His mother was screaming his name, and the whole house was on fire.Jace was twelve. Black smoke rolled along the ceiling of the hallway in the Berkshires house. The carpet was wet under his bare feet, and it stank of gasoline, a sharp, sweet smell that burned his eyes."Jace! Jace, where are you?"She crawled out of the smoke on her knees. Her dark hair was wild. Her face was black with soot, and tears had cut clean lines through it. She grabbed his wrist and snapped something cold and heavy around it."Don't take it off," she sobbed. "Ever. It only opens for our blood.""Mom, come with me. Mom!"She shoved him through the open window. He fell into wet grass. When he looked up, the window was full of orange light, and she was gone from it."Is he having a seizure?"The Whitmore dining room crashed back around him: white marble under his cheek, his own blood, twenty faces staring down."Is he on something?""Somebody film this."Jace curled around his wrist, around the bangle, and a s

Lily’s hand was so small under the sheet that it barely made a shape.Jace found it anyway. He slid his fingers under the thin blanket and closed them around hers. Her skin was cold and dry, like paper left out overnight.The clock above the door said 5:12. The monitor beeped softly. In the corner chair Clara slept curled under her white coat, and Jace had his hood still up from the walk past the nurses’ station.An oxygen tube ran under Lily’s nose. The blue scarf had slipped off her head, and without it she looked like a baby bird fallen out of a nest.He lifted her hand to his lips. Faint white lines ran across each of her fingernails, thin and straight, like chalk marks. When he bent close, her breath smelled of garlic.Hospital food, he had told her last month, pinching his nose to make her giggle.“I’m here, Lily-bug,” he whispered. “I came.”Her eyelids fluttered and stayed shut.“Who let him in?”A doctor stood in the doorway with a tablet under his arm. He had silver hair and

Clara would not look at him, not even when he said her name.She sat in the leather chair beside her mother's desk, turning her engagement ring around and around her finger. The diamond was the size of a thumbnail. It caught the lights of the whole city every time it turned.On Jace's own hand, a thin gold band from a pawn shop on Tremont Street had worn a pale groove into his finger. He pressed his thumb against it."Clara."She turned the ring.On the desk between them lay the divorce papers, squared neatly. A heavy black pen lay across them, the way Evelyn laid her knife across her plate when she was finished with a meal.The office was on the forty-first floor. Behind the desk, Boston glittered all the way to the harbor. Cael Sterling leaned one shoulder on the glass in a charcoal suit, scrolling through his phone like a man waiting for a train."You saved her," Clara said to her lap. "Everyone at the hospital knows. Thank you." Her voice was flat and careful, like words read off

The cuffs lay on the steel table like something that had died there.Detective Brennan had unlocked them from Jace’s wrists and dropped them in the middle of the table, and nobody had touched them since. Brennan kept his rumpled gray coat on. Beside Jace, Grace Shaw sat with her folio open and her pen still, watching the detective the way a cat watches a door.Brennan flipped open a thin folder and turned it around.“Here’s my problem,” he said. “You don’t exist.”Jace stared at him.“Jace Carter. No driver’s license. No passport. Never filed a tax return.” Brennan tapped the page. “Your marriage license lists a state ID number that was never issued. And the Social Security number?” He slid a second sheet across the steel. “Belongs to a Jason Carter. Pneumonia. Worcester, 2011. Age nine.”A small black-and-white photo sat at the top of the sheet. It showed a skinny boy with a buzz cut, grinning, one front tooth missing.Under it, Brennan had clipped a copy of the marriage license.Jac