Page 44

Dru turned over restlessly, remembering what Thais had said to her, the first night she’d locked her window and cried about Mason on her bed. Thais had petted her hair, knowing the crying was half rage and half humiliation. “Mason is nothing, miga,” she’d said. “You won’t remember him in a year or so. But don’t let him make you think any of this is your fault. You didn’t make a mistake. He did. Don’t let this stop you from trusting yourself.”

Dru had never been good at trusting her own instincts. Maybe her eyes were pretty. Everyone liked them on Julian. But just because someone complimented your eyes, it didn’t mean they even liked you. Some people complimented you because they wanted things—though she doubted Ash wanted the same thing from her that Mason had.

So far, in the Seelie Court, Ash was the only one who sometimes treated Dru as a person. She wanted to cling on to that. But in Faerie, the price of betrayal was more than just hurt feelings. She couldn’t afford to trust Sebastian’s son, even if it meant being lonelier than she’d ever been before.

Jaime

Jaime awoke with a gasp. For a disorienting moment he thought he was still in the forest, staring up at the gold mask of the Huntsman as a dagger slid between his ribs. He remembered the pain, bright and sharp, and he remembered the feel of his own blood running between his fingers like water, the world seeming to tilt under him before he tumbled into darkness.

He blinked his eyes open. At first he saw only shifting shadows. He was in a plaster-walled room with dim light filtering in from a small window high overhead. He was lying on something rough but soft. He began to push himself up gingerly. His arms felt as weak and bendable as plant stems. He groaned to himself just as a hand landed in the middle of his chest, pushing him gently back down.

“Don’t move,” said a girl’s voice. “You have to rest. You nearly died.”

Jaime let himself be guided onto what he now realized was a mattress so old that the coils were poking through the fabric. Leaning over him was a girl with long brown hair and dark eyes. Her face was smudged with dirt and she wore an anxious expression.

Despite the fact that his thoughts were still cloudy, he recognized her, though her presence here—wherever here was—seemed so incongruous that he wondered fleetingly if he were hallucinating.

“Thais,” he whispered, his throat dry. When he coughed, she put a glass to his lips, tilting it so he could gulp down water. The water tasted flat and stale, but he was long beyond caring. “Thais Pedroso,” he said, when he got his breath back. “You’re Dru’s friend.”

She settled back on her heels. “I wasn’t sure you’d remember me. It’s good that you do.”

“Why is it good?” Jaime asked.

“So you don’t waste a lot of time thinking I’m part of the Cohort or something.”

He sat up, frowning. Looking down at his body, he could see that he was barefoot, still wearing the clothes he’d worn in Faerie, though there was a ragged tear in his shirt. When he placed his hand over his chest, he found the fabric stiff with dried blood.

He ached, as if he’d been punched in the stomach. But the gaping cut that should have slashed across his ribs and stomach was gone. “Did you do this?” he asked, imagining her bending over him with a stele.

She shook her head. “Manuel Villalobos healed you. Then he dumped you here while you were still unconscious.” She glanced around the room. There was no furniture besides the mattress. “We’re in a manor house, somewhere in Brocelind Forest. A pretty dilapidated one, not that I’ve seen all that much of it. Manuel had me locked in a room on one of the upper floors.”

“Manuel?” Jaime said in disbelief. Manuel was one of the worst members of the Cohort. Being a member of the Cohort at all required that you be pretty despicable, but while the others were zealots, Manuel was a true psychopath who reveled in the pain of others. Why would he ever heal anyone, Jaime especially? “How did he even find me? The last thing I remember is being attacked by the Huntsman—”

“I don’t know who that is,” Thais said. “I’ll tell you what I do know.” She filled him in quickly—Dru and Clary had been kidnapped. Thais had been in the New York Institute and seen the rest of her companions vanish before looking down to realize that her own hands were glowing, becoming translucent. She was disappearing.

But she wasn’t unconscious. Instead, she had been trapped among strange hallucinations in which her parents lay dead before her on a great battlefield. She’d screamed until darkness came, mercifully shrouding everything. At last she’d been woken up in a dusty bedroom in Idris with Manuel standing over her, grinning unpleasantly.

“Sounds like a really bad couple of days,” Jaime noted.

“It was. I was sick and shaking when I woke up. And Manuel—that arrombado—didn’t improve things. He told me that I was lucky, that I was better off with him than trapped with my friends. He made it clear that Jace and Alec and the others were somewhere in Idris, but he wasn’t interested in telling me where. When I asked him ‘too many’ questions, he forced a potion down my throat. Then he left but promised to come back later to ‘play’ with me.”

Jaime winced in disgust. “What did he mean by that?”

“I don’t know,” Thais said. “And I hope never to know. I managed to break out of the bedroom after he left. I think I found a way out of the manor, but Manuel came back sooner than I thought he would, and I had to hide. He wasn’t alone—he had you with him. He was muttering about having to heal you from a wound that should have killed you. Still, he seemed to feel that the opportunity to torture you for information outweighed the pleasure of watching you die.”

“I forgot what a wonderful personality Manuel has,” Jaime said grimly. His older brother, Diego, had been a Centurion alongside Manuel before Manuel and Zara had betrayed the Clave. Diego had once described him as a psychopath with no human feelings. Jaime had regarded this as exaggeration at the time. “I assume he left again? We’re alone?”

Thais nodded. “Do you want to see if you can stand?” She rose to her feet, taking something out of the pocket of her jeans. A witchlight, Jaime saw, as it began to glow. She reached her hand down to help him up.

He winced as he let her pull him to his feet. “I assume our plan is to escape from this house as soon as possible?” He pushed a hand through his hair, finding it sticky with blood. “And then what? Find a way back to New York? Something that avoids running into the Cohort—specifically Manuel?”

Thais started toward the door of the small room. Jaime followed her, feeling, despite the general horror of the situation, a strange pleasure in being near another Shadowhunter again. It had been too long. “I thought you might know a way out of Idris,” she said. “Or at least have a guess.”

They made their way out into a long corridor. The walls here were dirty and it looked as if someone had scrawled on the plaster. Jaime looked closely. Someone definitely had scrawled on the walls, nine times, each one a name of a Prince of Hell. Asmodeus. Azazel. Belial. Leviathan. Sammael. Belphegor. Mammon. Astaroth. And below those names, in a shaky hand, Lucifer Morningstar.

“I know,” said Thais, following his gaze. “Someone who lived here was definitely unwell.”

“Looks like it,” Jaime said. “And unfortunately, I don’t know much about getting around Idris.”