City of Redemption

Three

Mia almost felt bad. She knew Jonathan wasn't Sebastian. She could see how her glares were hurting him. If it was any other person, she'd be apologizing already and baking them up a storm. But it was the boy who'd murdered her cousins, and she wasn't ready to forgive him yet. The Rosewains had headed home since Jonathan and Miri had showed up at the Institute doors, since Milo was complaining and everyone really wanted to just go to bed. All the Rosewains were now soundly asleep, except for Mia.

It was three in the morning, and she was in the family library that was nestled in the finished basement. She was seated on a very comfortable couch with Rosa, who was sleeping soundly beside Mia, and she had an enormous stack of books on the side table. The library was filled with Shadowhunter and mundane books alike. All of Mia's books were upstairs on her shelf (she had an entire shelf just for Jane Austen and Agatha Christie) but the books on Shadowhunting were downstairs.

It was a little known fact that Mia was an insomniac. It wasn't a family trait— her family could all conk out like logs in the blink of an eye. But Mia could stay up all night without her eyes drooping. Especially when there was reading involved.

She knew something had happened that night. She'd seen it immediately on both Miri and Jonathan's faces. Miri had explained to her vaguely what they'd seen. A pentagram. A Forsaken. And the fact that apparently the Forsaken had been summoned by the pentagram, which was bizarre. Mia had never heard of anything like that. Pentagrams summoned demons, and Forsaken were mundanes who'd had too much fun with a stele. She'd already torn through her father's best Shadowhunting volumes, but she had one good source left— the Codex. Her family's copy was in less-than-perfect shape. The margins were full of scribbled notes in German, and the front and back inside covers were covered with doodles that Mia herself had done when she was about six. Nevertheless, it was the Codex, and it would suffice. She flipped quickly to the pages nobody ever really read that much— the pages on Forsaken.

It is only shortly after the creation of the first Nephilim that humanity came to know, to its detriment, what happens if you Mark a person who does not have Shadowhunter blood, or who has not been made a Shadowhunter by drinking from the Mortal Cup.

Mia frowned. It was known by everyone that Forsaken were mundanes, and not demons. That led to two problems. First, the pentagram that had been able to summon the supposed Forsaken. Second, Mia had not missed the fact that Jonathan had left with an expensive coat and returned without one. She knew he hadn't left it at the crime scene; she'd checked before she went home. There was a darn good chance he'd had to strip it because it had been burned by the blood of the Forsaken.

The Forsaken.

Whose blood should not be that of a demon. Forsaken could even be theoretically turned into Shadowhunters if they drank from the Mortal Cup. That meant that what Jonathan had seen was not a Forsaken. It was something else entirely. Mia leaned back on the squashy couch that she'd been sitting on for the last two hours, thinking. She twirled a strand of hair around her finger, thinking to what this could mean. She glanced upon the pictures on the wall of her ancestors. Her favourite picture was one of a woman Shadowhunter who'd run the London Institute in the late 1800s. Charlotte Branwell. Mia had always heard stories about her great-great-aunt Charlotte. Tales of clockwork monsters, family, and even one about—

"Oh my God," Mia said, sitting upright. Rosa sat up too, shocked at the sudden movement. She barked once in protest. The Codex fell off her lap and onto the floor, and she almost knocked over the pink mug that held her hot cocoa. Mia immediately grabbed the Codex and flipped to the table of contents. Her eyes zoomed across the page until she found what she was looking for. She flipped to the right page and began to read. Her hazel eyes widened as she read. She dog-eared the page and raced upstairs, Codex in hand. She first grabbed her phone off the counter and dialled the first number on her list. After a few rings, she picked up.