DAYS PAST: LONDON, GROSVENOR SQUARE, 1901

On the night of the death of Queen Victoria, the bells of London erupted into clamorous alarm.

Matthew Fairchild also grieved, but not for a dead queen. He grieved for the loss of someone he had never known, for a life that had ended. For a future whose happiness would always be tainted with the shadow of what he had done.

He knelt before the statue of Jonathan Shadowhunter in his family’s parlor, his hands covered in ash. “Bless me,” he said haltingly, “for I have sinned. I have…” He stopped, unable to say the words. “Tonight someone died because of me. Because of my actions. Someone I loved. Someone I didn’t know. But I loved them just the same.”

He had thought the prayer might help. It did not. He had shared his secret with Jonathan Shadowhunter, but he would never share it with anyone else: not his parabatai, not his parents, not a single friend or stranger. From that night on, an impassable chasm opened between Matthew and the whole world. None of them knew it, but he was cut off from them forever in all the ways that mattered.

But that was as it should be, Matthew thought. After all, he had committed murder.

18 DARKNESS STIRS

The dead are sleeping in their sepulchres:

And, mouldering as they sleep, a thrilling sound,

Half sense, half thought, among the darkness stirs,

Breathed from their wormy beds all living things around,

And, mingling with the still night and mute sky,

Its awful hush is felt inaudibly

—Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Summer Evening Churchyard, Lechlade, Gloucestershire”

It was late afternoon by the time James was able to pry himself away from the Institute—it seemed every Enclave member who passed through the gates wanted to interrogate him about Mandikhor demons—and head to Grosvenor Square to meet the rest of the Merry Thieves.

After letting himself into Matthew’s house with his key, James paused for a moment on the steps that led to the cellar. He knew his friends were in the laboratory: he could hear their voices rising up toward him like smoke, could hear Christopher chattering, Matthew’s low and musical tones. He could feel Matthew’s presence, this close to his parabatai, like one magnet coming within range of another.

He found his friends seated around a high, marble-topped laboratory table. Everywhere were instruments of curious design: a galvanometer for measuring electrical currents, a torsion balance machine, and a clockwork orrery of gold, bronze, and silver—a gift from Charlotte to Henry some years ago. A dozen different microscopes, astrolabes, retorts, and measuring devices were scattered across the table and cabinet tops. On a plinth rested the Colt Single Action army revolver Christopher and Henry had been working on for months before all this had happened. Its river-gray nickel plating was deeply engraved with runes and a curving inscription: LUKE 12:49.