That was the devil’s bargain of Jem’s return, the truth she had tried to escape. He could live for centuries, but never truly live—never love—or she could have him back, fully alive and fully mortal, inevitably to lose him for good. It hadn’t been her choice to make, of course. But Jem had chosen her. She could never regret this.

The Silent Brother asked Jem to step outside and leave them in privacy for a moment, and Jem, laying a final kiss on her forehead, took his leave. Tessa propped herself up in bed, her strength already returning.

Do you remember what happened? Brother Enoch asked.

“I remember that Fal attacked, and then … there were so many dreams, and they were so vivid. And …” Tessa closed her eyes, trying to retrieve the details of the strange lives she’d lived in her head. “They weren’t all mine.”

You were trapped for several days inside the Change, Brother Enoch said.

“How could that happen?” Tessa asked in alarm. When she’d first experimented with her powers, there was always fear attached to the transformation. To let herself sink so fully into another person’s body and mind was to risk losing herself. It had taken much time and will to make herself trust the Change, trust that no matter how many forms she forced herself into, she remained, indelibly, Tessa Gray. If that faith was misplaced, then how could she ever risk Changing again? “Was it something about the weapon?”

It was not the weapon that caused this.

The cause is in you.

“You sure you’re up to this?” Jem asked as he and Tessa approached the L.A. Shadow Market.

“For the hundredth time, yes.” She spun around in a very un-Tessa-like pirouette, and Jem smiled, doing his best to disguise his worry. Brother Enoch had given her a clean bill of health, but she was trying too hard to seem like everything was well. And the harder she tried, the more Jem suspected that it was not.

He trusted Tessa, to the ends of the earth. If there was something wrong, she would tell him when she was ready. In the meantime, though, he would worry.

“We’ve wasted enough time,” Tessa said. “Rosemary’s counting on us to find her son.”

It turned out Jem had been right that something the bartender said tipped off Tessa about how to find Christopher Herondale’s father, the man once known as Jack Crow. He’s exactly the same bird he used to be, just a little less of a crook.

“It’s a riddle,” Tessa had explained, once she shook off the haze of her fever dreams. “And not even a particularly good one. What’s another word for ‘crow’ … that’s just a little less than a crook?”