James glanced over at Grace, who was being introduced to Charles Fairchild. Poor Grace. She wouldn’t find Charles the least bit interesting. James liked Matthew’s older brother well enough, and they were practically family, but he had only one interest—Shadowhunter politics.

Grace was nodding and smiling politely. James wondered if he ought to rescue her. The world of Alicante and its dramas and policies couldn’t be further from Grace’s experience.

“And now you’re thinking you ought to rescue her from Charles,” said Anna, running her fingers through her pomaded hair. “I can’t blame you.”

“Do you not like Charles?” James was slightly surprised. Anna viewed the world with amused tolerance. She rarely went so far as to particularly like anyone, and it was even more rare for her to dislike them.

“I cannot admire all his decisions,” said Anna, clearly choosing her words with care. James wondered what decisions she meant. “Go ahead, then, Jamie—rescue her.”

James got only a few steps before the world around him shifted and changed. Anna vanished, as did all the music and laughter: gray, formless nothing swirled around him. He could hear only the sound of his own heartbeat. The floor seemed to tilt under him like the deck of a sinking ship.

NO, he cried out silently, but there was nothing he could do to stop it: the shadows were rising all around him as the universe went gray.

The boy drew Lucie down the hall and through the first open door, taking them into the games room. He didn’t move to shut the door, only went to light the witchlight on the mantel, so Lucie shut it herself, and turned the key for good measure.

Then she spun around and stared accusingly. “What on earth are you doing here?” she demanded.

The boy smiled. He looked, puzzlingly, no older than Lucie remembered him—sixteen, seventeen perhaps. Still slender, and under real light and not a forest moon he was terribly, shockingly pale, with that cast of bruised sickliness to him: his green eyes fever-bright and shadowed.

“I was invited,” he said.

“You can’t have been,” Lucie said, putting her hands on her hips. The witchlight had flared up, and she could see that the room was in some disarray: someone had knocked over a decanter, and the billiard table was crosswise. “You are a forest-dwelling faerie changeling.”

At that, he laughed. He had the same smile she remembered. “Is that what you thought?”

“You told me about faerie traps!” she said. “You appeared from the forest and vanished back into it—”

“I am no faerie, nor a changeling,” he said. “Shadowhunters know about faerie traps too.”

“But you have no runes,” she said.