One night, still only days after Jesse’s death, a black carriage pulled up to the front of the manor, and Grace was ordered to open the gates. It was a muddy, rainy evening, but she did as she was told, trudging down the gravel drive and pulling the heavy iron gates open; they groaned a keening wail from long disuse. The carriage passed through, and she followed, studying it curiously. There were strange symbols carved all over its surface—not Shadowhunter runes, and nothing she recognized.

The carriage came to a stop at the front door, and when Grace caught up to it, a figure emerged. It was a man—in her memory he was very tall, but perhaps that was only because she was still a child—wearing a black cloak with a hood pulled up, shadowing his face. He spoke in a deep, gravelly voice, harsher than Grace would have expected. “Where is Tatiana Blackthorn?”

“My mother,” she said quickly. “I’ll go and find her. Whom shall I say—”

“No need,” the figure rasped. “I am expected.” He brushed past her and went into the house, turning down the first hall as though he knew the way.

Grace had thought to follow him, but once he passed by her, she found she was shivering so hard that she could not walk. She clutched her arms around her waist, trying to warm herself, her teeth chattering, and after a minute she was able to make her way back to her bedroom. There was a small fire, and she built it up as best she could, though the shiver would not leave her bones.

Time seemed to lose all meaning after Jesse’s death. Grace woke, and went about her business mechanically, and slept at night without dreaming. The color of the leaves changed in the gardens, and the briars grew higher. Tatiana wandered from room to shadowy room, not speaking, often staring at the broken clocks on the walls, which always showed the hour of twenty to nine.

They did not comfort each other. Grace knew herself to be alone, so alone that she was nearly not surprised when she began to hallucinate that Jesse was there. She had woken up in the depths of the night, gasping for air. And there he was, still wearing the clothes he had died in. He seemed to float just out of the range of her vision, at the other end of the room. And then all at once he was there next to her, a full, detailed apparition of her dead brother, faintly glowing, smiling just as he would when he was alive.

It was too much to bear, the cruelty of death and the cruelty of her own mind. She screamed.

“Grace!” her brother said in alarm. “Grace, don’t be frightened! It’s only me. It’s me.”

“You’re not real,” Grace said, numb. She forced herself to look up at him.