Lucie took a deep breath. Before Malcolm came, she wanted to be sure. She believed—she had told herself it had to be true—that Jesse had cast out Belial entirely. Surely there was not still a piece of the Prince of Hell in him. Malcolm had not asked—perhaps it had not occurred to him—but she could not imagine he would countenance trying to bring Jesse back if doing so would offer Belial a foothold in the world.

She laid her hand on Jesse’s chest. It was cold and stiff beneath her touch. If he were to touch me, I would feel so warm to him—scalding, even.

She closed her eyes and reached. As she had done once before, she sought Jesse’s soul among the mist and shadow behind her eyelids. For a moment there was blankness. Her heart tripped, stuttered—what if he was gone, gone forever—and then there was light around her, inside her.

But there was not the sense of wrongness she had felt before, when she had told him to live. Instead of shadowy monsters, she saw a dusty parlor—she was inside it, kneeling on a window seat, looking over the garden wall at a neighboring building: Herondale Manor. In the pane of the window, she could see Jesse’s face reflected, small and pale. She was inside his memories, she realized, looking around the room in wonder. Cobwebs were already forming in the corners, the wallpaper beginning to peel.…

She was whirled away to another scene, and another—the decrepit corridors of Blackthorn Manor; a memory of Tatiana Blackthorn, face twisted into a rare smile. She was standing in the open front door of the manor. Lucie could see the briar-covered gates in the distance. There was a small girl standing behind Tatiana, cowering away as though terrified to enter the house. Her gray eyes were wide and frightened.

Then Jesse and Grace were laughing together, climbing the overgrown trees that grew on the grounds of Blackthorn Manor. Grace had a smudge of dirt on her face, and her hem was torn, and she looked happier than Lucie had ever seen her look. But then the memory shifted abruptly. She—Jesse—was in the same cobwebbed parlor, dressed in formal gear that was a little too large, and one of the Silent Brothers was approaching, stele in hand. Tatiana hovered by the doorway, twisting her hands together. Lucie wanted to shout, to reach out to demand that they stop, that the Voyance rune would be Jesse’s death sentence—but then the scene shifted again. She was in Brocelind Forest, the trees bathed in moonlight. Jesse was walking the moss-covered paths, and this was Jesse as Lucie knew him—as a ghost.