There is nothing more painful than love denied, the strange Silent Brother had told her. A love that cannot be requited. I can think of nothing more painful than that.

If Valentine said he could give her Stephen Herondale, he meant it. Céline did not doubt this. He could do anything, and that included finding a way to force Stephen Herondale into her life and her arms. But even Valentine could not make Stephen love her.

To have Stephen would mean not having him—it would mean knowing in every moment, every embrace, that he wanted someone else. It would mean a lifetime of longing for the one thing she could not have. The Silent Brother was wise and spoke the truth. There could be no greater pain than that.

“Take your time,” Valentine said. “It’s a big choice.”

“I don’t need time,” she told Valentine. “I want it. I want Stephen.”

It didn’t feel like choosing, because it was the only choice she had.

Son of the Dawn

By Cassandra Clare and Sarah Rees Brennan

New York City, 2000

Every world contains other worlds within it. People wander through all the worlds they can find, searching for their homes.

Some humans thought their world was the only world there was. Little did they know of other worlds as close to their own as the next room, or of the demons trying to find a door through to them, and the Shadowhunters who barred those doors.

Still less did they know of Downworld, the community of magical creatures who shared their world and carved out their own little space therein.

Every community needs a heart. There had to be a common area where everyone could gather, to trade for goods and secrets, to find love and riches. There were Shadow Markets, where Downworlders and those with the Sight met, all over the world. Usually they were held outside.

Even magic was a little different in New York.

The abandoned theater on Canal Street had stood since the 1920s, silent witness to but not part of the blaze of activity that was the city. Humans who did not have the Sight passed by its terra-cotta facade in a hurry about their own affairs. If they spared the theater a look, they thought it as dark and still as ever.

They could not see the haze of faerie light that turned the gutted amphitheater and bare concrete halls to gold. Brother Zachariah could.

He walked, a creature of silence and darkness, through halls with sunshine-yellow tiles, panels of gold and red blazing on the ceiling above him. There were busts grimy with age set in alcoves along the walls, but for tonight faeries had coaxed flowers and ivy to twine around them. Werewolves had set little twinkling charms depicting the moon and stars in the boarded windows, lending brightness to the decayed red curtains still hanging in the arched frames. There were lamps with casements that reminded Brother Zachariah of a time long ago, when he and all the world had been different. In one vast echoing theater room there hung a chandelier that had not worked in years, but tonight warlock magic had suffused each bulb with a different-colored flame. Like burning jewels, amethyst and ruby, sapphire and opal, their light created a private world that seemed both new and old, and restored the theater to all its former glory. Some worlds lasted only one night.