Annabel’s colorless lips curled into a smile. “That gun won’t hurt me,” she said. “And the shot, the screams, will bring the Endarkened running. Chance it if you wish. I wouldn’t.”

Julian dropped the bottle. Water splashed over his boots. Emma prayed he wouldn’t launch himself at Annabel; his hands were shaking. “We can hurt you,” he said. “We can make you bleed.”

It was so close to what Emma herself had thought inside the nightclub that she was taken aback for a moment.

“The Endarkened will come,” Annabel said. “All I have to do is scream.” Her Marks had faded, just like all the other Shadowhunters’; her skin was pale as milk, without a single design. Emma was startled by how calm she seemed. How sane. But then, several years had passed here, for her. “I knew who you were the moment I saw you. You look just as you did in the Unseelie Court. The marks of the battle on your faces haven’t even healed.”

“Then why didn’t you tell Sebastian?” Emma spat. “If you wanted to get rid of us—”

“I don’t want to get rid of you. I want to make a deal with you.”

Julian yanked up his right sleeve with enough force to tear the fabric. There on his wrist was the rag he had worn all through Faerie, still crusted with dried blood. “This is my sister’s blood,” he ground out. “Blood you spilled. Why would I ever want to make a deal with you?”

Annabel looked unmoved at the sight of Livvy’s blood. “Because you want to get home,” she said. “Because you can’t stop thinking of what could be happening to the rest of your family. I am still possessed of powerful dark magics, you know. The Black Volume works even better here. I can open a Portal to take you home. I’m the only one in this world who can.”

“Why would you do that for us?” said Emma.

Annabel gave an odd little smile. In her red dress, she seemed to float suspended like a drop of blood in water. “The Inquisitor sent you into Faerie to die,” she said. “The Clave despises you and wants you dead. All because you wanted to protect what you loved. How would I not understand what that’s like?”

This, Emma felt, was pretty twisted logic. Julian, though, was staring at Annabel as if she were a nightmare he could not look away from.

“You enspelled yourself,” Annabel went on, her gaze fixed on Julian. “To feel nothing. I sensed the spell when I saw you in Faerie. I saw it, and I felt joy.” She twirled, her red skirt spinning out around her. “You made yourself like Malcolm. He cut himself away from emotions to get me back.”

“No,” Emma said, unable to bear the look on Julian’s face. “He tried to get you back because he loved you. Because he felt emotions.”

“Maybe at first.” Annabel stopped twirling. “But it was no longer the case by the time he raised me, was it? He had kept me trapped and tortured all those years, so he could bring me back for him, not for me. That is not love, to sacrifice your beloved’s happiness for your own needs. By the time he was able to get me back, he was so divorced from the world that he cared about his goal more than he cared about the kinds of love that matter. A thing that was true and pure and beautiful became corrupt and evil.” She smiled, and her teeth shone like underwater pearls. “Once you no longer feel empathy, you become a monster. You may not be under the spell here, Julian Blackthorn, but what about when you return? What will you do then, when you cannot bear to feel what you feel?”

“Shut up,” Emma said through her teeth. “You don’t understand anything.” She turned to Julian. “Let’s get away from here.”

But Julian was still staring at Annabel. “You want something,” he said in a deadly flat voice. “What?”

“Ah.” Annabel was still smiling. “When I open the Portal, take Ash with you. He is in danger.”

“Ash?” Julian repeated, incredulous.

“Ash seems to be doing fine here,” said Emma, lowering her Glock. “I mean, maybe he’s getting bored with his video game selection since, you know, Sebastian killed all the people who make video games. Or he could be running out of batteries. But I’m not sure that qualifies as danger.”

Annabel’s face darkened. “He is too good for this place,” she said. “And more than that—when we first found ourselves here, I brought him to Sebastian. I believed Sebastian would take care of Ash because he is his father. And for a time, he did. But rumors are circulating that the energy drain of maintaining so many Endarkened is slowly tearing Sebastian apart. The life forces of the Endarkened are poisoned. Useless. But Ash’s is not. I believe eventually he will kill Ash and use his considerable life force to rejuvenate himself.”

“No one’s safe, huh?” said Julian. He sounded distinctly unimpressed.

“This is a good world for me,” said Annabel. “I hate the Nephilim, and I am powerful enough to be safe from demons.”

“And Sebastian lets you torture Nephilim,” Emma said.

“Indeed. I visit upon them the wounds that were once visited upon me by the Council.” There was no emotion in her voice, not even a faint hint of gloating, only a deadly dullness that was even worse. “But it is not a good place for Ash. We cannot hide—Sebastian would hunt him down anywhere. He will be better off in your world.”

“Then why don’t you take him there yourself?” said Emma.

“I would if I could. It sickens me to be parted from him,” Annabel said. “I have given all my life these years to his care.”

Perfect loyalty, Emma thought. Was it that loyalty that had made Annabel so haggard, so sick-looking? Always putting Ash before herself, following him from place to place, ready to die for him at any moment, and never really knowing why?

“But in your world,” Annabel went on, “I would be hunted, and torn from Ash. He would have no one to protect him. This way, he will have you.”

“You seem to have a lot of trust in us,” said Julian, “given that you know we hate you.”

“But you don’t hate Ash,” Annabel said. “He is innocent, and you have always protected the innocent. It is what you do.” She smiled, a knowing smile, as if she felt in her heart that she had caught them in a net. “Besides. You are desperate to get home, and desperation always has a price. So how about it, Nephilim? Do we have a deal?”

*

Ash scooped the piece of paper that had fallen from Julian Blackthorn’s jacket off the floor of the nightclub. He was careful not to let Sebastian see him do it. He’d been in Thule long enough to know that it was never a good idea to catch Sebastian’s attention unawares.

Not that Sebastian was always cruel. He was generous in fits and starts, when he remembered Ash existed. He’d hand him weapons or games he found in raids on rebel homes. He ensured that Ash dressed nicely, since he considered Ash a reflection of himself. Jace was the only one who was ever actually kind, though, seeming to find in Ash somewhere to put the frustrated, bottled-up feelings he still carried for Clary Fairchild and Alexander and Isabelle Lightwood.

And then there was Annabel. But Ash didn’t want to think about Annabel.

Ash unfolded the paper. A jolt went through his body. He turned away quickly so that Jace and Sebastian, deep in conversation, wouldn’t see his expression.

It was her, the strange human girl he’d once seen in the Unseelie weapons room. Dark hair, eyes the color of the sky he only partially remembered. A murder of crows circled in the sky behind her. Not a photograph, but a drawing, done with a wistful hand, a sense of love and longing emanating from the page. A name was scribbled in a corner: Drusilla Blackthorn.

Drusilla. She looked lonely, Ash thought, but determined as well, as if a hope lived behind those summer-blue eyes, a hope that could not be quenched by loss, a hope too strong to feel despair.

Ash’s heart was pounding, though he could not have said why. Hastily, he folded the drawing and thrust it into his pocket.

*

Diana was waiting for them outside the Bradbury, leaning against the closed garage door with a shotgun over her shoulder. She lowered the weapon with a look of visible relief as Emma and Julian’s motorcycle puttered to a stop in front of her.

“I knew you’d make it,” she said as Julian swung himself off the bike.

“Aw,” said Emma, dismounting. “You were worried about us!”

Diana tapped on the garage door with the tip of her shotgun. She said something to Emma that was lost in the grinding of the gears as the door opened.

Julian watched Emma answer Diana with a smile and wondered how she did it. Somehow Emma could always find lightness or a joke even under the greatest stress. Maybe it was the same way he could stand in front of Sebastian and pretend to be the Endarkened version of himself without even feeling his hands shake. That started only when it was over.

“I’m sorry I had to take off,” Diana said once the door was shut and bolted and their bike stowed back under Raphael’s tarp. “If I’d stuck around and you’d been caught—”

“There’s nothing you could have done for us,” said Julian. “And they would have killed you, once they figured out who we really were.”