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He looked at Dru.

She felt him see her even before he’d turned, his eyes brightening as he focused in on her. No more sneaking around, Dru thought. It was on.

She tightened her grip on the seraph blade in her hand. “Camael,” she whispered, naming the weapon, and felt it come to life in her hand, the shining adamas blade blazing into a deadly sword.

The false Jace laughed. “Little Drusilla Blackthorn,” he said. “Don’t tell me you’re the warrior they’ve decided to send to take me down. I would have thought Alec would have a better plan.”

Dru rolled her eyes. “Whatever. When I want your opinion, dickhead, I’ll ask for it.” She braced her feet on the wet roof. “And the rest of them are coming. Alec, Izzy, the real Jace—they’ll be here any second. You can’t win.”

He grinned at her, and the grin seemed to split his face in half. He suddenly looked absolutely nothing like Jace. “You have no idea,” he said, “what I can do.”

Dru sprang, pushing off the balls of her feet, racing as fast as she could across the roof. She knew her only chance was to get to him while he was still holding Clary, before he had a weapon in his hand.

She reached him and slashed out with her seraph blade. It was an awkward blow; she was trying hard not to hit Clary, and the edge of her blade missed his neck and opened up a gash across his arm. She heard him swear as she spun around. He had already lifted Clary, draping her limp body over the horse’s back. Dru threw herself toward him, raising her blade to plunge it into his spine—

He turned so fast and fluidly that Dru barely saw the motion. Metal gleamed in his hand and she turned the blade of her sword just in time to block his slashing blow. Steel clashed against adamas, sending up sparks.

She stumbled back. He was ridiculously strong; it was like being hit with a hammer. He swung again and again, a whirlwind of speed, force, and motion. She parried each blow, and each time the impact rattled her teeth. She could taste blood in her mouth.

And she was being driven back. Back and back; it was impossible to stand her ground. If her blade had been made of anything but adamas, it would have shattered. She could already feel the pain in her wrists from holding it steady. She tried to ignore the cold fear spreading through her chest, the little voice that whispered that she was outmatched, that the man she was fighting wasn’t a man at all, but something infinitely worse than a demon—

Her feet slid out from under her. Not because she’d stumbled. Because she’d reached the edge of the roof, the very edge, and she had taken a step back into nothingness.

The moment stretched out, endless and irreversible. Dru felt Camael go flying from her hand. Saw Thule Jace standing over her, eyes bright with hate. Felt her arms windmill desperately as she tried to grab at something, anything, to keep her from going over the edge. She still had one foot on the roof, but it was slipping—

The false Jace grabbed at the sleeve of her shirt. For a moment she hung in the space at the edge of the roof, still reaching for something to cling on to, even as not-Jace grinned down at her with a bright, pitiless smile. “Now fall,” he said. “Isn’t that what angels do?”

He let go of her sleeve.

Dru fell away from the roof as if she were in a dream. There was a strange cracking sound in her ears, the smell of rain, the gray asphalt below rushing up to meet her. The faces of her brothers and sisters flashed through her mind. Jules, I’m so sorry—

Something fast and dark shot downward from the sky, a falling star. Arms caught Dru around the waist, driving the air out of her lungs. Gasping, she hurtled upward, held tightly in an unbreakable grip as the ground spun away from her, the roof of Pandemonium growing smaller and smaller. She thought she saw the false Jace glaring up in fury, but a second later she was too far away to see anything but a pattern of streets and rooftops under her feet.

The night air was cold. But the arms around Dru were warm, and as the daze of shock and chaos faded slightly, she forced herself to look up. To see what was holding her, impossibly, in the middle of the sky.

She saw black wings, unfurled like a canopy, stretched out above her, blotting out the stars. A face above hers, coming into focus. The sharply angled, slightly alien face of a boy about her age, who was unmistakably part human and part fey.

He was beautiful in the uncanny way fey things were beautiful, as if they had been made too perfectly, free of the flaws that complicated that which was mortal. His hair was so close to white that where it was wet from rain, it streaked his forehead like lines of white paint. His eyes burned green, a strangely familiar color.

“It would be very helpful,” he said, his cool, slightly drawling voice carrying on the wind, “if you would hold on to me, my dear. Otherwise I’m just hauling you around like luggage.”

Dru blinked. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected him to say, this flying boy, but it wasn’t something so—practical. She raised her arms and wrapped them around his neck, which pressed her tighter against him. She could feel the tensile strength in his body; the arms around her were hard as cordwood, and his wings beat against the night in a steady rhythm as the Hudson River appeared under her feet.

Dru could see the tiny whitecaps dotting the dark water, and the ferries slipping back and forth between Manhattan and New Jersey. Nausea surged through her.

“Don’t look down,” said the boy. “It’ll make you sick, and I’d rather you weren’t sick on me. I just had this shirt made.”

Dru tilted her chin back up. “Who are you?” she said, and groaned inwardly. She wished she’d said something more clever or original, but really, Who are you? was what she wanted to know, followed quickly by, Are we landing anytime soon?

He looked almost exasperated. “Of course. You don’t remember me. A very strange habit of yours.”

Dru felt her arms slip a little, and clawed at the back of his shirt. Feathers brushed lightly against her hands, soft as a rabbit’s fur. Black wings, she thought. Fair hair. Green eyes like Clary’s.

I know who you are.

“Ash,” she said. “You’re Ash Morgenstern.”

Sebastian’s son. Clary’s nephew. And the son of the Seelie Queen. Who had been taken to the demon world of Thule from Faerie when he was only thirteen, and trapped there with the Sebastian and Jace who lived in that dimension. It was like they were raising him, Emma had told her. It was like Sebastian and Jace were his parents there.