Chain of Thorns (The Last Hours, #3)

The room was dark. A little light came through from Anna’s side of the door, where a candle was burning; still, Ari could see Anna mostly as a silhouette, but it hardly mattered. She would recognize her anywhere, in any light.

“Anna,” she whispered, sitting up, but Anna only put a finger to her lips and climbed onto the bed. She wore a silk dressing gown; it was too big for her and slid down her slender shoulders. On her knees, she reached for Ari, her lean fingers cupping Ari’s face in her hands, then ducked her head to meet Ari’s lips with her own.

Ari had not realized how starved for Anna’s touch she had been. She gathered fistfuls of the silk dressing gown in her hands, pulling Anna closer, realizing she wore nothing under it. Her hands found the hard silk of Anna’s skin, stroking her back as they kissed harder.

Ari reached for the lamp on her nightstand, but Anna caught her wrist. “No,” she whispered. “No lights.”

Surprised, Ari drew her hand back. She stroked Anna’s short curls as Anna kissed her throat, but a sense of unease had begun to creep in, threading through the haze of her desire. There was something harsh about the way Anna was kissing her, something desperate. “Darling,” she murmured, reaching to stroke Anna’s cheek.

It was damp. Anna was crying.

Ari bolted upright. She scrabbled for the witchlight under her pillow and lit it, casting them both into a whitish glow; Anna, one hand holding her dressing gown closed, was sitting back on her heels. She looked at Ari defiantly, with red-rimmed eyes.

“Anna,” Ari breathed. “Oh, my poor darling…”

Anna’s eyes darkened. “I suppose you think I am weak.”

“No,” Ari said vehemently. “Anna, you are the strongest person I know.”

“I told myself not to come to you,” Anna said bitterly. “You should not have to share the burden of my grief. It is mine to carry.”

“It is ours,” said Ari. “No one is strong and unyielding all the time, and none of us should be. We all have to let down our guard sometime. We are made up of different parts, sad and happy, strong and weak, solitary and in need of others. And there is nothing shameful about that.”

Anna took Ari’s hand and looked down at it, as if she were marveling at its construction. “If we are all made up of different parts, then I am quite the chessboard.”

Ari turned Anna’s hand over in hers, then laid it over her heart. “Never a chessboard,” she said. “Nothing so plain. You are a brightly colored pachisi board. You’re a backgammon set with triangles of inlaid mother-of-pearl and pieces of gold and silver. You are the queen of hearts.”

“And you,” Anna said softly, “are the lamp that gives light, without which the game cannot be played.”

Ari felt tears burn behind her eyes, but for the first time in days, they were not unhappy tears. She held her arms out, and Anna lay down beside her, curling into her, her head on Ari’s shoulder, her breathing soft as velvet against Ari’s hair.





29 EXILE FROM LIGHT




At whose approach, ghosts, wandering here and there,

Troop home to churchyards: damned spirits all,

That in crossways and floods have burial,

Already to their wormy beds are gone;

For fear lest day should look their shames upon,

They willfully themselves exile from light

And must for aye consort with black-brow’d night.

—William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream



A stinging fine rain had started coming down while Cordelia waited outside the gates of the cemetery. It felt like cold needles against her skin.

She had heard of the Cross Bones Graveyard, but she had never been here before tonight. It had been Lucie’s decision that this was where they would enact their plan. Cordelia had seen no reason not to go along with it; Lucie knew London far better than she did.

According to Lucie, Will Herondale had often come here as a young man. It was a graveyard where the unblessed, unmourned, and unconsecrated were buried; the dead here were restless, eager to interact. Will had the Herondale gift of seeing ghosts, and the ghosts of Cross Bones would share information with him: about demons, about secret places in London, about history that only they remembered.

In the time since Will had been a boy, civilization had crept closer to Cross Bones. The city pressed in around it. Two ugly redbrick charity schools had been built and loomed over the square patch of land behind the cemetery gates. Cordelia was not sure what time it was, but no one was on the streets. The mundanes seemed less active at night, and she could not help but wonder if they were also more sensitive to places like Cross Bones in their enchanted state.

The Watchers, of course, would be a different story, and she kept an eye out for them, her hand on the hilt of Cortana. She prayed she would not have to draw it before the time was right, though she felt the joy of having it back with her, the sense of rightness that came with its presence.

She glanced back at Cross Bones. She could see Lucie only as a shadow, moving around the graveyard. She seemed to be dusting off her hands; a moment later she approached the rusted gates, her face a pale smudge against the darkness. She was dressed in gear, her hair tied back in a plait, a small rucksack over her shoulders.

“Daisy.” Lucie illuminated a witchlight, keeping the light low, and began to fiddle with the mechanism on her side of the gates. “Any Watchers? Were we followed?”

Cordelia shook her head as Lucie pulled the gate open with a squeak of hinges. She ducked through the small gap and into the circle of Lucie’s witchlight. “Everything’s ready?” she whispered as Lucie closed the gate carefully behind her.

“Ready as it can be,” Lucie said in her normal speaking voice, which sounded unnaturally loud in the stillness. “Follow me.”

Cordelia did, Lucie’s witchlight dancing ahead of her like a will-o’-the-wisp leading an unwary traveler to a dark fate. Still, she was grateful for the light. She could see where she was walking over rocky, uneven ground, weeds poking up through the gravelly soil. She had at least expected grave markers, but there were none. The unconsecrated dead who lay beneath their feet had had any sign of their presence erased by time and progress. It looked more like an abandoned building lot than anything else, with stacks of rotting lumber forgotten in corners, along with old pencils, notebooks, and other refuse from the charity schools.

“Grim, isn’t it?” Lucie said, leading Cordelia between two conical piles of rock. Small cairns, perhaps? “They buried fallen women here, and paupers whose relatives couldn’t afford a funeral. People London thought ought to be forgotten.” She sighed. “Usually in a graveyard there are some souls not at rest. But here, there are no souls at rest. Everyone here was uncared for and unwanted. I know my father used to come here—he was friends with a ghost called Old Mol—but I don’t know how he could stand it. It’s so unbearably sad.”

“Did you have to—you know, command them?” Cordelia asked.

“No.” Lucie sounded as if she were a bit surprised herself. “They wanted to help. All right—here we are.” She stopped at a spot near the cemetery’s back wall. There was nothing notable about it to Cordelia, but Lucie seemed sure of herself. She raised her witchlight and said, “I suppose there’s no reason to wait. Go ahead, Daisy.”

“Here?” Cordelia said. “Now?”

“Yes. You’re standing in exactly the right place.”

Cordelia took a deep breath and drew Cortana. A ripple of power passed through her arm, followed by joy: it was clear Cortana still wanted her, still chose her. How she had missed this: the match of the sword and the wielder. It gave off a faint golden glow, a beacon in the demonic darkness. She raised her other hand and drew the blade across her palm. It was so sharp that she barely felt it as her skin opened. Fat drops of blood pattered onto the ground.

The ground shuddered. Lucie’s eyes widened as a blackened glow, like a hole in the night itself, appeared, and the Mother of Demons emerged from it.

She wore a gown of silver silk, and her feet were shod in slippers of the same silver material. Her hair was coiled around her head in braids the color of hematite. The black, shining scales of the snakes in her eyes glittered as they darted back and forth, taking in the scene before her.

“Really,” she said, sounding annoyed. “I had hoped that after you killed the Blackthorn woman, it would give you a taste for blood. I did not hope it would be your own blood.” She glanced around—at the graveyard, at the sky full of rolling gray-and-black clouds. “Belial has rather outdone himself, hasn’t he?” she said, with a sort of reluctant admiration. “I suppose you want me to do something about it, and that’s why you’re bothering me?”

“Not quite,” said Cordelia. She could feel her heart pounding. She bit the inside of her cheek. She would not show Lilith fear. “I think you will find what I have to say interesting.”