Learn About Loss by Cassandra Clare

Author:Cassandra Clare
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shadow Market Enterprises
Published: 2018-06-19T16:00:00+00:00

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

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