Learn About Loss (Ghosts of the Shadow Market Book 4)

by Cassandra Clare

  Belial said, “True. I will.”

  Emilia said, “Then our deal?”

  “Done,” Belial said. And was gone, leaving Sister Emilia in a room walled in mirrors, holding an adamas mask in one hand and in her other a sword that was quite remarkable and yet in no way the equal of the blades that she would make one day.

  When she emerged onto the carnival thoroughfare, already many of the tents were gone or else simply abandoned. There were few people about, and those she saw looked dazed and dreamy, as if they had just woken up. The Bazaar of the Bizarre was gone entirely, and there was not a single werewolf to be seen, although the cotton-candy machine was still spinning slowly, filaments of sugar floating in the air.

  Brother Zachariah was standing in front of the empty stage where they had seen the magician and his faerie wife. “We all play a role, and it would astonish you, I think, to know how helpful I am being,” he said.

  She realized that he was quoting Belial. “I have no idea what that means,” she said.

  He waved his hand at the sign above the stage. ROLAND THE ASTONISHING.

  “Role and,” she said slowly. “It would astonish you.”

  Tricks and slights. He offered me the hand of friendship. Sleight of hand. Magic tricks. I should have known sooner. I thought the magician had the look of my friend Will. But he and his wife have fled.

  “You’ll find them again,” Sister Emilia said. “I feel quite sure.”

  They are Herondales, and they are in trouble, said Brother Zachariah. So I will find them, because I must. And Belial did say something that has proved of some interest to my brothers.

  “Go on,” Sister Emilia said.

  I am as I am, Brother Zachariah said, A Silent Brother but not entirely of the Brotherhood, because for so long I was unwillingly dependent on yin fen. And now I am, not entirely whole-heartedly, a Silent Brother, so that I might remain alive in spite of the yin fen in my blood that should have killed me years ago. Brother Enoch and the others have long searched for a cure and found nothing. We had begun to think perhaps there was no cure. But Brother Enoch was extremely interested in the choice Belial offered me. He said he’s already researching demonic cures associated with Belial.

  “Then if you were cured,” Sister Emilia said, “you would choose not to be what you are?”

  Brother Zachariah said, Without hesitation. Though not without gratitude for what my Brothers in the Silent City have done for me. And you? Will you regret choosing a life in the Iron Citadel?

  Sister Emilia said, “How can I know that? But no. I am being given an opportunity to become what I have always known I was meant to be. Come on. We’ve done what we were sent to do.”

  Not quite, Brother Zachariah said. Tonight is a full moon, and we don’t know whether or not the werewolves have gone back into the mountains. As long as there are mundanes here, we must wait and watch. The Silent Brothers have sent messages to the Praetor Lupus. They take a hardline Prohibitionist stance, not to mention they crack down hard on eating mundanes.

  “Seems a little harsh,” Sister Emilia said. “The Prohibitionist stance. I get that eating people is wrong, generally.”

  Werewolves live by a harsh code, Brother Zachariah said. She could not tell, by looking at his face, whether or not he was joking. But she was fairly sure that he was.

  He said, Though now that you have passed your test, I know you must be anxious to return to the Iron Citadel. I’m sorry to keep you here.

  He wasn’t wrong. She longed with all of her heart to go to the only place that had ever truly felt like home to her. And she knew, too, that some part of Brother Zachariah must dread returning to the Silent City. She had seen enough in the mirrors to know where his home and his heart was.

  She said, “I’m not sorry to tarry here a little longer with you, Brother Zachariah. And I’m not sorry that I met you. If we never meet again, I will hope that one day a weapon made by my hand may yet prove useful to you in some way.” Then she yawned. Iron Sisters, unlike Silent Brothers, required things like sleep and food.

  Brother Zachariah hoisted himself up onto the edge of the stage and then patted the space beside him. I’ll keep watch. If you grow weary, sleep. No harm will come while I keep vigil.

  Sister Emilia said, “Brother Zachariah? If something strange happens tonight. If you should see something that you thought you would not see again, don’t be alarmed. No harm will come of it.”

  What do you mean? Brother Zachariah said. What did you and Belial discuss when I had gone?

  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 stout-hearted 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 upon 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 become 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 that 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 almost 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 Jem 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.

  Read on for a snippet from the fourth Ghosts of the Shadow Market story, “A Deeper Love,” by Cassandra Clare and Maureen Johnson:

  A Deeper Love excerpt

  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 is 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 went 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 their flashlights 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 Tessa slowly emerged, Magnus’s friends Catarina Loss and Ragnor Fell encircled her.

  “A Deeper Love” by Cassandra Clare and Maureen Johnson will be published on August 14, 2018.

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  About the Authors

  Cassandra Clare was born to American parents in Teheran, Iran and spent much of her childhood traveling the world with her family. She lived in France, England and Switzerland before she was ten years old. Since her family moved around so much she found familiarity in books and went everywhere with a book under her arm. She spent her high school years in Los Angeles where she used to write stories to amuse her classmates, including an epic novel called “The Beautiful Cassandra” based on the eponymous Jane Austen short story (and from which she later took her current pen name).

  After college, Cassie lived in Los Angeles and New York where she worked at various entertainment magazines and even some rather suspect tabloids. She started working on her YA novel, City of Bones, in 2004, inspired by the urban landscape of Manhattan, her f
avorite city.

  In 2007, the first book in the Mortal Instruments series, City of Bones, introduced the world to Shadowhunters. The Mortal Instruments concluded in 2014, and includes City of Ashes, City of Glass, City of Fallen Angels, City of Lost Souls, and City of Heavenly Fire. She also created a prequel series, inspired by A Tale of Two Cities and set in Victorian London. This series, The Infernal Devices, follows bookworm Tessa Gray as she discovers the London Institute in Clockwork Angel, Clockwork Prince, and Clockwork Princess.

  The sequel series to The Mortal Instruments, The Dark Artifices, where the Shadowhunters take on Los Angeles, began with Lady Midnight, continues with Lord of Shadows and will conclude with Queen of Air and Darkness.

  Other books in the Shadowhunters series include The Bane Chronicles, Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy, and The Shadowhunter’s Codex.

  Her books have more than 36 million copies in print worldwide and have been translated into more than thirty-five languages. Visit her at CassandraClare.com.

  Kelly Link is the author of the collections Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, Pretty Monsters, and Pulitzer Prize finalist Get in Trouble. Her short stories have been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Best American Short Stories, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. She has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She and Gavin J. Grant have co-edited a number of anthologies, including multiple volumes of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and, for young adults, Steampunk! and Monstrous Affections. She is the co-founder of Small Beer Press and co-edits the occasional zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.