“All right,” she said. She hesitated, as though she was trying to decide whether to speak.

“Lucie,” James said heavily. “It’s me. Just say it.”

“Well… it’s only… do you want Cordelia and me there?”

“Yes,” he said. “You should come. That would be… that would be good.”

She smiled, and he smiled back, and he felt like maybe everything would someday, not today, but someday, be all right.

Then the next day he went to train with Lucie and Cordelia. Cordelia had brought with her the Carstairs’ famous sword, Cortana, which James had long wanted to admire up close. He didn’t get a chance, though, because ten minutes into their first exercise, he collapsed in a sudden spasm of unbearable pain.

The girls cried out and ran to him. He had crumpled like a puppet with its strings cut, and only the years of training he’d already put in kept him from accidentally falling onto his own blade. By the time he realized where he was and what had happened, he was on the floor.

The look on Lucie’s face as she touched his forehead did not reassure him.

“By the Angel,” she exclaimed, “you’re burning up.”

Cordelia was already racing toward the door, calling, “Mâmân!” in alarm. Her image wavered and faded as James closed his eyes.

Scalding fever, Sona and Elias declared. They’d seen it before. It was a disease unique to Shadowhunters. Most got it as infants, when it was very mild. Once it passed, you could never catch it again. Before James was even up from the floor of the training room, Sona was barking orders, her heavy skirts gripped in both hands. James was carried to his bedroom, Lucie dragged away to her own quarters, and messages dispatched to Will and Tessa, and the Silent Brothers.

Feverish, James lay in his bed and watched the light fade outside. As the night came on, he began to shiver. He wrapped himself in all the blankets available but shook like a leaf. He waited for the Silent Brothers to come—until they had checked him, nobody else could be in the room.

It was Brother Enoch who came, not Uncle Jem, to James’s disappointment. Yes, it is almost certainly scalding fever, he said. Everyone who has not had it before will need to depart the house. I will go to tell them.

Lucie had not had it before. James didn’t know about anyone else. He waited a long time for Enoch to come back, but he must have fallen asleep, because all of a sudden there was morning light casting silvery stripes on the wall, and the sound of a door, and footsteps, and then Cordelia was there.