The Rise of the Hotel Dumort Read Online Free

something is coming, and we’d be fools to ignore it.”
    “When have I ever claimed not to be a fool?”
    “Magnus!” Aldous stood suddenly and slammed the tip of his walking stick down, sending a flood of purple bolts crackling along the wreckage of the floor. Even when he was talking crazy, Aldous was a powerful warlock. Stick around for two thousand years—you’re bound to pick up a thing or two.
    “When you decide to be serious, come and find me. But don’t wait too long. I have a new residence, at the Hotel Dumont, on 116th Street.”
    Magnus was left in the dripping remains of his bar. One Downworlder coming in and talking a load of nonsense about omens and disaster was to be ignored. But having that followed by a visit from Aldous, who seemed to be saying much the same thing . . .
    . . . unless those two rumors were one and the same, and they had both originated with Aldous, who was not sounding like the voice of complete reason.
    That made sense, actually. The High Warlock of Manhattan gets a little strange, starts talking about doom and mundane money and disaster . . . someone would pick that story up and carry it along, and like all stories, it would find its way to Magnus.
    Magnus tapped his fingers on the cracked marble of his once-pristine bar. Time, he had noticed, moved more quickly these days. Aldous wasn’t completely wrong about that. Time was like water, sometimes glacial and slow (the 1720s . . . never again ), sometimes a still pond, sometimes a gentle brook, and then a rushing river. And sometimes time was like vapor, vanishing even as you passed through it, draping everything in mist, refracting the light. That had been the 1920s.
    Even in fast times like these, Magnus could not instantly reopen his bar. He had to keep up some pretense of normalcy. A few days, maybe a week. Maybe he would even clean it up the mundie way, by hiring people to come with buckets and wood and nails. Maybe he would even do it himself. It would probably do him good.
    So Magnus rolled up his sleeves and set to work, collecting broken glass, throwing broken chairs and tables into a pile. He got a mop and pushed along puddles of mixed booze and dirt and splinters. After a few hours of this, he grew tired and bored and snapped his fingers, setting the whole place to rights.
    Aldous’s words still preyed on his mind. Something should be done. Someone should be told. Someone more responsible and interested than him should take over this concern. Which, of course, meant only one group of people.

    Shadowhunters would not come to speakeasies. They respected the mundane law against alcohol (always so tedious with their “The law is hard but it is the law”). This meant that Magnus had to take a trip to the Upper East Side, to the Institute.
    The grandeur of the Institute never failed to impress him—the way it towered high and mighty above everything else, timeless and unmoving in its Gothic disapproval of all that was modern and changeable. Downworlders could not normally enter the Institute through the main door—the Sanctuary was their entrance. But Magnus was no ordinary Downworlder, and his connection to the Shadowhunters was long and well-known.
    This didn’t mean that he got a warm reception. The housekeeper, Edith, said nothing as she admitted him except, “Wait here.” He was left in the foyer, where he eyed the fusty decorations with a critical eye. The Shadowhunters did love their burgundy wallpaper and their rose-shaped lamps and their heavy furnishings. Time would never move quickly here.
    “Come on,” Edith said, returning.
    Magnus followed her down the hall to a reception room, where Edgar Greymark, the head of the Institute, stood in front of a bookstand.
    “Edgar,” Magnus said, nodding. “I see you’ve bowed to the pressure and installed a telephone.”
    Magnus pointed to a telephone sitting on a small table in a dark corner, as if it was being punished for existing.
    “It’s a