Also by Cassandra Clare

Emma stood in front of the mirror in her bathroom, slowly peeling off her tank top.
Twenty minutes with a bottle of bleach had removed the blood from the inside of the Toyota. That
had been fine. She was used to bloodstains. But there was something more visceral about this, about
Julian’s blood dried on her skin, red-brown patches over her ribs and shoulder. As she unzipped her
jeans and wriggled out of them, she could see splatters of dried blood along the waistband, the
telltale pinpricks of it up and down the seams.
She balled up the jeans and top and threw them in the trash.
In the shower, the water scalding hot, she scrubbed away the blood and dirt and sweat. She
watched the water run pinkish down the drain. She couldn’t count how many times that had happened,
how often she’d made herself bleed during training and battles. Scars slashed across her midriff and
shoulders, along her arms, at the backs of her knees.
But Julian’s blood was different.
When she saw it she thought of him, shot and crumpling, the way his blood had run like water
through her fingers. It was the first time in years that she’d actually thought he might die, that she might
lose him. She knew what people said about parabatai, knew that it was meant to be a loss as
profound as that of a spouse or a sibling. Emma had lost her parents; she had thought she knew what
loss was, was prepared for it.
But nothing had prepared her for the feeling that the idea of losing Jules wrenched out of her: that
the sky would go dark forever, that there would never be solid ground again. Even stranger had been
the feeling that had rushed through her when she realized he was going to be all right. She had become
aware of his physical presence in a way that almost hurt. She had wanted to put her arms around him,
to grab on to him with her fingers digging in as if she could press them together hard enough to seal
their skin, interlock their bones. She knew it didn’t make sense, but she couldn’t explain it another
way.
She just knew it was intense, and painful, and a thing she hadn’t felt about Julian before. And that it
scared her.
The water had gone cold. She spun the shower off with a savage twist of her wrist, stepped out,
and toweled her hair dry. She found a clean camisole and boxer shorts folded on her laundry basket
and, dressed, stepped out into her bedroom.