“I hate this,” Lucie burst out, wiggling her fingers inside their damp gloves. “I hate the idea of James going into the shadow realm. I know—if Magnus says it’s all right, I’m sure it will be, but I hate it.”

“I hate it too,” Cordelia said. “But Luce, I’ll be there with him—as much as I can be—”

“I know. But it seems dreadful, and I hate that—that Matthew is—”

“Miserable?” Cordelia said, trying hard not to think about the broken bottle in the snow.

Lucie glanced at her, biting her lip. “I know none of us talk about it. We can’t. I don’t even know how much Christopher and Thomas are aware of it. But he’s been like this for ages now. He must be awfully unhappy. But I don’t know why. We all love him, and James loves him so terribly much. When we were younger—James had this shirt, just an ordinary shirt, you know, and Mam threw it away because he’d outgrown it and he was so furious and went to fetch it from the rubbish. It was the shirt he was wearing when Matthew asked him to be parabatai. He wouldn’t get rid of it.”

Cordelia hesitated. “Sometimes,” she said, “it is not enough for others to love you. I do not think Matthew loves himself very well.”

Lucie’s eyes widened. “What is there about him he could possibly not love?” she said, with such sincerity it made Cordelia’s heart ache. She would try to convince Matthew to tell his friends his secret, she thought. They loved him so. They would never judge him as he feared.

The two carriages clattered noisily under a railway viaduct and down a narrow backstreet toward a courtyard surrounded by Georgian row houses. A peeling sign declared it to be Nelson Square. They were cutting along one corner, wheels crunching on gravel and ice, when Balios whinnied loudly, rearing up.

The girls’ carriage stopped so abruptly that Cordelia and Lucie nearly toppled out of their seats. The door was ripped open, and a taloned hand reached inside, snatching a screaming Lucie out into the night.

Cordelia whipped Cortana from its sheath and launched herself out into the darkness, her boots crunching on snow, her skirts swirling. Outside, the blank faces of the row houses surrounded a patchy and dilapidated garden, edged with a few leafless plane trees. A dozen small demons were scampering around it, frightening Balios, who stamped and snorted. Lucie, half-covered in snow where she had fallen, had already yanked herself free of them. Her hat was gone, and she stood bareheaded and furious, brandishing her axe.