He hadn’t been prepared for the state of Blackthorn Manor in the middle of the night, its deadly hush, its aura of menace like an opened tomb. Thick silver dust trailed along the edges of banisters and furniture and tangled into cobwebs in every corner. At the edge of his vision was a gray blur: he knew it was the border of the shadow realm. He knew he was courting that world by turning his flesh to shadow.

But he had made a promise.

James could see ghosts, and there were no ghosts here. But this place felt haunted regardless. The shadows seemed to listen intently to his footfalls. Most strange of all, every clock in the house that he passed was stopped at exactly the same hour of twenty to nine.

James went up the stairs. At the end of a long corridor before a turret wall stood a ghastly suit of armor, easily twice as tall as a human. Thankfully, it was only a decoration: fashioned from steel and copper, it resembled nothing so much as a massive human skeleton, with a chest piece in the shape of a rib cage and a helmet and mask that formed a leering skull. It stopped him short, and he stood staring at it until it came to him what it must be: one of Axel Mortmain’s famous clockwork creatures, an empty shell that had once housed a demon. The very monsters that his own parents had defeated when they were only barely older than he was now.

Grace had told him that Tatiana had left the house untouched all these years, but that was not entirely true: she had installed this mechanical creature’s corpse in its gallery. Why? What did it mean to her? Was it admiration of Mortmain, who had nearly destroyed the Shadowhunters?

James hated to turn his back on the thing, but he moved on, and quickly found the door to Tatiana’s study. The room was piled with boxes and crates, stacks of yellowed pages and decaying books. On the wall was a portrait of a boy, about the same age as James, shining green eyes dominating his gaunt face. James knew who it must be, though he had never seen him: Jesse Blackthorn.

There was a metal box set on the low wrought-iron table below the portrait of the dead boy, carved all over with the winding vines that the Blackthorns used to decorate seemingly everything. The lock was built into the lid, presenting a simple keyhole in the smooth surface.

Without looking directly at the box, he lowered his hand to its lid; he felt his body flash into and out of shadow in irregular jerks and for an awful moment saw that other land, the blighted place of twisted trees.