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“Would it matter if they did?”

“It might,” Ty said. “Or…”

Livvy landed lightly on the grass between them. It didn’t bend under her weight. The ghostly pendant around her throat glittered as she said, “Haven’t all these puzzles required both of you to be involved in solving them? Or at least to do the physical part of them. That’s always been true before. In Amsterdam, Ty had to hold the door open. In Bruges, he pulled you out of the water.”

Ty looked at her curiously. “Go on.”

“Well,” she said. “What if the bells all have to be rung at the same time?”

“But there’s only two of us, and the bells are too far apart,” Kit said. “And I doubt we can yank them off the mausoleums and ring them. I’m pretty sure that would violate how the spell’s supposed to work—” He broke off, realizing that Livvy and Ty were looking at each other, not at him, something unspoken passing between them. He felt it the way he sometimes felt energy from ghosts, especially the ones who didn’t speak but communicated silently, through their eyes and gestures. In the past, when he’d still been made uneasy by ghosts, those had been the ones who frightened him the most.

“I can do it,” Livvy said to Ty. “I touched Dru that time. I’m strong enough.”

“All right.” Ty spoke very reluctantly. He wouldn’t look at Kit. “Let’s try.”

Kit stayed by the red mausoleum, while Ty crossed the grass to stand beside the door with the arrow etched on it. Livvy floated up to a spot beside the weeping angel statue.

They reached for the bells all at once. Kit felt a strange pull in the air, a ripple of magic that surged through him. Livvy was shimmering in the dim light, her body trembling as she tried to make herself solid enough to strike the bell. Ty, watching her, was alarmingly pale; as Kit watched, he saw Ty put out a hand to steady himself against the side of the arrow mausoleum.

The Heir part of Kit spiked suddenly inside Kit’s head, as if the volume had been turned up on an inner radio. He called out, “Ring the bells! Now!”

And they did, all at once. The sound filled the air, the bells harmonizing, turning from the sound of three different chimes to a single deep humming noise, as if a thousand bees were buzzing in unison.

As the sound went on and on, Ty sank to the grass, holding his head. Kit started toward him, panicked, but at that moment, the door of the red mausoleum flew open. A strange light glowed from inside it. Kit saw Livvy swoop down from her perch by the angel to kneel beside Ty; she was speaking to him in a low, inaudible voice, and he had raised his head, nodding as if he agreed with her.

Reluctantly, Kit turned away, stepping inside the mausoleum. The light within had only grown brighter, illuminating every surface, every crack in the stone. As Kit watched, a section of marble slid aside, revealing a small hiding space.

Within it was the third piece of artifact, gleaming and untarnished. Kit grabbed it and the terrible buzzing sound stopped, cut off abruptly. Kit glanced at the artifact briefly before tucking it into the zip pocket of his gear jacket. How many more? he wondered, feeling suddenly exhausted. How many more pieces of artifact needed to be collected? He wanted to be home, at Cirenworth, with his family.

And with Ty.

Something that sounded like a growl echoed from outside. Kit sprang out of the mausoleum and saw that Ty was already on his feet, a seraph blade in his right hand. Beside him, Livvy hovered, wide-eyed and staring toward a copse of oak trees, from which a group of pale white figures was emerging.

They drove a sense of powerful dark magic before them, like a cold front, and like cold, it made Kit shiver. As they moved closer, it became clear that they were not pale figures in any normal sense. They were human skeletons.

Their hollow eyes glowed with yellow light, as if candles had been lit inside their skulls; their teeth grinned and chattered. Tattered clothes hung from their rib cages, and stringy bits of old hair still clung to their bare skulls. They were armed with a motley collection of battered swords and daggers.

Dullahans. Kit had read about them: skeletons made from mismatched bones and bound together by ancient faerie magic, sent to do the bidding of whoever had created them.

“There are too many for us to fight off,” Ty whispered to Kit. “We should run—”

“We can’t.” Kit instinctively reached for his gun, then remembered he didn’t have it and drew one of the seraph blades he’d found in the synagogue. “I’ve read about these things. They can travel faster than the wind. They’ll catch us.”

Livvy touched Ty’s shoulder, though Kit couldn’t tell if Ty could feel it. He was putting his headphones on, his eyes fixed on the approaching monsters.

“I’ll get help,” she said, and vanished; Ty raised his seraph blade. “Arakiel,” he said firmly, and the blade exploded into light, making Kit reach for his own weapon.

He held it up, whispering, “Gabuthelon,” just as the dullahans closed in.

Kit’s blade sprang to life in his hand. Adrenaline shot through his veins; there was no time to think, only to react. A dullahan was already upon him, its teeth bared in a malevolent rictus. Kit lunged at it, his seraph blade striking out in a wide arc. The dullahan raised its bony arm to block it, but Kit’s strike was too fast, slashing through the creature’s arm and severing it cleanly from the shoulder. The skeletal arm—sword still in its bony grip—hit the ground with a hollow thud, but the dullahan didn’t pause.

It opened its jaws wide, as if it meant to scream, but no sound came. Flames danced in its hollow eye sockets as it snatched up its fallen weapon with its remaining hand. It advanced on Kit, swinging its blackened blade. Kit ducked just in time, cold air rushing past him as the dullahan’s sword missed him by a hair.

The exhaustion had left Kit completely. Instead he felt the freezing energy of battle-rage, that feeling that often came on Shadowhunters when they were fighting. Vision narrowed as everything fell away from Kit but the fight and the weapon in his hand.

He thrust his seraph blade upward, driving it deep into the creature’s rib cage.

There was no cry, no blood. But the skeleton cracked and splintered with a sickening sound as the creature dissolved—with a loud series of snapping noises—into a pile of scattered bones.