“You called the dead,” said Jesse. “You called the dead, and the dead came. I heard you, across the whole city, calling for someone to help you.”

“What do you mean? Why would I have any ability to call the dead up? I can see them, but I certainly can’t command—”

She broke off. She was suddenly back in Emmanuel Gast’s bedroom in that small, terrible flat. You will, she had said when the ghost proclaimed he would never tell, and he had given up his secrets. Leave us, she had said, and he had winked out of existence.

“You were the only one who could see me in the ballroom,” said Jesse. “You have always been the only one who can see me besides my family. There’s something unusual about you.”

She stared at him. What if she ordered Jesse to do something? Would he have to do it? Would he have to come to her if she called, as he had on the riverbank?

She swallowed. “When we were beside the river, when you were with me, you were holding that locket at your throat. Clutching it.”

“And you want me to tell you why?” he said, and she knew he’d had the same thought she had. She didn’t like the thought. She didn’t want to order him around, or Jessamine. Perhaps she had to be panicked, though, she told herself. She’d been frightened in Gast’s flat, and again at the river.

“If you want to,” she said.

“This locket was placed around my throat by my mother,” he said. “It contains my last breath.”

“Your last breath?”

“I ought to tell you how I died, I suppose,” he said, perching himself on the windowsill. He seemed to like it there, Lucie thought, just on the threshold. “I was a sickly child. My mother told the Silent Brothers that I wasn’t well enough to withstand being given runes, but I begged and begged. She managed to fight me off until I was seventeen. You might understand that by then, I was desperate to be a Shadowhunter like other Shadowhunters. I told her that if she did not let me get the Marks, I would run away to Alicante and get them myself.”

“And did you? Run away?”

He shook his head. “My mother relented, and the Silent Brothers came to the manor house. The rune ceremony went off without a hitch, and I thought I had triumphed.” He held up his right hand, and she realized what she had thought was a scar was the faint outline of the Voyance rune. “My first rune and my last.”

“What happened?”