“I had her, and I let her walk away.” Jem couldn’t stop picturing it, that morning on the bridge in Paris, when he’d begged Rosemary Herondale to accept his protection. He had asked a Herondale to trust him and been judged unworthy.

“You didn’t let her do anything,” Tessa pointed out. “She made her own choice.”

“The Herondale way,” Jem said wryly.

“You let her know you would always be there if she needed you, and now that she does—”

“I’m twiddling my thumbs five miles away, useless.”

“Enough.” Tessa abruptly swerved onto the shoulder of the road and sped past the clogged lanes, then careened onto the first exit ramp they came to. Instead of slowing down, she picked up speed as they hit the surface streets, weaving wildly from lane to lane to sidewalk. Soon, finally, they found their way into the hills, the road narrowing to a single lane of hairpin turns bounded by a vertiginous drop. Tessa didn’t slow down.

“I know you have superhuman reflexes, but—”

“Trust me,” she said.

“Infinitely.”

He couldn’t tell Tessa the other reason he felt guilty—it wasn’t simply that he’d let Rosemary slip through his fingers all those years ago. It was what he’d done for her since, which suddenly seemed like next to nothing. Ever since he’d sloughed off his life as Brother Zachariah and fought his way back to James Carstairs—and back to Tessa Gray, the other half of his soul, his heart, his self—he’d given himself permission to be happy. They’d visited Shadow Markets all over the world, keeping watch for Rosemary, always searching for ways they might be able to assist her from a distance. They’d even visited the Market here in L.A. several times, but they had found no trace of her there. What if, despite his best intentions, Jem had missed something, some opportunity to find and help Rosemary before it was too late? What if, lost in his own happiness with Tessa, he’d enabled her suffering?

The car screeched to a stop in front of a small Spanish-style bungalow. The yard was a riot of color: monkeyflowers, hummingbird sage, desert mallow, jacaranda blossoms. A gauntlet of sunflowers watched over the path to the door, nodding in the breeze, as if to welcome them.

“It’s like a house from a storybook,” Tessa marveled, and Jem agreed. The sky was an impossible blue, dotted with cotton-candy clouds, and the mountains on the horizon made it feel like they were in an Alpine village, rather than the middle of a sprawling metropolis. “It’s so peaceful,” she added. “Like nothing bad could ever happen here—”

She was interrupted by a piercing scream.