Son of the Dawn (Ghosts of the Shadow Market #1)(14)

This was not the first time this had happened to him, seeing a trace of what had been in what was. The coloring was entirely different. The boy did not really have anything to do with Will. Jem knew that. Jem—for in the moments he remembered Will, he was always Jem—was used to seeing his lost and dearest Shadowhunter in a thousand Shadowhunter faces and gestures, the turn of a head or the note of a voice. Never the beloved head, never the long-silent voice, but sometimes, more and more rarely, something close.

Jem’s hand was firmly clasped around his staff. He had not paid attention to the carving beneath his palm like this for many a long, cold day.

This is a reminder of my faith. If there is any part of him that can be with me, and I believe there is, then he is at hand. Nothing can part us. He allowed himself a smile. His mouth could not open, but he could still smile. He could still speak to Will, though he could no longer hear any answer.

Life is not a boat, bearing us far away on a cruel, relentless tide from all we love. You are not lost to me on some forever distant shore. Life is a wheel.

From the river, he could hear mermaids. All the sparks of the city by morning were kindling a new fire. A new day was born.

If life is a wheel, it will bring you back to me. All I must do is keep faith.

Even when having a heart seemed hard past bearing, it was better than the alternative. Even when Brother Zachariah felt he was losing the struggle, losing everything he had been, there was hope.

Sometimes you seem very far away from me, my parabatai.

Light on water had not rivaled the boy’s blazing contradiction of a smile, somehow both indomitable and too easily hurt. He was a child going to a new home, as Will and the boy Zachariah had been had once traveled in lonely sorrow to the place where they would find each other. Jem hoped he would find happiness.

Jem smiled back at a boy long gone.

Sometimes, Will, he said. You seem very close.


Read on for an snippet from the second Ghosts of the Shadow Market story, “Cast Long Shadows,” by Cassandra Clare and Sarah Rees Brennan:





Cast Long Shadows excerpt


Old sins cast long shadows — English Proverb


London, 1901


The railway viaduct passed only a hair’s breadth away from the church of St. Savior. There had been discussion among the mundanes about the possibility of demolishing the church to make way for the railroad, but it had met with unexpectedly fierce opposition. Instead the railway took a slightly more circuitous route, and the spire of the church still remained, a silver dagger against the night sky.

Beneath the arches, crosses, and rattling rails, a mundane market was held by day, the largest association of grocers in the city. By night, the market belonged to the Downworld.

Vampires and werewolves, warlocks and the fey, met under the stars and under glamour that human eyes could not pierce. They had their magic stalls set up in the same pattern as the humans’ stalls, under the bridges and through tiny streets, but the Shadow Market stalls did not hold apples or turnips. Under the dark arches the stalls shone, laden with bells and ribbons, gaudy with color: snake green, fever red, and the startling orange of flames. Brother Zachariah smelled incense burning and heard the songs of werewolves for the distant beauty of the moon, and faeries calling for children to come away, come away.

It was the first Shadow Market of the New Year by English standards, though it was still the old year in China. Brother Zachariah had left Shanghai when he was a child, and London when he was seventeen, to go to the Silent City, where there was no acknowledgment of time passing save that the ashes of more warriors were laid down. Still he remembered the celebrations of the New Year in his human life, from egg nog and fortune-telling in London to the setting off of fireworks and nibbling of moon dumplings in Shanghai.

Now, snow was falling on London. The air was crisp and cold as a fresh apple, and felt good against his face. The voices of his brothers were a low hum in his head, affording Brother Zachariah a little distance.

Zachariah was here on a mission, but he took a brief time to be glad he was in London, in the Shadow Market, to breathe air clear of the dust of the departed. It felt something like freedom, like being young again.

He rejoiced, but that did not mean the people of the Shadow Market rejoiced with him. He observed many Downworlders, and even mundanes with the Sight, casting him looks that were the opposite of welcoming. As he moved, a dark murmur threaded through the hum of conversation all around him.

The denizens of the Downworld considered this Market time as space snatched away from angels. They clearly did not relish his presence among them. Brother Zachariah was one of the Silent Brothers, a voiceless fraternity that lived long amid old bones, sworn to seclusion with hearts dedicated to the dust of their city and their dead. Nobody could be expected to embrace a Silent Brother, and these people would not be likely to take pleasure in the appearance of any Shadowhunter at all.

Even as he doubted, he saw a stranger sight than any he had expected in the Market.

There was a Shadowhunter boy dancing a cancan with three faeries. He was Charlotte and Henry Fairchild’s younger son, Matthew Fairchild. His head was thrown back, his fair hair bright by firelight, and he was laughing.

Brother Zachariah had an instant to wonder if Matthew was spellbound before Matthew caught sight of him and bounded forward, leaving the fairies behind him looking discomfited. The Fair Folk were not accustomed to having mortals skip out on their dances.