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“I’ll get food,” Kit said, hopping down from his barrel. He was aware of eyes on him as he made his way to the bar and got in line. Neither he nor Ty was glamoured, and in their gear, they must have looked as if they wanted to party.

Kit smiled to himself, glancing over at the table where Ty was sitting. Something about the place made Kit feel the exhilaration of travel. His focus—their focus—had been so tightly on their quest, he’d barely allowed himself to enjoy what this kind of trip provided: a sense of being cut adrift from one’s ordinary life. Here, among these beautiful, unfamiliar things, he could be anyone—someone with no claims on his bloodline, someone whose past was wiped clean of memories and mistakes.

Loaded down with two Cokes and a pile of crisp packets, Kit returned to the ironing board to find that a strange man had come up to bother Ty in a peculiar mixture of German, Hungarian, and English. Kit gave him a menacing look, and he fled.

“I have no idea what he wanted,” Ty said in a mystified voice, as Kit slid a bag of crisps—chips, he reminded himself—across the table.

“He thought you were cute,” Kit said, tearing into his own chips. Salt and vinegar. The Coke tasted painfully sweet washing them down. He shot a glance at Ty, all messy black hair and gray eyes and high cheekbones. Cute didn’t really cover it. He’d been cute when he was fifteen. Now he was stupidly beautiful.

Not that that was something he could say.

Ty shrugged. “I hate small talk with strangers,” he said. “I hate not talking about the stuff you’re actually interested in. I hate having to translate all the time, like I think in one language and other people think in another and it’s my job to come up with the words they can understand.”

“I wonder if it’s extra hard because we’re all pretending half the time anyway?” Kit said. “Pretending not to be Shadowhunters. Pretending we don’t see what we see.”

“Maybe,” Ty said. “Maybe that’s why it’s so tiring.”

And Shadowhunters had to push through tiredness, Kit thought. They had to shove down their exhaustion and their feelings and their reactions, and Ty had to do it twice as much. Kit wanted badly to go around the table and hug him, but he knew he couldn’t.

“So let’s talk about something you’re actually interested in,” Kit said instead. “Something unrelated to our current situation.”

Ty’s eyes brightened. “Can I ask you something? It’s related to something I’m interested in, I swear.”

“Sure.”

“Dru said you were going to mundane school. In England. Why?”

“Well, Tessa and Jem handle my Shadowhunter training,” Kit said. “But for history, science—”

“Most of us just don’t learn those things, you know.”

“I wonder if we should, though. I went to regular mundane school before I found out I was a Shadowhunter, and it wasn’t all wasted time. If we didn’t separate ourselves so much from mundane things, we might be able to protect them better. I mean, that’s the ultimate goal, isn’t it? Protection?”

Ty’s eyes were bright. “I was thinking about that. My final project at the Scholomance was supposed to be about using magic to solve crime, not just deal with demon attacks.”

“I like that idea. You could have a Shadowhunter detective agency.”

“And you could remind me how to pick locks,” Ty said, carefully nibbling the edge of a chip. “I keep wondering if you’re going to steal something.”

Kit almost upset his drink. “What?”

Ty widened his eyes. It was a habit of his, as if he was trying to take in more than he normally could of the world around him. “That stuff your dad taught you. How to pick locks, play con games…”

True enough. Johnny Rook had been a grifter and a con artist. He never bought anything if he could steal it instead. Kit had once seen him leave a grocery store with an entire rotisserie chicken under his coat.

“It took me a little while to stop lifting stuff when I moved to Cirenworth,” Kit admitted. “I stole food from the pantry, mostly canned stuff, chocolate bars, an old set of napkin rings…I never took anything valuable, but that was a matter of time.”

“Did Jem and Tessa notice?”

“Yeah.” Kit had emptied his pack of chips; he turned it upside down to get the crumbs. “One night, I came into my bedroom and they’d put a bunch of their most valuable things in there, lined them up on the shelves and windowsills. They said…” Kit’s voice hitched as he remembered. We want you to know there is nothing in this house more precious to us than you. He swallowed against the ache in his throat. “They said I could have them. That I was family.”

“And was that it? You never stole anything again?”

Kit grinned sideways. “Maybe not nothing. But nothing more from Cirenworth. After Mina was born…” He blushed, hoping the dim light of the bar hid it. “I wanted to set a good example for her. Even though she’s too young to really notice.”

Ty rested his chin on his hand. “You seem different.”

Kit felt his heart skip a beat. “You mean, than you thought I’d be?”