2013

“So you didn’t sense any kind of demonic energy or other kind of supernatural emanation from the tarn?” Ty asked.

It was March, and outside the Scholomance the world was wintry white, as if all the Carpathian Mountains were in mourning. Ty was writing at his desk, in the black notebook where for six months he had been keeping a record of the side effects, benefits, and discoverable qualities of Livvy’s resurrected state.

Early entries ran along the lines of Incorporeal. Invisible to all with some exceptions. Some animals appear to sense her. Most cats, for example, though cannot entirely be sure since cats do not talk. Can, with some effort, make herself invisible to me. Have asked her not to do this. Find it worrying. Does not sleep. Does not need food. Says she believes it is possible she can taste things that I (Ty) eat. Will test this—Livvy wait in other room while I taste various foods—but not the most pressing of experiments, and there is the question of whether or not this is entirely related to Livvy’s current state or whether it is due to being twins or the undeniable fact that I have made all of this happen. Magnus says there is very little reliable information. Sense of smell unimpaired. Tested her on clean and dirty socks as well as various herbs. Insensible to extremes of heat or cold. Says that she is happy to be here with me. Says that she loves me and wishes to stay with me. Proof, can we assume, that some things (some emotions or relationships) survive the grave?

“No?” Livvy said. Often, while Ty wrote, she hovered at his shoulder, to see what he wrote down and to qualify his notes with her own observations. But at the moment, she was more interested in something she had discovered carved into the wall just below the headboard of Ty’s bed. If she made an effort, she could push herself through the wooden headboard, just like a ghost in one of Dru’s movies, who could walk through walls. How she would have liked to show off this ability to her sister—but she and Ty had agreed that she should not manifest in front of the rest of their family.

Behind the headboard of Ty’s dorm-issue bed, the tops of letters just faintly visible, someone had gouged a rough sentence into the wall, and a date. “ ‘I did not choose this life,’ ” Livvy said out loud.

“What?” Ty said, sounding startled.

“Oh,” Livvy said hastily. “That’s not an observation, Ty. It’s something that someone carved here on the wall. There’s a year, too. ‘1904.’ But no name.”

Ty had been at the Scholomance for four months now. And where Ty went, Livvy went too. Four months at the Scholomance, and six months since Livvy had come back as a ghost when the catalyst Ty was using in his attempt to resurrect her had failed him, and the spell from the Black Volume of the Dead had gone awry. At first Livvy had not been entirely herself. There were pages in Ty’s notebook about the gaps in her memory, the ways in which she did not seem to be the same person. But, gradually, she had come back to herself. Ty had written in his notebook: Jet lag, when one travels between coasts or countries and experiences a change in time zones, is part of the human condition. It is possible that Livvy is experiencing some version of this. A writer once called Death “that unknown country.” Presumably Livvy had to travel, at least psychically, quite far to come back to me.

All in all, the last few months had been a time of great and alarming changes—Livvy’s ghostly return from the dead had been neither the greatest nor the most alarming. The Cohort and their supporters were now shut off in Idris, while supporters of the Clave had been exiled to all the corners of the globe. No one could get into Idris and none could get out. “What do you think they’re eating?” Ty had asked Livvy. “Each other, hopefully,” Livvy replied. “Or zucchini. Lots of zucchini.” She felt sure that no one honestly enjoyed zucchini.

The Scholomance, too, had changed. Historically it was the institution where Centurions were trained, and Livvy had heard the Centurions who descended on the L.A. Institute speak of the place. It had become a recruiting ground for the Cohort, and it had sounded thoroughly horrible. Those Cohort sympathizers were now in Idris, and that was no great loss as far as Livvy could see. Every member of the Cohort she had ever met had been a bully, a bigot, or a petty-minded bootlicker. The zucchini of the Shadowhunter world. Who missed them? The real problem now was not that they were gone but that they were not gone enough. There they were, lurking inside the wards of Idris, planning and plotting only the Angel knew what.

Some of the Scholomance’s instructors had gone to Idris with the Centurions, and now Jia Penhallow, the former Consul, was in charge here. She’d decided to step down as Consul so that she could have time to rest, but once her health improved, she wanted something useful to do. Her husband, Patrick, was with her, and Ragnor Fell had stepped in too, to teach and offer guidance. Catarina Loss was a frequent presence as well. She spent more time at the new Academy on Luke Garroway’s farm in upstate New York, but she would stop by the Scholomance now and then to restock the infirmary or heal unusual magical maladies.

There were other changes. Kit had gone off to live with Jem and Tessa, while Helen and Aline were now ensconced at the Los Angeles Institute. Livvy wished with all of her ghostly heart that she and Ty could have stayed in Los Angeles, but Ty had been adamant. Going off to the Scholomance was the penance he must endure for his great crime—the great crime of attempting to bring Livvy back. Not very flattering, Livvy thought, to now be the ghostly albatross that Ty wore around his neck, but better a ghostly albatross than simply a dead sister.

Ty said, “No one chooses this life.” He had put down his pen.

He sounded as if he were somewhere far away. Livvy didn’t think he was talking about the Scholomance.

She said hastily, “I saw animal tracks around Dimmet Tarn. It isn’t fully iced over—I heard some of the other students say that this year is warmer than any on record. Can you imagine more snow than we’ve had? It looks as if animals come down to drink from Dimmet Tarn. I wonder what they are.”

“A Carpathian lynx, perhaps,” Ty said. “They are supposed to haunt the area.”

“Same,” Livvy said. But Ty didn’t laugh at her joke.

He said, “You were away for nearly three hours. I noted it in the book. I felt as if some part of me was falling asleep. Pins and needles.”

Livvy said, “I felt it too. Like a rubber band being stretched.”

The past week, when Ty was not in classes, they had been experimenting with timed intervals in which Livvy moved progressively farther and farther away from Ty. Dimmet Tarn was only just past the Scholomance, less than a quarter of a mile away from Ty’s room, but it was the farthest Livvy had ventured. She’d hovered over the surface of the water for so long she had almost begun to feel hypnotized by the unmoving black stillness beneath her. She had been able to see the reflection of leafless trees on the tarn, but no matter how close she pressed her face to the flat inky surface of the water, she had not been able to see herself. She could see her hand if she held it out, but not the reflection of her hand, and that had made her feel very strange. So instead she looked only at the water and tried to let go of all her unhappinesses and worries. The only thing to hold on to was Ty.

So eventually she had withdrawn her attention from Dimmet Tarn and she had come back to him. She said, “I would have liked to see a Carpathian lynx.”

“They’re endangered,” Ty said. “And very shy.”

“And I am very invisible,” Livvy said. “So I feel my chances are quite good. But please mark down that Dimmet Tarn is quite an ordinary tarn. Those old stories, I think, must be only that. Stories.”

“Further investigation required, let us say,” Ty said. “I will continue to do research in the library.”

They had picked Dimmet Tarn as a destination for Livvy not only because the distance was a useful measure but because there were lots of interesting stories about Dimmet Tarn among the other students at the Scholomance. It had once been a place of great uncanniness, supposedly, but none of the stories were in agreement as to the nature of its uncanniness. Some stories said that it was once a place beloved of the faeries. Others said that there was a great clutch of demonic eggs far down at the bottom of the tarn, so deep down that no sounding rope could give a true measure. Another story said that an unhappy warlock had enchanted the water so that to swim in it would curse the swimmer with a toe fungus that eventually hatched miniature blue and green toadstools, which sounded improbable, but then warlocks were often improbably petty. It was one of the potential side effects of immortality. You got very bad at letting go of things.

“Did you try to submerge yourself?” Ty asked.

“Yes,” Livvy said. Much like pushing through a headboard, she had been able to push herself down into the water. It had been nothing like swimming had been back in Los Angeles, where the water was green or blue or gray, depending on the time of day and whether the sun was shining, and all the waves wore a cap of white froth and came rushing up noisily on the wet sand. Dimmet Tarn was black, utterly black, as black as night but without stars or moon or the promise that dawn would ever come. Black as tar, black as—nothingness.

Livvy had not felt the water of Dimmet Tarn, but she had sunk into it all the same, slowly, until her head was beneath the surface, darkness below her, the suggestion of the winter sky above shrinking until it was gone altogether and she saw and felt nothing. She had sunk down and down into that void, that blackness, that nothingness, until it was not clear to her whether she was still sinking at all. Nothingness was all around her. Only that strand that connected her to Ty remained, as thin as it could be and yet stronger than the strongest metal.

She and Ty had theorized that perhaps since she was now, as a ghost, uncanny herself, she might be able to discover the secret of Dimmet Tarn. Livvy had liked the idea she might have a superpower of some kind, be useful in some way, and Ty liked the idea that there might be a local mystery that they could solve. But if Dimmet Tarn was keeping an occult secret, Livvy had not discovered it.

“They’re going to ring the bell for dinner soon,” Livvy said.

“I hope it’s not olive loaf,” Ty said.

“It is,” Livvy said. “Can’t you smell it?”

“Ugh,” Ty said. He put down the black notebook and picked up the red one in which he kept his timetables. He flipped back a page and said, “That’s three times in four weeks.”

Livvy had worried about what it would be like for her brother, to be so far away from home, but Ty had adapted surprisingly well. He’d drawn up a schedule for himself on the first night, and he followed it faithfully. He laid out his clothes each night for the following morning, and before he fell asleep he checked his alarm clock against the watch he wore around his wrist. Ty kept one of Julian’s old empty lighters in the pocket of his jeans, for when he needed to keep his fingers busy, and he wore his headphones around his neck during classes like a kind of talisman.

After he’d failed to resurrect Livvy from the dead, Ty had thrown his phone into the Pacific Ocean so he wouldn’t be tempted to try other spells from the Black Volume. He had a new phone now, but he hadn’t uploaded his photos. More penance, Livvy thought, although Ty hadn’t said so. Instead, he had a triptych of paintings by Julian on the wall above his desk: one of their parents, one of all the Blackthorn siblings and Diana and Emma, with the ocean behind them. The third painting was of Livvy, and Livvy often found herself staring at it so that she wouldn’t forget her own face. Not being able to see yourself in a mirror was not a big deal, compared to other parts of being dead, but all the same it was not very pleasant.

Ty wrote a letter to Julian every week, and he wrote Dru and Mark and Diana and Tavvy and Helen postcards, but Livvy couldn’t help but notice that he never wrote Kit at all. She knew Kit had been angry at Ty for trying the resurrection spell, but surely Kit had gotten over that by now? If she brought up Kit, though, Ty shrugged and put his headphones on.

In general, though, Ty seemed to be fitting in just fine at the Scholomance. Better than Livvy would have imagined, before her death, had she imagined such a thing. Ty hadn’t made any friends, but he managed everything that the instructors asked of him, and if he was mostly quiet or withdrawn otherwise, no one seemed to think that was strange. There were a lot of Shadowhunter kids at the Scholomance now who were worried or afraid or occasionally went off to cry in a corner. Ty was keeping his head down. No one except for Livvy, and maybe Julian, would have known there was something wrong.

But there was something wrong. And Livvy had no idea how to fix it, especially since she had no idea what was wrong. All she could do was be there. She had promised him that she would always be there. He had saved her from death, and she loved him.

Anyway, she didn’t have anywhere else to be.

Sometimes, while Ty was studying or sleeping, she went exploring. To the library, where the great silvery tree grew through the broken ceiling like a promise that no wall or hardship (or promise) endured forever.

Sometimes she lingered by a student reading by themselves in the library, or perched on a window ledge, looking out at Dimmet Tarn. She would press all her attention upon them, testing them, to see if she could make herself known. “Can you see me? Can you see me?”

But no one saw her. Once, late at night, Livvy came across two girls kissing in an alcove, one with curly black hair and the other fair. They were only a year or two older than she, and Livvy wondered if this was their first kiss. The fair-headed one drew back at last and said, “It’s late. I should get back to my room. Books aren’t going to read themselves.”

The curly-haired girl sighed but said, “Okay, but that’s true of kisses, too. I’m not going to make out with myself.”

The other said, “Good point.”

But this time the curly-haired girl was the one who broke away from the embrace, laughing. She said, “Okay, okay. It’s late and you’ve got the kissing thing down. Top marks. And there’ll be time for more kissing later. So much time for so much kissing. Go read your books. See you at practice tomorrow?”

“Sure,” the fair-haired girl said, and ducked her head, blushing. Livvy trailed her all the way back to her room. “Can you see me? Can’t you see?” she demanded. “Life is short! Oh, can’t you see? There’s less time than you think, and then it’s gone.”

Sometimes Livvy wondered if she was going crazy. But it was easier in the day, when Ty was awake. Then she wasn’t so alone.

*  *  *

After dinner, which was indeed olive loaf, while he was getting ready for bed, Ty said, “Everyone keeps talking about Idris. About what might be going on in there.”

“Jerks being jerks is what’s going on there,” Livvy said.

“No one can get in because of the wards,” Ty said. “But I was listening to them and I had an idea. No one can get in, but what if you could get in?”

“Me?” Livvy said.

“You,” Ty said. “Why not? You can pass through all sorts of things. Walls. Doors. We could at least test it.”

“Well,” Livvy began, and then was silent. A feeling came over her, and she realized that the feeling was excitement.

She grinned back at her twin. “You’re right,” she said. “We should at least test it.”

“Tomorrow, after Volcanoes and the Demons that Dwell in Them,” Ty said. He made a note in his schedule.

*  *  *

But that night, while Ty was sleeping, Livvy found herself pulled toward Dimmet Tarn again, toward the nothingness of its depths. Every time she thought of Idris, and the experiment that she and Ty would try tomorrow, she thought of her own death, of the blow that Annabel had struck. That moment of pain and dislocation. The stricken look on Julian’s face as she fled her body.

Of course Annabel wasn’t in Idris now. Annabel was dead. And of course, even if Annabel had still been alive, Livvy shouldn’t be afraid of her murderer. A Shadowhunter shouldn’t be afraid. But the thought of her own body on the cold stone of the Accords Hall, the thought of her body burnt upon a pyre, the thought of Lake Lyn, where she had returned, all of these pursued her as she sank into the blackness of Dimmet Tarn and let its nothingness hide her.

It was almost morning when at last she rose up, pearly light already sliding over the crust of snow around the tarn. And there, too, on the lip of the tarn was a small crumpled heap as if someone had dropped their hat or scarf.

Livvy drew near and saw that it was a kitten, starved and motionless. Its paws were torn by the ice, and there were marks of bright blood in the snow. Its ears were long, tipped in black, and its coat was spotted with black as well. “You poor thing,” Livvy said, and the kitten opened its eyes. It looked right at Livvy and snarled noiselessly. Then its eyes closed again.

Livvy fled back to the Scholomance, to Ty.

“Wake up, Ty!” she said. “Hurry, wake up, wake up!”

Ty sat bolt upright. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“There’s a Carpathian lynx down by Dimmet Tarn,” Livvy said. “A kitten. I think it’s dying. Hurry, Ty.”

He threw a coat over his pajamas and pulled on his boots. He bundled up a blanket in his arms. “Show me,” he said.

The kitten was still alive when they got back to Dimmet Tarn, Ty’s boots breaking through the snow with each step. He sank, sometimes, to his knees. But Livvy, of course, floated above the snow. There were advantages, sometimes, to being dead. Livvy could admit that.

You could see the small rise and fall of the lynx’s chest. Small wisps of breath rose from its black nose.

“Is it going to be okay?” Livvy asked. “Will it live?”

Ty knelt down in the bank of snow beside the lynx. He began to wrap it in the blanket. “I don’t know,” he said. “But if it lives, it will be because you saved it, Livvy.”

“No,” Livvy said. “I found it. But I can’t save it. You’ll have to be the one who saves it.”

“Then we’ll both have saved it,” Ty said, and smiled at her. If Livvy had had a notebook, she would have written it down. It had been a long time since she’d seen her brother smile.

*  *  *

Ty found a box and put an old sweater in it. From the kitchen he got a plate of chicken casserole and a bowl to fill with water. When the lynx wouldn’t eat or drink, he went to the infirmary and asked Catarina Loss what to do.

“She says to moisten a piece of cloth—a T-shirt, maybe? Or a hand towel?—and then drip water into its mouth.”

“Then do it,” Livvy said anxiously. How useless she felt!

“Catarina gave me a hot water bottle too,” Ty said. He reached into the box and unwrapped the bundle of blanket enough to put the hot water bottle in as well. Then he began to drip water onto the lynx’s mouth until the fur was wet all around its face.

Ty was more patient than Livvy thought she could have been. He dipped the smallest section of T-shirt sleeve into a bowl of water and then wrung it out gently, until the animal’s mouth opened and a pink tongue poked out. Ty dripped water onto the tongue, and when the lynx swallowed it, he picked up the bowl and tipped it slowly so that the lynx could drink without moving its head. After that, he tore the chicken into small pieces and fed the pieces to it. The lynx ate ravenously, making small, angry noises.

At last the chicken was gone. “Go get more,” Livvy said.

Ty said, “No. Catarina said not to let it eat too much at first.” He tucked a towel in around the lynx, and then covered over the box with a jacket. “We’ll let it sleep now. I’ll give it more later.”

“What about a name? Are you going to give it a name?”

Ty scratched his head. Livvy saw, with a pang, that he had the faintest beginnings of a beard on his face. But he, of course, would continue to grow older. One day he would be a man, but she would always be a child. Ty said, gaze fixed on one black-tipped ear, all that was visible of the lynx, “But we don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl.”

“Then we can give it a gender-neutral name,” Livvy said. “Like Stripes or Hero or Commander Kitty.”

“Let’s see if it lives first,” Ty said. By mutual agreement, they put off the plan to test Livvy’s capabilities to bypass the boundaries of Idris until the next day. Ty attended his classes, and Livvy watched over the lynx, and in between Ty’s classes he supplied their ever more lively captive with scraps of food and bowls of milk. By the time the dinner bells were ringing, they had ascertained the lynx’s gender and Ty’s arms were bloody with scratches. But the lynx was asleep and purring in his lap.

There was a makeshift litter box in the closet, and as it turned out, Ty’s fidget toys also made excellent cat toys.

“Irene,” Ty said. Once again, Livvy saw, he was smiling. “Let’s call her Irene.”

In the end, he skipped dinner altogether. And that night, Livvy did not go back to Dimmet Tarn. Instead she watched over her brother, Irene curled around his head on the pillow, her glowing eyes closing and opening, always fixed on Livvy.

There was a new note in Ty’s book. It said, Lynx sees her. Is this because the Lynx (have given her a name, Irene) was close to death? Or because she is a cat, though larger than house cats? Inconclusive. More research needed, though large cats may be hard to come by.

*  *  *

If it hadn’t been for the matter of Idris, Livvy could have spent the whole next day playing with Irene. She and Ty had discovered that if Livvy drew her foot along the ground, back and forth, Irene would try to pounce, over and over. She could not understand why she couldn’t catch Livvy. “Like a laser pointer,” Ty said. “You’re the red dot that always escapes.”

“That’s me,” Livvy said. “The elusive red dot. So, Idris. How do we do this?”

Shadowhunters used Portals to go to Idris. Only now, Idris was warded and Portals wouldn’t work. Livvy, being dead, didn’t need Portals. When Ty had come to the Scholomance, he had stepped through a Portal and Livvy had willed herself to go with Ty. To be in the place where Ty was.

Ty said, “It should be the same as Dimmet Tarn. Or when I’m in class and suddenly you just show up. Hold Idris in your mind, like a picture. Let yourself go there.”

“You make it sound easy,” Livvy said.

“Something ought to be easy,” Ty said. “Everything can’t be hard all the time.”

“Fine,” Livvy said. “Here we go.”

She thought of Idris, of Lake Lyn. Of the moment she was no longer dead. Saw it in her mind and held it there. And then she was no longer in the room with Ty and Irene. Instead she was floating above the great stillness of Dimmet Tarn.

“Great job, Livvy,” she told herself. But she didn’t go back to Ty. Instead she thought of Idris once more, and imagined, this time, that she was alive again. She thought of how once, when she’d been very young, she had Portaled with her family from the beach outside the L.A. Institute into Idris. Had that been the first time she’d gone to Idris?

She closed her eyes, opened them, and found herself beside the ocean in L.A. The sun was just coming up, turning the foam atop the waves to fiery lace. And there was the Institute where her family would be waking up soon. Making breakfast. Did they think of her? Dream of her and then wake and think of her again?

“This isn’t where I want to be,” she said, and knew it wasn’t true. She tried again. “This isn’t where I’m supposed to be.”

The sun was rising, and she tried to feel its warmth—something other than its brightness. To warm herself. What she would have given to feel that wet velvet crust of the top layer of sand under her feet, to feel the cold grittiness of the sand underneath change in temperature as the warmth of her human feet soaked away. To scream herself hoarse, knowing that no one would hear over the roar of the surf. She squatted and tried with every particle of herself to pick up a piece of beach glass. But it was a useless endeavor. She had no more effect on the world than a fragment of dream. It seemed to her, in fact, that she was shrinking, growing smaller and smaller until she no longer stood on the sand, but was instead slipping between the icy grains, now large as boulders around her.

“No!” she said. And was no longer on the beach in Los Angeles. Instead she was back at Dimmet Tarn, her bare feet skimming the deep black.

“Get a grip on yourself,” she told herself sternly. “And try again. What’s the worst that could happen?”

This time, instead of thinking of Idris, Livvy thought of the way in which it was bounded. She thought of the wards that kept out everyone who was not welcome. She imagined Idris, picturing the terrible dessert they served at least once a month at the Scholomance, in which unidentifiable pieces of fruit were embedded in a vast Jell-O dome. There were certain advantages to being dead: you were not expected to be enthusiastic about terrible desserts simply because they were desserts. But nevertheless, even dead, she remembered the consistency of Jell-O, and she imagined Idris as if it had been encased in gelatin instead of magic. She imagined traveling to Idris, to the shore of Lake Lyn, as if she were pressing up against a Jell-O mold. Doing this, she could almost feel the wards of Idris resisting her: tingling, slippery, and only the slightest bit yielding. Still she persisted, imagining pressing all of her incorporeal self against their magic.

Livvy closed her eyes, and when she opened them, she was in a green meadow where she had never been before. There were sugar-white mountains against the horizon, and insects, buzzing languorously like secrets, in among the blades of grass. She was not in Idris. What was even the point of being a ghost if you didn’t get to infiltrate the bad guys’ lair in order to haunt jerks like the Cohort?

“This would prove that you fail at life, Livvy, except, you know,” she said to herself. And then was surprised, because it seemed that someone had heard and was answering her.

“If they failed, would it really matter?” the voice said. A male voice with a strong Spanish accent. Livvy could see no one, but she could hear the voice as if the speaker stood beside her. “Then we could fight. I’m tired of this. We’ve been sitting around on our asses for months now, eating basic rations and arguing about the pettiest of goals.”

“Shut up, Manuel,” said a voice that Livvy knew. Zara. And now she recognized Manuel’s voice as well. “We have been told to check the wards, and so we will check the wards. Obedience is a virtue in a Shadowhunter. So is patience.”

“Patience!” Manuel said. “Like you’ve ever practiced patience in your life, Zara.”

Livvy could see nothing but the meadow around her, the far white peaks of the mountain range. But she found that she could feel Idris, warded against her, pressing against her consciousness. Though she couldn’t penetrate the wards, apparently she could eavesdrop through them. They must be standing right there, Livvy on one side of the wards and Zara and Manuel on the other.

“I am practicing enormous patience right now in not killing you,” Zara retorted.

“I wish you would,” Manuel said. “Then I wouldn’t have to suffer through another dinner of dandelion greens and half a parsnip garnished with unseasoned pigeon while your father’s cronies bicker about whether we mark the start of this new age by naming ourselves Raziel’s Chosen Angels or the Birthright or the Glorious Front. Why not just call ourselves Super Amazing People Who Did the Right Thing but Now Have Run Out of Coffee and Staples?”

“You think with your stomach,” Zara said.

Manuel ignored this. “Meanwhile, out there, there are Downworlders having baguettes slathered with Brie, and chocolate chip cookies, and vats and vats of coffee. Do you know how awful it is to spy on people who are eating delicious things like chocolate croissants when you don’t even have a cube of sugar? By the Angel, I never thought I would say this, but I miss the food at the Scholomance. What I would give for olive loaf. Olive loaf!”

Livvy thought, I’m dead and I wouldn’t eat olive loaf. But then, I wouldn’t hang out with Zara, either. She could still see nothing of Idris inside the wards, but as she tried to push through again, glittering symbols she did not recognize appeared, hanging in the air.

“This will be a brief chapter in the history of the Imperishable Order,” Zara said. “Or whatever historians end up calling us. Anyway, the point is, when we see that the time is right to leave Idris and we have the whole world to set to rights, no one is going to bother recording that you missed olive loaf. They’re going to write about all the battles that we won, and how good we looked winning them, and how all our enemies like Emma Carstairs died pitifully choking on their own pleas for mercy.”

“Last time I looked, she was partying on a beach,” Manuel said. “As if she wasn’t thinking about us at all.”

“Good,” Zara said. “Let them not think about us. And then let us be the last thing they ever see. Come on. The wards are holding. Let’s get back before there’s nothing left for lunch.”

And like that, the voices were gone. Livvy was alone in the green meadow, Idris as inaccessible as ever. But she had succeeded, sort of, hadn’t she? She hadn’t gotten past the wards, but she had gathered information. She’d learned, what? That the Cohort was low on food, and just as unpleasant as ever. They had some sort of plan to emerge at some unknown date from Idris, in some kind of surprise attack. Most important, they seemed to be able to spy, somehow, on the outside world. She should go back to Ty and report what she had learned. All she had to do was tug on that strand of necromantical magic that connected her to Ty, and she would go flying back. This was the farthest she had ever gone from her twin, and it was not entirely a comfortable sensation. And yet it was a sensation and Livvy found herself savoring it. There was so little left to feel. For months now she had been less than a shadow at Ty’s heels. Now, stretched so far away from him, she felt both more and less solid than she had been.

She sank into the grassy meadow, feeling herself growing smaller and smaller until the blades of grass towered around her. The noise of the insects changed—where before it had been shrill, now it slowed and grew thunderous. Why could she hear and see but not touch anything? She stretched out her hand toward a towering stalk of grass and then drew it back with a gasp. There was a bead of blood on her palm as if she had cut herself on the green edge. And when she raised her hand to her mouth, her blood was the most delicious thing she had ever tasted. She closed her eyes, savoring the taste, and when she opened them again, she was floating above the placid black nothing of Dimmet Tarn.

*  *  *

There was something she was supposed to do. There was someone who knew her, who knew what she should be doing. She could feel them tugging at her, as if she were a balloon on a tenuous string. They were pulling her away from the black reflective surface in which she could see no face, hard as she looked, and she let herself be reeled in.

Then she was in a room with a tall, rather thin boy with messy hair who was pacing up and down, fiddling with an empty lighter, a small creature stalking after him, pouncing at his heels. “Livvy!” the boy said.

As he said this, she recognized both herself and him. He was quite tall now. Hardly a boy now at all. It wasn’t that she was growing smaller. It was just that he was growing, would continue to grow, and she was dead. That was all.

“Ty,” she said.

“You’ve been gone all day,” he said. “It’s three in the morning. I stayed up because I got worried. It felt like you were . . . well, far away. It felt like something was . . . wrong.”

“Nothing was wrong,” Livvy said. “I just couldn’t get into Idris. But I think I was just outside of it, somehow. Just outside the wards. I overheard people talking. Zara and Manuel. They were checking the wards and talking.”

“Talking about what?” Ty said. He sat down at his desk and flipped open his notebook.

“Mostly about how hungry they were. But I think they have a way to spy on us. Well, not us, but you know. They can spy on everyone out here outside Idris. And they’re planning some kind of surprise attack.”

“When?” Ty said, busily writing.

“They didn’t say. And ‘surprise attack’ is overstating it. They mentioned in a vague kind of way that when they did attack us, we were going to be really surprised and then really dead. Because they think they’re super awesome and all we do is sit around and eat delicious croissants. And then they finished testing the wards and went away, and I couldn’t hear anything else.”

“Still,” Ty said. “Those are two pieces of information. We should go tell someone. I could tell Ragnor. Or Catarina.”

“No,” Livvy said. “I’m the one who figured it out. I want to be the one who gets to tell. I’ll go find Magnus and tell him. Didn’t Helen say in her last letter that Magnus was spending time at the Los Angeles Institute?”

Ty didn’t look at her. “Yes,” he said at last. “That seems fair. You should go. Only, Livvy?”

“What,” she said.

“While you were gone,” he said, “did you feel different? Did you feel anything strange?”

Livvy considered his question. “No,” she said. “Write that down in the book. That I didn’t feel anything strange at all. You don’t need to worry about me, Ty. I’m dead. Nothing bad can happen to me now.”

Irene was curled up on Ty’s bed now, leg extended as she fastidiously groomed one haunch. Her unblinking golden eyes stayed fixed on Livvy. They said, I belong here. Do you?

“You and Irene take care of each other while I’m gone, okay?” Livvy said.

“You’re going now?” Ty said. He grimaced as if the thought was causing him physical discomfort.

“Don’t wait up,” Livvy said, and then the room around her was gone, and she was once again standing on the beach beside the Los Angeles Institute, the sun slipping down below the darkening waves of the Pacific Ocean. The rush of the water down the sand was wrong somehow.

She could see lights blazing in the windows of the Institute. She wasn’t sure, but most likely they had already had dinner. Someone, probably Helen or Aline, would be doing the dishes. Tavvy would be getting ready for bed. Someone would read a book to him. Mark and Cristina would be in New York, most likely. Was Mark more settled in the human world now? It had always seemed so strange to her, how he had been taken from them and then restored. How alien he had seemed when he came back. And yet now she had become something even stranger.

She wished to be inside the Institute suddenly, away from the blackness of the water so like the blackness of Dimmet Tarn. And so she was inside. She found herself in the kitchen. Helen was sitting at the table, the dishes still waiting to be washed. Aline’s head rested against her shoulder. Her arm was around Helen’s shoulders. They looked utterly at home, as if they had always lived there. As if they had never been exiled to a small frozen island far away from their family.

“It’s nice to have Mark home for a few days,” Helen said.

Aline turned her face into Helen’s neck. “Mmm,” she said. “Do you think we could trust him to hold down the Institute for a few hours? I was thinking I could book a spa day for the two of us.”

“No,” Helen said. “Probably not. But let’s do it anyway.”

It was wonderful to see how settled in Helen and Aline were, but it was also all extremely unfair, Livvy felt. Everyone else got to come home. Mark. Helen. Even Ty would come home someday. But she would never truly be home again. A shudder of envy and despair and longing went through her, and as if she had any material effect on the world at all, the pile of dishes beside the sink suddenly toppled over, sending shards and bits of food all over the counter and floor.

“What was that?” Aline said, standing up.

Helen groaned. “A tremor, I think. You know, welcome to California.”

Livvy fled the kitchen, up to Dru’s room, where her sister sat on her bed, watching one of her horror movies on the Institute’s battered television.

“Hey!” Livvy said. “You like scary movies so much? Well, here I am! The real deal. Boo!”

She got right into Dru’s face, being as loud as she could. “Here I am! Can you see me? Dru? Why can’t you see me! I’m right here!”

But Dru went on watching her stupid movie, and Livvy felt herself shrinking, growing smaller and smaller until she could have slipped right into the still, black calm of her sister’s pupil as if it were a pool of water and lodged herself there. She could be safe there. A secret from everyone, even Dru. And then Ty wouldn’t have to worry about her anymore. He would be safe too.

“Safe from what, Livvy?” she asked herself.

The screen of the television went dark then, and the witchlight sconces over Dru’s bed flickered and went out. “What the hell,” Dru said, and got up. She went over to the wall and touched the sconce. The room filled with light again.

There was a knock on the door, and when Dru opened it, Helen and Aline were there. Helen said, “Did you feel anything just now?”

“We were in the kitchen and then a bunch of dishes fell,” Aline said eagerly. “Helen says it might have been an earthquake! My first one!”

“No,” Dru said. “I don’t think so? But the TV went off a second ago. So, maybe?”

In the doorway behind Helen and Aline, Mark appeared.

Helen said, “Did you feel it too?”

“Feel what?” Mark said.

“A tiny earthquake!” Aline said, grinning.

“No,” Mark said. “No, but Magnus just got a message from Jem. He says Tessa’s in labor. So he’s gone to them.”

“Of course,” Helen said dryly. “Because Magnus is exactly the person I want to keep me company when I’m about to give birth.”

“I bet he gives amazing baby presents, though,” Aline said. “And to be fair, I think that he feels he should have been there when Tessa and Will had their children, considering. Where are Julian and Emma right now? We should let them know.”

“Paris,” Helen said. “They like it so much there they keep extending their stay. Or do you think Magnus has let them know too?”

Magnus! Livvy realized that she had entirely forgotten why she had come. She had information for him. Well. In one moment she was in Dru’s room, ignored and forgotten by a good number of the people she had loved most in the whole world. In the next, all the doors of the Los Angeles Institute flung themselves open and all the windows of the Institute shattered outward and Livvy did not even notice because she was suddenly beneath a full moon above a black pond carpeted in lily pads, fat velvet pads of the softest gray in the moonlight. Frogs, invisible in the shadows, were singing.

She knew, without knowing how she knew this, that she was now in the countryside, somewhere outside London. This was Cirenworth Hall, the estate where Jem and Tessa lived with Kit Herondale. Julian had visited there, and described it in a letter to Ty. There were horses and cows and apple trees. Tessa had an herb garden, and there was a glass conservatory that Jem had converted into a kind of music studio. How nice life was for the living! Jem, too, had gone away from the world for whole lifetimes and been allowed to return. Oh, why couldn’t Livvy do the same? Why was she the only one who could not return and take up her life again?

It must be very late at night here, or else very early in the morning, but as with the Institute, lights were blazing in all the windows of the house. She drifted toward it, and then was inside. She was in another kitchen, this one very different from the cheery contemporary kitchen of the Institute. The walls were white plaster, hung with bundles of herbs and copper pots. Enormous beams dark with age ran across the whitewashed ceiling. Sitting at a long, scarred oaken table was Kit, playing solitaire and sipping from a mug. It might have been tea, but Livvy suspected from the face that he made as he sipped that it was something alcoholic instead.

“Boo!” she said, and Kit fumbled the mug, spilling liquid all down his pants.

“Livvy?” he said.

“That’s right,” she said, pleased. “You can see me. It gets really, really boring being invisible to everyone.”

“What are you doing here?” Kit said. Then, “Is he okay? Ty?”

“What?” Livvy said. “No, he’s fine. I’m looking for Magnus, actually. There’s something that I need to ask him. Or tell him. I think I’m supposed to tell him something.”

“Are you okay?” Kit said.

“What, aside from being dead?” Livvy said.

“Just, um, you seem a little off,” Kit said. “Or something.”

“Yeah, well, dead,” Livvy said. “But other than that.”

“Magnus is in the old conservatory with Jem and Tessa. Tessa’s in labor, but, like, they seem like it’s not a big deal or anything. They’re just sitting around and talking about stuff. But, you know, it was kind of freaking me out. Like, she’s going to have a baby, you know? Which is cool! But I thought I should give them some space.”

“Okay, thanks,” Livvy said. “Great to see you, Kit. Sorry I scared you. Sort of.”

And then she was in the conservatory, which had been completely outfitted for a musician. There was a grand piano in one corner, and various instruments hanging on a beautiful wooden cabinet. Jem was playing a cello, his long hands drawing the bow across the strings as if he were coaxing out those low, beautiful, belling notes. Tessa was pacing, slowly, along a glass wall, one hand on her great belly and the other on her back. Magnus was nowhere to be seen.

Livvy wasn’t really thinking about Magnus, though. Not anymore. All of her attention was focused on Tessa. On the hand that rested on the pregnant belly. She could not take her eyes away.

There was a voice in Livvy’s head, way below the song that Jem was playing, below the sounds of the living hearts that beat in the conservatory: Jem, Tessa, and the unborn baby. She almost recognized the voice. It belonged to someone who had once been very dear to her. “Livvy,” it was saying. “Something’s wrong. I think that something’s wrong.”

Livvy did her best to ignore the voice. She thought, If I make myself very small, I bet that I could do the thing I am thinking of. I could make myself so very small that I could slip into that baby. I wouldn’t take up much room at all. A baby is hardly a person at all, really. If I took the place of whoever the baby is going to be, if I wanted a do-over, it wouldn’t hurt Tessa and Jem at all. They would be good parents to me. And I would be a good daughter. I was good when I was alive! I could be good again. And it isn’t fair. I shouldn’t have died. I ought to get another chance. Why shouldn’t I have another chance?

She drew closer to Tessa. Tessa groaned.

“What is it?” Jem said, putting down his bow. “Is it my rank, terrible playing? Magnus may have magically transformed this space to be hospitable to instruments, but I am still an amateur when it comes to the cello.” His face changed. “Or is it time? Shall we go back to the house?”

Tessa shook her head. “Not yet,” she said. “But drawing nearer. Keep playing. It helps me.”

“Magnus will be back soon with the herbs you wanted,” Jem said.

“There’s still time,” Tessa said. “There’s still time too if you don’t want to be the one to deliver this baby. Magnus could fetch someone.”

“What, and miss my chance at the big time?” Jem said. “I’d like to think that all my years as a Silent Brother weren’t totally pointless.”

Livvy was shrinking, shrinking, shrinking down almost to nothingness. All the darkness outside the glass walls of the conservatory was pressing in as if they were all submerged beneath Dimmet Tarn, but she could still escape. She could be a living girl again.

Jem got up and went over to Tessa. He knelt down in front of her and laid his head against her belly. “Hello there, Wilhelmina Yiqiang Ke Carstairs. Little Mina. You are welcome, little Mina, my heart. We are waiting for you in joy and hope and love.”

Tessa rested her hand on Jem’s head. “I think she heard you,” she said. “I think she’s hurrying now.”

“Livvy!” said the other voice. The one that Livvy didn’t want to hear right now, the one that tugged at her as if it were a leash. “Livvy, what are you doing? Something’s wrong, Livvy.”

And oh, the voice was right. Livvy came back to herself. What had she been thinking of doing? She had been going to—and as she realized what she had been about to do, all the walls of the conservatory exploded outward into the night in a great cloud of glass shards.

Jem and Tessa both cried out, crouching down. And then Magnus was there in green silk pajamas beautifully embroidered with Pokémon. “What in the world?” he said, bending over to help Jem and Tessa up.

“I don’t know,” Jem said wildly. “Demons? A sonic boom?”

Magnus looked around the conservatory. A strange expression came over his face when he saw Livvy.

“I’m sorry!” she said. “I didn’t mean to, Magnus!”

Looking hard at her, Magnus said to Jem and Tessa, “Not a demon, I think. There’s nothing dangerous here now. Come on. Let’s get you back to the house. I have your herbs, Tessa. Kit’s brewing you a nice cup of tea.”

“Oh good,” Tessa said faintly. “The intervals between contractions are getting shorter. I thought there would be more time. Are you sure we shouldn’t be more concerned about whatever broke all the windows?”

“Everyone always thinks they’ll have more time,” Magnus said. He was still looking right at Livvy as he said it. “And no. I don’t think you have to be concerned at all. I would never let anything happen to you. Think of it as part of the christening! You know that when they christen a ship, they break a bottle of champagne against the forward bow. Your baby just gets the deluxe version. Imagine her voyage! Her life, I predict, will be full of wonders.”

“Come on,” Jem said. “Let’s get inside the house. Magnus, will you bring my cello?” He took down his violin from the cabinet, and with his other hand, he took Tessa’s arm and began to walk her toward the house, over the dark ground strewn with broken glass.

Magnus said, “Oh, Livvy.”

“I almost—” she said.

“I know,” he said. “But you didn’t. Go find Kit and stay with him. I’ll come to you in a little while to fetch Tessa’s tonic.”

*  *  *

Kit seemed relieved, actually, to have company, even if company was only a ghost. “What happened out there?” he said. “What happened to the conservatory?”

“I think that was me,” Livvy said. “I didn’t mean to, though.”

“Is this the kind of thing that you’ve been getting up to at the Scholomance?” Kit said. “Is that why you came to find Magnus?”

“No!” Livvy said. “I haven’t done anything like this. Well, not until today. I think I smashed some plates at the Los Angeles Institute. And I made the lights go out in Dru’s room while she was watching a scary movie.”

“Nice,” Kit said. “So, like, basic poltergeist stuff.”

“I didn’t mean to do any of it!” Livvy said. “It just sort of happened. I’m sorry I wrecked the conservatory.”

“Maybe you could try not to do anything like that again,” Kit said.

“Sure,” Livvy said. “Of course. I don’t want to do anything like that again.”

There was a glint off something Kit wore on a chain around his neck. “Oh,” Livvy said, looking closer. It was a heron made of silver.

“It belonged to my mother,” Kit said. “Jem and Tessa gave it to me a while ago. I found it again this morning. I’d forgotten about it.”

“It’s so pretty,” Livvy said.

Kit said, “I’d give it to you if I could. She used it to summon Jem and Tessa to her side when she was attacked. In the end, it didn’t save her. So I guess I have a grudge against it.”

Livvy said, “I’m sorry.”

“Why?” Kit said. “You didn’t kill them. Anyway, everything’s okay?” He was looking at his hands very intently, as if he thought there might be something wrong with them.

“What?” Livvy said. “Yes. Everything’s fine. Oh. You mean Ty.”

Kit didn’t say anything, but he nodded. He looked as if he wished he hadn’t asked at all, and also as if he were listening with all of his being.

It was ridiculous, Livvy thought. You could tell how much he missed Ty. As much as Ty missed him. She didn’t understand boys at all. Why couldn’t they just say what they felt? Why did they have to be so stupid?

“He’s okay,” Livvy said. “He’s doing well at the Scholomance. He has a Carpathian lynx in his room! He doesn’t really have any friends, though. He misses you, but he won’t talk about it. But other than that, he’s fine.”

As she said it, though, she realized that she wasn’t sure at all that Ty was fine. The strand that bound her to Ty—that filament of magic—felt wrong, somehow, as if it were slackening. She could feel Ty reaching for her, but weakly.

“Livvy?” Kit said.

“Oh no,” she said. “No, I think I have to go back. I think I shouldn’t be here.”

Now Kit looked truly alarmed. “What’s wrong?” he said.

“Ty,” she said. “It’s hurting him that I’m here. Tell Magnus I’m sorry, but I have to go. Tell him to come find me. I have information for him about Idris.”

“About Idris?” Kit said. “Never mind. I’ll tell him. Go!”

And Livvy went.

*  *  *

She must have been back at the Scholomance in the space of a breath, although to be fair, since she didn’t breathe anymore, she was only guessing that was how long it took. She was in Ty’s room, but Ty wasn’t there. Only Irene, looking accusingly at her from the door, which she appeared to be attempting to chew open.

“Sorry,” Livvy said, and then felt ridiculous. This time she let her awareness of Ty, where he was, pull her toward him, and yet that was not where she found herself. She found herself, instead, hovering once more over Dimmet Tarn.

“No!” she said. And, feeling as if she were fighting her way to him through some impenetrable and gloomy dark chasm, she came at last to her brother.

He was lying in a bed in the infirmary, looking very pale. Catarina Loss was by his side, and a boy that Livvy recognized from Ty’s classes. Anush.

“He just collapsed,” Anush was saying. “Is it food poisoning?”

“I don’t think so,” Catarina Loss said. “I don’t know.”

Ty opened his eyes. “Livvy,” he said, so softly that her name was barely a sound at all.

“What did he say?” Anush asked.

“Livvy,” Catarina said, laying her hand on Ty’s head. “His sister. The one who was slain by Annabel Blackthorn.”

“Oh,” Anush said. “Oh, how sad.”

Catarina Loss said, “His color is improving a little, I think. Are you good friends?”

“Uh, not really?” Anush said. “I don’t know who his friends are. If he has friends. I mean, he seems like a good guy. Smart. Super focused. But he kind of keeps to himself.”

“I’m going to keep him in the infirmary overnight,” Catarina Loss said. “But if it occurs to you to come back to visit him, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. Everyone needs friends.”

“Yeah, sure,” Anush said. “I’ll come back later. See if he needs anything.”

Catarina Loss poured a glass of water for Ty and helped him sit up to take a drink. “You fainted,” she said in a neutral voice. “Sometimes new students take their course of study too seriously and forget about things like getting enough sleep or eating.”

“I don’t forget things like that,” Ty said. “I have a schedule so that I don’t forget.”

“You came to me the other day about the lynx,” Catarina Loss said. “How is she doing? I see there are scratches on your arm.”

“She’s great!” Ty said. “She eats everything I bring her and she’s drinking fine too. How long have I been here? I should go make sure that she’s okay.”

“You’ve only been here a little while,” Catarina Loss said. “When Anush comes back, you can tell him to look after her for tonight. I think he’d be happy to do that. Do you think you could eat something?”

Ty nodded, and Catarina Loss said, “I’ll see what delights the kitchen can supply. Stay in bed. I’ll be right back.”

When she was gone, Livvy said, “Ty!”

Ty frowned at her. He said, “I could feel you getting farther and farther away. It hurt, Livvy. And you were getting stranger and stranger, the farther away you got. I could feel you. But you didn’t feel like you anymore. You felt—”

Livvy said, “I know. I felt it too. It was scary, Ty. I was scary. You’re going to have to write that down in your notebook. I don’t think it’s good when I’m away too long. I think the farther away from you that I get, the more dangerous it is for both of us. The longer I stayed away, the more I forgot things. Like who I was. Like you. Why I should come back.”

Ty said, “But you did come back.”

“I came back,” Livvy said. “Almost too late. But I’m here now. And just in time. Irene is gnawing her way through your door.”

She grinned at Ty reassuringly, and Ty smiled back. Then his eyes closed again.

“Ty?” she said.

“I’m fine,” he said. “Just really tired. Going to sleep for a little while, Livvy. Will you stay with me while I fall asleep?”

“Sure,” she said. “Of course I will.”

He was asleep when Catarina Loss returned with a tray of food, and still asleep when Magnus Bane came through the door several hours later in a puffy scarlet down parka trimmed in black fake fur that came all the way down to his ankles. He looked as if he had been mostly swallowed by a very fat eiderdown dragon.

Catarina Loss was with him. “A girl!” she said. “I’ve been knitting a blanket for her, but it isn’t done yet. Wilhelmina Yiqiang Ke Carstairs. That’s quite a big name for a very small baby.”

“Mina for short,” Magnus said. “Oh, she’s lovely, Catarina. She has Jem’s fingers. A musician’s fingers. And Tessa’s chin. So how’s our patient?”

“He’ll be fine,” Catarina Loss said. Then, “Though what was wrong with him in the first place isn’t quite apparent to me. He seems perfectly healthy. I’m due to teach a class. Will you still be here in an hour or so?”

“I’ll be here or somewhere close at hand,” Magnus said. “Come and find me when you’re done.”

When Catarina Loss was gone, Magnus said to Livvy, “Well. There is apparently something that you must say to me. And then there is something that I must say to you.”

Livvy said, “I know. I think I know what you must say to me. But first let me tell you about Idris.” And she told him everything she had heard Zara and Manuel say.

“We knew that sooner or later they plan to attack us,” Magnus said at last. “But now that we know they are spying on us, we will have to find out how. And perhaps if it is possible for them, then it is also possible for us to spy on Idris. But I don’t think we can risk you doing it again.”

“No,” Livvy said. “Because every time I get too far away from Ty, things start to go wrong. I start to change. I get stronger, I think. I can do things! Like I did with the conservatory. I broke dishes, too, and I think I almost hurt Tessa’s baby somehow. And Ty, it’s bad for him, too, when we’re apart. That’s why he ended up in the infirmary. Because I was gone too long.”

“Yes,” Magnus said. “Smart girl.”

“If I had stayed away longer,” Livvy said, “would he have died?”

“I don’t know,” Magnus said. “But the magic he tried to use to bring you back from the dead was dark magic, Livvy. Necromancy. A spell from the Black Volume of the Dead! And a failed spell, at that. When the spell failed, the thing that kept you here, that bound you, was Ty. Your twin. That’s not normal for ghosts. Most of them are bound to an object. Things like a ring or a key or a house. But you’re bound to a person. It makes sense that you need to stay close to Ty now. And that he has to stay close to you. I think that when you are away from him for too long, you become less yourself. More powerful. Less human. More a hungry ghost. Something dangerous to the living.”

“When I was in the conservatory,” Livvy said, forcing the words out, “I felt as if I could swap places with Tessa’s baby. That I could be alive again, if I were willing to take her baby’s life. Her baby’s place.”

Magnus said, “Necromancy is a very dark art. Yes. Perhaps you could have. Or perhaps you might have killed the baby or Tessa, and ended up with nothing at all. Magic can have a high price, Livvy.”

“I don’t want to hurt anybody,” Livvy said. “That’s what Annabel did. I don’t want to be like Annabel, Magnus. I don’t! But I don’t want to be dead, either! It isn’t fair!”

“No,” Magnus said. “It isn’t fair. But life isn’t fair. And you died bravely, Livvy.”

“Stupidly,” Livvy said. “I died stupidly.”

“Bravely,” Magnus said. “Though I admit that sometimes I wish Shadowhunters were a little less brave and used their heads a little more.”

Livvy sniffed. “Well,” she said. “Ty is good at that. Using his head.”

“Ty is exceptional,” Magnus said. “I expect great things from him. And from you, too, Livvy. Because if you do not do great things, then I fear you may do terrible things. The two of you have remarkable potential.”

“Me?” she said. “But I’m dead.”

“Nevertheless,” Magnus said. He reached into his pocket and said, “And I have a present for you. Well, it’s from Kit, too. It’s for you and Ty.” He held out a silver chain from which hung the figure of a bird. A heron, Livvy realized.

“You’re bound to Ty,” Magnus said, “but it’s a necromantical bond. I was poking around for something to use that might work to bear a little of the weight that bond must be on you and Ty, and Kit asked what I was doing. He gave me this, and I have altered it a little. Given it some potency. If Ty wears it, it should shield him a little from any side effects of being bound to the dead. And it should sustain you a little. It should ease some of the strangeness of being in the living world. You can touch it. And, too, should you or he feel in need of help, you can use it to call on me. Or Ty can. Once it belonged to Kit’s mother. It was given to her by Jem, so that when she was in danger she could summon him. Now it will serve you and your brother.”

Livvy stretched out a finger. Stroked the silver heron. “Oh,” she said. “I can! I can feel it!”

Magnus said, “Yes. Well. Good.”

“Like one of Ty’s fidget toys,” Livvy said. “Like Julian’s lighter.” She was running her fingers along the chain now. “Is the baby okay? Mina?”

“Yes,” Magnus said. “She’s fine. Everyone is fine. The conservatory, on the other hand . . .”

Livvy thought, suddenly, of Dimmet Tarn. She said, “You’ve been here before, to the Scholomance?”

“Yes,” Magnus said. “Many times, over the years.”

“Have you ever been to Dimmet Tarn?” Livvy said.

“Yes,” Magnus said. “A most unimpressive body of water. You must find it a sad change from the Pacific Ocean.”

“Yeah, well, there are stories that it’s supernatural in some way,” Livvy said. “But nobody knows how. Ty and I were trying to see if we could find out anything about it.”

Magnus said, “Let me see. There were stories about it, but I never paid much attention to them. What was it?”

He sat in silence for a minute, and Livvy sat companionably with him. Ty stirred as if he were dreaming in a way that made Livvy think that he would wake up soon.

“Yes!” Magnus said. “Of course. The story was this. That if you went to Dimmet Tarn and looked into the water for long enough, you would see something of your future. That was the enchantment placed on it by some warlock or other. Funnily enough, I believe he was from Devon, actually. Dimmet is a Welsh word. Why? Did you go there? Livvy? Did you see something there?”

“No,” Livvy said at last. She tried to think of what it had been like, sinking into that vast dark nothingness. “I didn’t see anything. It was nothing at all.”

“I see,” Magnus said in a tone that suggested he saw everything she wasn’t saying. “But let us say that there was someone who happened to look into dismal Dimmet Tarn and let’s say they saw something they didn’t like. Something that suggested a future they didn’t want. And let’s say that this someone came and talked to me. Do you know what I would tell them?”

“What?” Livvy said.

Magnus said, “I would tell them this. That the future isn’t fixed. If we see a path in front of us that we would not choose, then we can choose another path. Another future. Dimmet Tarn be damned. Would you agree with that, Livvy?”

He stared hard at Livvy and Livvy stared right back. She couldn’t think of anything to say at all, but finally she set her mouth and nodded.

From the bed, Ty said, “Livvy!” His eyes opened and found her, and he said, “Livvy,” again. This time he didn’t sound despairing. He hadn’t noticed yet that Magnus was there at all.

A terrible wailing came from the doorway as Ty spoke. It was Irene, her whiskery jaws stretched open and all of her fur standing on end. Livvy would not have thought that such a tiny animal could have produced such a large noise. Still wailing, Irene leaped onto the bed and butted Ty in the chin. The noise she was making changed to smaller, angry inquiring trills like a hot teakettle who had a lot of questions but suspected she wasn’t going to like any of the answers.

“What on earth is that?” Magnus said.

“This is Irene,” Ty said. “She’s a Carpathian lynx.”

“Of course!” said Magnus. “A Carpathian lynx. How silly of me.” His eyes met Livvy’s. “A boy, a Carpathian lynx, and a ghost. Truly I expect great things from you and your brother, Livvy. Here, Ty. This is for you.” He dropped the Herondale necklace into Ty’s palm. “Livvy will explain its purpose. Suffice it to say that if you need me for any reason at all, you can use it to summon me. Livvy’s been telling me about Idris, about what she overheard. But I have been up all night long, and I need some strong tea. I’m going to go find Ragnor Fell and make him find me some strong tea.”

He made as grand an exit as anyone can make when they are wearing an oversize down coat, and as he exited, Anush entered, his arms bloody with scratches.

Anush gazed after Magnus in astonishment. “That was Magnus Bane,” he said to Ty. “Was he here to see you?”

“Yes. He’s our friend,” Ty said.

Anush said, “I knew that you know him, but I didn’t realize you had a just-dropping-by-the-Scholomance-to-see-you type of relationship! Sorry about that animal. I went to your room to see if I could bring you back a book or some clothes or something, and she got away from me. She’s so pretty. But she’s so mean.”

“Her name is Irene,” Ty said, looking fondly at the lynx curled up beside him.

Anush said, “Again, rhymes with ‘mean.’ Do you want me to go get some scraps from the kitchen for her?”

When Anush was gone, Livvy told Ty everything that had happened while she had been in Los Angeles and in the conservatory in England. Ty said, “I’m so sorry, Livvy.”

“For what?” she said.

“For doing this to you,” he said.

“Oh, Ty,” she said. “I would have done it for you. It isn’t a thing that should be done, but I would have done it anyway. And so we would be in just the same mess we’re in now. Besides, I think I’m getting the hang of this ghost thing.”

Ty nodded. He turned the necklace over and over in his hand, then held it out, dangling the heron over the bed so that the sunlight caught the silver, and Irene batted it with her paw. Livvy thought of Kit sitting at the table in the kitchen, so carefully not asking her anything about Ty.

She reached over and caught the chain in her hand. Gently untangled it from Irene’s sharp claws. Holding the necklace still, Livvy said, “This belonged to Kit. You’ll have to write him. To say thank you. You’ll write him and give the letter to Magnus to take back when he goes.”

“Okay,” Ty said at last. “But he won’t write back.”

“Then you’ll keep on writing until he does,” Livvy said. “Necromancy is bad. We’re all agreed on that. But postcards are pretty harmless. You know. Something scenic on the front.” Dimmet Tarn flashed in front of her. That black nothingness. “Wish you were here. That kind of thing.”

She held the chain tighter. Rubbed the small links between her fingers. Maybe that was her future. Black nothingness. But right now she had Ty. She could choose the path that led away from Dimmet Tarn for as long as she could. She had an anchor. She would hold on as tightly as she could.