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Dru couldn’t help herself. “What punishment?”

“You will find out soon enough.” The Queen turned to Janus. “Take her back to her chamber. And be sure to lock her in.”

—

The train pulled into the station in Bruges in the afternoon, under a sunny sky that seemed to make the railroad tracks sparkle. The station itself felt oddly quiet, despite the crowds, which meant Ty didn’t need to put his headphones on. Kit wondered if he was getting any better at picking up on Ty’s tells, the little things that indicated when he was feeling bothered or overwhelmed.

Then he told himself it didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to be with Ty once they’d finished this mission. He didn’t need to learn everything about how Ty worked. The thought did not make him feel even slightly better about anything.

The address Catarina had passed along had turned out to be a building inside Minnewater Park in the center of Bruges, a popular tourist attraction. Ty stopped in the middle of the main hall to retrieve a brochure, while Kit looked around with mild interest.

The station felt old in the way a lot of things in Europe did—as if it could have been built anytime in the last two centuries. A startlingly beautiful mural ran around the top of the interior walls, showing a vision of golden cities rising from canals and forests. It reminded Kit so sharply of Alicante that he almost wondered if a Shadowhunter had painted it to give mundanes a glimpse into a world they would never know.

But a Shadowhunter probably wouldn’t have painted quite so many Belgian peasants, he realized upon reflection. Ty was back, anyway, brochure in hand, and they headed out into the sunshine.

They crossed the broad square outside the station, called the Stationsplein, and plunged into a tangle of winding medieval streets. Ty insisted on reading while he walked, which meant Kit had to keep redirecting him with nudges to his shoulder.

“The address is going to take us to a lake in the park,” said Ty. “It’s called the Minnewater, the Lake of Love. There’s a legend about it—the usual kind of tragic story: There was a girl, she wanted to marry a guy, her father said she had to marry a different guy, so she threw herself into the lake.”

“I’m not sure I’m up for a tragic love story,” Kit said, as they turned a corner. A man was leaning there against a lamppost, smoking a cigarette and reading a newspaper whose French headline blared the story of a bizarre wild animal attack in Chicago that had left fifty-one people injured.

That sounded like demons, Kit thought. He glanced sideways at Ty, who was now reading something about a tower near the bridge that had once stored gunpowder. Probably best Ty didn’t notice the headline. They had enough on their plate as it was.

Before Kit expected it, the park appeared in front of them. It was a green expanse, set with open iron gates, through which pedestrians streamed in both directions.

Ty tucked the brochure away as they entered the park. The leaves on the trees were green and bronze, fluttering in the slight wind. It didn’t take long to reach the lake, where a bridge with metal railings stretched across the iron-blue water. At the opposite side of the bridge a red tower rose, its bricks softened with ivy, a window set high in its single turret.

They made their way to the bridge and Ty paused, looking out over the lake. Cyclists whizzed past, and below, Kit could see couples strolling along the path by the lake, hands in each other’s pockets. “So apparently,” Ty said, “if you throw a coin in, you’ll be lucky in love.”

“I don’t have any coins,” said Kit. “How lucky do I get if I throw in a five-euro note?”

Ty glanced over at him, his eyes not meeting Kit’s. “You have a girlfriend, don’t you?”

Kit blinked at the change of topic. “You mean Hazel? We broke up, a while ago. I guess Dru told you about her?”

“I can’t reveal my sources,” said Ty. “Did you ever find out if she was a werewolf? And did you tell her you were a Shadowhunter?”

Kit wondered if there was any point in explaining: Hazel was fun, but both of us knew it wasn’t serious; there didn’t seem to be a lot of point in making it more than it was. I couldn’t tell her the truth about me, I couldn’t tell any of my friends in Devon the truth. Everything had to be casual. Shallow. “No,” he said.

Ty looked down at the silvery water. “I don’t think I could keep a secret that big.”

“You keep a secret that big every day,” said Kit.

Ty flinched.

Kit cursed at himself. He still thought raising Livvy from the dead, turning her into a ghost, had been a terrible mistake. But they’d made a deal. He put his hands on the railing, letting the cold of the iron soak into his bones, chilling his blood. He said in a stiff voice, “I’m sorry—I know we’re not supposed to talk about that stuff.”

Ty, still looking at the water, nodded slightly.

Kit said, “What about you? At the Scholomance? Is there—” A boyfriend? A girlfriend? I think it would be a boyfriend, but I’m not even sure. “Do you like it there? Really like it?”

Ty pushed his hair out of his eyes. “I know you guys were all worried about me going to the Scholomance,” he said, and Kit wasn’t certain who you guys was—everyone who knew Ty? Just his family? “That I would be lonely and not fit in. But yeah, I actually do enjoy being there. It’s not a big group of people but a lot of them are similar to me. Everyone has their own interests and it doesn’t matter how odd or strange they are; they’re encouraged to learn more about them. Like Anush, he’s into mechanical things, mundane technology mixed up with magic. Sensors. That sort of stuff.”

“Who’s Anush?” Kit asked.

A cheerful, slightly accented voice broke into their conversation. “Yoo-hoo! Shadowhunters! Over here for the magical scavenger hunt!”

None of the mundane tourists seemed to have heard anything, but Kit and Ty both turned. A beautiful faerie woman had stuck her head out the window of the Gunpowder Tower and was waving at them. Her hair was long and black, and Kit could see the shimmer of multicolored wings sprouting from her shoulders. There was something unusual about her skin, too, something that glinted, though he couldn’t see it well from this distance.