Page 9

In the end, Magnus Bane, the Consul’s husband, had given Jaime an enchanted ring he could use to summon help in case of emergency, but Jaime doubted he’d need it. He was accustomed to sneaking around unnoticed.

He’d thought it would be easy, but as it turned out, “sneaking” into the Seelie Court was nearly impossible. It was surrounded with faerie soldiers day and night, the Queen’s own guard, including their leader, an inhospitable redcap named Bonecrusher. That was information in and of itself—it seemed as if the Queen was preparing to defend against an attack—but not enough to carry back to the Clave. Nor had he learned anything of Nene, and he dreaded facing Mark and Helen without news of her.

He would have to find out the Seelie Court’s plans some other way, he’d thought, and he’d waited for a night when the fey would be overcome with their need for a revel, their need to dance and lose themselves under the multicolored stars of Faerie.

It happened when the moon was at crescent. Jaime had become nocturnal by that point, sleeping in the woods during the day, when the forest was less dangerous, and keeping watch on the bastion of the Seelie Court at night.

Jaime had kept to the shadows at the revel. He’d covered his Marks with glamour, and his face with a faerie mask carved to look like a fire spirit, but he knew his disguise would fool no one for any length of time.

He never stopped to dance as he moved among the crowd, his ears wide open to catch any chatter about the Queen. Eventually he’d encountered one of the Queen’s handmaidens, a pretty girl with blue-green hair who was bemoaning the fact that the Queen’s son, Ash, was not present at the revel. Apparently he’d been at Court for some time now and had captured the hearts of quite a few fey.

This caught Jaime’s attention, because so far as he knew, Ash Morgenstern, the son of the Seelie Queen and Sebastian Morgenstern, resided permanently in an entirely other world, the hell dimension Thule: a brutal place ruled by demons, where Shadowhunters no longer existed. Travel between dimensions was, if not impossible, incredibly rare and required some of the most difficult magic that existed.

At that moment, the handmaiden went quiet, her face paling to a light green. “It’s the Huntsman,” she murmured to her friend, a teal-skinned nixie. “If he hears me talking about Ash, he’ll be angry.”

The nixie nodded in agreement. “It is strange how close the Queen keeps him,” she said. “A Huntsman should not be an advisor. He is merely supposed to protect the Court from dangerous beasts.”

Jaime looked in the direction the handmaiden had indicated, and saw a tall man, all in black, wearing the golden mask of a hawk. There was something about him, something familiar in the way he carried himself, the way he kept his hand on the hilt of the sword at his waist—a hand that bore the faded scar of a Voyance rune.

A Shadowhunter? Jaime thought, and then realized: Not just any Shadowhunter. This was Jace Herondale, but not the one he knew in his world. That would be impossible. Considering the presence of Ash, this had to be the other Jace, the one who, in Thule, had become a slave to Sebastian Morgenstern and all the evil he represented.

Jaime knew that this was enough information to bring back to the Consul and the Clave. He knew he should slip away over the border between Seelie and Unseelie, find Mark and Cristina, rejoin the mortal world. But when Jace—the Huntsman—turned away from the fires of the revel and began to make his way back toward the dark hill of the Court, Jaime could not help but follow.

Which was how he had come to find himself here: deep within the tunnels that snaked below the Court itself. He had been following the Huntsman for some time; he guessed they had covered miles by this point.

It was then that he saw a faint light glowing up ahead.

He squinted; it felt like years since he’d seen daylight, but daylight it was. He could no longer hear the Huntsman’s boots ahead of him. He sped up, nearly running as the tunnel turned again and then opened out into a vista of towering trees, a forest with a mossy floor starred with small white flowers.

Jaime, like all Shadowhunters, knew those flowers. They were keryx, unique to only one country in the world. Idris.

An ugly tension snaked along his veins. The last time he’d been in Idris, he’d been captured by the Cohort, along with his brother—and tortured. He’d sworn not to return until Zara Dearborn and her Cohort were gone forever.

“Pretty, aren’t they?” said a voice behind him. A voice that was familiar, but changed, as if Jace Herondale’s natural voice had been abraded by sandpaper.

He whirled around. The Huntsman—he couldn’t think of him as Jace—stood before him, his mouth twisted into a slight mocking smile.

“What are you doing here?” Jaime asked. “That passageway to Idris—it shouldn’t exist.”

The Huntsman cut him off with a laugh. “If only you could carry a message from me back to your Clave,” he said, “to tell them that everything they thought was impossible will soon be possible. All safety will be ripped away. All promises broken.”

Jaime said, as steadily as he could, “Why can’t I bring that message back for you?”

In answer, the Huntsman took a step toward him, reaching out with one hand as if to lay it in a comradely fashion on Jaime’s shoulder. “Because of this,” he said, and his other hand moved with unearthly speed, plunging the blade of a silver dagger deep into Jaime’s chest.

2

His Sudden Vengeance

Outside, the New York City streets were slick with rain and loud with traffic. Inside the club Pandemonium, the dance floor was pulsing with color and sound. Brightly colored strobe lights in gold, crimson, and royal blue played over the crowd, illuminating one group of dancers—mundanes, in sequins and luminous body paint—and then another—vampires, the brilliantly colored lights making them look even paler and more eerie than usual. The whole room smelled like damp polyester, perfume, and sweat.

The beat of the music—Simon and his band onstage, playing incredibly loudly if not that well—seemed to make the whole club tremble. Dru, perched beside Thais on a high stool by the bar, could feel the vibrations through the metal of her chair. She poked her black straw into the red Solo cup she was holding, chasing a maraschino cherry at the bottom.

Not that there was any alcohol in her drink. She and Thais were wearing the dread under-twenty-one pink wristbands foisted upon them by the bouncer at the front door. They’d both been given fruity, fizzy mocktails that tasted a lot like the syrup from a can of sliced peaches.

Dru, looking out at the crowd, crossed one fishnet-clad leg over the other. Her charcoal combat boots were laced up to her knees, and she wore a long-sleeved vintage Carrie T-shirt, pinned at her waist, just above her Black Watch–plaid miniskirt. A lace choker circled her throat, and her makeup was exactly how she liked it: red lips, eyes lined with black, a little silver glitter dusting her cheeks. She’d refreshed the dye on the two dark blue streaks in her black hair and they fell loosely, framing her face.

Thais, beside her, was lounging gracefully—not easy to do on an uncomfortable high chair—and her nut-brown hair fell in waves and curls down her back. She wore a pink mesh top and jeans, and gold hoops in her ears. Her only makeup was lip gloss. She always struck Dru as effortlessly cool, which probably had something to do with her being from Brazil.