Tessa deserved more than a being who could never truly be a man again, who could not love her with a whole heart. Even though he loved her with all the broken fragments of heart he had left, it was not enough. She deserved more than he had to offer.

He should never have reached for her that way.

Nevertheless, there was a selfish joy within him, a warmth that he could carry even into the deathlike coldness of the City of Bones. She had kissed him and clung to him. For one shining night, he had held her in his arms again.

Tessa, Tessa, Tessa, he thought. She could never be his again, but he was hers forever. That was enough to live on.

That evening, Catarina and Tessa walked in the direction of St. Bart’s.

“A bacon sandwich,” Catarina said. “Piled so high you can barely hold it. And thick with so much butter the bacon slides off the bread. That’s what I’m having first. How about you?”

Tessa smiled and shone her torch down the pavement, stepping over a bit of rubble. Around them, there were shells of buildings. Everything around had been reduced to charred brick and ash. But already London was picking up, pushing the debris back. The dark was like an embrace. All of London was under a blanket together, holding each other close.

“An ice cream,” Tessa said. “With strawberries. Loads and loads of strawberries.”

“Oh, I like that,” Catarina said. “I’m changing mine.”

A man walking toward them tipped his hat.

“Evening, Sisters,” he said. “You see that?”

He gestured up at St. Paul’s Cathedral, the great building that had sat guarding over London for hundreds of years.

“They wanted to take it down last night, but they didn’t, did they?” The man smiled. “No, they didn’t. They can’t break us. You have a good evening, Sisters. You keep well.”

The man walked on, and Tessa looked up at the cathedral. Everything around it was gone, but it had been saved—impossibly, improbably saved from thousands of bombs. London would not let it die, and it had lived.

She touched the jade pendant around her neck.

The Wicked Ones

By Cassandra Clare and Robin Wasserman

Paris, 1989

It was said among the Shadowhunters that one could not know true beauty until one had seen the gleaming towers of Alicante. It was said that no city on earth could rival its wonders. It was said that no Shadowhunter could feel truly at home anywhere else.

If anyone had asked Céline Montclaire her opinion on the subject, she would have said: obviously these Shadowhunters had never been to Paris.