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She saw the pupils of his eyes dilate and realized how close to him she was standing. She took a step back as he said, “Is that still bothering you?”

“Yes,” Dru said flatly.

“I believe in the mundane world, people welcome newcomers to their neighborhood with pies. Here, it’s knives. Perhaps you could write it off as a cultural difference.”

Throwing knives at someone is not a cultural difference. “By the rules of the game,” Dru said, “you have to actually answer the question.”

He lowered his sword. “No one has ever told me the full truth of who I am. Not my mother. Not Janus. I thought maybe Clary would. But only if she disliked me.”

“You want to know about Sebastian,” Dru guessed. “What he was really like. If she felt sympathy for you, she wouldn’t be able to bear telling you the truth, is that it?”

He gave her a tight smile. “One question per hit. I believe that is, as you put it, one of the rules of the game.”

He sprang at Dru, ducking, then twisting to the side. The blade of his sword grazed her sleeve. It was a light touch, but it still counted.

“My turn,” he said. “You really don’t remember me? Nothing’s come back since you’ve been here?”

“I remember you saving me,” Dru said. “On the rooftop. Nothing before that.”

His expression was careful, neutral, but his eyes were like storm clouds, a shifting, puzzling silvery green. “It makes no sense. There’s no reason you should keep forgetting”—he hesitated for a moment, and a look of something like pain flashed across his face—“the past.”

Dru tilted her head to the side. “Do you want me to remember you or not?”

She half expected him to complain that she was asking a question without having scored a hit, but he just shrugged. “It does not matter to me either way,” he said. “It is curious. That is all.”

And they were fighting again, before Dru had a chance to mull over his words. Their blades sang as each of them pressed their advantage, and for a moment Dru lost herself in the familiar rhythm of the fight: advance, parry, retreat, advance again.

They were fairly evenly matched, Dru thought. He’d clearly had excellent fight training, even if it wasn’t Shadowhunter training. Which made this a time for cunning and trickery. She let him push her into retreating, and retreating again, until her back was pressed against the wall. She looked at him with wide eyes—then used the wall to throw herself forward, past his defense. The tip of her sword touched his collar.

“Hit,” she gloated, pushing her sweaty hair out of her eyes with her free hand.

“Imagine,” he said, looking down at her, “that I thought you might let me win.”

Dru felt her breath catch. Is he saying he knows? That his charm doesn’t work on me? “But you wouldn’t want that,” she said carefully. “It’s more fun for you if I’m a little…disobedient.”

“So it is,” he said, in a low voice. She felt him look at her in a way that seemed like a hand passing over her, mapping the route his eyes took, gliding over her breasts, her waist, her hips. She could feel the pulse in her throat pounding. Anger, she told herself. How dare he look at her so—familiarly?

“So…what did Janus mean about the fate of Shadowhunters?” she asked, lowering her sword. “I mean, that didn’t sound like a good fate, like a surprise party with ice cream kind of fate.”

The heat in Ash’s gaze vanished, and the corner of his mouth twitched. “He wants them reformed. That’s all.”

Right, Dru thought. Reformed right into a million pieces. “Why does he care about reforming the Shadowhunters? He’s not really one of us anymore. All he seems to care about is Clary, so why…”

Her voice trailed off. Ash’s eyes were an almost luminous pale green as he stared at her. He said, “Do you think Clary’s Shadowhunter friends, or the man she plans to marry, would ever stop looking for her? Janus is no fool. He knows that unless he returns her, which he will never do, they will hunt him to the ends of the earth. The doors to Faerie cannot remain closed forever. When they open again, Jace and the others will come for her. And he wants to be ready.”

So he’ll battle an entire race of people in order to keep her? It was an insane idea, completely impractical…and, unfortunately, it seemed on-brand for Janus. “My family will never stop looking for me, either,” Dru said, even though she knew the words were unwise.

“Just your family?” Ash said softly. “Is there no one else who loves you?”

Dru blinked. “Are you asking if I have a boyfriend?”

“I suppose. I have heard that this sort of thing exists in the mortal world. Not the casual fancy of lovers, nor the lawful binding of marriage, but something else. A lesser commitment.”

Dru wondered if it was worth trying to explain Mason Hardcastle. Would faeries even understand a friends-with-benefits situation? Would Ash want to learn the term situationship? Probably not.

“You sound like you’ve been reading mundane advice columns,” she said.

The light in his eyes intensified. “Humor me,” he said, and Dru knew from his tone that she had no choice.