The answer mattered little. Grace didn’t need her mother’s adoration, as long as she had Jesse. He was a companion when she needed one most, and so much older that he seemed almost grown to her.

It was a good thing they had each other for companionship, since they rarely left the grounds of the manor, save when they went with their mother on her brief trips to Chiswick House, a vast stone estate in England that Tatiana had wrested from her brothers twenty-five years ago and now jealously guarded. Though Chiswick House was near London, and thus a valuable piece of property, Tatiana seemed determined to watch it rot away too.

Grace was always relieved to return to Idris. Being close to London did not quite remind her of her old life—that had turned to shadows and dreams—but it did recall to her that she had a past, a time before she had belonged to Jesse, to Tatiana, and to Blackthorn Manor. And what was the point of that?

One day Grace heard a queer thumping noise coming from the room above hers. She went to investigate, more curious than worried, and discovered that the source of the noise was, shockingly, Jesse, who had set up a makeshift knife-throwing gallery with some straw bales and a hessian sheet in one of the high-ceilinged, airy rooms on the manor’s top floor. They must have been used as training rooms by the house’s earlier inhabitants, but her mother only ever referred to them as “the ballrooms.”

“What are you doing?” asked Grace, scandalized. “You know that we aren’t meant to pretend to be Shadowhunters.”

Jesse went to retrieve a thrown knife from a straw bale. Grace couldn’t help but notice he’d very accurately hit his target. “It’s not pretending, Grace. We are Shadowhunters.”

“By birth, says Mama,” she said cautiously. “But not by choice. Shadowhunters are brutes and killers, she says. And we’re not allowed to train.”

Her brother prepared to throw the knife again. “And yet we live in Idris, a secret nation built for and known only by Shadowhunters. You bear a Mark. I—ought to.”

“Jesse,” Grace said slowly. “Do you really care so much about being a Shadowhunter? About fighting demons with sticks, and all that?”

“It’s what I was born to do,” he said, his brow dark. “I have taught myself, since I was eight years old—the attic of this house is full of old weapons and training manuals. It’s what you were born to as well.” Grace hesitated, and a rare memory surfaced in her mind—her parents throwing knives into a board hung on the wall of their small house in Alicante. They had fought demons. It was how they had lived and how they had died. Surely that was not all foolishness, as Tatiana claimed. Surely it was not a meaningless life.