“Poor Sophie,” said Jessamine unexpectedly. “She was always such a kind girl. Except for that time she hit me over the head with a mirror and tied me to my bed.”

Lucie did not inquire further. Jessamine’s stories usually ran the gamut from rambling to alarming. Instead she pulled Alexander into her lap and rested her chin atop his head.

“It seems to be the lot of the living to have tragedy visited upon them,” Jessamine mused.

Lucie did not point out that the alternative seemed worse. Jessamine never seemed to wish she was alive; she seemed content in her role as ghost guardian. So different from Jesse, Lucie thought. Jesse, who had asked her to keep him a secret, so that his odd half-life would not be discovered and ended by the Clave. Jesse, who seemed to badly want to live.

“We were all very brave then,” said Tessa. “I wonder sometimes if it is easier to be brave when one is young, before one knows truly how much there is to lose.”

Cecily murmured something in response; Lucie hugged Alexander, who was half-asleep in her arms, tightly. He was a comfort, despite being three years old and fussy. She felt somewhere in the core of her heart the truth of what her mother had just said. And one should put truth in books, she thought, but this would never be the sort of thing she put in the pages of The Beautiful Cordelia. Books were about experiencing joy. This was the raw and awful stuff of life.

It was much too terrible.

James was sitting at his writing desk, trying to read, but his eyes were skipping over the words on the page. He kept thinking of Barbara. He had not been extremely close with his cousin—the difference in age between them meant she regarded him indulgently as a child, as she did Thomas—but she had been there all his life, kind and cheerful, without her sister’s sharp tongue, always expecting the ready best of everyone. He had never lived in a world without Barbara in it.

Lucie was in the library, he knew, absorbing the company of others. But James had always found solace in books. Admittedly not the kind of book he was reading currently, though.

He had been surprised how very little material there was in the library on the Princes of Hell. They were not the kind of demons Shadowhunters fought—in the mythology about them, they were the mirrors of angels like Raziel. Their interests seemed to go beyond humanity, who were like ants to them. Their battles were with angels and the rulers of realms—other worlds than Earth, dimensions the princes seemed to collect like chess pieces. They could not be killed, though sometimes they were able to wound each other in a manner that left the injured party weakened for years.