Chain of Thorns (The Last Hours, #3)

Those waiting on the London side glanced around at one another. After a long moment, Martin Wentworth followed Charles, and he too turned to wave. He seemed to be mouthing, Idris, before he walked out of sight.

Now the crowd was moving. They began to arrange themselves in a loose queue, filing toward the gate, stepping through it one by one. Cordelia looked over at Anna as Piers and Catherine passed through, accompanying Christopher’s body on its wheeled bier; Anna was utterly motionless, a stone statue.

Eugenia went through, carrying Winston in his cage, which she had taken from Ari. “Farewell! Farewell!” Winston called, until his chirping voice was swallowed up by the Portal. Flora Bridgestock had gone to speak to Ari, who shook her head sternly; Flora went through the Portal alone, casting a despondent glance back at her daughter before she stepped across the threshold.

“Layla,” Risa said, laying a hand on Cordelia’s arm. “It’s time to go.”

Cordelia heard Alastair suck in his breath. She looked over at her mother in the Bath chair. Sona had her hands folded in her lap; she was looking at her children with dark, questioning eyes. She suspects, Cordelia thought, though she could not prove it, could not be sure. She could only hope her mother would understand.

Risa had begun to push her mother’s chair forward, clearly expecting Cordelia and Alastair to follow.

“Oscar!” Thomas shouted. Cordelia whirled to see that Oscar had broken free of his leash and was galloping delightedly in circles.

“Bloody dog,” Alastair cursed, and ran to help Thomas catch the wayward retriever.

As Thomas reached out for the dog, Oscar broke to the left and pranced away, yapping merrily. “Bad dog!” Thomas called, as Lucie ran toward him, reaching for Oscar’s collar. “This is not the time!”

“Risa—I have to help. Bring M?m?n through; I’ll see you on the other side in a moment,” Cordelia said. With one last look at her mother, she ran to join the others.

Anna, Jesse, Ari, and Thomas had spread out into a circle, trying to trap Oscar inside. Lucie was calling, “Here, Oscar, here,” clapping her hands together to catch his attention. Members of the Enclave continued to pass by, giving Cordelia and her friends a wide berth as Oscar frolicked, running up first to Ari, then darting just out of her grip, then doing the same to Grace and Jesse.

“Leave the dog, idiots!” yelled Augustus Pounceby, who was just passing through the Portal. He was nearly the last one going through, Cordelia saw; there were perhaps five Nephilim behind him.

Not long now.

Oscar flung himself down on the ground and rolled, his legs waving. It was Anna who got down on her knees, as the last of the Enclave—Ida Rosewain—passed through the Portal. She laid a hand on Oscar’s side. “Good dog,” she said. “What a very good dog you are, Oscar.”

Oscar rose to his feet and nosed gently at her shoulder. The Embankment was nearly deserted now. Cordelia looked around at the group who remained: she and Alastair, Anna and Ari, Thomas, Lucie, Jesse, Grace.

The Portal still beckoned; Cordelia and the others could still see glimpses of the cold plains outside Idris, the milling crowd of Nephilim beginning to regroup on the other side. They could still choose to step through. But to do so would be to abandon not just London, but Matthew and James. And they were none of them going to do that.

Thomas stepped forward to clip Oscar’s leash back on. “Good boy,” he said, rubbing Oscar gently behind the ears. “You did exactly what you were meant to do.”

“Who would have thought Matthew Fairchild’s dog would be so well trained?” Alastair said. “I assumed Oscar lived a life of dissipated debauchery at the Hell Ruelle.”

“Matthew and James used to train Oscar together,” said Lucie. “They taught him all sorts of games and tricks, and—” Her eyes were bright. “Well. It worked. I hadn’t thought it would.”

Cordelia suspected none of them really had, not when they had come up with the idea in the desperate dead of night, with only hours to go before morning and departure. Yet they had all gone along with it, faithfully; in times like this, it seemed, faith was all one had.

“I feel so guilty,” Ari murmured. “My mother—what will she think when I don’t join her?”

“Eugenia will explain our plan to everyone,” Thomas said. “She promised she would.” He straightened up, staring toward the gate. “The Portal’s closing.”

They all watched, locked in place, as the view through the archway faded. Shadows crowded in, like black paint covering a canvas, erasing first the mountains, then the plains below them, and the distant images of the Shadowhunters who waited on the other side.

The Portal winked out of existence. The archway had gone back to being what it was: a gate that comes from nowhere and goes to nowhere. Their way out of London had vanished.

“Now what?” Grace whispered, staring at the darkness below the arch.

Cordelia took a deep breath. “Now we go back to the Institute.”



* * *



From the York Gate it was only a short walk back, but it had a very different, more dangerous feel than the trip there. Then they had been following Belial’s orders; now they were defying them and hoping they weren’t noticed.

Lucie felt like they were mice trapped in a basin, and somewhere above hovered a cat. She watched the mundanes move through the streets in their daze. It was not mercy, she knew, that had prevented Belial from killing everyone in the city, or expelling them as he had the Shadowhunters. It was that he wanted to rule over London—not an empty shell that had been London, not a ruin of London, but the city as he knew it, complete with bankers walking to work with newspapers under their arms, with women selling flowers outside churches, with tradesmen driving their carts to their next jobs.

When the eight of them had made their plan, after the terrible meeting yesterday, they’d agreed they would stay in the Institute. They were fairly sure that the Watchers, and any other of Belial’s demons who might be roaming the streets, would attack them on sight now, and it was easier to secure one house than many. Also, Lucie thought, it was too depressing for them to sleep in their empty houses, and Grace had nowhere else to go.

Even Oscar’s expression was grave as he trotted alongside Thomas. The silence weighed on Lucie. She had mostly spent the time since James and Matthew had been taken shut up in her room, often with Jesse’s company. He was—as she supposed ought not surprise her—excellent at providing silent and almost invisible support. He stayed with her quietly as she read her old stories and wondered what she had been thinking, how she could have been so carefree and playful. Sometimes Jesse held her on the bed, stroking his fingers gently through her hair; they were careful not to do much more than that. When alone, she stared at blank pages for hours, sometimes writing a line, then crossing it out in violent slashes of ink.

Christopher was dead. Lucie had reached out for him and felt nothing. She did not want to force it—she knew from experience that calling up spirits that were not already haunting the human world was a violent act, that they came reluctantly at best. Wherever they were, it was better than being a ghost.

James was gone, and Matthew with him. Were they still alive? Belial could only possess James while he lived, and surely if he’d succeeded in that, he would have already come back to taunt them about it. It was bizarre to see that the Merry Thieves, who had been the lifeblood of all her friends, who had been the central ring, strong as steel, to which everyone else could attach themselves securely, had been whittled down to only Thomas.

And now they were back at the Institute courtyard, which was empty and quiet, as it always was. There was no scar here, no sign of the dreadful things that had happened there such a short time ago. Lucie envisioned a plaque: HERE IS WHERE IT ALL BROKE APART. Matthew and James’s vanishing, Christopher’s death—they seemed both very close, a trauma still ongoing, and yet far away.

On the other hand, she thought, this courtyard had been torn up by Leviathan a couple of weeks ago, and there was no sign of that, either. Perhaps to be a Shadowhunter simply meant drawing runes over one’s scars, over and over.

Inside, all was just as silent and empty, an eerie change after the bustle that had filled the place for the last days. Their boots rang loudly against the stone floor and echoed off the walls. As they made their way up the central staircase, Jesse slid his gloved hand into hers.

“Did you notice Bridget leave?” he said in a low voice. “I swear I didn’t see her in the crowd.”

Lucie was startled. “No—I didn’t—but she must have, mustn’t she? Probably we were all too busy with Oscar to notice.”