This was different. Something felt—not wrong, exactly, but sticky. Like she had to yank herself out of her own form and forcibly shove it into another. The transformation felt difficult, almost painful, as it had in her earliest days in London, her bones and muscles and flesh tearing and distorting themselves into alien form, body rebelling against mind, while mind fought its own battle, defending its territory against the colonizing force of an other. Tessa forced herself to stay calm, focused. Reminded herself that it was always more difficult to embody the dead. She felt herself shrinking, fading, firm limbs narrowing to Rosemary’s delicate, bony frame, and as she did so, the horror flooded in, those final moments. The flash of the longsword. The hot breath of the faerie Rider. The unthinkable pain and pain and pain of the blade thrust once, twice, and finally, fatally. The terror, the despair, and beneath it, the fierce, loving rage on behalf of the boy who must, somewhere out there, survive, he must, he must, he—

“Tessa!”

Then Jem was there, steady, his arms on her shoulders, his gaze firm and kind, his love a tether to keep her from floating away. Jem, always, bringing her home to herself.

“Tessa, you were screaming.”

She breathed. She focused. She was Rosemary and she was Tessa, she was the Change itself, the possibility of transformation, the inevitability of flux, and then, mercifully, she was clear.

“I’m okay. It’s okay.” Even now, after more than a century of Changing, it was strange to hear herself speak with another woman’s voice, to look down and see another woman’s body as her own.

“Do you know where he is? The boy?”

My boy. Tessa could hear the wonder in Rosemary’s voice, could feel the other woman’s ongoing surprise that it was possible to love like this. They won’t have him. I won’t allow it.

There was fear, but mostly rage, and Tessa realized that “they” were not the fey. “They” were the Shadowhunters. This was one secret she would keep for herself. Jem didn’t need to know that Rosemary had died as she’d lived: convinced they were the enemy.

“Let me go deeper,” Tessa said. “She’s spent years burying what she knows about him, but it’s there. I can feel it.”

Rosemary’s being was in battle with itself. She’d been entirely consumed with her son, with the fierce need to protect him, but had also spent these years trying with all her might to forget him, to force all thought of him from her consciousness, for his own safety. “She knew the greatest danger in his life was her,” Tessa said, horrified by the sacrifice this woman had made. “She knew the only way to keep him alive was to let him go.”