DRU
I wasn’t
KIT
Sorry
DRU
BUT NOW I AM
KIT
Oh no
DRU
Kit?
Kit?
I can’t believe you
disappeared again
Have fun with your cursed
antiques
I go cry into the mane
of my ghost horse
HELEN & ALINE
Hey Julian,
Thanks for your letter! We’ve never been to Cirenworth but it sounds beautiful. Funny to think of quiet, modest Jem and Tessa living in a turreted manor house. It sounds like Kit’s settled in well and become part of their family, which is wonderful to hear. And we need more pictures of Mina! Never enough pictures of Mina! I will drop a line to Tessa immediately.
But mostly I wanted to say: please don’t worry yourself about Ty and Kit. You’ve got a house to renovate and fairy renovators to manage and a ghost to help and a curse to break…it’s a lot on your plate already. You know Ty, and you know he always speaks his mind. He’s made it clear he doesn’t want to talk with us about Kit. Whatever happened between them (and yes, we’re curious, of course we’re curious!) we have to respect his wishes.
Besides, you remember being a teenager. It is a timeof highest drama. (Uh, admittedly, your teenage years contain some specific drama that most people’s don’t, e.g. the civil war in the Clave, Malcolm, you turning into a glowing giant stomping on people…Yes, we know you didn’t actually stomp on anyone.) With a little more time and distance from whatever happened, I bet Ty will eventually come around and want to talk about it. We just need to give him time. And maybe Ty needs more time than most people. (For instance, it turns out he needs more time than Kit.)
Either way, please don’t worry too much. You know as well as I do Ty is stronger than he seems. He’ll be all right.
Thanks for the picture. Aline is going to have it printed out at the drugstore so we can hang it on our well. I think we’ll put it in the kitchen—I miss ourCHAOS BREAKFASTS. (Aline has come by to read this and she says she is going to switch her primary Shadowhunter weapon and start training to fight with Chaos Breakfasts.) Here’s a photo for you in return! Tavvy has gotten deeply into Pokémon, which is very cute and also worrying. Will memorizing literally more than a thousand imaginary monsters get in the way of his learning the names of actual demon types or weapons? We worry he won’t be able to tell the difference between a glaive, a guisarme, and a bec de corbin!
Love you, love to Emma, and, hey, love to the ghost. Ghosts need love too,
Helen
EMMA & TATIANA
Dear Bruce,
Ah, it’s good to get back to the dank, gloomy ruin that is Cursed Blackthorn Hall. You know, I’ll almost miss the curse when it’s gone. Just kidding! Cirenworth proves you can have an old manor house with hundreds of years of history and it can be warm and welcoming and friendly.
We got back last night, and then this morning Hypatia brought over a few more translated bits of Tatiana’s diary. (Don’t worry, Bruce: you are my One True Diary. Tatiana’s diary means nothing to me, I swear. Nothing!) She was a big weirdo about it as usual; the translations are all on these large parchment pages that look like movie props, but Hypatia just likes to use ancient yellowing vellums for her normal work here in the twenty-first century. Warlocks! She mentioned something about treated pages, demon language, and so on. And she was wearing kind of a forties burgundy dress with a matching hat and, Bruce, the brimof this hat was so wide I thought the wind would carry her away. (Oh, I should have said, we were outside. Julian was on the roof with the builders, not my favorite thing, so I was watching from the front gates while I tried to cut back the briars, which grow here at like ten times the rate of anything in California despite the much worse weather. I pointed this out to one of the faeries and he looked at me and said, “Black. Thorn.” And then walked away as though he’d made a great point. “But it was Lightwood House first,” I yelled back, and he ignored me. Which is for the best, really.)
