Also by Cassandra Clare

Tavvy was a curled-up ball under the covers of his bed. He was asleep, his body curved around
one of his pillows, his mouth open on a gasp. Tears ran down his face.
Julian sat down on the bed and put a hand on Tavvy’s shoulder. “Octavian,” he said. “Wake up;
you’re having a nightmare, wake up.”
Tavvy shot upright, his brown hair in wild disarray. When he saw Julian, he hiccuped and flung
himself at his older brother, arms wrapping around his neck.
Jules held Tavvy and rubbed his back, gently patting the sharp knobs of his spine. Too small, too
skinny, his mind said. It had been a battle to get Tavvy to eat and sleep ever since the Dark War.
He remembered running through the streets of Alicante with Tavvy in his arms, stumbling on the
cracked paving, trying to keep his little brother’s face mashed against his shoulder so that he wouldn’t
see the blood and the death all around him. Thinking that if they could just get through everything
without Tavvy seeing what was happening, it would be all right. He wouldn’t remember. He wouldn’t
know.
And still Tavvy woke up with nightmares every week, shaking and sweating and crying. And every
time it happened, the dull realization that he hadn’t really saved his baby brother at all went through
Julian like spikes.
Tavvy’s breaths evened out slowly as Julian sat there, arms around him. He wanted to lie down,
wanted to curl up around his youngest brother and sleep. He needed rest so badly it was dragging at
him, like a wave pulling him under and down.
But he couldn’t sleep. His body felt restless, unsettled. The arrow going into him had been agony;
pulling it out had been worse. He’d felt his skin tear and a moment of pure, animalistic panic, the
surety that he was going to die, and then what would happen to them,
livvyandtyanddrusillaandtavvyandmark?
And then Emma’s voice in his ear, and her hands on him, and he’d known he was going to live. He
looked at himself now, the mark on his ribs entirely gone—well, there was something there, a faint
line of white against his tanned skin, but that was nothing. Shadowhunters lived through scars.
Sometimes he thought they lived for them.
Unbidden, in his mind rose the image he’d been trying to crush down since he’d returned to the
Institute: Emma, in his lap, her hands on his shoulders. Her hair like drifts of pale gold around her
face.
He remembered thinking that if he died, at least he would die with her as close to him as she could
possibly be. As would ever be allowed by the Law.
As Tavvy slept, Julian reached for the law book he’d taken from the library. It was a book he’d
looked at so many times that it now always fell open to the same well-worn page. On Parabatai, it
said.
It is decreed that those who have undergone the ceremony of parabatai and are forever bound by
the terms of the oaths of Saul and David, of Ruth and Naomi, shall not enter into marriage, shall
not bear children together, and shall not love each other in the manner of eros, but only the
manner of philia or agape.
The punishment for the contravention of this law shall be, at the discretion of the Clave: the
separation of the parabatai in question from each other, exile from their families, and should the
criminal behavior continue, the stripping of their Marks and their expulsion from the Nephilim.
Never again shall they be Shadowhunters.