Chain of Thorns (The Last Hours, #3)

Cold crept into his bones. Perhaps he had drawn the rune incorrectly, though he knew in his heart that he hadn’t. He did it again. Waited again.

Nothing. Only the wind blowing particles of ice and soot, and the terrible silence of a London without birdsong, traffic, or the calls of barrow boys.

Lucie was gone.

He made his way warily back to his room, and crossed most of the way to the bed before he realized it was occupied. There was a sort of nest of blankets in the center, mixed up with scattered papers, and in the middle of the nest was Grace. She was curled up, her feet bandaged, wearing a clean linen nightgown. Her pale hair was in braids. She looked years younger than she was, less like the young woman she had become and more like the little girl he had trained and protected to the best of his ability so many years ago.

“They’re gone,” she said. “Aren’t they?”

Jesse sat down at the foot of the bed. “How did you know?”

She tugged at a braid. “I couldn’t sleep. I was looking out the window and saw them go outside together. And then you rushed out, and it looked like you were trying to Track them.” She frowned. “Where’d they go?”

Jesse fished Lucie’s note from his trouser pocket and handed it to Grace, who unfolded it curiously. When she was done, she looked at Jesse with worried eyes.

“I knew they were planning something,” she said. “I didn’t know it was this. Edom, and Lilith—I don’t know—”

“How did you know they were planning something?” asked Jesse, furrowing his brow.

“The way they were looking at each other,” Grace said. “Like—they had a secret.”

“I feel a fool,” Jesse said. “I didn’t notice.”

“I used to have a secret with Lucie. You. I know what she looks like when she’s planning something. Cordelia’s harder to read, but…” Grace cast her eyes down. “I’m sorry I didn’t guess what it was. I would have said something. Even when I saw them leave, I assumed they were just hunting Watchers, or looking for more Downworlders.…”

“It’s not your fault,” Jesse said. Her eyes were huge, the color of mirrors, and fixed on him. He meant it, though—he didn’t blame her; not for this, at least.

“It’s strange,” he said. “When I was a ghost, I could sense Lucie, you know. I could simply… reach out into the shadows and always find her. Appear wherever she was. But not anymore.”

“Now you’re alive,” Grace said quietly. “You must live within human limitations. And within those, there is nothing you could have done.”

“I wish Lucie had told me,” Jesse said, looking down at his hands. “I could have tried to talk her out of it.…”

Grace said, not unkindly, “I’ve come to know Lucie quite well, you know, these last months. She was probably as close to a friend as I have ever had. And I know—and you know, too, I don’t doubt—that she is very determined. This is what she wanted, and she would have let nothing stand in her way. Not even you.”

“Even if I couldn’t have stopped her,” Jesse said, “I could have gone with her.”

“No,” said Grace. “I mean—Jesse, if they’ve gone to Edom, it is only because Cordelia is protected by her bond with Lilith, and Lucie by her ties to Belial. It’s a demon realm, and you would have been in terrible danger—it’s why Lucie didn’t tell you, or anyone. I don’t know if Cordelia even told Alastair. They knew no one else could come.”

“I wouldn’t have minded,” Jesse said, clenching and unclenching his fists. “The risk, I mean.”

“Well, I would mind. If you risked yourself. I know you are angry with me, Jesse. I know you may never feel the same way about me again as you did once. But you are still my brother. You are part of my character, and if there is a little good in me, along with the evil, then it is there because of you.”

Jesse softened. He reached out and took Grace’s hand in his, and for a moment, they sat in silence.

“If it’s any consolation,” Grace said after a time, “I think that Lucie also went without you because she knew we needed you. There are only six of us here now. Six Shadowhunters to stand between London and the forever dark.”

“It’s a bit of consolation,” Jesse said. “And—there is good in you, Gracie,” he added, after a time. “The first thing you did when you escaped the Silent City was run here to warn us of Tatiana. You could simply have fled. It would have been easier, perhaps safer. Yet you took the risk.”

“I didn’t want her to win,” Grace said. “Mama. She had taken so much from me. I wanted her defeated. I hope it was goodness; I worry it was only stubbornness. We are both stubborn, you and I.”

“Is that a good thing?” Jesse said. “Maybe being stubborn will get us all killed.”

“Or maybe it will make the difference between winning and losing,” Grace said. “Maybe it’s just what we need right now. To not give up. To never give up. To fight all the way to the end.”



* * *



By the time the sun set, Matthew was shaking uncontrollably. It didn’t seem to matter if he was wrapped in his own coat and James’s, too; his teeth chattered together so hard that he’d gashed open his lower lip. Gasping that the taste of the blood nauseated him, he crawled some distance away and was sick, throwing up apples and water and, James worried, the last of Christopher’s sedative.

How much worse might this be, he wondered grimly, if Matthew had not already started to cut down his alcohol intake. He had been suffering before they’d come to Edom. James could only hope that what he had already paid in pain would reduce the cost to him now.

The moon rose in the sky, an eerie gray-white—and then a second moon, and a third. The courtyard was illuminated as brightly as it had been during the day, though the shadows between the dead trees were deeper. James went to get water, and he watched the reflection of the three moons tremble on the surface of the stone bowl.

He thought of his parents, far away in Alicante, in the shadow of the true Gard. They must have learned by now what had happened to London. To him. Someone would carry the news to them. Not Lucie—she would never agree to leave London to its fate.

When he returned to the wall, Matthew was resting his back against it, shivering. James tried to hand him the cup of water, but Matthew was shaking too hard to take it; James held the cup to his lips, encouraging him to drink until it was empty.

“I don’t want to be sick again,” Matthew said hoarsely, but James only shook his head.

“Better than dying of thirst,” he said, setting the cup down. “Come here.”

He pulled Matthew roughly toward him, Matthew’s back to his chest, and wrapped his arms around his parabatai. He had thought Matthew might protest, but he seemed beyond that: he only sagged back, an alarmingly light weight against him.

“This is good,” he said tiredly. “You’re better than a coat.”

James rested his chin on Matthew’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said.

He felt Matthew tense. “Sorry for what?”

“All of it,” James said. “Paris. The fight we had at the Shadow Market. When you told me that if I didn’t love Cordelia, I should let someone else love her. I was too blind to see what you meant.”

“You were,” Matthew said, with some difficulty, “under a spell. You said yourself, it blinded you—”

“Don’t,” James said. “Don’t excuse it. What you said, back at the Institute, about not being able to be angry with me—I’d rather you were. Even if you won’t blame me for anything I did under the bracelet’s control, what about after it was broken? I ought to have thought more about your feelings—”

“And I ought not to have run off to Paris with Cordelia,” said Matthew.

“I know how I must have seemed to you,” James said quietly. “Feckless, flighty, pointlessly cruel to Cordelia, and oblivious to all of it. In the name of an infatuation that made no sense to anyone but me.”

“It was still selfish. I thought… I told myself you didn’t love her. And that I loved her, loved being with her, because—”

“Because she is who she is,” James said.

“But also because she never knew me, as you did, before I drank. Not really. I had feelings for Lucie once, you know, but I could see in her eyes when she looked at me that she was waiting for me to go back to my old self. The Matthew I was before I ever picked up a bottle. Cordelia only knew me after I changed.” Matthew hugged his arms around his knees. “The truth is, I do not know the person I will be when I am entirely sober. I do not know if I will even like that person myself, assuming I survive to meet him.”

James wished he could see the expression on Matthew’s face. “Math. The drinking has not—did not—make you more witty, more charming, more worthy of love. What it did was make you forget. That is all.”