A sharp pain twinged behind his eyes. He’d been having bad headaches lately. Maybe due to lack of sleep. He rubbed at his temples. He would certainly not get any rest sitting here, staring into the fire. As he rose to his feet, he recalled that he’d intended to look for a pocketknife earlier. Perhaps it could undo the latch of his bracelet. But he was too tired to venture down to the study, and by the time he climbed into bed, he no longer remembered what he had meant to do.

LONDON: FINCH LANE

Fog came stealthily in the small hours, settling in every doorway and alley of Bishopsgate and obscuring the outlines of buildings and trees. As dawn approached, the costermongers were the first to break the silence, the fog muffling the sounds of their carts as they wheeled them into the streets to display their wares. A faint red glow between the buildings heralded a weak sun just as the Shadowhunter patrols trudged through the backstreets on their way home, invisible to the mundane merchants they passed.

And on Threadneedle Street, a killer went in search of a victim.

He moved like a wraith, slipping soundlessly from the cover of one awning to the next, nearly invisible in a dark cloak that blended with the soot-covered stone. He darted past the statue of the Duke of Wellington and behind the white columns of the Bank of England. All around him, well-dressed bankers and brokers on their way to work took no note of him as they streamed through the doors of London’s financial institutions like fish spawning up a stream. The killer mused that those pathetic mortals might as well be fish, they were so weak, so mindless, driven by no more noble pursuit than the exchange of currency.

But the killer’s quarry was not just any mortal. He had more potent prey in mind.

There—that figure in black, gray-haired, exhaustion showing in the sag of his shoulders as he stepped off the main thoroughfare onto Finch Lane, the kind of quiet side street no one takes any note of as they hurry past. The killer followed a few paces behind his quarry, marveling that this was the best the Nephilim had to offer, this weary hunter who didn’t even realize that he was the one who was being hunted now.

He wondered if the demons were disappointed in their prey; surely over the past thousand years they had grown used to the Nephilim putting up a better fight. This one, for example, didn’t even notice the killer gaining on him. Didn’t notice the blade until its cold edge was pressed against his throat. Adamas to flesh, the razor edge the work of the Iron Sisters at their forges, working adamas into killing tools.