City of Heavenly Fire

“Except the young and the very old.”


“Well, my parents were neither of those things.”

“Would you rather they’d been Turned?” Helen said quietly, and Emma knew she was thinking of her own father.

“No,” Emma said. “But are you really saying that it doesn’t matter who killed them? That I shouldn’t even want to know why?”

“Why what?” Tiberius was standing in the door, his mop of unruly black curls tumbling into his eyes. He looked younger than his ten years, an impression helped by the fact that his stuffed bee was dangling from one hand. His delicate face was smudged with tiredness. “Where’s Julian?”

“He’s down in the kitchen getting food,” Helen said. “Are you hungry?”

“Is he angry with me?” Ty asked, looking at Emma.

“No, but you know he gets upset when you yell at him, or hurt yourself,” Emma said carefully. It was hard to know what might frighten Ty or send him into a tantrum. In her experience it was better to always tell him the unvarnished truth. The sort of lies people routinely told children, of the “This injection won’t hurt a bit” variety, were disastrous when told to Ty.

Yesterday, Julian had spent quite a bit of time picking broken glass out of his brother’s bloody feet and had explained to him rather sternly that if he ever walked on broken glass again, Julian would tell on him to the adults and he’d have to take whatever punishment he got. Ty had kicked him in response, leaving a bloody footprint on Jules’s shirt.

“Jules wants you to be okay,” Emma said now. “That’s all he wants.”

Helen reached out her arms for Ty—Emma didn’t blame her. Ty looked small and huddled, and the way he was clutching his bee made her worried for him. She would have wanted to hug him too. But he didn’t like to be touched, not by anyone but Livvy. He flinched away from his half sister and moved over to the window. After a moment Emma joined him there, being careful to give him his space.

“Sebastian can get in and out of the city,” said Ty.

“Yes, but he’s only one person, and he’s not that interested in us. Besides, I believe the Clave has a plan to keep us safe.”

“I believe the same thing,” Ty muttered, looking down and out the window. He pointed. “I just don’t know if it’ll work.”

It took Emma a moment to realize what he was indicating. The streets were crowded, and not with pedestrians. Nephilim in the uniforms of the Gard, and some in gear, were moving back and forth in the streets, carrying hammers and nails and boxes of objects that made Emma stare—scissors and horseshoes, knives and daggers and assorted weapons, even boxes of what looked like earth. One man carried several burlap sacks marked SALT.

Each box and bag had a symbol stamped on it: a spiral. Emma had seen it before in her Codex: the sigil of the Spiral Labyrinth of the warlocks.

“Cold iron,” said Ty thoughtfully. “Wrought, not heated and shaped. Salt, and grave dirt.”

There was a look on Helen’s face, that look adults got when they knew something but didn’t want to tell you what it was. Emma looked over at Ty, quiet and composed, his serious gray eyes tracking up and down the streets outside. Beside him stood Helen, who had risen up off the bed, her expression anxious.

“They sent for magical ammunition,” said Ty. “From the Spiral Labyrinth. Or maybe it was the warlocks’ idea. It’s hard to know.”

Emma stared through the glass and then back at Ty, who looked up at her through his long lashes. “What does it mean?” she asked.

Ty smiled his rare, unpracticed smile. “It means what Mark said in his note was true,” he said.



Clary didn’t think she’d ever been so heavily runed, or had ever seen the Lightwoods covered in as many of the magical sigils as they were now. She had done them all herself, putting everything she had into them—all of her desire for them all to be safe, all her yearning to find her mother and Luke.

Jace’s arms looked like a map: runes spread down onto his collarbones and chest, the backs of his hands. Clary’s own skin looked foreign to her when she caught sight of it. She remembered once having seen a boy who had the elaborate musculature of the human body tattooed onto his skin, and thinking it was as if he had been turned to glass. It was a bit like that now, she thought, looking around at her companions as they toiled up the hill toward the Dark Gard: the road map of their bravery and hopes, their dreams and desires, marked clearly on their bodies. Shadowhunters weren’t always the most forthcoming of people, but their skins were honest.