In the end, he skipped dinner altogether. And that night, Livvy did not go back to Dimmet Tarn. Instead she watched over her brother, Irene curled around his head on the pillow, her glowing eyes closing and opening, always fixed on Livvy.

There was a new note in Ty’s book. It said, Lynx sees her. Is this because the Lynx (have given her a name, Irene) was close to death? Or because she is a cat, though larger than house cats? Inconclusive. More research needed, though large cats may be hard to come by.

If it hadn’t been for the matter of Idris, Livvy could have spent the whole next day playing with Irene. She and Ty had discovered that if Livvy drew her foot along the ground, back and forth, Irene would try to pounce, over and over. She could not understand why she couldn’t catch Livvy. “Like a laser pointer,” Ty said. “You’re the red dot that always escapes.”

“That’s me,” Livvy said. “The elusive red dot. So, Idris. How do we do this?”

Shadowhunters used Portals to go to Idris. Only now, Idris was warded and Portals wouldn’t work. Livvy, being dead, didn’t need Portals. When Ty had come to the Scholomance, he had stepped through a Portal and Livvy had willed herself to go with Ty. To be in the place where Ty was.

Ty said, “It should be the same as Dimmet Tarn. Or when I’m in class and suddenly you just show up. Hold Idris in your mind, like a picture. Let yourself go there.”

“You make it sound easy,” Livvy said.

“Something ought to be easy,” Ty said. “Everything can’t be hard all the time.”

“Fine,” Livvy said. “Here we go.”

She thought of Idris, of Lake Lyn. Of the moment she was no longer dead. Saw it in her mind and held it there. And then she was no longer in the room with Ty and Irene. Instead she was floating above the great stillness of Dimmet Tarn.

“Great job, Livvy,” she told herself. But she didn’t go back to Ty. Instead she thought of Idris once more, and imagined, this time, that she was alive again. She thought of how once, when she’d been very young, she had Portaled with her family from the beach outside the L.A. Institute into Idris. Had that been the first time she’d gone to Idris?

She closed her eyes, opened them, and found herself beside the ocean in L.A. The sun was just coming up, turning the foam atop the waves to fiery lace. And there was the Institute where her family would be waking up soon. Making breakfast. Did they think of her? Dream of her and then wake and think of her again?