Also by Cassandra Clare

The last time Kit Rook ever saw his father, it was an ordinary day and they were sitting in their
living room. Kit was sprawled on the floor reading a book on cons and scams. According to Johnny
Rook, it was time to “learn the classics”—which for most people would have meant Hemingway and
Shakespeare, but for Kit meant memorizing things like the Spanish Prisoner and the Melon Drop.
Johnny was in his favorite chair, in his usual thinking pose—fingers templed under his chin, legs
crossed. It was times like this, when the sun slanted through the window and lit up the fine, sharp
bones of his father’s face, that Kit wondered about all the things he didn’t know: who his mother had
been, if it was true, as was whispered in the Market, that Johnny’s family was English aristocracy
who’d tossed him out when he manifested his Sight. It wasn’t that Kit yearned to be aristocracy so
much as he wondered what it would be like to be in a family that had more than two people in it.
The ground suddenly seized up under him. Kit’s book went flying and he slid several feet across
the floor before slamming into the coffee table. He sat up, heart speeding, and saw his father already
at the window.
Kit got to his feet. “Earthquake?” he said. When you lived in Southern California you got used to
small shiftings of the fault lines in the earth, waking up in the night with the glasses rattling in the
kitchen cupboards.
Johnny turned away from the window, his face deathly pale. “Something’s happened to the
Guardian,” Johnny said. “The protection spells on the house have faded.”
“What?” Kit was bewildered. Their house had been warded for as long as he could remember. His
father had always spoken of the wards as if they were the roof or the foundation: essential, necessary,
built into the fabric of their home.
He remembered, then, last year, his father saying something about demon protection spells, more
powerful ones—
Johnny swore, a fluent string of curses, and whirled toward the bookcase. He seized a worn spell
book. “Get downstairs, Kit,” he said, moving to kick aside the rug in the middle of the room,
revealing the protection circle there.
“But—”
“I said get downstairs!” Johnny took a step toward his son, as if he meant to reach out to him, to
touch his shoulder perhaps. Then he dropped his arm. “Stay in the cellar and don’t come out, no