This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again.
—John Keats, “This Living Hand”
It was a bit like the moment in a dream where one realized one was dreaming, only in reverse. When Lucie saw the boy from the forest come into the ballroom, she assumed she was dreaming, and only when her parents began to hurry over toward him and his two companions did she realize that she wasn’t.
In a daze, she pushed through the crowd toward the ballroom doors. As she neared her parents, she recognized the woman they were speaking to, her taffeta dress stretched across bony arms and shoulders, her oversize hat covered with lace, tulle, and a memorable stuffed bird. Tatiana Blackthorn.
Lucie had always been a bit frightened of Tatiana, especially when she had come to their house, demanding that James cut the thorns from her gates. She remembered her as a sort of towering skeleton, but with the passage of years, it seemed that Tatiana had shrunk: still tall, but no longer a giant.
And there beside her was Grace. Lucie recalled her as a determinedly poised child, but she was quite different now. Cold and lovely and statuesque.
But Lucie barely spared them a glance. She was staring at the boy who had come in with them. The changeling boy she had last seen in Brocelind Forest.
He had not altered at all. His hair was still a black spill over his forehead, his eyes the same eerie green. He wore the same clothes he had in the forest: dark trousers and an ivory shirt whose sleeves had been rolled up above his elbows. It was very odd attire for a ball.
He was watching as Tessa and Will greeted Tatiana and Grace, Will bending to kiss Grace’s satin-gloved hand. Oddly, neither of them greeted the boy. As Lucie neared them, her brows drew down into a frown. They were speaking to each other, ignoring him entirely, talking through him as if he weren’t there. How could they be so rude?
Lucie hurried forward, her mouth opening, her gaze fixed on the boy, her boy, her boy from the forest. He raised his head and saw her looking, and to her astonishment, a look of horror passed over his face.
She stopped dead. She could see James making his way through the crowd toward them somewhere in the distance, but the boy was already stepping away from Tatiana and Grace, moving toward Lucie. Speeding toward her, actually, like a runaway horse on Rotten Row.
No one else seemed to see him. No one turned to look at either of them, even when he seized hold of Lucie’s wrist and drew her after him out of the room.
“Would you do me the honor of this dance?” said James.
He was conscious of the presence of his parents, and of Tatiana Blackthorn, observing everything with her poison-green eyes. He was conscious of the music, continuing around them, and conscious of his own heartbeat, loud as thunder in his ears. He was conscious of all those things, but they seemed distant, as if trapped behind a wall of glass. The only thing that was real in the room was Grace.
James’s parents looked on with concern etched on their faces. He felt a sense of guilt that they must be wondering, now, why he had rushed over to Grace: as far as they knew, he was barely acquainted with her. But the guilt, too, felt distant. They didn’t know what he did. They didn’t know how important this was.
“Well, go on, Grace,” Tatiana said, a beaky smile spreading across her thin face. “Dance with the gentleman.”
Without looking up, Grace put her hand lightly in James’s. They made their way out onto the floor. Touching Grace was like touching adamas for the first time: sparks rocketed through James as he drew her toward him, placing one hand on her shoulder and the other at her waist. She had always been graceful when they had danced, as children, in the overgrown garden of her house in Idris. But she felt different in his arms now.
“Why did you not tell me you were coming?” he said in a low voice.
She finally raised her face and he was struck by a jolt of recognition: Grace might hold herself with near-silent poise, but she felt with an absolute intensity. She was like a fire blazing in the heart of a glacier. “You didn’t come to Idris,” she said. “I waited—I expected you—but you never came.”
“I wrote to you,” he said. “I told you we weren’t coming this summer.”
“Mama found the letter,” she said. “First she hid it from me. I thought you had forgotten—at last I found it in her room. She was dreadfully angry. I told her again we only had a friendship, but—” She shook her head. James was conscious that everyone in the room was staring at them. Even Anna was looking at them curiously through the cheroot smoke that wreathed her like mist off the Thames. “She wouldn’t say what was in it, she just smiled as the days went by and you didn’t come. And I was so frightened. When we are not together, when we are not with one another, the bond between us weakens. I feel it. Don’t you?”
He shook his head. “Love must be able to survive distance,” he said, as gently as he could.
“You don’t understand, James. You have a life here in London, and friends, and I have nothing.” Her voice shook with the strength of her feeling.
“Grace. Don’t say that.” But he thought of the overgrown house full of stopped clocks and rotted food. He had sworn he would help her escape from that.
She slid her hand down his arm. He felt her fingers circle his wrist, below the silver bracelet. Loyalty Binds Me. “I should have trusted you would have written to me,” she whispered. “That you thought of me. I thought about you each night.”
Each night. He knew she meant it innocently, but he felt himself tense. It had been so long since he had last kissed her. He could not remember what it had been like, not exactly, but he knew it had shattered him. “I think of you every day,” he said. “And now that you are here…”
“I never thought it would happen. I never thought I would see London,” she said. “The streets, the carriages, the buildings, it’s all so wonderful. The people…” She looked around the room. There was a look in her eyes, avid, almost hungry. “I cannot wait to know them all.”
“There is an outing tomorrow,” James said. “A group going to Regent’s Park. Would your mother allow you to come?”
Grace’s eyes gleamed. “I think she will,” she said. “She had said she wants me to meet people here in London, and oh—I should like to know your parabatai, Matthew. And Thomas and Christopher that you’ve spoken so much of. I—I should like your friends to like me.”
“Of course,” he murmured, and drew her closer against him. She was light and slim, not nearly as soft and warm as Daisy—
Daisy. Raziel, he’d been dancing with Daisy just a few minutes ago. He couldn’t remember excusing himself. Couldn’t remember leaving her.
He looked away from Grace for the first time and searched the floor for Cordelia. He found her in moments—she was easy to spot. No one else had hair that color, a deep dark red, like fire shining through blood. She was dancing with Matthew, he saw to his surprise. Matthew’s arms were around her, and she was smiling.
Relief went through him. So he hadn’t done her any harm. That was good. He liked Cordelia. He had been glad to see her there among the usual group of girls, knowing he could ask her to dance and she would make no wrong assumptions about his intentions: they were family friends.
The music stopped. It was a pause for refreshments. Couples began to flood off the dance floor—James smiled to himself as he saw Jessamine, the Institute’s resident ghost, drifting above the head of Rosamund Wentworth as Rosamund gossiped with her friends. Jessamine loved overhearing gossip, even though she’d been dead for a quarter century.
Cordelia flashed past as she hurried away from Matthew; she was glancing around, as if searching for someone. Her brother, perhaps? But Alastair seemed to be deep in conversation with Thomas. Very puzzling, that—James was positive Thomas hadn’t liked Alastair much at school.
“My mother is summoning me back,” Grace said. “I had better go.”
Tatiana was indeed beckoning from the sidelines. James touched Grace’s hand lightly with his own. He knew they could not hold hands, as Barbara and Oliver were doing. They could not show any affection openly.
Not now. But someday.
“Tomorrow, in the park,” he said. “We will find a time to talk.”
She nodded and turned away, hurrying toward Tatiana, who stood alone by the ballroom doors. James watched her go: it had been years of summers, he thought, but Grace was still a mystery.
“She’s very pretty,” said a familiar voice behind him. He turned and saw Anna leaning against the wall. She had the uncanny ability to disappear from one spot and appear in another, like a moving point of light.
James leaned against the wall next to Anna. He had spent many dances this way, draped against the William Morris wallpaper with his acerbic cousin. Too much dancing always made him feel as if he were being disloyal to Grace. “Is she?”
“I assumed that was why you bolted across the room like Oscar spotting a biscuit.” Oscar was Matthew’s golden retriever, well known for loyalty if not intelligence. “Bad form, James. Abandoning that nice Cordelia Carstairs.”
“I hope you know me well enough to know that I don’t simply bolt at every pretty girl I see,” said James, nettled. “Maybe she reminded me of a long-lost aunt.”
“My mother is your aunt, and you’ve never been that enthused to see her.” Anna smiled, her blue eyes sparking. “So how do you know Grace Blackthorn?”
James glanced over at Grace, who was being introduced to Charles Fairchild. Poor Grace. She wouldn’t find Charles the least bit interesting. James liked Matthew’s older brother well enough, and they were practically family, but he had only one interest—Shadowhunter politics.
Grace was nodding and smiling politely. James wondered if he ought to rescue her. The world of Alicante and its dramas and policies couldn’t be further from Grace’s experience.
“And now you’re thinking you ought to rescue her from Charles,” said Anna, running her fingers through her pomaded hair. “I can’t blame you.”
“Do you not like Charles?” James was slightly surprised. Anna viewed the world with amused tolerance. She rarely went so far as to particularly like anyone, and it was even more rare for her to dislike them.
“I cannot admire all his decisions,” said Anna, clearly choosing her words with care. James wondered what decisions she meant. “Go ahead, then, Jamie—rescue her.”
James got only a few steps before the world around him shifted and changed. Anna vanished, as did all the music and laughter: gray, formless nothing swirled around him. He could hear only the sound of his own heartbeat. The floor seemed to tilt under him like the deck of a sinking ship.
NO, he cried out silently, but there was nothing he could do to stop it: the shadows were rising all around him as the universe went gray.
The boy drew Lucie down the hall and through the first open door, taking them into the games room. He didn’t move to shut the door, only went to light the witchlight on the mantel, so Lucie shut it herself, and turned the key for good measure.
Then she spun around and stared accusingly. “What on earth are you doing here?” she demanded.
The boy smiled. He looked, puzzlingly, no older than Lucie remembered him—sixteen, seventeen perhaps. Still slender, and under real light and not a forest moon he was terribly, shockingly pale, with that cast of bruised sickliness to him: his green eyes fever-bright and shadowed.
“I was invited,” he said.
“You can’t have been,” Lucie said, putting her hands on her hips. The witchlight had flared up, and she could see that the room was in some disarray: someone had knocked over a decanter, and the billiard table was crosswise. “You are a forest-dwelling faerie changeling.”
At that, he laughed. He had the same smile she remembered. “Is that what you thought?”
“You told me about faerie traps!” she said. “You appeared from the forest and vanished back into it—”
“I am no faerie, nor a changeling,” he said. “Shadowhunters know about faerie traps too.”
“But you have no runes,” she said.
He glanced down at himself—his arms, revealed from the elbows down, his hands. Every Shadowhunter was Marked with a Voyance rune on the back of their dominant hand when they turned ten years old, to help them master the Sight. But the only mark on the back of his hand was the old burn scar she had noticed in the forest. “No,” he said. “I don’t.”
“You didn’t say you were a Shadowhunter.” She leaned back against the billiard table. “You never told me what you were.”
“I never thought it would matter,” he said. “I thought by the time you were old enough to ask questions and demand answers, you wouldn’t be able to see me anymore.”
Lucie felt as if a cold hand had been placed on her back. “Why wouldn’t I be able to see you?”
“Think about it, Lucie,” he said gently. “Did it seem like anyone else in the ballroom could see me? Did anyone greet me or acknowledge me, even your father?”
She said nothing.
“Children can see me sometimes,” he said. “Not many others. Not people as old as you.”
“Well, thank you very much.” Lucie was indignant. “I’m hardly ancient.”
“No.” A smile hovered around his soft mouth. “No, you’re not.”
“But you said you were invited.” Lucie was not inclined to drop the comment. “How could that be, if no one can see you, though why that should be—”
“All the Blackthorns were invited,” he said. “The invitation was addressed to Tatiana Blackthorn and Family. I am family. I am Jesse Blackthorn.”
“But he’s dead,” Lucie said, without thinking. She met his gaze with her own. “So you’re a ghost?”
“Well,” he said. “Yes.”
“That’s why you said ‘even your father,’ ” said Lucie. “Because he can see ghosts. All the Herondales can. My brother, my father—they should be able to see you too.”
“I am no ordinary ghost, and if you can see me, you are no ordinary girl,” said Jesse. Now that he’d told her who he was, the resemblance was unmistakable. He had Tatiana’s height, and Gabriel’s handsome, angular features. Though the crow-dark hair must have come from his father. Blackthorn blood and Lightwood blood, blended.
“But I can touch you,” said Lucie. “I touched you in the forest. You lifted me out of the pit. One cannot touch a ghost.”
He shrugged. “Think of me as on the threshold of a door. I am unable to take a step outside the door, and I know I can never be allowed back in, to live again. But the door has not closed behind me.”
“Your mother and your sister—can they see you?”
He perched on the billiard table with a sigh, as if resigning himself to settling into a long conversation. Lucie could not believe it. To see her forest changeling again, and then to find out he was not a changeling but an odd kind of ghost no one else could see. It was quite a lot to be getting on with.
“They can see me,” he said. “Perhaps because they were there when I died. My mother worried I would vanish on them when we moved to Chiswick House, but that doesn’t seem to have happened.”
“You could have told me your name.”
“You were a little girl. I believed you wouldn’t always be able to see me. I thought it would be kinder not to tell you who I was, when our families are enemies.” Jesse spoke as if the enmity was a fact, as though there were a bloodstained feud between the Blackthorns and the Herondales as there was between the Montagues and Capulets. But it was Tatiana Blackthorn who hated them: they had never hated her.
“Why did you drag me out of the ballroom?” Lucie demanded.
“No one else can see me save my family. I don’t understand how you can; it’s never happened before. I didn’t want everyone to think you were mad. And besides…”
Jesse jerked upright. A shadow passed over his face, and Lucie felt a chill at her very bones; for a moment his eyes seemed too large for his face, too liquid, all the wrong shape. She thought she could see darkness in them, and the form of something moving. He turned his eerie gaze on her. “Stay in this room,” he said, grasping her wrist below the bell of her sleeve. She gasped; his hands were ice-cold.
“There is death here,” he said, and vanished.
The gray world surrounded James. He had forgotten the cold that came when the shadows rose up. Forgotten the way he could still see the real world, as if through a thin scrim of dust: the ballroom was all around him, but it had turned to black and white like a photograph. The Nephilim on the dance floor had become shadows, stretched and elongated like figures from a nightmare.
He staggered back a step as trees seemed to explode up through the ground, sending roots twining along the polished wood floor. He knew enough not to scream: there was no one to hear him. He was alone in a world that was not real. Scorched earth and sky flickered in and out of his vision, even as the shadow figures twirled around him, unheeding. He recognized a face, a gesture here and there—he thought he saw Cordelia’s bright hair, Ariadne Bridgestock in her wine-colored dress, his cousin Barbara as she reached up toward her dancing partner—just as a curling tendril of root wound its way around her ankle and drew her down.
Lightning seemed to fork behind his vision, and suddenly he was back in the ordinary ballroom, the world teeming with sound and light. There was a firm grip on his shoulders. “Jamie, Jamie, Jamie,” said an urgent voice, and James—his heart trying to beat its way out of his chest—tried to focus on what was in front of him.
Matthew. Behind him were other Shadowhunters: James could hear their laughter and chatter, like the background dialogue of characters in a play.
“Jamie, breathe,” Matthew said, and his voice was the only steady thing in a world turning upside down. The horror of this happening in front of a crowd of people—
“Did they see me?” James breathed. “Did they see me turn?”
“You didn’t,” Matthew said, “or at least, only a very little bit—perhaps just a bit fuzzy round the edges—”
“It’s not funny,” James said through his teeth, but Matthew’s humor acted like a slap of cold water. His heart was starting to slow down. “You mean—I didn’t turn into a shadow?”
Matthew shook his head, letting his hands slide from James’s shoulders. “No.”
“Then how did you know to come to me?”
“I felt it,” Matthew said. “That you had gone to—that place.” He shuddered slightly and reached into his waistcoat, drawing out a flask monogrammed with his initials. James could smell the sharp, biting scent of whiskey as he unscrewed the top. “What happened?” Matthew asked. “I thought you were just talking to Anna.”
In the distance, James could see that Thomas and Christopher had caught sight of him with Matthew. They were both looking over with curiosity. He and Matthew must look as if they were speaking very intently, James realized. “It was your brother’s fault,” he said.
“I am perfectly prepared to think everything is Charles’s fault,” said Matthew, his voice steadier now. “But in this case—”
He broke off as a yell echoed through the room.
Cordelia couldn’t understand why she was so worried about Lucie. Several withdrawing rooms had been opened up, and Lucie could have wandered off to any of those, or returned to her own bedroom. She could really be anywhere in the Institute. Matthew had told her not to worry before he’d hurried off somewhere, but Cordelia couldn’t shake her sense of unease.
“For pity’s sake!” someone called, interrupting her thoughts. It was a man’s voice, low and baritone. “Someone come help her!”
Cordelia glanced about: everyone seemed to be looking surprised and chattering to each other. In the distance she could see a loose circle of people standing around whatever was going on. She picked up her skirts and began to push her way through the crowd.
She could feel her hair coming out of its carefully arranged curls and spilling down over her shoulders. Her mother would be furious, but really. Why didn’t people move? They were Shadowhunters. What on earth were they doing standing around like sticks while someone was in distress?
She wriggled through a small knot of onlookers and there, on the floor, was a young man holding Barbara Lightwood’s limp body in his arms. Oliver Hayward, Cordelia realized. Barbara’s suitor. “We were dancing,” he was saying, looking bewildered, “and she just collapsed—”
Cordelia dropped to her knees. Barbara Lightwood was ghastly white, her hair dark with sweat at her temples. She was breathing in short, erratic bursts. In times like this, all shyness deserted Cordelia: she could only think of what to do next. “She needs air,” she said. “Her corset is probably tormenting her. Has anyone a knife?”
Anna Lightwood pushed through the crowd and moved forward, kneeling down opposite Cordelia with fluid grace. “I have a dagger,” she said, drawing a sheathed blade from her waistcoat. “What needs to be done?”
“We need to cut her corset off,” Cordelia said. “She has had a shock, and she needs to breathe.”
“You might leave that to me,” said Anna. She had an extraordinary husky voice, honey and sandpaper. She reached to lift Barbara out of Oliver’s lap, then ran the dagger down the back of her dress, delicately separating the fabric and then the thicker material of the corset underneath. As it sagged free of Barbara’s body, Anna glanced up and said absently, “Ari—your wrapper—”
Ariadne Bridgestock swiftly drew her silk wrapper from her shoulders and handed it to Anna, who swaddled Barbara in it to keep her decent. Barbara was already beginning to breathe more regularly, the color in her cheeks returning. Anna looked at Cordelia over Barbara’s head, a considering look in her blue eyes.
“What on earth?” Sophie Lightwood had made her way through the circle of onlookers, her husband, Gideon, just behind her. “Barbara!” She turned to Oliver, who stood nearby, looking utterly distressed. “Did she fall?”
“She just collapsed,” repeated Oliver. “We were dancing, and she fainted—”
Barbara’s eyelids fluttered. She sat up in her cousin’s arms, blinking up at her mother. Her cheeks flushed bright red. “I’m—I’m all right,” she said. “I’m all right now. I had a spell, a silly dizzy spell.”
Cordelia rose to her feet as more guests joined the loose circle of bystanders surrounding Barbara. Gideon and Sophie helped their daughter to her feet, and Thomas, appearing from the crowd, offered his sister a worn-looking handkerchief. She took it with a wobbly smile and dabbed at her lip.
It came away stained with blood.
“I bit my lip,” Barbara said hastily. “I fell, and bit my lip. That’s all.”
“We need a stele,” Thomas said. “James?”
Cordelia hadn’t realized James was there. She turned and saw him standing just behind her.
The sight of him startled her. Years ago, he’d had the scalding fever: she was reminded of the way he’d looked then, pale and sick. “My stele,” he said roughly. “Inside my breast pocket. Barbara needs a healing rune.”
For a moment Cordelia wondered why he couldn’t fetch it himself, but his hands were clenched at his sides, hard as stones. She reached out and fumbled nervously at his chest. Silk and cloth under her hand, and the beat of his heart. She seized hold of the slim, pen-shaped object in his pocket and held it out to Thomas, who took it with a look of surprised thanks. She hadn’t really looked at Thomas before—he had bright hazel eyes, like his mother’s, framed by thick brown lashes.
“James.” Lucie had slipped between James and Cordelia and was tugging at her brother’s sleeve. “Jamie. Did you—”
He shook his head. “Not now, Luce.”
Lucie looked worried. The three of them watched in a silent group as Thomas finished the healing rune on his sister’s arm, and Barbara exclaimed again that she was just fine and had only had a dizzy spell. “I forgot to eat today,” she said to her mother, as Sophie put her arm around her. “That’s all it is.”
“Nevertheless, we had better get you home,” Sophie said, glancing around. “Will—can you have the carriage brought around?”
The crowd had begun to scatter; clearly there was nothing more of interest to see here. The Lightwood family were headed to the door, Barbara on Thomas’s arm, when they paused. A pigeon-chested man with a black handlebar mustache had rushed up to Gideon and was speaking to him excitedly.
“What’s the Inquisitor saying to Uncle Gideon?” Lucie asked curiously. James and Matthew only shook their heads. After a few moments, Gideon nodded and followed the man—the Inquisitor, Cordelia supposed—to where Charles stood speaking to Grace Blackthorn. Her face was turned up to his, her eyes bright and interested. Cordelia remembered all the lessons her mother had given her in how to appear interested in conversation at social events: Grace seemed to have already absorbed them all after only being in society for a short time.
Charles turned reluctantly away from Grace and fell into discussion with Gideon Lightwood. The Inquisitor was moving through the crowd, stopping to speak to several Shadowhunters as he went. Most seemed to be about Charles’s age: Cordelia guessed he was somewhere in his twenties.
“Looks like the party’s over,” said Alastair, appearing out of the crowd holding a cigar. He was gesturing with it, though Cordelia knew that if he ever started puffing tobacco, Sona would murder him. “Apparently there was a Shax demon attack in Seven Dials.”
“A demon attack?” James said, with some surprise. “On mundanes?”
Alastair smirked. “Yes, you know, the sort of thing we’re meant to prevent. Angelic mandate and all that.”
Matthew’s face had turned to stone; Lucie was looking at him anxiously. James’s eyes narrowed.
“Charles is going with Gideon Lightwood and Inquisitor Bridgestock to see what’s going on,” Alastair said. “I offered to go with them, but I don’t know the streets of London well enough yet. Charles will get me acquainted with the city and I will soon be a gift to any patrol.”
“You, a gift,” Matthew said, his eyes glittering. “Imagine.”
He walked away. Alastair watched him go with one eyebrow raised. “Moody, isn’t he?” he said, to no one in particular.
“No,” said James shortly. His jaw was set, as if he was barely tolerating Alastair’s presence. Cordelia thought back to the time Alastair had been at the Academy and wished she knew what had happened there.
Alastair looked as if he was about to speak again, but Sona appeared out of the crowd, arriving like a docking steamship. Her roosari quivered as her gaze fell upon Alastair, and then Cordelia. “Children,” she said, as Alastair hastily slid his cigar into his pocket. “I believe we should take our leave.”
Rumors of the attack were clearly spreading through the ballroom, breaking up the dance. The musicians had stopped playing, and quite a few of the girls in pastel dresses were being bundled into wrappers and gloves by anxious parents. Will and Tessa were now at the center of a crowd, bidding them good night. Nearby Charles was tucking a wrapper fondly about Ariadne’s shoulders as Gideon and the Inquisitor waited for him by the doors.
A moment later Will and Tessa had joined Cordelia and the others. As Sona thanked them for a delightful evening, Cordelia’s attention was arrested by the Fairchilds. Matthew was standing beside a thin man with faded ginger hair who was confined to a Bath chair. Matthew leaned over the back of it, saying something to make the older man smile: Cordelia realized this must be Henry Fairchild, Matthew’s father. She had nearly forgotten he was a veteran of the Clockwork War, in which he had lost the use of his legs.
“Oh, dear,” Tessa was saying. “We will try again, Mrs. Carstairs, truly. You deserve a real welcome to the London Enclave.”
Sona smiled. “I am sure if we put our heads together, we can think of something.”
“Thank you for rushing to help Barbara, Cordelia,” said Tessa. “You will make quite an excellent parabatai for Lucie.”
Cordelia looked over at Lucie, who smiled at her. It was a slightly shaky smile. There were shadows in Lucie’s eyes, as if something was bothering her. When she didn’t reply to Tessa, James moved a step closer to his sister, as though to put a barrier between her and further attention. “Cordelia was a great help to Barbara,” he said. “She was the one who had the idea to cut her corset away.”
Sona looked slightly horrified. “Cordelia has a tendency to throw herself into every situation headlong,” she said to Tessa and Will. “I’m sure you understand.”
“Oh, we do,” said Will. “We’re always speaking very sternly to our children about that very thing. ‘If you don’t throw yourself into situations headlong, James and Lucie, you can expect bread and water for supper again.’ ”
Alastair choked on a laugh. Sona stared at Will as if he were a lizard with feathers. “Good night, Mr. Herondale,” she said, turning both herself and her offspring toward the door. “This has certainly been a most interesting evening.”
It was long past midnight. Tessa Herondale sat in front of the mirror in the bedroom she had shared with her husband for twenty-three years, and brushed her hair. The windows were closed, but soft summer air seeped in under the sill.
She recognized Will’s step in the hallway before he came into the bedroom. More than twenty years of marriage did that.
He shut the door behind him and came to lean against one of the bedposts, watching her at the vanity table. He had shrugged off his jacket and undone his tie. His dark hair was mussed, and in the slightly blurred mirror, he looked no different to Tessa than he had when he was seventeen.
She quirked a smile at him.
“What is it?” he said.
“You’re posing,” she said. “It makes me want to paint a portrait of you. I’d call it Gentleman, Dissipated.”
“You can’t paint a line, Tess,” he said, and came over to her, putting his hands on her shoulders. Now that he was close up, she could see the silver in his dark hair. “Much less capture my glorious handsomeness, which, I hardly need to point out, has only grown with age.”
She didn’t disagree—he was as handsome as ever, his eyes still the same startling blue—but there was no need to encourage Will. Instead she reached up and tugged on one of the more silvered locks of his hair. “I’m well aware of that. I saw Penelope Mayhew flirting with you tonight. Shamelessly!”
He bent his head to kiss her neck. “I hadn’t noticed.”
She smiled at him in the mirror. “I take it from your insouciant manner that all went well in Seven Dials. Did you hear from Gideon? Or”—she made a face—“Bridgestock?”
“Charles, actually. It was a nest of Shax demons. Quite a few more than they’ve been used to dealing with lately, but nothing they couldn’t manage. Charles was very insistent that there was nothing to worry about.” Will rolled his eyes. “I have a feeling he was fretting in case I suggested the picnic at Regent’s Park lake tomorrow be canceled. All the young ones are going.”
There was a very faint lilt at the end of Will’s speech, which sometimes came when he was tired. The faintest remnants of an accent, sanded away by time and distance. Still, when he was exhausted or grieved, it came back, and his voice would roll softly like the green hills of Wales.
“Do you worry?” he said, meeting her eyes in the mirror. “I do, sometimes. About Lucie and James.”
She set down her hairbrush and turned around, concerned. “Worry about the children? Why?”
“All this—” He waved his hand vaguely. “The boating parties, the regattas and cricket matches and fairs and dances, it’s so… mundane.”
“You’re worried they’re turning into mundanes? Really, Will, that’s a bit prejudiced of you.”
“No, I’m not worried about that. It’s just that—it’s been years since there’s been anything but minimal demonic activity in London. The children have grown up training, but barely needing to patrol.”
Tessa rose from her chair, her hair tumbling down her back. It was one of the oddities of being a warlock: her hair had stopped growing when she stopped aging, rather unexpectedly, at nineteen. It remained the same length, halfway to her waist.
“Isn’t that good?” she said. “We don’t want our children in danger from demons, do we?”
Will sat down on the bed, kicking off his shoes. “We don’t want them unprepared, either,” he said. “I remember what we had to do when we were their age. I don’t know if they could face the same thing. Picnics don’t ready you for war.”
“Will.” Tessa sank down beside him on the bed. “There is no war.”
She knew why he worried. For them, there had been war, and loss. Tessa’s brother, Nate. Thomas Tanner. Agatha Grant. Jessamine Lovelace, their friend, who now guarded the London Institute in ghostly form. And Jem, who they had both lost and kept.
“I know.” Will reached out to stroke her hair. “Tess, Tess. Do you think when you stopped growing older, you stopped aging in your heart? You never became cynical and fearful? Is it old age catching up with me, that I am so fretful and disquieted over nothing?”
She seized him by the chin, turning his face to hers. “You are not old,” she said fiercely. “Even when you are eighty, you will be my beautiful Will.”
She kissed him. He made a pleased, startled noise, and his arms came up about her. “My Tess,” he said. “My lovely wife.”
“There is nothing to be afraid of,” she said, drawing her lips across his cheek. His hands tightened in her hair. “We have been through so much. We deserve this happiness.”
“There are others who deserve happiness who have not gotten it.”
“I know.” A sob caught in her throat; they were both talking about the same person, and she did not know if the tears she held back were for him or for Will and herself. “I know.” She kissed his eyes as he laid her back onto the pillows, his hand finding the knot holding her dressing gown closed. His lean body pressed hers into the mattress. Her fingers found their way into his hair, twining among the thick curls. “I love you,” she gasped as the dressing gown fell away. “I love you, Will.”
He did not answer, but his lips on hers said more than any words.
Standing on the roof of the Institute, James watched Charles Fairchild’s carriage as it rattled out of the Institute’s courtyard, under the great black iron gates.
James often came to the roof when he could not sleep, and tonight insomnia had descended with a vengeance. He could not stop thinking of what he had seen in the ballroom—and the night before last, in the dark alley near the Devil Tavern.
The shadow realm. That was what he had always called it in his head, that black and gray place that opened up in front of him sometimes like a vision of Hell. He had first seen it when he was thirteen, and the visions had come repeatedly after that, usually when he lost control of his emotions. The world would go gray, and later those who had been with him—his family or friends—would report that his body had turned half-transparent, like gray smoke.
Once when he had done it on purpose, at Grace’s request, he had nearly been unable to come back. The horror of that experience had left him with screaming nightmares. His parents, at their wits’ end, had sought out help from Uncle Jem. James had woken up one morning with Jem sitting at the foot of his bed in an armchair, gazing at him through closed eyelids.
So, Jem had said. You know, of course, that our universe contains many worlds.
James had nodded.
Think of the universe then as like a honeycomb, each of its chambers a different realm. So some chambers lie next to one another. I believe that the walls between our own world and this world that you are seeing, this world of shadows, have grown thin. You see this realm and you find yourself drawn into it.
“Is it dangerous?” James said.
It could be. Demon realms are unstable places, and this power of yours is not something we know much about. It is possible that you could be drawn into the shadow realm and find yourself unable to come back.
James had been silent for a moment. Finally he said, “So more is at stake than just my sleeping through the night.”
Potentially much more, agreed Jem. You must build a fortress of control around yourself. You must come to know this power, so that you may master it.
“Was this how it was for my mother?” James had said quietly. “Before she learned to control her shape-shifting?”
Your mother had brutal teachers. They held her against her will and forced her to Change. It must have been terrifying, and painful. James was silent. You know that your mother has not used her power since the end of the Clockwork War. Since then the act of shape-shifting has been… difficult for her. Painful. She has chosen not to do it.
“Is this all because of my grandfather?” James had demanded. “My mother’s demon father? Is this his gift to us? I would have been perfectly satisfied with a new pair of socks on my birthday.”
The question of your grandfather’s identity, Jem had said, is one that I’ve concerned myself with since before you were born. It may well cast some light on your power, and your mother’s as well. But that identity has been well hidden—so well hidden as to be suspicious in itself. Beyond the fact that he was a Greater Demon, I have no other insight yet to share.
As far as James could tell, Jem made no progress over the next year in determining his grandfather’s identity, or at least no progress worth sharing. But in that year, James learned to prevent himself from being drawn into the shadow realm, under Jem’s instruction. On a cold night in winter, with a bitter wind blowing, Jem took him to the top of Hampstead Heath, and he resisted the pull even when shivering so hard his teeth seemed to shake. They sparred in the training room, Jem surprisingly spry for a Silent Brother, and talked through the feelings that triggered the power—how to control them and breathe through them, even in the middle of a fight. On one memorable occasion, Jem borrowed Matthew’s dog, Oscar Wilde, riled him up, and released him on an unsuspecting James during breakfast.
James thought some of Jem’s training ideas were deliberate pranks—Silent Brothers had the best poker faces he could imagine, after all. His father assured him that it wasn’t in Jem’s nature, and that however odd the training, he was sure it was intended sincerely. And James had to admit that the strange regimen did seem to work.
Gradually his sleep became more restful, his mind less constantly watchful. The shadow realm receded from the corners of his vision, and he felt its influence retreat from him, a weight he’d had no awareness of until it lifted. Soon he was losing himself to shadow less and less. It had not happened even once in this past year, until two nights previously, when they’d fought the Deumas demon.
He had thought it might not happen again at all, until tonight.
Nobody had noticed, he told himself now. Well, perhaps Matthew, but that was the bond of parabatai: to some extent, Matthew could feel what James felt. Still, Matthew could not see what he saw. He had not seen the dancers turn sinister, the blasted room, or Barbara being pulled down into shadow.
And a few moments later, Barbara had collapsed.
James did not know what to think of it. The visions he saw in the shadow realm had never been echoed in the real world: they were sights of horror, but not of premonition. And Barbara was well—it was only a dizzy spell, she’d said—so perhaps it was a coincidence?
And yet. He distrusted coincidence. He wanted to talk to Jem. Jem was the one he confided in about the world of shadows: Jem was a Silent Brother, a keeper of all the wisdom the Shadowhunters had accrued through the ages. Jem would know what to do.
He took a box of matches from his pocket. It was a rather unusual item, the cover printed with a sketch of Hermes, the messenger god of the Greeks. Jem had given it to him some months ago, with strict instructions as to its use.
James struck one of the matches against the iron rail that ran around the roof. As it burned, he thought unexpectedly of one more person who he suspected had noticed something odd about his behavior: Cordelia. It was in the way she’d looked at him when he’d come up to her and asked her to take his stele.
It wasn’t as if Cordelia didn’t know about his world of shadows. Their families were close, and she had been with him when he had had the scalding fever at Cirenworth and had passed in and out of the shadow realm. He thought perhaps she had even read out loud to him then. It was difficult to recall: he had been very ill at the time.
The match had burned down to his fingertips: he flicked the burnt stub aside and tipped his head back to look at the moon, a milky crescent in the sky. He was glad Cordelia was in London, he realized. Not just for Lucie, but for himself. It was odd, he thought—almost as if he had forgotten what a steady light her presence could be when the world went dark.