He had bolted out of the room the moment he’d read Lucie’s note. He had no idea how long it had been since she’d left it, though he felt as if he’d barely slept—surely it couldn’t have been more than half an hour before he’d rolled over and the crinkle of Lucie’s note had awakened him.

He barely remembered throwing on clothes and rushing out into the street. He was halfway across the snowy courtyard when he recalled: he was a Shadowhunter. He could do better than racing into the night with no map and no plan. With Lucie’s gold comb in hand, he drew a Tracking rune on the back of his hand and waited.

And felt nothing.

Cold crept into his bones. Perhaps he had drawn the rune incorrectly, though he knew in his heart that he hadn’t. He did it again. Waited again.

Nothing. Only the wind blowing particles of ice and soot, and the terrible silence of a London without birdsong, traffic, or the calls of barrow boys.

Lucie was gone.

He made his way warily back to his room, and crossed most of the way to the bed before he realized it was occupied. There was a sort of nest of blankets in the center, mixed up with scattered papers, and in the middle of the nest was Grace. She was curled up, her feet bandaged, wearing a clean linen nightgown. Her pale hair was in braids. She looked years younger than she was, less like the young woman she had become and more like the little girl he had trained and protected to the best of his ability so many years ago.

“They’re gone,” she said. “Aren’t they?”

Jesse sat down at the foot of the bed. “How did you know?”

She tugged at a braid. “I couldn’t sleep. I was looking out the window and saw them go outside together. And then you rushed out, and it looked like you were trying to Track them.” She frowned. “Where’d they go?”

Jesse fished Lucie’s note from his trouser pocket and handed it to Grace, who unfolded it curiously. When she was done, she looked at Jesse with worried eyes.

“I knew they were planning something,” she said. “I didn’t know it was this. Edom, and Lilith—I don’t know—”

“How did you know they were planning something?” asked Jesse, furrowing his brow.

“The way they were looking at each other,” Grace said. “Like—they had a secret.”

“I feel a fool,” Jesse said. “I didn’t notice.”

“I used to have a secret with Lucie. You. I know what she looks like when she’s planning something. Cordelia’s harder to read, but…” Grace cast her eyes down. “I’m sorry I didn’t guess what it was. I would have said something. Even when I saw them leave, I assumed they were just hunting Watchers, or looking for more Downworlders.…”

“It’s not your fault,” Jesse said. Her eyes were huge, the color of mirrors, and fixed on him. He meant it, though—he didn’t blame her; not for this, at least.

“It’s strange,” he said. “When I was a ghost, I could sense Lucie, you know. I could simply… reach out into the shadows and always find her. Appear wherever she was. But not anymore.”

“Now you’re alive,” Grace said quietly. “You must live within human limitations. And within those, there is nothing you could have done.”

“I wish Lucie had told me,” Jesse said, looking down at his hands. “I could have tried to talk her out of it.…”

Grace said, not unkindly, “I’ve come to know Lucie quite well, you know, these last months. She was probably as close to a friend as I have ever had. And I know—and you know, too, I don’t doubt—that she is very determined. This is what she wanted, and she would have let nothing stand in her way. Not even you.”

“Even if I couldn’t have stopped her,” Jesse said, “I could have gone with her.”

“No,”said Grace. “I mean—Jesse, if they’ve gone to Edom, it is only because Cordelia is protected by her bond with Lilith, and Lucie by her ties to Belial. It’s a demon realm, and you would have been in terrible danger—it’s why Lucie didn’t tell you, or anyone. I don’t know if Cordelia even told Alastair. They knew no one else could come.”

“I wouldn’t have minded,” Jesse said, clenching and unclenching his fists. “The risk, I mean.”

“Well, I would mind. If you risked yourself. I know you are angry with me, Jesse. I know you may never feel the same way about me again as you did once. But you are still my brother. You are part of my character, and if there is a little good in me, along with the evil, then it is there because of you.”

Jesse softened. He reached out and took Grace’s hand in his, and for a moment, they sat in silence.

“If it’s any consolation,” Grace said after a time, “I think that Lucie also went without you because she knew we needed you. There are only six of us here now. Six Shadowhunters to stand between London and the forever dark.”

“It’s a bit of consolation,” Jesse said. “And—there is good in you, Gracie,” he added, after a time. “The first thing you did when you escaped the Silent City was run here to warn us of Tatiana. You could simply have fled. It would have been easier, perhaps safer. Yet you took the risk.”

“I didn’t want her to win,” Grace said. “Mama. She had taken so much from me. I wanted her defeated. I hope it was goodness; I worry it was only stubbornness. We are both stubborn, you and I.”

“Is that a good thing?” Jesse said. “Maybe being stubborn will get us all killed.”

“Or maybe it will make the difference between winning and losing,” Grace said. “Maybe it’s just what we need right now. To not give up. To never give up. To fight all the way to the end.”

How much worse might this be, he wondered grimly, if Matthew had not already started to cut down his alcohol intake. He had been suffering before they’d come to Edom. James could only hope that what he had already paid in pain would reduce the cost to him now.

The moon rose in the sky, an eerie gray-white—and then a second moon, and a third. The courtyard was illuminated as brightly as it had been during the day, though the shadows between the dead trees were deeper. James went to get water, and he watched the reflection of the three moons tremble on the surface of the stone bowl.

He thought of his parents, far away in Alicante, in the shadow of the true Gard. They must have learned by now what had happened to London. To him. Someone would carry the news to them. Not Lucie—she would never agree to leave London to its fate.

When he returned to the wall, Matthew was resting his back against it, shivering. James tried to hand him the cup of water, but Matthew was shaking too hard to take it; James held the cup to his lips, encouraging him to drink until it was empty.

“I don’t want to be sick again,” Matthew said hoarsely, but James only shook his head.

“Better than dying of thirst,” he said, setting the cup down. “Come here.”

He pulled Matthew roughly toward him, Matthew’s back to his chest, and wrapped his arms around his parabatai. He had thought Matthew might protest, but he seemed beyond that: he only sagged back, an alarmingly light weight against him.

“This is good,” he said tiredly. “You’re better than a coat.”

James rested his chin on Matthew’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said.

He felt Matthew tense. “Sorry for what?”

“All of it,” James said. “Paris. The fight we had at the Shadow Market. When you told me that if I didn’t love Cordelia, I should let someone else love her. I was too blind to see what you meant.”

“You were,” Matthew said, with some difficulty, “under a spell. You said yourself, it blinded you—”

“Don’t,” James said. “Don’t excuse it. What you said, back at the Institute, about not being able to be angry with me—I’d rather you were. Even if you won’t blame me for anything I did under the bracelet’s control, what about after it was broken? I ought to have thought more about your feelings—”

“And I ought not to have run off to Paris with Cordelia,” said Matthew.

“I know how I must have seemed to you,” James said quietly. “Feckless, flighty, pointlessly cruel to Cordelia, and oblivious to all of it. In the name of an infatuation that made no sense to anyone but me.”

“It was still selfish. I thought… I told myself you didn’t love her. And that I loved her, loved being with her, because—”

“Because she is who she is,” James said.

“But also because she never knew me, as you did, before I drank. Not really. I had feelings for Lucie once, you know, but I could see in her eyes when she looked at me that she was waiting for me to go back to my old self. The Matthew I was before I ever picked up a bottle. Cordelia only knew me after I changed.” Matthew hugged his arms around his knees. “The truth is, I do not know the person I will be when I am entirely sober. I do not know if I will even like that person myself, assuming I survive to meet him.”

James wished he could see the expression on Matthew’s face. “Math. The drinking has not—did not—make you more witty, more charming, more worthy of love. What it did was make you forget. That is all.”

Matthew sounded as if he had forgotten to breathe. “Forget what?”

“Whatever it is you are so angry at yourself about,” said James. “And no, before you ask—Cordelia has told me nothing. I think you shared your secret with her; I think that is part of what has made you long for her. We so desperately want to be with those who know the truth of us. Our secrets.”

“You guessed all this?” Matthew said, sounding a little amazed.

“When I am not under a spell, I am surprisingly insightful,” James said dryly. “And you are the other half of my soul, my parabatai; how could I not guess?” He took a deep breath. “I cannot demand that you tell me anything; I have kept enough from you. Only… if you want to tell me, I swear I will listen.”

There was a long silence. Then Matthew sat up a little straighter and said, “Bloody convincing Herondales.” He tipped his head back, staring up at the strange triple moon. “All right. I’ll tell you what happened.”

It was midday, though one could hardly tell, and Alastair and Thomas were hunting for Watchers in Bayswater.

It had started off as more of a reconnaissance mission. Follow the Watchers without being seen, Anna had said; find out where they congregated, and if possible, how they might be harmed or killed.

It had been hours now. They had seen several Watchers and tried following them, creeping through the streets after them as they wandered, but that didn’t bring them any closer to figuring out how to defeat them, since everyone in the city—mundanes, Downworlders, even animals—gave the Watchers a wide berth. There was no way of discovering what they could do in a fight, or how they could be stopped, just by watching at a distance.

They had decided: the next Watcher they saw, they would engage in battle. They were both heavily armed; Thomas carried a halberd, and Alastair a long shamshir, a curved Persian blade, in addition to the seraph blades and daggers in their belts. Ordinarily, Thomas would have felt fairly secure, but it was impossible to feel secure in this London.

They were walking down Westbourne Grove past the lightless, grimy windows of Whiteleys, a department store that took up half the street. It was normally thronged with stylish carriages, delivery vans, and excited shoppers. Now there were no carriages at all. One lone old gentleman sat collapsed like a beggar on the pavement outside the Gents’ Hosiery window, his frock coat crumpled and his hat askew, muttering to himself about socks. Beyond him a flash of movement jolted Thomas for a moment, but it was just an abandoned and very grubby ladies’ umbrella, which might have been pink once, flapping like a dying bird beside an expensive display of hats, dimly visible through the mud-splashed window. The hats also looked grubby. It was not a particularly cheering sight, and Thomas could not help but agree with Alastair.

“Do you mean, you preferred London when it was not cut off from the rest of the world, or you preferred London when the mundanes were autonomous rather than puppeteered by a demon?” Thomas said politely.

“I mean,” said Alastair dryly, “I preferred when the shops were open. I miss buying hats. Come on out, Watchers!” he called in a louder voice. “Let us get a good look at you!”

“I don’t think there are any in this neighborhood,” said Thomas. “We’ve looked everywhere. But we could try Hyde Park. When I was walking Jesse and Grace to Grosvenor Square, I saw a big clump of them there.”

They proceeded down Queensway, which was also deserted and equally depressing. Drifts of rubbish two feet high had blown up against the railings along the east side of the street. They both tensed as they saw a figure in a white, flapping robe—then relaxed; it was not a Watcher, but a young mundane nursemaid in a white apron, pushing a large, fancy white perambulator. “Once upon a time,” she was saying brightly. “Once upon a time. Once upon a time…”

As they passed her, Thomas glanced under the hood of the perambulator and saw to his relief that there was no baby there, only a collection of rubbish the woman must have picked up off the street: dirty old rags, crumpled newspapers, tin cans, dead leaves. He thought he glimpsed the bright eyes of a rat staring out from the nest of litter.

How long could the mundanes go on like this? Thomas wondered. Were they feeding themselves, their children? Would they starve, or begin to wind down someday, like dying clockwork? Belial had claimed he wanted to rule over a New London—was he going to rule over a London of corpses? Would he bring in demons to populate the houses, the streets?

They had reached Bayswater Road and the park entrance. Tall black wrought-iron gates stood open on either side of a broad path lined with leafless beech trees, which stretched away into foggy gloom. There were none of the usual groups of tourists, or dog walkers or kite-flying children, or indeed anything alive at all except for a group of horses peacefully cropping the grass; a scene that should have seemed pleasantly bucolic, but they were all wearing bridles and blinkers and head-collars, and one appeared to be trailing part of the broken shaft of a hansom cab. As Thomas watched, he caught a glimpse of a redheaded figure slipping behind an oak tree—he blinked, and it was gone.

“Thomas,” Alastair said. “Don’t brood.”

“I’m not,” Thomas lied. “So what happened with Cordelia and Lucie? Did you know they were going to Edom?”

That morning Jesse had shown them all the note left by Lucie, explaining that she and Cordelia had worked out a way to get to Edom, Belial’s realm, and had gone there hoping to rescue James and Matthew.

Everyone had reacted as Thomas would have expected them to. Anna was angry but resigned, Ari and Thomas had tried to be optimistic, Jesse was quiet but firm, and Grace was silent. Only Alastair’s response had confused him: he had seemed as if none of this came as a surprise to him at all.

“I didn’t know exactly what they had planned,” Alastair said. “But Cordelia asked me for Cortana yesterday, and I gave it to her. It was clear she was brewing up some sort of scheme.”

“Did you think about trying to stop her?” Thomas asked.

“I have learned,” Alastair said, “that when my sister sets her mind to something, there is little point in trying to stop her. And besides, what would I be stopping her for? So she could experience more of this?” He gestured around. “If she wants to die as a Shadowhunter, in battle, defending her family, I can’t deny her that.”

The words were defiant, but beneath them, Thomas could sense the depth of Alastair’s worry and pain. He wanted to pull Alastair close, though they had barely touched since the night of Christopher’s death. Thomas had felt too raw, as if his whole body were an open wound. But the lost sound in Alastair’s voice…

“What’s that?” Alastair said, squinting. He pointed in the direction of Lancaster Gate, which led out from the park back into the city.

Thomas looked. He saw it too, after a moment.… A flash of white robes through the iron bars.

They hurried through the gate, keeping out of sight. Sure enough, a single white-robed, white-hooded figure was headed briskly north, its back to them. Thomas and Alastair stared at each other before dashing after the Watcher as silently as they could.

Thomas wasn’t much paying attention to where they were going until Alastair tapped him on the shoulder. “Isn’t that Paddington Station?” he whispered.

It was. The station didn’t have a signpost or a fancy entrance: it was a rather unprepossessing, long, grimy Victorian building, accessed by a sloping pavement leading down to a covered arcade labeled GREAT WESTERN RAILWAY.

Normally there would have been paper sellers and crowds of passengers flooding through the doors. Now the place was deserted—save for their Watcher striding down the ramp.

Thomas and Alastair hurried to follow it into the arcade. It swept ahead of them, seemingly unconscious of their presence, and whisked through a doorway that led into the Second-Class Booking Office. It was dark and deserted inside; the ticket windows along the mahogany counter were shuttered and the marble floor was littered with abandoned luggage, some of which had burst open. The archway that led into the station was blocked by a large brown leather suitcase, spilling a pair of red-and-white-striped pajamas and a child’s stuffed bear. Thomas and Alastair leaped over the mess and emerged into the cavernous vault of the station.

They were on platform one, which, like the booking office, was strewn with abandoned luggage and a random selection of passengers’ personal items, all laid out like a stall at a giant bazaar. The big station clock, permanently stopped at a quarter to four, was wearing a red woolen scarf; an enormous, befeathered “cartwheel” hat hung at a jaunty angle from the top of a chocolate vending machine; and five cheap novels, spilled from a velvet bag, lay on the floor like collapsed dominoes.

Above them soared the huge triple arch of the great iron-and-glass roof: a gigantic cathedral, supported by rows of delicate, ornate wrought-iron columns, like the ribs of some metal giant. In normal circumstances it would have been filled with trains and clouds of steam and smog and crowds of people and sounds—the babble of voices and railway announcements and guards blowing whistles and slamming doors; the deafening clanking, chuffing, and whistling sounds of the trains.

Now it was empty. Belial’s demon twilight filtered down from the soot-laden glass roof through a misty haze, broken sporadically by flickering lamps; there was a weird fizzing electrical hum coming from them that sounded eerie in the echoing quiet. The faint illumination from the open end of the station, where the trains came in, cast an uncanny glow across the far ends of the platforms and threw everything else into a gloom that made the deep shadows deeper. Sometimes they seemed to be moving, and small scuttling noises came from them—rats, probably. Hopefully.

Thomas and Alastair headed down platform two, hands on their weapons, their footsteps muffled by Soundless runes. The platforms were empty except for a lone train halfway down platform three, its doors standing open, waiting for the passengers who would never arrive. And—there was the Watcher, walking along beside it. As Thomas spotted it, it turned and seemed to look directly at them. Then it stepped between two carriages of the train and disappeared.

Alastair swore and broke into a run. Thomas followed, jumping off the platform when it ended, onto the dangerous ground of the rail yard: uneven wooden railway sleepers on top of coarse, sharp chunks of gravel, crisscrossed with iron tracks.

Alastair slowed to a stop where the Watcher had disappeared, letting Thomas catch up to him. They looked around and saw nothing. The area around the train seemed deserted, the silence almost oppressive.

“We lost it,” Alastair said in disgust. “By the Angel—”

“I’m not so sure,” Thomas said, keeping his voice low. The silence didn’t feel comforting, but wrong somehow, just like the shadows were wrong. “Draw your weapon,” he whispered, reaching for his halberd.

Alastair looked at him for a moment, eyes narrowed. Then, seeming to decide that he trusted Thomas, he started to reach for his shamshir—just as a white-clad figure leaped from the train’s roof, knocking Alastair flat.

The shamshir flew out of Alastair’s hand as he and the Watcher rolled across the uneven ground. The Watcher pinned Alastair down; there was no way he could reach for his weapons belt. Instead he reared back and punched the Watcher in the face.

“Alastair!”Thomas shouted. He ran toward the place where Alastair was grappling with the Watcher; he was hitting it over and over, and the Watcher was bleeding, spattering red-black droplets over the gravel of the train yard. But it seemed impassive: if the blows hurt, it gave no sign. It had one long white hand wrapped around Alastair’s throat, and as Thomas watched, it started to squeeze.

Something exploded behind Thomas’s eyes. He did not remember closing the space between himself and the Watcher, only that he found himself standing over it, swinging his halberd. The polearm connected with the Watcher, its axe-head slamming into the thing’s shoulder. It snarled but kept choking Alastair, whose lips were turning blue. Panicked, Thomas yanked the halberd free—and tore half the Watcher’s cloak away with it. He caught a glimpse of its hairless skull and the back of its neck, printed with a demonic scarlet rune.

Acting on instinct, Thomas swung the halberd again, this time driving the blade straight into the rune, slashing across it, obliterating the pattern.

The Watcher sprang to its feet, releasing Alastair. The ragged remains of its white robes were soaked in red-black blood. It staggered toward Thomas, catching hold of him with hands like iron claws. It flung him, hard; he flew through the air and slammed into the side of a train car. He slid to the ground, dazed; he had lost his halberd somewhere, but his head was ringing too loudly for him to look for it.

He could taste metal in his mouth. He willed himself to get up, to move, but his body would not cooperate. He could only watch through blurred eyes as the Watcher twitched and spasmed strangely. It fell to its knees, something peculiar seeming to emerge from the bloody wound on the back of its neck. Long, spidery legs, feelers scraping at the air. They pushed the Chimera demon’s body free. It crawled out of the Silent Brother’s limp body, its abdomen pulsing, its green eyes glowing as they fixed on Thomas. It leaped toward him, as a merciful darkness came down like a curtain.