She thought the reassurance might help, but instead Alastair’s mouth wrenched out of shape with sudden violence.

“Really,” he said coldly. “Well, it makes a difference to me to have a sister who is a sneak and a spy. Get out of my room, Cordelia. Now.”

“Jesse,” Lucie whispered. “Jesse, where are you?”

She sat on the floor by the cast-iron fireplace in the Institute drawing room. She had come home from the Devil Tavern once night had begun to fall in earnest. Both Thomas and Christopher had been distracted and preoccupied, anyway, and she wasn’t sure how much real Pyxis research was getting done. Christopher had had some kind of realization about the antidote he was working on and vanished into the steel-lined corner of the tavern room, where he had banged about trying to distill something in a retort.

But that wasn’t the real reason she had wanted to leave. Night had a new importance now. Night meant she could talk to Jesse.

“Jesse Blackthorn,” she said now, feeling a little ridiculous. “Please come here. I want to speak with you.”

She glanced about the room, as if Jesse might be hiding under a sofa. This was their family room, where the Herondales often gathered in the evenings. Tessa had kept some of the older decorations here—a gilt-framed mirror still hung over the fireplace—and the furniture was comfortably shabby, from the flowered armchairs by the fireplace to the big old desk, scarred with years of marks from the nibs of pens. The walls were papered in light damask, and well-thumbed books lined the walls.

Tessa would read aloud from a new book, and the others would sprawl around the fire; sometimes they would exchange gossip, or Will and Tessa would tell familiar stories from the past. It was a place Lucie associated with great comfort, and afternoons spent scribbling away at the desk. So it was perhaps doubly unnerving when Jesse appeared, evolving out of the shadows in his white shirtsleeves, his face pale under his dark hair.

“You came!” she said, not bothering to hide her astonishment. “I really didn’t know if that was going to work.”

“I don’t suppose you ever wondered if now was a convenient time for me,” he said.

“What could you possibly have been doing?” she wondered aloud.

Jesse made an unghostlike snorting sound and seated himself on the rickety desk. The weight of a live person would likely have tipped it over, but he was not a live person. “You wanted to speak with me. So speak.”

She told him hastily about Emmanuel Gast, how she had found the ghost and what he had said to her. As he listened, Jesse played with the gold locket around his throat.