where they felt he could not follow, they were all parted from him by something.
He could not blame Etta.
“Would you want it?” Magnus asked at last, after a long time swaying together. He did not make the offer, but he thought it, that he could have it arranged. There were ways. Ways one might pay a terrible price for. Ways his father knew of, and Magnus hated his father. But if she could stay with him always—
There was another silence. All Magnus heard was the click of his shoes, and the soft shuffle of her bare feet, on his wooden floors.
“No,” said Etta, her cheek pressed against his shoulder. “No. If I could have it all my own way, I’d want a little more time with you. But I wouldn’t stop the clock for it.”
Strange and painful reminders came to Magnus every now and then, when he had become accustomed to Raphael as the always irritated and irritating housemate who had been wished upon him. He would be surprised with a reminder of what he already knew: that Raphael’s clock had been stopped, that his human life had been viciously wrenched away from him.
Magnus was constructing a new hairstyle with the aid of Brylcreem and a dash of magic when Raphael came up behind him and surprised him. Raphael often did that, since he had the silent tread of his vampire kind. Magnus suspected that he did it on purpose, but since Raphael never cracked a smile, it was hard to tell.
“You’re very frivolous,” Raphael remarked disapprovingly, staring at Magnus’s hair.
“And you’re very fifteen,” Magnus shot back.
Raphael usually had a retort for whatever Magnus threw at him, but instead of a reply Magnus received a long silence. When Magnus looked up from his mirror, he saw that Raphael had moved over to the window and was looking out onto the night.
“I would be sixteen by now,” said Raphael, voice as distant and cold as the light of the moon. “If I had lived.”
Magnus remembered the day when he had realized that he was no longer aging, looking in a mirror that seemed colder than all other mirrors had before, as if he had been viewing his reflection in a shard of ice. As if the mirror had been responsible for holding his image so utterly frozen and so utterly distant.
He wondered how different it was to be a vampire, to know down to the precise day, the hour, the minute when you stopped belonging to the common warm and changing course of humanity. When you stood still, and the world whirled on and never missed you.
He did not ask.
“You people,” said Raphael, which was how he referred to warlocks, because he was quite the charmer. “You stop aging randomly, don’t you? You’re born like a human is born, and you’re always what you are, but you age like a human does, until you don’t anymore.”
Magnus wondered if Raphael had read those same thoughts on Magnus’s face.
“That’s right.”
“Do you think your people have souls?” Raphael asked. He was still staring out the window.
Magnus had known people who thought he did not. He believed he did, but that did not mean he had never doubted.
“Doesn’t matter,” Raphael continued before Magnus could answer. His voice was flat. “Either way I envy you.”
“Why so?”
The moonlight poured in on Raphael, bleaching his face so he looked like a marble statue of a saint who had died young.
“Either you still have your souls,” said Raphael, “or you never had them, and you do not know what it is to wander the world damned, exiled, and missing them forever.”
Magnus put his hairbrush down. “All Downworlders have souls,” he said. “It’s what makes us different from demons.”
Raphael sneered. “That is a Nephilim belief.”
“So what?” Magnus said. “Sometimes they’re right.”
Raphael said something unkind in Spanish. “They think they are such saviors, the cazadores de sombras,” he said. “The Shadowhunters. Yet they have never come to save me.”
Magnus looked at the boy silently. He had never been able to argue against his stepfather’s convictions regarding what God wanted or God judged. He did not know how to convince Raphael that he might still have a soul.
“I see you’re trying to distract me from the real point here,” Magnus said instead. “You had a birthday—a perfect excuse for me to throw one of my famous parties—and you didn’t even tell me about it?”
Raphael stared at him silently, then turned and walked away.
Magnus had often thought of getting a pet, but he had never considered acquiring a sullen teenage vampire. Once Raphael was gone, he thought, he was getting a cat. And he would always throw his cat a birthday party.
It was soon afterward that Raphael wore a cross around his neck, all night, without crying out or exhibiting any visible signs of discomfort. At the end of the night, when he removed it, there was a faint mark against his chest, as of a long-healed burn, but that was all.
“So that’s it,” Magnus said. “That’s great. You’re done! Let’s go visit your mother.”
He had sent her a message telling her not to worry and not to visit, that he was using all the magic he could to save Raphael and could not be disturbed, but he knew it would not keep her away forever.
Raphael’s expression was blank as he fiddled with the chain in one hand, his only sign of uncertainty. “No,” he said. “How many times are you going to underestimate me? I’m not done. I’m not even close.”
He explained to Magnus what he wanted to do next.
“You are doing a good deal to help me,” Raphael said the next night as they approached the graveyard. His voice was almost clinical.
Magnus thought but did not say, Yes, because there were  times when I was as desperate as you, and as miserable, and as convinced that I had  no soul. People had helped him when he’d needed it, because he had needed it and for no other reason. He remembered the Silent Brothers coming for him in Madrid, and teaching him that there was still a way to live.
“You don’t need to be grateful,” Magnus said instead. “I’m not doing it for you.”
Raphael shrugged, a fluid easy gesture. “All right, then.”
“I mean, you could be grateful occasionally,” Magnus said. “You could tidy up the apartment once in a while.”
Raphael considered this. “No, I don’t think I will.”
“I think your mother should have beaten you,” said Magnus. “Frequently.”
“My father hit me once, back in Zacatecas,” Raphael said casually.
Raphael had not mentioned a father before, and Guadalupe had not mentioned a husband, though Magnus knew there were several brothers.
“He did?” Magnus tried to make his voice both neutral and encouraging, in case Raphael wanted to confide in him.
Raphael, not the confiding type, looked amused. “He didn’t hit me twice.”
It was a small graveyard, secluded and far away in Queens, hemmed in by tall and dark buildings, one warehouse and one abandoned Victorian home. Magnus had arranged for the area to be sprinkled with holy water, blessed, and made sacred. Churches were hallowed ground but graveyards not so. All vampires had to be buried somewhere, and had to rise.
It would not provide a barrier like the Institute of the Shadowhunters, but it would be hard enough for Raphael to rest his foot on the ground.
It was another test. Raphael had promised not to do more than touch his foot to the ground.
Raphael had promised.
When Raphael lifted his chin, like a horse taking a bit between its teeth, and charged right onto the holy ground, running and burning and screaming, Magnus wondered how he could ever have believed him.
“Raphael!” he shouted, and ran after him, into the darkness and onto the sacred earth.
Raphael sprang onto a gravestone, landed balanced on it. His curly hair was blown back from his thin face, his body arched, his fingers clawed against the marble edge. His teeth were bared from vicious tip to gum, and his eyes were black and lifeless. He looked like a revenant, a nightmare rearing up from a grave. Less human, with less of a soul, than any savage beast.
He leaped. Not at Magnus but at the perimeter of the graveyard. He came out on the other side.
Magnus chased after him. Raphael was swaying, leaning against the low stone wall as if he could barely stay on his feet. The skin on his arms was visibly bubbling. He looked as if he wanted to claw off the rest of his skin in agony but did not have the strength.
“Well, you did it,” Magnus remarked. “By which I mean you almost gave me a heart attack. Don’t stop now. The night is young. What are you going to do to upset me next?”
Raphael glanced up at him and grinned. It was not a nice expression.
“I am going to do the same thing again.”
Magnus supposed he had asked for that.
When Raphael had run through the holy ground again not once but ten times, he leaned against the wall looking worn and spent, and while he was too weak to run, he leaned against the wall and murmured to himself, choking at first and then getting the word out, the name of God.
He choked up blood as he said it, coughed, and kept murmuring. “Dios.”
Magnus bore the sight of him, too weak to stand and still hurting himself, as long as he could.
“Raphael, don’t you think you’ve done enough?”
Predictably, Raphael glared at him. “No.”
“You have forever to learn how to do this and how to control yourself. You have—”
“But they don’t!” Raphael burst out. “Dios, do you understand nothing? The only thing I have left is the hope of seeing them, of not breaking my mother’s heart. I need to convince her. I need to do it perfectly, and I need to do it soon, while she still hopes that I am alive.”
He had spoken “Dios” almost without flinching that time.
“You’re being very good.”
“It is no longer possible for me to be good,” Raphael said, his voice steely. “If I were still good and brave, I would do what my mother would want if she knew the truth. I would walk out into the sun and end my own life. But I am a selfish, wicked, heartless beast, and I do not want to burn in the fires of Hell yet. I want to go see my m-mother, and I will. I will. I will!”
Magnus nodded. “What if God could help you?” he asked gently.
It was as close as he could get to saying, What if  everything you believe is wrong and you could still be loved and still be  forgiven?
Raphael shook his head stubbornly.
“I am one of the Night Children. I am no longer a child of His, no longer under His watchful eye. God will not help me,” Raphael said, his voice thick, speaking through a mouthful of blood. He spat the blood out again. “And God will not stop me.”
Magnus did not argue with him again. Raphael was still so young in so many ways, and his whole world had shattered around him. All he had left to make sense of the world were his beliefs, and he would cling to them even if his very beliefs told him that he was hopelessly lost, damned, and dead already.
Magnus did not even know if it would be right to try to take those beliefs away.
That night when Magnus was sleeping, he woke and heard the low, fervent murmur of Raphael’s voice. Magnus had heard people praying many times and recognized the sound. He heard the names, unfamiliar names, and wondered if they had been Raphael’s friends. Then he heard the name Guadalupe, the name of Raphael’s mother, and he knew the other names had to be the names of Raphael’s brothers.
As mortals called on God, on angels and saints, as they chanted while telling their rosary, Raphael was pronouncing the only names that were sacred to him and would not burn his tongue to utter. Raphael was calling on his family.
There were many drawbacks to having Raphael as a roommate that did not concern Raphael’s conviction that he was a damned lost soul, or even the fact that Raphael used up so much soap in the shower (even though he never sweated and hardly needed to shower so often) and never did the washing up. When Magnus pointed this out, Raphael responded that he never ate food and was therefore not creating any washing up, which was just like Raphael.
One more drawback became apparent the day that Ragnor Fell, High Warlock of London and perpetual enormous green thorn in Magnus’s side, came by to pay an unexpected visit.
“Ragnor, this is a welcome surprise,” said Magnus, flinging the door open wide.
“I was paid by some Nephilim to make the trip,” said Ragnor. “They wished for a spell.”