He took her in his arms then, imagining the life growing inside of her and the future they would have together, a family, more love to fill the absences left by those they’d lost, more love than either of them had ever imagined still possible. The future was so precarious, shadowed by a looming danger neither of them fully understood, and Jem wondered what kind of world his child would be born into. He thought of all the blood that had been shed these last few years, the growing sense among the Shadowhunters he knew that something dark was rising, that this Cold Peace after the war might be only the eerie calm at the eye of the hurricane, those still, silent moments in which it was possible to deceive yourself into imagining the worst was over.

He and Tessa had been alive too long to deceive themselves, and he thought about what might happen to a child born at the eye of such a storm. He thought about Tessa, her will and her strength, her refusal to let loss after loss harden her against love, her refusal to hide any longer from the brutality of the mortal world, her determination to fight, to hold on.

She too had been a child born of storms, he thought, as had he, as had Will. All three had risen in love through their struggles to find happiness—and without the struggle, would the happiness have been so great?

He closed his eyes and pressed a kiss to Tessa’s hair. Behind his lids, he did not see darkness but the light of a London morning and Will there, smiling at him. A new soul made of you and Tessa, Will said. I can hardly wait to meet such a paragon.

“Do you see him too?” Tessa whispered.

“I see him,” Jem said, and he held her even more tightly against him, the new life they had created together between them.

The Lost World

By Cassandra Clare and Kelly Link

The world and everything in it had changed … people passed me as I sat—people who laughed and joked and gossiped. It seemed to me that I watched them almost as a dead man might watch the living.

—Arthur Conan Doyle, The Fate of the Evangelion

2013

“So you didn’t sense any kind of demonic energy or other kind of supernatural emanation from the tarn?” Ty asked.

It was March, and outside the Scholomance the world was wintry white, as if all the Carpathian Mountains were in mourning. Ty was writing at his desk, in the black notebook where for six months he had been keeping a record of the side effects, benefits, and discoverable qualities of Livvy’s resurrected state.