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She was murmuring a quiet prayer to Raziel when the door opened and Janus came in. She tried not to flinch. He was wearing his Huntsman’s finery, black velvet and black leather, Heosphoros sheathed at his side and his face half covered by his golden hawk mask, the same color as his eyes.

Heosphoros. The ancestral Morgenstern sword, the twin of Phaesphoros, both of which had once been owned by her father, Valentine. Sebastian had wielded Phaesphoros to do a great deal of evil in the mortal world, but Clary had loved Heosphoros. She had fought with it and killed Sebastian with it. It had been destroyed in Edom, and the one Janus wore was the version that existed in Thule. Clary knew it was not her sword, but she felt a yearning toward it nonetheless.

Janus approached the bars of the cage, his gaze moving slowly over her. She didn’t get up off the floor; there seemed to be no point. “I was going to bring you to the revel this evening,” he said, as if he expected her to already know about it. “But I find I want you to myself.”

A flash of resentment and rage arrowed through her. She had no expectation she would have enjoyed the revel, but she might have been able to see Dru. Maybe Dru would even have gotten hold of a stele. Even if not, it would have been time out of this room, this cage. Away from the reminders of Janus all around her.

But rage and bitterness were not things she could show to Janus. He had no right to her true emotions. She plastered a smile on her face and said, “That’s kind of you to say.”

He sat down in front of the cage in his usual spot. He sat with her every day—as far as Clary could tell day from night—sometimes to talk, sometimes only to sit and watch her. Sometimes she was glad for the bars, though she didn’t fool herself: He could open the cage door if he wanted to.

Usually, though, he wasn’t wearing the mask. The mask was unnerving—it made him look less human, yes, but also more like Jace. It covered the scars and lines that were unique to him, but his hair, his hands, the shape of his mouth—

“Would you let me draw you?” she asked, abruptly.

She had rarely seen him startled, but even with the mask, she could read his astonishment. “All right,” he said, after a long moment. “One day I shall give you a room of your own that is just for your art. I know how important drawing is for you.”

No you don’t. You know how important it was to the Clary you knew; you know nothing about me. But in his mind, there was no difference between her and the Clary he’d known save that she didn’t love him—not yet. Though he seemed confident that one day she would, in a way that unnerved her.

From the stack of drawing supplies he’d left her, Clary selected a paper-wrapped charcoal pencil and a pad of sheets. As she settled herself, she said to him, “Take off your mask.”

He removed it without a second thought. Holding it in one hand, he looked past her, gazing at a memory she couldn’t see. “It’s Ash,” he said.

Good. He’s talking.

She started to draw. “What about Ash?”

“I fear I feel him slipping away,” he said, to her surprise. “When I first met him, he was a frightened child. I tried to give him the best life I could in Thule. There it was us against the world—a dark and punishing world. Here, I struggle to make him see the importance of my mission.”

“In my experience of children, they need to know that they’re important to you,” Clary said, sketching away.

Janus looked almost surprised. “Ash knows he is indispensable to my plans. He knows they will not work without him.”

Clary thought, That wasn’t the point. But there was real pain in his voice when he spoke of Ash. For the first time, she let herself wonder if there might be some little bit of her Jace inside him. Maybe he was, in some way, capable of caring for someone. She said, “What is your plan for Ash? I know you want him by your side, but doing what, exactly?”

Janus spoke slowly. “He has always wanted power and responsibility. I will give him that. I will make him a sort of ambassador, bestriding the worlds of faerie and humanity.”

Clary couldn’t help but wonder: Was it Janus’s influence over the Seelie Queen that made him so sure that he would have such control of Ash’s future? Or did he really believe Ash would do anything he said because Janus had had a hand in raising him?

She glanced down at her drawing and froze. The face looking out at her from the paper wasn’t Janus’s face. She hadn’t been drawing what she saw, but what she wished she saw—her own Jace, a slight smile on his lips, a clear light in his eyes even as shadows from her cage bars striped his face. “I’m sure Ash would be a good ambassador,” she said, automatically. “Being half faerie and half Shadowhunter will help.”

Clary herself didn’t think she sounded sincere, but Janus didn’t seem to notice. As if in answer to an unasked question, he said, “Ash is ready for this. This is what Sebastian and I raised him for. He’s prepared. He expects it.”

Sebastian. This was the first time Janus had slipped up and spoken of himself and Sebastian as more than enemies. As a team. Clary thought of all the time she had spent hoping to find some trace of goodness in Sebastian. She never had.

She didn’t realize she had stopped drawing until Janus tapped the cage bars. “Is the portrait finished?”

Silently, she tore the page out of her sketch pad and passed it to him. Her heartbeat quickened as he studied it. She couldn’t read his face. Would he recognize that she had drawn Jace, not him?

His face lit up. “I see what you have done. You drew me as I was when I was younger. When we first knew each other. Do you remember our first kiss, in the greenhouse?”

Clary looked down at her charcoal-stained hands. “Of course I do.”

Janus stood up, letting the piece of paper flutter to the ground. He unlocked the cage door and stepped inside. For a moment, Clary’s muscles tensed with anxiety. But there was a softness in his gaze she hadn’t seen before. When he came to help her up from the floor, she allowed it. He would let go if she asked him to. Even being who he was, he did not seem to want to force her. He wanted her to love him. It was clear in the way he laid his hand against her cheek, the skin of his palm rough and scarred. And clear in the careful way he leaned down and kissed her.

She couldn’t help it—he was so much like Jace, and she missed Jace so painfully. And for a moment, it was like kissing Jace. It felt familiar, and like home, and when he kissed her she remembered kissing her Jace in the Seelie Court, and the Seelie Queen’s voice: The kiss you most desire.

But the moment passed. There was desperation in the way Janus kissed her, a sort of unfulfilled hunger that had nothing to do with her. Just as she was kissing a memory, so was he. He held her tightly, awkwardly, and she realized: He had no experience in kissing an adult woman. He had convinced himself she was the same Clary as his, but his Clary had died at sixteen. Even if his mind refused to admit the difference, his body knew it.