“You can,” he said, in a low voice, “but there are consequences, and I cannot help you with them if you do not tell me—I will not always be waiting in the shadows, Lucie. It was only an accident that I was here to stop Martha.”

“Why were you here?”

He set his hands on her shoulders. There was no warmth where his fingers touched her, yet there was weight there, and realness. “I know you have been trying to—to help me. To raise me.” She wanted to lean into his touch. “When I rise at night, I see where you and Grace have left the marks of your works behind—the ashes, the scattered bits of potion ingredients. But now blood—blood magic is dark stuff, Lucie.”

Lucie frowned inwardly. Grace, what are you doing? “You have been fading,” she said softly. “I worry that there is not much time. I think Grace feels it too, in her way.”

“As do I,” he said, a deep ache in his voice. “You think I do not want to live again, truly? To walk with you by the river, hand in hand in the sunlight? And I have had hopes. But after what we tried last night, Luce—you cannot keep putting yourself in danger. That includes seeking out dangerous people as though you’re at some—some garden party.”

To walk with you by the river, hand in hand. Words she would store away and take out later to turn over in her memories as someone might take out a beloved photograph to study its details. Now, however, she only said, “Jesse, I am a Shadowhunter, not some mundane girl you need to shelter from the riffraff.”

“We’re not talking about riffraff. We’re talking about necromancers. Real danger, for you and for Grace.”

“We have hardly done anything that serious. Why don’t you speak to Grace about this? Why am I the only one scolded?”

“Because I can say to you what I cannot say to her.” He hesitated. “Remember, I have witnessed this journey before. I cannot bear the thought of you—either of you—drawn into dark magic as my mother was.”

She stiffened. “Tatiana and I are nothing alike.”

Jesse flashed a bitter smile. “Certainly you are not alike now. But I think my mother might have been a whole person once, a—an ordinary person, maybe even a happy person—and I do not know how much of that life was taken away from her by bitterness, and how much was because she lost herself to this sort of shadowy magic and necromancy—all the forces that you and Grace are dabbling in.”

The hollowness in his eyes when he spoke of Tatiana broke her heart. How deep were the scars his mother had given him?

“Do you—hate her now? Your mother?”