What Really Happened in Peru (The Bane Chronicles 1)

"I say, fellow, do you want to have your picture taken?" asked Geoffrey.

"Youre 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, charmi

ng. 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 Geoffreys 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.

"Wed better go pretty quickly!" Kitty shouted, voice breathless as they rushed. "Hes 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 mothers 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 its 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 cant 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 dont. "

Magnus had seen humans shocked and scared and amazed by his power. Kitty flung herself into his arms.

"Tell me, handsome stranger," she said. "How do you feel about a life of magical crime?"

"Sounds like an adventure," said Magnus. "But promise me something. Promise we will always steal from the irritating and spend the cash on booze and useless trinkets. "

Kitty pressed a kiss to his mouth. "I swear. "

They fell in love, not even for a mortal lifetime but for a mortal summer, a summer of laughing and running and being wanted by the law in several different countries.

In the end Magnuss favorite memory of that summer was an image he had never seen: that last picture on Geoffreys camera, of a man trailing bright colors and a woman hiding them beneath a white blouse, both smiling because they knew a joke he did not.

Magnuss sudden turn to a life of crime, shockingly enough, was not the reason he was banned from Peru either. The High Council of Peruvian warlocks met in secret, and a letter was sent to Magnus several months later announcing that he had been banned from Peru, on pain of death, for "crimes unspeakable. " Despite his inquiries, he never received an answer to the question of what he had been banned for. To this day, whatever it is that actually got him banned from Peru is - and perhaps must always remain - a mystery.