Jesse did seem to understand that Grace had gotten engaged to Charles in order to be protected from Tatiana’s influence, and that James and Cordelia were marrying to save Cordelia’s reputation. He even seemed to think it was the right thing to do. But Jesse loved his sister with a great protective love, and Lucie had no desire to discuss with him the fact that she worried Grace had broken James’s heart.

Especially not while she still needed Grace’s help.

“Well, I’m glad to hear it,” she said briskly. Turning out of Shoe Lane, they rolled through the iron gateway of the Institute and into the courtyard. The cathedral rose above them, dark and imposing against the sky. “When—when will I see you again?”

She immediately wished she hadn’t asked. He always turned up, rarely missing more than a night between their meetings. She shouldn’t press him.

Jesse smiled a little sadly. “Would that I could make an appearance during the wedding. It is a pity. I would have liked to see you in your suggenes dress. It looked like a butterfly’s wings.”

She had shown him the material—an iridescent peach-lavender shot silk—before; still, she was surprised he recalled it. Lights were coming on in the Institute; Lucie knew that her parents would soon be emerging to welcome her back. She drew away from Jesse, reaching to gather up her discarded glove, as the front door of the Institute opened, spilling warm yellow light across the flagstones.

“Perhaps tomorrow night—” she began, but Jesse was already gone.

GRACE: 1893–1896

Once upon a time, she had been someone else, she remembers that much. A different girl, though she had the same skinny wrists and white-blond hair. When she was still small, her parents sat her down and explained that she and they and everyone they knew were not ordinary people, but the descendants of angels. Nephilim, sworn to protect the world from the monsters that threatened it. The girl had a drawing of an eye on the back of her hand, from before remembering. Her parents put it there, and it marked her as one of the Shadowhunters and allowed her to see the monsters that were invisible to others.

By all rights, she should be able to remember the details of her parents’ faces, the house they lived in. She had been seven years old—she should be able to remember how she felt in the stone room in Alicante, when a crowd of adults who were strangers to her came and told her that her parents were dead.

Instead that moment was the end of feeling. The girl who had existed before she went into the stone room—that girl was gone.