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Janus rose to his feet, looking down at her where she sat on the floor. “I have been thoughtless,” he said. “You must be tired and hungry. I shall consult with our chief steward, Mossbeard, and have a meal brought for you.”

Clary couldn’t bring herself to thank him, but she inclined her head slightly, knowing it would be unwise to make him angry.

He hesitated a moment, as if there was something else he wished to say, and in the brief softening of his expression, Clary saw his resemblance to her Jace, the real one. It felt like a dagger to her ribs. Instinctively, she pressed her hand against her stomach as Janus spun on his heel and stalked out of the room.

5

This Great Journey

In the end, Kit was only unconscious for a moment. The darkness faded, and he could see the end of the Portal like the end of a tunnel, or a slide at one of the water parks his father had taken him to back in the old days, before he’d known about Shadowhunters.

Then the whirl of the Portal was gone, and Kit hit the ground with enough force to knock the breath out of him. He rolled over, coughing, and pushed himself up on his hands and knees. He could feel asphalt, gritty, under his palms, and hoped he hadn’t smashed everything in his backpack to smithereens.

He was in a narrow alley, with nondescript gray walls rising on either side of him. In the distance, at the alley’s mouth, he could see a city street, cars rushing by, their brake lights glowing pale red through the mist and drizzle.

When he looked the other way, he saw a silver shimmer, like ripples had been painted on the air. A moment later Ty appeared, like he’d fallen out of an invisible door high up in the wall. He landed more gracefully than Kit had, straightening immediately out of a crouch before turning a wary gray gaze on his surroundings.

“Are you all right?” Kit asked gruffly. He remembered that about two minutes ago he’d been clutching on to Ty, begging him not to disappear. The thought made a prickle of awkwardness run down his spine, but what had he been supposed to do? However mad he’d been at Ty over the past four years, he’d never wanted anything actually bad to happen to him.

“Fine. Look.” Ty raised his hands. They looked damp, a little grubby—but were no longer glowing. Relief flooded Kit’s chest. Ty was no longer disappearing the way Jem, Tessa, and Mina had; that was all that mattered.

The thought of his family was like a punch in the gut. Involuntarily, Kit put his hand over his stomach, as if he could protect himself from the grief and fear that were gnawing at him. But that was the thing about emotional pain, why it was so much worse than physical pain. You couldn’t ignore it. It never stopped and there was no medicine for it. It had to be endured, pushed through. Locked down.

“Where are we?” Ty asked.

Kit looked up. The sky had cleared a little, and Kit could see skyscrapers rising over the roofs of the nearby buildings. “London, I think? But it could be any city in England. Manchester, Leeds—”

He broke off as the air gave another shudder, and Ragnor Fell popped out of nothingness like a cork shooting out of a bottle. He hit the wet pavement with a smack, and rolled onto his back, groaning, looking a bit—in Kit’s opinion—like an angry green toad that had fallen off a log.

“I’m getting too old for this Portal nonsense,” Ragnor complained. “Too hard on the old bones.”

“You’re immortal,” Ty pointed out. “Your bones don’t get older.”

Ragnor got up slowly. His black cloak was now rather the worse for wear: It was wet and torn, and leaves were stuck to the hem. Ragnor had certainly hung back at Cirenworth for at least a few minutes before following Kit and Ty to London. But why?

“Yes, I’m immortal,” he said, brushing himself off, “not indestructible.”

Ty opened his mouth to say something, but Kit beat him to it. He couldn’t help himself. “What happened back there?” he demanded. “My family just—disappeared in front of me.” He swallowed hard. “Are they alive?”

Ragnor’s angry expression softened. “Come with me,” he said. “We need to talk somewhere safer than this.”

—

The training room was deserted. Dru felt no relief, just an increase of tension; Ash was probably hanging back deliberately to make her nervous. Or maybe he was watching her through some kind of peephole, checking to see what she’d do when she thought she was alone. The idea made her so angry she yearned to slap him.

She moved forward into the room. It was in a cave-like space, like her bedroom, with rock walls that reached up toward a shadowy ceiling where long vines had been secured to metal clamps. Iron handholds and footholds had been hammered into the walls, and there were racks of weapons: blades, staffs, daggers, and axes, all bearing the marks of faerie workmanship. The light in the lower part of the room was bright; smokeless torches burned in bronze holders spaced along the walls. Mats made of pressed moss were rolled out across the polished wood floor, and a sparring circle had been painted in one corner.

Ash had it made to his specifications. The specifications of a boy who had never been in a Nephilim training room, but had learned what it ought to look like from stories, and had built it from what was available to him: vines instead of ropes for climbing, mats created from moss, faerie weapons without a single seraph blade or runed dagger. And where Shadowhunter training rooms smelled of sweat and blood, this one smelled like dank stone and running water. It must have been built over an underground river, perhaps the same one that fed the waterfall in Dru’s room.

She crossed the room and tugged on one of the vines. It was strong, with more spring to it than a rope. She had an urge to swing on it, like Tarzan, but suppressed it. Glancing sideways, she saw the only piece of furniture in the room, wedged into a corner: a wooden wardrobe, painted with a symbol of the Seelie Court—two swans facing each other, one white and one black. Each wore a crown, the gold paint glittering in the torchlight.

Dru moved toward the rack of weapons. She hesitated a moment before a saber—that had been Livvy’s weapon of choice, and seeing them always made Dru long for her sister. Her ghost sister, who had finally spoken to her. Livvy, she thought, did you see what happened to me? Can you find me here?

There was no answer, of course. Livvy was tied to Ty; she couldn’t be expected to follow Dru to Faerie without him. With one last lingering look at the saber, Dru took down a shortsword. Given her small stature, it was more of an ordinary sword in her hand. She lifted it up, letting light run across the blade, illuminating the faerie script etched into the metal.

“What are you doing?”

Ash had come into the room silently. He was watching her from one of the mats, his pale hair gleaming in the torchlight. He was dressed in his own training gear: black trousers, a short-sleeved tunic the color of ash wood. Delicate faerie patterns were embroidered into the tunic: leaves and vines, rayed suns, crescent moons, visible only when the light caught them.