She'd been impressed by his looks at first--those sharply planed cheekbones and those black, fathomless eyes--but his affable, sympathetic personality grated on her now. She didn't like boys who looked as if they never got mad about anything. In Isabelle's world, rage equaled passion equaled a good time.

Pain is only what you allow it to be

Well, then, since you say there will be another life for me, let us both pray I do not make as colossal a mess of it as I have this one.

She was afraid you'd freak out? Start seeing demons in the White House?

I don't care," Clary said. "He'd do it for me. Tell me he wouldn't. If I were missing-" "He'd burn the whole world down till he could dig you out of the ashes. I know," Alec said.

Meanwhile, Will had begun cutting his toast into strips and was making rude pictographs out of them. Oh, that looks rather like a ...- , Jem began.

He played of love and loss and years of silence, words unsaid and vows unspoken, and all the spaces between his heart and theirs; and when he was done, and he'd set the violin back in its box, Will's eyes were closed, but Tessa's were full of tears.