The Bane Chronicles 1: What Really Happened in Peru by Sarah Rees Brennan Cassandra Clare Read Free Book Online

sad, dying flower.
    “Another thing here is the natives,” said Geoffrey. “I had hoped we could get some decent pictures. I expected them to be so much more colorful, don’t you know?”
    “It’s almost as if they are not here for your entertainment,” said Magnus in Spanish.
    Kitty turned around at the sound, and Magnus saw a small mocking face and red hair curling underneath the brim of a very large straw hat. Her lips were curling too.
    Geoffrey turned when she turned.
    “Oh, well spotted, old girl,” he said. “Now, he’s what I call colorful.”
    That much was true. Magnus was wearing more than a dozen scarves all in different colors and carefully arrayed to swirl about him like a fantastic rainbow. He was not too impressed by Geoffrey’s powers of observation, however, since Geoffrey was apparently unable to imagine that anyone with brown skin could possibly be a visitor like himself.
    “I say, fellow, do you want to have your picture taken?” asked Geoffrey.
    “You’re an idiot,” Magnus told him, smiling brightly.
    Magnus was still speaking in Spanish. Kitty choked on a laugh and turned it into a cough.
    “Ask him, Kitty!” said Geoffrey, with the air of one prompting a dog to do a trick.
    “I apologize for him,” she said in halting Spanish.
    Magnus smiled and offered his arm with a flourish. Kitty skipped over the flagstones, worn so smooth by time that the stone was like water, and seized his arm.
    “Oh, charming, charming. Mother will love to see these shots,” said Geoffrey enthusiastically.
    “How do you put up with him?” Magnus inquired.
    Kitty and Magnus beamed like actors, toothy, ecstatic, and entirely insincere.
    “With some difficulty.”
    “Let me offer an alternate proposition,” Magnus said between the locked teeth of his smile. “Run away with me. Right now. It will be the most amazing adventure, I promise you that.”
    Kitty stared at him. Geoffrey turned around, in quest of someone who could take shots of them all together. Behind Geoffrey’s back Magnus saw Kitty begin, slowly and delightedly, to smile.
    “Oh, all right. Why not?”
    “Excellent,” said Magnus.
    He spun and seized her hand, and they ran, laughing, together down the sunlit street.
    “We’d better go pretty quickly!” Kitty shouted, voice breathless as they rushed. “He’s bound to notice soon that I stole his watch.”
    Magnus blinked. “Pardon?”
    There was a noise behind them. It sounded disturbingly like a ruckus. Magnus was, through hardly any fault of his own, somewhat familiar with the sound of the police being summoned and also the sounds of a hot pursuit.
    He pulled Kitty into an alleyway. She was still laughing, and undoing the buttons of her blouse.
    “It will probably take them a little longer,” she murmured, the mother-of-pearl buttons parting enough to show the sudden rich flash of emeralds and rubies, “to realize that I also stole all his mother’s jewels.”
    She gave Magnus a little saucy smile. Magnus burst out laughing.
    “Do you con a lot of annoying rich men?”
    “And their mothers,” said Kitty. “I could probably have taken them for the whole family fortune, or at least the silver, but a handsome man asked me to run away with him, and I thought, What the hell .”
    The sound of pursuit was closer now.
    “You are about to be very glad you did,” Magnus told her. “Since you showed me yours, I believe it’s only fair I show you mine.”
    He snapped his fingers, making sure to trail blue sparks to impress the lady. Kitty was clever enough to realize what was going on as soon as one of the first pursuers glanced down the alleyway and ran on.
    “They can’t see us,” she breathed. “You turned us invisible.”
    Magnus raised his eyebrows and made a gesture of display. “As you see,” he said. “And they don’t.”
    Magnus had seen humans shocked and scared and amazed by his power. Kitty flung herself into his arms.
    “Tell me, handsome stranger,” she