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you come to my room after we get back?” Emma asked, flicking on the headlights. “I want to show you something.”
    Cristina frowned. “It isn’t a strange birthmark or a wart, is it? My abuela said she wanted to show me something once, and it turned out to be a wart on her—”
    “It’s not a wart!” As Emma pulled the car out and merged with the rest of the traffic, she sensed anxiety fizzing through her veins. Usually she felt exhausted after a fight as the adrenaline drained out of her.
    Now, though, she was about to show Cristina something that no one but Julian had ever seen. Something she herself wasn’t exactly proud of. She couldn’t help wondering how Cristina would take it.

2
    N EITHER THE A NGELS IN H EAVEN
    “Julian calls it my Wall of Crazy,” Emma said.
    She and Cristina were standing in front of the closet in Emma’s bedroom, the door of which was propped wide open.
    The closet was empty of clothes. Emma’s wardrobe, mostly vintage dresses and jeans she’d picked up in secondhand stores in Silver Lake and Santa Monica, was either hung in her armoire or folded in her dresser. The inside walls of the closet in her blue-painted room (the mural on the bedroom wall of swallows in flight over the towers of a castle had been done by Julian when she first moved in, a nod to the symbol of the Carstairs family) were covered in photographs, newspaper clippings, and sticky notes in Emma’s cramped handwriting.
    “Everything is color coded,” she said, indicating the sticky notes. “Stories from mundane newspapers, research into spells, research into demonic languages, things I’ve managed to get out of Diana over the years . . . It’s everything I’ve ever found that connects to my parents’ deaths.”
    Cristina moved closer to examine the walls, then swung around suddenly to stare at Emma. “Some of these look like official Clave files.”
    “They are,” Emma said. “I stole them from the Consul’s office in Idris when I was twelve.”
    “You stole these from Jia Penhallow?” Cristina looked horrified. Emma supposed she couldn’t blame her. The Consul was the highest elected official in the Clave—only the Inquisitor came close in terms of power and influence.
    “Where else was I going to get photos of my parents’ bodies?” Emma asked, shrugging off her jacket and tossing it onto her bed. She wore a tank top underneath, the breeze from the wilderness cool on her bare arms.
    “So the pictures I took tonight—where do they go?”
    Cristina handed them to Emma. They were still damp with toner—the first thing they’d done when they’d gotten back to the Institute was print out the two clearest photos of the alleyway body from Cristina’s phone. Emma leaned in and pinned them carefully beside the Clave photos of her own parents’ bodies—dimmed with time now and curling at the edges.
    She leaned back and looked from one to the other. The markings were ugly, spiky, hard to concentrate on. They seemed to push back against being viewed. They weren’t a demon language anyone had been able to identify to her, but they felt as if no human mind could have conceived of them.
    “So now what?” Cristina said. “I mean, what is your plan for what to do next?”
    “I’ll see what Diana says tomorrow,” Emma said. “If she found out anything. Do the Silent Brothers already know about the murders Rook was talking about? If they don’t, I’ll go back to the Shadow Market. I’ll dig up whatever money I’ve got, or owe Johnny Rook a favor—I don’t care. If someone’s killing people now and covering their bodies with this writing, then it means—it means Sebastian Morgenstern didn’t kill my parents five years ago. It means I’m right, and their deaths were something else.”
    “It might not mean exactly that, Emma.” Cristina’s voice was gentle.
    “I’m one of the few people alive who saw Sebastian Morgenstern attack an Institute,” said Emma. It was both one of her