What to buy for the Shadowhunter who has everything

Part 5.

Thinking about the night at Taki's, Magnus realized what the perfect present for Alec would be. He also realized that he had no idea how to give it to him. In the only piece of luck in a terrible day filled with slime and cruel friends, at that very moment the buzzer rang.

Magnus crossed the floor in three easy strides and boomed into the intervim: "WHO DARES TO DISTURB THE HIGH WARLOCK AT WORK?"

There was a pause.

"Seriously, if you are Jehovah's Witnesses..."

"Ah, no," said a girl's voice, light, self-confident, and with the slight, odd inflection of Idris. "This is Isabelle Lightwood. Mind if I come up?"

"Not at all," said Magnus, and he pressed the button to let her in.

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Isabelle Lightwood walked straight for the coffee machine and got herself a cup without asking if she could have any. She was that kind of girl, Magnus thought, the kind who took what she wanted and assumed you would be delighted that she'd taken a fancy to it. She studiously ignored Elyaas as she went: she had taken one look at him when she'd come into Magnus's apartment and apparently decided that asking questions about the tentacle demon would be impolite and probably boring.

She looked like Alec, had his high cheekbones, porcelain-pale skin, and black hair, though she wore hers long and carefully styled. Her eyes were different, though, glossy and black, like lacquered ebony: both beautiful and indestructible. She seemed as if she could be as cold as her mother, as if she might be as prone to corruption as so many of her ancestors had been. Magnus had known a lot of Lightwoods, and he had not been terribly impressed by most of them. Not until one.

Isabelle hopped up onto the counter, stretching out her long legs. She was wearing tailored jeans and boots with spiked heels, and a deep red silk tank top that matched the ruby necklace at her throat, which Magnus had bought for the price of a London townhouse more than a hundred years before. Magnus rather liked seeing her wear it. It felt like watching Will's niece, brash, laughing, cheroot-smoking Anna Lightwood---one of the few Lightwoods he liked---wearing it a hundred years before. It charmed him, made him feel as if he had mattered in that space of time, to those people. He wondered how horrified the Lightwoods would be if they knew that the necklace had once been a dissolute warlock's love gift to a murderous vampire.

Possibly not as horrified as they would be if they learned Magnus was dating their son.

He met Isabelle's bold black eyes, and thought that she might not be horrified to learn where her necklace had come from. He thought she might get a bit of kick out of it. Maybe someday he would tell her.

"So it's Alec's birthday today," Isabelle announced.

"I'm aware," said Magnus.

He said nothing more. He didn't know what Alec had told Isabelle, knew how painfully Alec loved her and wanted to shield her, not to let her down, as he wanted not to let any of them down and passionately feared he would. Secrecy did not sit well with Magnus, who had winked at Alec the first night he'd met him, when Alec had been simply a deliriously good-looking boy glancing at Magnus with shy interest. But it was all more complicated now, when he knew how Alec could be hurt, when Magnus knew how much it would matter to him if Alec were hurt.

"I know you two are...seeing each other," said Isabelle, picking her words carefully but still meeting Magnus's eyes dead-on. "I don't care. I mean, it doesn't matter to me. At all."

She flung the words defiantly at Magnus. There was no need to be defiant with hin, but he understood why she was, understood that dhe must have practiced the defiant words she might have to say to her parents one day, if she stood by her brother.