But he was angry. There would be no more such accidents.

The killer quickened his pace. One, two, three strides and he was upon the man. He grabbed his shoulder roughly and spun him around, shoving him up against a cold brick wall. The man blinked in anger, then confusion. His mouth opened, and a single word passed his lips just before the knife went into his chest:

“You?”

12

REQUIEM

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor, home from sea,

And the hunter, home from the hill.

—Robert Louis Stevenson, “Requiem”

The knife went in, grinding past bone, sinking into soft tissue, blood pulsing up and around the blade, the stench of it, hot and coppery, thickening the air….

James sat up in bed, pain shooting through his chest. His heart was slamming against his ribs. He choked, memories flooding back—the empty streets, the shops and stalls of Shepherd Market. The man leaving the noisy, bright pub, heading for the narrower streets, perhaps hoping to find an unwatched mews house to sleep in.

The killer, the blade, the hate again, that hatred hot as fire.

I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled.

He pushed himself upright, dread growing like a cancer in the pit of his stomach. He had thrashed about in the bed hard enough to tear his pajama top; his shoulder and arm were bare, freezing in the cold air coming from the open window.

It was cold, so cold; he gripped the man’s brown coat with one hand, driving the knife in with the other—

James was suddenly unable to breathe. “No,” he gasped, throwing off the bedcovers, sucking in lungfuls of air. He staggered to the window—he knew he hadn’t left it open; he had checked twice last night—and slammed it shut.

He could see the man on his back, staring up at the sky. He knew him. His brown coat, his face, his voice.

Elias.

He threw on his trousers, buttoned up his shirt with shaking hands. Let it have been a nightmare, a meaningless dream and not a vision. Maybe he had only had a dream because he and Elias had fought last night; maybe he’d dreamed of Elias only because he was angry with him. Such things happened.

A pounding started up downstairs, someone knocking over and over on the door. James raced out of his room, barefoot, and tore down the stairs. Cordelia was already in the entryway, her hair a loose red river, a dressing gown thrown on over her nightclothes. Risa was there with her; she tore open the door, and Sona Carstairs stumbled inside.

“Mâmân?” he heard Cordelia say, her voice rising with panic. “Mâmân?”

Sona gave a keening wail. Risa caught her in her arms, and Sona buried her face against her old nursemaid’s shoulder, weeping as if her heart would break.

“He’s dead, Layla,” she sobbed. “They found him this morning. Your father is dead.”

Though Cordelia had visited the Silent City before, she had never been inside the Ossuarium. She had been lucky, she realized numbly, as she, James, Alastair, and Sona filed along a narrow corridor, following the light of Brother Enoch’s witchlight torch. She had not encountered death so close to her before.

Alastair had come into the Curzon Street house after Sona and explained with surprising calm that Elias’s body had been discovered by a morning patrol and already brought to the Silent City. If the family wished to see him before the autopsy began, they would need to hurry to the Ossuarium.

Cordelia recalled what happened next only in bits and pieces. She had gone to get dressed, feeling as numb as if she had fallen through Arctic ice into a black and frozen sea. When she emerged from the house to join her mother and brother in the carriage, she had been distantly surprised to find that James was beside her. He had been absolutely insistent on coming to the Silent City, though she had told him it wasn’t necessary. “Only family need go,” she told him, and he had said, “Daisy, I am family.”

In the carriage, he had murmured words of condolence in Persian: Ghame akharetoon basheh.

May this be your last sorrow.

Sona had wept steadily and silently all the way to Highgate Cemetery. Cordelia had half expected Alastair to react to Elias’s death with the blazing rage he often showed when he was hurt. Instead he seemed stiff and hollow, as if he were being propped up inside by wires. She could hear him, as if from a distance, saying all the correct things as they met Brother Enoch, who was waiting for them at the entrance to the Silent City.

Cordelia had felt a pang inside for Jem. If only he were not in the Spiral Labyrinth. If only he could be here for them: he was family, and Enoch was not. Did Jem even know? How long would it be before he was told that his uncle, the man who had slain his parents’ murderer, was dead?

There would be a funeral eventually, she supposed now, her eyes fixed on Brother Enoch’s witchlight torch, bobbing ahead of them. It would have to wait. Elias’s body would be studied and then preserved until the murderer had been caught: they would not burn it and destroy potential clues. Jem could be with them then, but she found she could not imagine the scene—the fields of Alicante, her father’s body on a pyre, the Consul speaking soothing words. It seemed like a horrific dream.

She felt James take her hand as they came into a stone square, the iron entrance of the Ossuarium rising up before them. Words were inscribed above the doors:

TACEANT COLLOQUIA. EFFUGIAT RISUS.

HIC LOCUS EST UBI MORS GAUDET

SUCCURRERE VITAE.

Let conversation stop. Let laughter cease. Here is the place where the dead delight to teach the living.

The doors opened before them, the ancient iron hinges groaning. Sona walked ahead, seemingly oblivious of everything but what was waiting inside the large, windowless room.

Inside the Ossuarium, walls of smooth white marble rose up to an arched ceiling high above them. The walls were bare save for a series of plain iron hooks from which various instruments of autopsy hung: shining scalpels, hammers, needles, and saws. Jars of viscous liquid lined a series of shelves; there were folded piles of white silk—bandages, Cordelia thought, before she realized: there was no reason to bandage the dead. The white silk strips were for binding the eyes of Shadowhunters before they were laid on the pyre to be burned. It was tradition.

At the center of the room was a row of high marble tables where the bodies of the deceased were laid out for examination. Here Amos Gladstone and Basil Pounceby had been brought to be examined, Cordelia thought, and Filomena as well. Only one table was occupied now. Cordelia told herself that lying there, draped in lengths of pristine white fabric, was what was left of her father, but she could not quite make herself believe it.

Shall we begin? asked Enoch, approaching the table.

“Yes,” said Sona. She stood close to Alastair, his arm around her for support, her hand on her rounded belly. Her eyes were wide and haunted, but when she spoke, her voice was clear. She kept her chin level as Enoch slowly drew back the long white sheets to reveal Elias’s body. He wore his old brown coat, the lapels peeled back to show a shabby white shirt beneath, stained heavily with blood. His skin was ashen, as if drained of blood: his hair and stubble looked dirty gray, like an old man’s.

“How did he die?” said Alastair, his gaze fixed on his father’s body. “Like the others?”