In the back of his mind, his Brothers murmured: Be careful, be careful, be careful. Oh, be careful.
Sister Emilia said, “Nothing of any great importance. But I think he is a little afraid of me now, and he should be. He offered me something so that I would not become his nemesis.”
Tell me what you mean, Brother Zachariah said.
“I’ll tell you later,” Sister Emilia said firmly. “Right now I’m so tired I can barely talk at all.”
Sister Emilia was hungry as well as tired, but she was so very tired she couldn’t be bothered to eat. She would sleep first. She climbed up on the stage beside Brother Zachariah and took off her cloak and made it into a pillow. The evening was still warm, and if she grew cold, well, then she would wake up, and she and Brother Zachariah could keep watch together companionably.
She hoped that her brothers, now grown men all, were as kind and stouthearted as this man was. She fell asleep remembering how she and they had played at fighting before they were old enough to train, laughing and tumbling and vowing to be great heroes. Her dreams were very sweet, though she did not remember them in the morning when she woke.
* * *
Silent Brothers do not sleep as mortals do, but nevertheless Brother Zachariah, as he sat and watched and listened in the deserted carnival, felt as the night drew on that he was in a dream. Silent Brothers do not dream, and yet slowly the voices of Brother Enoch and the others in his head dissipated and blew away and were replaced by music. Not carnival music, but the sound of a qinqin. There should not have been a qinqin anywhere on the mountain above Chattanooga, and yet he heard it. Listening to the sound of it, he discovered that he was no longer Brother Zachariah at all. He was only Jem. He did not sit on a stage. Instead, he was perched on a tiled roof, and the sounds and smells and sights around him were all familiar ones. Not the Silent City. Not London. He was Jem again, and he was in the city where he had been born. Shanghai. Someone said, “Jem? Am I dreaming?”
Even before he turned his head, Jem knew who would be sitting there beside him. “Will?” he said.
And it was Will. Not Will old and tired and wasted as Jem had last seen him, and not even Will as he had been when they’d first met Tessa Gray. No, this was Will as he had been in the first few years when they had lived and trained together in the London Institute. As he had been when they made their oath and became parabatai. Thinking this, Jem looked at his shoulder, where his parabatai rune had been inscribed. The flesh there was unmarked. He saw that Will was doing the same thing, looking under his collar for the rune on his chest.
Jem said, “How is this possible?”
Will said, “This is the time between when we had pledged to become parabatai and when we went through the ritual. Look. See the scar here?” He showed Jem a distinctive mark on his wrist.
“You got that from an Iblis demon,” Jem said. “I remember. It was two nights after we had decided. It was the first fight we had once we’d made up our minds.”
“So that is when we are,” Will said. “But what I don’t know is where we are. Or how this is happening.”
“I think,” Jem said, “that a friend has made a bargain for me. I think that we are here together because the demon Belial is afraid of her, and she asked this for me. Because I would not ask for myself.”
“Belial!” Will said. “Well, if he’s afraid of this friend of yours, I hope I never meet her.”
“I wish you could,” Jem said. “But let’s not waste whatever time we have talking about people you don’t have any interest in. You may not know where we are, but I do. And I am afraid that the span of time we have together may not be long.”
“That has always been the case with us,” Will said. “But let us be grateful to your terrifying friend, because however long we have, here we are together and I see no sign of yin fen on you, and we are in possession of the knowledge that there was never any curse on me. For however long, there is no shadow on us.”
“There is no shadow,” Jem agreed. “And we are in a place that I long wished to go with you. This is Shanghai, where I was born. Remember when we used to talk about traveling here together? There were so many places I wanted to show you.”
“I remember you thought very highly of a temple or two,” Will said. “You promised me gardens, although why you think I care for gardens, I don’t know. And there were some vistas or famous rock formations or things.”
“Forget the rock formations,” Jem said. “There’s a dumpling place down the street, and I haven’t eaten human food in half a century. Let’s go see who can eat the most dumplings in the shortest amount of time. And duck! You really ought to try pressed duck! It’s a great delicacy.”
Jem looked at Will, suppressing a smile. His friend glared back, but at last neither of them could hold back their laughter. Will said, “There is nothing so sweet as feasting upon the bones of my enemies. Especially with you at my side.”
There was a lightness in Jem’s chest that he realized, finally, was joy. He saw that joy mirrored in his parabatai’s face. The face of the one you love is the best mirror of all. It shows you your own happiness and your own pain and it helps you to bear both, because to bear either alone is to be overwhelmed by the flood.
Jem stood up and held out his hand to Will. Without realizing it, he held his breath. Perhaps this was a dream after all, and when Jem touched him Will would vanish away again. But Will’s hand was warm and solid and strong, and Jem drew him up easily. Together they began to run lightly over the tiles of the roof.
The night was very beautiful and warm, and they were both young.
A Deeper Love
By Cassandra Clare and Maureen Johnson
London, December 29, 1940
“I think first,” Catarina said, “lemon cake. Oh, lemons. I think I miss them most.”
Catarina Loss and Tessa Gray were walking down Ludgate Hill, just passing the Old Bailey. This was a game they sometimes played: What will you eat first when this war is over? Of all the terrible things that were going on, sometimes the most ordinary ran the deepest. Food was rationed, and the rations were small—an ounce of cheese, four thin pieces of bacon, and one egg a week. Everything came in tiny amounts. Some things simply went away, like lemons. There were oranges sometimes—Tessa saw them at the fruit-and-veg market—but they were only for children, who could have one each. The nurses were fed at the hospital, but the portions were always tiny, and never enough to keep up with all the work they performed. Tessa was lucky to have the strength she did. It was not all the physical strength of a Shadowhunter, but some trace of angelic endurance lingered within her and sustained her; she had no idea how the mundane nurses kept up.
“Or a banana,” Catarina said. “I never liked them much before, but now that they are gone, I find myself craving them. That’s always the way, isn’t it?”
Catarina Loss did not care about food. She barely ate at all. But she was making conversation as they walked down the street. This was what you did—you pretended life was normal, even as death rained from above. It was the London spirit. You kept to your routines as much as you could, even if you slept in a Tube station at night for shelter, or you returned home to find the neighbor’s house or yours was no longer there. Businesses tried to stay open, even if all the glass blew out of the windows or a bomb went through the roof. Some would put out signs that said, MORE OPEN THAN USUAL.
You carried on. You talked about bananas and lemons.
At this point in December, London was at its darkest. The sun started going down just after three in the afternoon. Because of the air raids, London was under blackout orders every night. Blackout curtains blocked light from every window. Streetlamps were turned off. Cars dimmed their lights. People walked the streets carrying torches to find their way through the velvety darkness. All of London was shade and corner and nook, every alley blind, every wall a dark blank. It made the city mysterious and mournful.
To Tessa, it felt like London itself grieved for her Will, felt his loss, turned out every light.
Tessa Gray had not particularly enjoyed Christmas this year. It was difficult to enjoy things with the Germans raining bombs overhead whenever the whim suited them. The Blitz, as it was called, was designed to bring terror to London, to force the city to its knees. There were deadly bombs that could crush a home, leaving a pile of smoking rubble where children once slept and families laughed together. In the mornings, you would see walls missing and the inner workings of houses, exposed like a doll’s house, scraps of cloth flapping against broken brick, toys and books scattered in piles of rubble. More than once she saw a bathtub hanging off the side of what remained of a house. Extraordinary things would happen, like the house where the chimney fell, smashing through the kitchen table where a family ate, shattering it but harming no one. Buses would be upturned. Rubble would fall, instantly killing one family member, leaving the other stunned and unscathed. It was a matter of chance, of inches.
There was nothing worse than being left alone, the one you loved ripped from you.
“Did you have a good visit this afternoon?” Catarina asked.
“The younger generation are still trying to talk me into leaving,” Tessa replied, stepping around a hole in the pavement where part of it had been blown away. “They think I should go to New York.”
“They’re your children,” Catarina said gently. “They want what’s best for you. They don’t understand.”
When Will died, Tessa had known there could be no place for her among the Shadowhunters. For a time it had seemed as if there was no place for her in all the world, with so much of her heart in the cold ground. Then Magnus Bane had taken Tessa into his home when she was almost mad with grief, and when she slowly emerged, Magnus’s friends Catarina Loss and Ragnor Fell encircled her.
No one understood the pain of being immortal save another immortal. She could only be grateful they had taken her in.
It was Catarina who introduced Tessa to nursing when the war broke out. Catarina had always been a healer: of Nephilim, of Downworlders, of humans. Wherever she was needed, she went. She had nursed in the last Great War, only twenty years before, the war that was never supposed to happen again. The two of them had taken a small flat off Farringdon Street, close to the London Institute and to St. Bart’s Hospital. It was not as luxurious as her previous homes—just a small, second-story walk-up with a shared bath in the hall. It was easier this way, and cozier. Tessa and Catarina shared one small bedroom, hanging a sheet down the middle for privacy. They often worked at night and slept during the day. At least the raids were only at night now—no more sirens and planes and bombs and antiaircraft guns at noon.