He sat on the bed, scattering crumbs, black hair damp and curling with the humidity. She placed the scones carefully on the top of the dresser. By the time she turned back around, he was asleep, head pillowed on his arm.

She perched herself on the nightstand table for a moment, her arms around herself. She could see Diego in the colors and curves of Jaime’s face. It was as if someone had taken Diego and sharpened him, made all his angles more acute. A tattoo of more script looped around one brown wrist and disappeared up Jaime’s shirtsleeve; she wished she knew enough Spanish to translate it.

She started to turn toward the door, meaning to leave him alone to rest. “Don’t go,” he said. She spun around and saw that his eyes were half-open, his lashes casting shadows on his too-sharp cheekbones. “It’s been a long time since I had anyone to talk to.”

She sat down on the edge of the bed. Jaime rolled over on his back, his arms folded behind his head. He was all long limbs and black hair and lashes like spider’s legs. Everything about him was slightly off-kilter, where everything about Diego had been even lines like a comic book. Dru tried not to stare.

“I was looking at the stickers on your nightstand,” he said. Dru had bought them in a store on Fleet Street when she’d been out with Diana picking up sandwiches. “They’re all horror movies.”

“I like horror movies.”

He grinned. Black hair flopped into his eyes. He shoved it back. “You like to be scared?”

“Horror movies don’t scare me,” said Dru.

“Aren’t they supposed to?” He sounded genuinely interested. Dru couldn’t remember the last time anyone had seemed genuinely interested in her love for slasher films and vintage horror. Julian had sometimes stayed up to watch Horror Hotel with her, but she knew that was just older-brother kindness.

“I remember the Dark War,” she said. “I remember watching people die in front of me. My father was one of the Endarkened. He came back, but it wasn’t—it wasn’t him.” She swallowed hard. “When I watch a scary movie, I know whatever happens, I’ll be all right when it’s over. I know the people in it were just actors and after everything was done, they walked away. The blood was fake and washed off.”

Jaime’s eyes were dark and fathomless. “It almost lets you believe none of those things exist,” he said. “Imagine if they didn’t.”

She smiled a little sadly. “We’re Shadowhunters,” she said. “We don’t get to imagine that.”

*

“People will do anything to get out of housework,” said Julian.

“Not you,” Emma said. She was lying on the sofa with her legs hooked over the arm.

Since they couldn’t follow Annabel to the church today, they’d decided to spend the afternoon reading through Malcolm’s diaries and studying Annabel’s drawings. By the time the sun began going down, they had a sizable amount of notes systematically arranged around the cottage in piles. Notes about timeline—when Malcolm had joined Annabel’s family, how they, who ran the Cornwall Institute, had adopted him when he was a child. How intensely Annabel had loved Blackthorn Manor, the Blackthorns’ ancestral home in the green hills of Idris, and how they had played in Brocelind Forest together. When Malcolm had started planning for their future, and built the cottage in Polperro, and how he and Annabel had hidden their relationship, exchanging all their messages through Annabel’s raven. When Annabel’s father had discovered them, and thrown his daughter out of the Blackthorn house, and Malcolm had found her the next morning, weeping alone on the beach.

Malcolm had determined then that he would need protection for them from the Clave. He had known of the collection of spell books at the Cornwall Institute. He would need a powerful patron, he had decided. Someone he could trade the Black Volume to, who in turn would keep the Council away from them.

Emma read aloud from the diaries, and Julian took notes. Every once in a while they would stop, take pictures with their phones of their notes and questions, and text them to the Institute. Sometimes they got questions back and scrambled to answer them; sometimes they got nothing. Once they got a picture of Ty, who had found an entire row of first-edition Sherlock Holmes books in the library and was beaming. Once they got a picture of Mark’s foot. Neither of them knew what to make of that.

At some point Julian stretched, padded into the kitchen, and made them both toasted cheese sandwiches on the Aga, a massive iron stove that radiated warmth through the room.

This is bad, he thought, looking down at his hands as he settled the sandwiches onto plates and remembered that Emma liked hers with the crusts cut off. He’d made fun of her for it often. He reached for a knife, the gesture mechanical, habit.

He imagined doing this every day. Living in a house he’d designed himself—like this one, it would have a view of the sea. A massive studio where he could paint. A room for Emma to train. He imagined waking up every morning to find her beside him, or sitting at a table in the kitchen with her morning cereal, humming, raising her face to smile at him when he came in.

A wave of desire—not just for the physicality of her but for the dream of that life—swept through him, almost choking him. It was dangerous to dream, he reminded himself. As dangerous as it was for Sleeping Beauty in her castle, where she’d fallen into dreams that had devoured her for a century.

He went to join Emma by the fire. She was bright-eyed, smiling as she took the plate from him. “You know what I’m worried about?”

His heart did a slow curl inside his chest. “What?”

“Church,” she said. “He’s all alone in the Institute in L.A.”

“No, he isn’t. He’s surrounded by Centurions.”

“What if one of them tries to steal him?”

“Then they’ll be appropriately punished,” said Julian, moving slightly closer to the fire.

“What’s the appropriate punishment for stealing a cat?” Emma asked around her sandwich.

“In Church’s case, having to keep him,” said Julian.

Emma made a face. “If there were any crusts on this sandwich, I’d throw them at you.”

“Why don’t you just throw the sandwich?”

She looked horrified. “And give up the tasty cheese? I would never, ever give up the tasty cheese.”

“My mistake.” Julian tossed another log onto the fire. A bubble of happiness swelled in his chest, sweet and unfamiliar.

“Cheese this tasty doesn’t just come along every day,” she informed him. “You know what would make it even better?”

“What?” He sat back on his heels.

“Another sandwich.” She held out her empty plate, laughing. He took the plate, and it was a completely ordinary moment, but it was also everything he’d ever wanted and never let himself imagine. A house, with Emma; laughing by a fire together.

All that would make it better would be his brothers and sisters somewhere nearby, where he could see them every day, where he could fence with Livvy and watch movies with Dru and help Tavvy learn the crossbow. Where he could look for animals with Ty, hermit crabs down by the edge of the water, scuttling under their shells. Where he could cook massive dinners with Mark and Helen and Aline and they’d all eat them together, out under the stars in the desert air.

Where he could hear the sea, as he could hear it now. And where he could see Emma, always Emma, the better, brighter half of him, who tempered his ruthlessness, who forced him to acknowledge the light when he saw only darkness.

But they would all have to be together, he thought. Long ago the pieces of his soul had scattered, and every piece lived in one of his brothers or sisters. Except for the piece that lived in Emma, which had been burned into its home in her by the flame of the parabatai ceremony, and the pressure of his own heart.

It was impossible, though. An impossible thing that could never happen. Even if by some miracle his family came through all this unscathed and together—and if Helen and Aline could come back to them—even then, Emma, his Emma, would someday have her own family and her own life.