Every city had a Shadow Market, and in a way, they were all the same Market, branches of a single tree—but that didn’t stop each Market from taking on the character of its environs. From what Jem could tell, Los Angeles’s environs were: tanned, health conscious, and obsessed with automobiles. The Shadow Market was located on a tony corner of Pasadena, and everything there was shiny, including its occupants: vampires with bleach-white fangs, bodybuilding faeries whose bulging muscles sheened with gold-spangled sweat, witches with neon hair and self-writing screenplays for sale, ifrits hawking glittering “star maps” that, on closer examination, had nothing to do with astronomy but were in fact self-updating maps of Los Angeles with a tiny photograph of Magnus Bane marking each location the infamous warlock had caused some infamous chaos. (Tessa bought three of them.)

They threaded through the crowds as quickly as they could. Jem was relieved to no longer bear the robes of the Silent Brotherhood, the ineradicable mark of his creed. There was a taste of the frontier to the Shadow Market, a sense that the rules applied here only as far as anyone was willing to enforce them. Faeries cavorted openly with their fellow Downworlders; warlocks did business with mundanes that should never be done; Shadowhunters were, for obvious reasons, unwelcome.

Their destination lay just beyond the buoyant chaos. In the liminal space between the Shadow Market and the shadows, there stood a ramshackle structure with no sign and no windows. There was nothing to suggest it was anything but a ruin, certainly nothing to mark it as a seedy Downworlder bar, home away from home for down-on-their-luck Downworlders for whom even the Shadow Market wasn’t quite shadowy enough. The last thing Jem wanted to do was let Tessa set foot inside, especially wearing the face of someone the Unseelie Court intended to assassinate—but since he’d met her, no one had let Tessa do anything.

According to Tessa, Rosemary and her husband had a deal. If Rosemary ever needed him, she would come to this place and somehow make it known that she needed him, and he would appear. It was that middle part of the plan that seemed a little too vague for comfort, but there was no way out but through, Tessa had said cheerfully, then kissed him. Even in someone else’s body, even with someone else’s lips, her kiss was all Tessa.