He didn’t move, his gaze straying toward—then quickly away from—the body. The boy’s jeans were coated in blood, and Tessa wondered if it belonged to his father.

“My father. He …” His voice trembled.

“You must grieve later,” Tessa told him. He was, by blood if not by training, a warrior. She knew his strength better than he knew it himself. “Right now you are in great danger. More of those things may come, and worse things as well.”

“Are you a Shadowhunter?”

She flinched at the disgust in his voice.

“I am not,” she said. “But—” Rosemary had tried so hard to keep this from him. Had sacrificed everything so he could live in ignorance of the darkness surrounding him. That life was over now, that lie was dead, and Tessa would be the one to deal it the final, fatal blow. “But you are.”

The boy’s eyes widened. She extended a hand. “Come now. On your feet, Christopher Herondale. We’ve been looking for you a long time.”

Jem gazed out at a picture-perfect landscape—white crests on a sun-dappled sea, the peaks of the palisades poking at a storybook blue sky, and beside him, Tessa Gray, the love of his many lifetimes—and tried to ascertain why he felt so uneasy. Christopher Herondale, or Kit, as he preferred to be called, was safely under the protection of the L.A. Institute. Jem and Tessa hadn’t failed Rosemary, not entirely—they’d lost her but saved her son. Returned a lost Herondale to the Shadowhunter world, where, hopefully, he would find a new home. He and Tessa would soon part—she’d been summoned to the Spiral Labyrinth to look into some troubling reports of illness in the warlock community, while Jem went in search of Malcolm Fade’s body and the Black Volume of the Dead. He had a feeling that what Fade had begun here in Los Angeles was only the beginning of a graver danger. All of these were ample reasons to feel uneasy, but that wasn’t it.

It was Tessa, who was still holding herself at some remove from him, as if there was something she couldn’t bear for him to know.

“This place,” Tessa said, sounding troubled. Jem put an arm around her shoulders, held her close. These felt like stolen moments together, before they turned to their respective missions. He breathed her in, trying to memorize the feel of her, already preparing for her absence. “There’s something so familiar about it,” Tessa said.

“But you’ve never been here before?” he asked.

She shook her head. “No, it’s … it’s more like something I saw in a dream.”

“Was I there with you?”

Tess’s smile had an unmistakable trace of sorrow. “You’re always in my dreams.”

“What’s wrong?” Jem said. “Is it Rosemary? I can’t help but feel her death is on my shoulders.”