There was Charlotte, her dark hair up in a practical bun. She was smiling, but anxiously, as if squinting into the sun. Beside her was Jessamine in a dress that looked black in the photo, but which Magnus knew had been dark blue. Her hair was curled and ribbons fell like streamers from the brim of her straw bonnet. She looked very pretty, but very unhappy. He wondered how she would have reacted to someone like Isabelle: a girl her own age who obviously loved Shadowhunting, who showed off her bruises and the scars of her marks as if they were jewelry instead of hiding them with Mechlin lace.
On the other side of Charlotte stood Jem, looking like a photographic negative himself with his silvery hair and eyes turned almost white; his hand rested on his jade dragon-topped cane, and his face was turned toward Tessa’s. Tessa—Tessa’s hat was in her hand and her long brown curls blew free, slightly blurred by their motion.
There was a faint halo of light around Will: as befitted his nature and would have surprised no one who’d known him, he had not been able to stand still for the photograph. As always, he was hatless, his black hair curling against his temples. It was a loss not to be able to see the color of his eyes, but he was still beautiful and young and a little vulnerable-looking in the photograph, with one hand in his pocket and the other behind his neck.
It had been so long since Magnus had looked at the photograph that the resemblance between Will and Jace struck him suddenly. Though it was Alec who had that black hair and those eyes—that very startling dark blue—it was Jace who had more of Will’s personality, at least on the surface. The same sharp arrogance hiding something breakable underneath, the same pointed wit . . .
He traced the halo of light around Will with a finger and smiled. Will had been no angel, though neither had he been as flawed as some might have thought him. When Magnus thought of Will, even now, he thought of him dripping rainwater on Camille’s rug, begging Magnus for help no one else could give him. It was Will who had introduced him to the idea that Shadowhunters and Downworlders might be friends.
Jem was Will’s other, better half. He and Will had been parabatai, like Alec and Jace, and shared that same evident closeness. And though Alec struck Magnus as nothing at all like Jem—Alec was jumpy and sweet, sensitive and worried, while Jem had been calm, rarely bothered, older than his years—both of them were unusual where Shadowhunters were concerned. Alec exuded a bone-deep innocence that was rare among Shadowhunters—a quality that, Magnus had to admit, drew him like a moth to a flame, despite all his own cynicism.
Magnus looked at Tessa again. Though she was not conventionally pretty in the way Jessamine had been pretty, her face was alive with energy and intelligence. Her lips curved up at the corners. She stood, as Magnus supposed was appropriate, between Jem and Will. Tessa. Tessa, who, like Magnus, lived forever. Magnus looked at the detritus in the box—memories of loves past, some of whose faces stayed with him as clearly as the day he’d first seen them, and some whose names he barely remembered. Tessa, who like him, had loved a mortal, someone destined to die as she was not.
Magnus replaced the photograph in the trunk. He shook his head, as if he could clear it of memories. There was a reason he rarely opened the trunk. Memories weighed him down, reminded him of what he had once had but did no longer. Jem, Will, Jessamine, Henry, Charlotte—in a way it was amazing that he still remembered their names. But then, knowing them had changed his life.
Knowing Will and his friends had made Magnus swear to himself that he would never again get involved in Shadow-hunters’ personal business. Because when you got to know them, you got to care about them. And when you got to care about mortals, they broke your heart.
“And I won’t,” he told Chairman Meow solemnly, perhaps a little drunkenly. “I don’t care how charming they are or how brave or even how helpless they seem. I will never ever ever—”
Downstairs, the doorbell buzzed, and Magnus got up to answer it.
CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter 1: The Council Chamber
Chapter 2: Reparations
Chapter 3: Unjustifiable Death
Chapter 4: A Journey
Chapter 5: Shades of the Past
Chapter 6: In Silence Sealed
Chapter 7: The Curse
Chapter 8: A Shadow on the Soul
Chapter 9: Fierce Midnight
Chapter 10: The Virtue of Angels
Chapter 11: Wild Unrest
Chapter 12: Masquerade
Chapter 13: The Mortal Sword
Chapter 14: The Silent City
Chapter 15: Thousands More
Chapter 16: Mortal Rage
Chapter 17: In Dreams
Chapter 18: Until I Die
Chapter 19: If Treason Doth Prosper
Chapter 20: The Bitter Root
Chapter 21: Coals of Fire
Acknowledgments
A Note on Tessa’s England
For Elka
Khalepa ta kala
“I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul. . . . Since I knew you, I have been troubled by a remorse that I thought would never reproach me again, and have heard whispers from old voices impelling me upward, that I thought were silent for ever. I have had unformed ideas of striving afresh, beginning anew, shaking off sloth and sensuality, and fighting out the abandoned fight. A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing. . . .”
—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
PROLOGUE
The Outcast Dead
The fog was thick, muffling sound and sight. Where it parted, Will Herondale could see the street rising ahead of him, slick and wet and black with rain, and he could hear the voices of the dead.
Not all Shadowhunters could hear ghosts, unless the ghosts chose to be heard, but Will was one of those who could. As he approached the old cemetery, their voices rose in a ragged chorus—wails and pleading, cries and snarls. This was not a peaceful burial ground, but Will knew that; it was not his first visit to the Cross Bones Graveyard near London Bridge. He did his best to block out the noises, hunching his shoulders so that his collar covered his ears, head down, a fine mist of rain dampening his black hair.
The entrance to the cemetery was halfway down the block: a pair of wrought iron gates set into a high stone wall, though any mundane passing by would have observed nothing but a plot of overgrown land, part of an unnamed builder’s yard. As Will neared the gates, something else no mundane would have seen materialized out of the fog: a great bronze knocker in the shape of a hand, the fingers bony and skeletal. With a grimace Will reached out one of his own gloved hands and lifted the knocker, letting it fall once, twice, three times, the hollow clank resounding through the night.
Beyond the gates mist rose like steam from the ground, obscuring the gleam of bone against the rough ground. Slowly the mist began to coalesce, taking on an eerie blue glow. Will put his hands to the bars of the gate; the cold of the metal seeped through his gloves, into his bones, and he shivered. It was a more than ordinary cold. When ghosts rose, they drew energy from their surroundings, depriving the air around them of heat. The hairs on the back of Will’s neck prickled and stood up as the blue mist formed slowly into the shape of an old woman in a ragged dress and white apron, her head bent.
“Hallo, Mol,” said Will. “You’re looking particularly fine this evening, if I do say so.”