Prophet of evil I ever am to myself: forced for ever into sorrowful auguries that I have no power to hide from my own heart, no, not through one night’s solitary dreams.

—Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

The city slept, beneath its blanket of snow. Every footstep Thomas took seemed to echo down empty streets, beneath the awnings of shops, past houses where people lay warm and safe inside, never knowing he paced past their thresholds.

He had walked up from Mayfair through Marylebone, past closed shops whose windows glittered with Christmas displays, until he reached Regent’s Park. The freezing rain had turned the trees into elaborate ice sculptures. There were a few carriages on the Euston Road as the hours turned toward dawn; doctors making emergency calls, perhaps, or traveling to or from late-night shifts at the hospitals.

It had been a long night, both because of the rain that had begun shortly after midnight, and because as he passed along Brewer Street, he had nearly run into a patrol of Shadowhunters: four or five men bundled in gear and heavy coats. He slipped away from them, through Golden Square. The last thing he wanted was to be caught, and likely censured. He could not—would not—rest until the killer was apprehended.

He could not have entirely explained what drove his restless determination. James was certainly a part of it—James, tied up in his own bedroom all night while their friends stood guard downstairs, prepared for something none of them believed possible. James, who bore the weight of a heritage darker than any shadows. It never seemed to touch Lucie, but James’s eyes were always haunted.

There was only one other person Thomas had known with eyes like that. Not golden eyes, but dark, and so sad—he had always been drawn to that dichotomy, he thought, of the cruelty of Alastair’s words, and the sadness with which he said them. Sorrowful eyes and a vicious tongue. Tell me, he had always wanted to say, what broke your heart, and let such bitterness spill out?

On and on Thomas strode, down through Bloomsbury, barely noticing how numb and cold his feet had grown, driven on by the feeling that just around the next corner, his quarry would be waiting. But there was nobody about except for the occasional bobby on his beat, or cloaked and bundled night workers trudging home, their faces invisible but no sense of threat coming from them. He passed the Covent Garden market, just beginning to open, tall stacks of wooden crates lining its colonnades as the wagons rolled in and out, carrying flowers, fruit, and even Christmas trees, whose boughs filled the air with the scent of pine.