Chain of Thorns (The Last Hours, #3)

He waited for the rune to vanish. Instead it lingered. Not for more than a minute, perhaps, but as James stared, it remained, fading very slowly, on Matthew’s arm.

Matthew had stopped jerking and trembling in James’s grasp. As the healing rune faded slowly, James flew into action: he drew another, and then another and another, starting a new one each time the previous one dwindled.

Matthew was no longer shaking. He was taking deep, steady breaths, looking down in incredulity at his arm, where a crisscrossing map of healing runes—some new, some fading—covered his forearm. “Jamie bach,” he said. “You can’t do this all night.”

“Watch me,” James said grimly, and braced himself against the wall so that he could keep drawing for as long as it took.



* * *



Grace and Jesse had found a bag of miniature explosives in the laboratory and had amused themselves for nearly an hour by setting several of them off in the fireplace. They worked like fireworks, though rather than setting them alight, one tapped them with a stele and then tossed them a distance away, where they would sound a loud crack before exploding.

It was nice to laugh with Jesse a little bit, even if the laughter was really half exhaustion. It was astonishing what one could get used to: dodging Watchers and slinking through abandoned houses. Broken glass and turned-over carriages in the streets. On every face, a blank stare. No worse, perhaps, than living under the roof of Tatiana Blackthorn for eight years.

What Grace couldn’t get used to was her sense of utter frustration. She had all of Christopher’s notes, and her own as well. In her time in the Silent City, she had felt on the verge of a breakthrough, as if the solution to the problem with fire-messages was at the tips of her fingers. Hers and Christopher’s.

But now… With Jesse’s help, she had tried everything she could think of—swapping out ingredients, changing out the runes. Nothing worked. They had not even achieved the level of success Christopher had in managing to send half-burned, illegible messages.

It was the one thing she should have been able to contribute, she thought. She and Jesse had given up on the explosives and were instead staring at a piece of rune-covered vellum spread out on the worktable. The one good thing she could have done, the one way she could have helped after doing so much harm. But it seemed even that would be denied to her.

“How can we tell if it’s working?” Jesse said, eyeing the vellum on the table. “What’s it supposed to do, exactly?”

In a clear sign of rejection by the universe, the scroll of vellum let off a cough of smoke before exploding with a bang, flying backward off the table, and landing on the floor between them, where it continued to burn, not consuming the vellum.

“Not that,” Grace said.

She went to fetch the fireplace tongs leaning against the far corner of the room. These she used to retrieve the vellum—still burning—and deposit it into the fireplace.

“Look on the bright side,” said Jesse. “You’ve invented… ever-burning vellum. Christopher would be proud. He loved when things didn’t stop burning.”

“Christopher,” Grace said, “would have finished this already. Christopher was a scientist. I like science. Those are two very different things.” She stared down at the burning vellum. It was rather pretty, edged in white flame like lacework. “It’s ironic. Belial never asked Mother to kill Christopher. Never thought about him at all. But in murdering him, she may have ensured Belial’s success.”

The words were not enough. She threw her pencil across the room, where it clattered unsatisfactorily against a file cabinet.

Jesse raised an eyebrow. Grace wasn’t given to outbursts. “How long has it been since you’ve eaten anything?” he said.

Grace blinked. She couldn’t recall.

“I thought so. I’ll search through the pantry, all right? Hoping for biscuits, willing to make do with tinned beans.” He was already headed upstairs. Grace knew he was trying to give her a moment to gather herself, but she could only scrub tiredly at her aching eyes: Jesse wasn’t the problem. The problem was Christopher. She needed Christopher.

She laid her hand against the pitted, discolored wood of the worktable. How many of these blotches had Christopher made? Cutting, burning, spilling acid. Years of work, marked out here in scars, the way the lives of Shadowhunters were marked out in the pale memories of old runes on their skins.

Something flickered at the back of her mind. Something about runes. Runes and fire-messages.

Christopher would have known.

“Christopher,” she said softly, running the tips of her fingers over a long knife-cut in the wooden surface of the table. “I know you’re gone. And yet I feel you everywhere. In every beaker, every sample… every strange method of organization I run across… I see you everywhere, and I only wish I could have told you—that I care about you, Christopher. And I did not think that kind of feeling to be real. I thought it was a conceit of novels and plays, that one could… could want the happiness of another beyond even their own, beyond anything else. I wish I had understood it more when you were… when you were still alive.”

The silence of the laboratory seemed to echo all around her. She closed her eyes.

“Maybe you are here, though,” she said. “Maybe you’re keeping an eye on this place. I know Lucie said you were gone, but—how could you keep away? How could you not be curious beyond even the pull of death to see what happens? So if you are here… please. I’m so close, with the fire-messages. I’ve gone beyond where you were, but I haven’t found the solution yet. I need your help. The world needs your help. Please.”

Something touched her shoulder. A light touch, as if a butterfly had landed there. She stiffened, but something told her not to open her eyes.

“Grace.” A soft voice, unmistakable.

She sucked in her breath. “Oh—Christopher—”

“Don’t turn around,” he said. “Or look at me. I am only a very little bit here, Grace. It is taking all my strength for you to hear me. I cannot also make myself seen.”

Don’t turn around. She thought of Orpheus in the Greek tales, who had been forbidden from turning to look behind him at his dead wife as he escorted her from the underworld. He had failed, and lost her. Grace had always thought he was silly—surely it could not be that difficult simply not to turn around and look at someone.

But it was. She felt the ache inside her like pain, the loss of Christopher. Who had understood her, and not judged her.

“I thought,” she whispered, “ghosts could only return if they had unfinished business. Are the fire-messages yours?”

“I think,” he said, “that you are my unfinished business.”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t need my help to solve this,” said Christopher, and she could see him, behind her eyelids, looking at her with his funny quizzical smile, his eyes such a dark violet behind his spectacles. “You only need to believe that you can solve it. And you can. You are a natural scientist, Grace, and a solver of puzzles. All you have to do is silence the voice in your head that says you aren’t good enough, don’t know enough. I have faith in you.”

“I think you are the only one who does,” Grace said.

“That’s not true. Jesse believes in you. In fact, all of them believe in you. They have left this task in your hands, Grace. Because they believe you can do it. It is only up to you to believe it too.”

Behind her eyelids, now, she saw not Christopher, but the notes he had given her—his observations, his equations, his questions. His handwriting scrolling across the darkness, and then her own notes, intertwining with his, and Christopher believed in her. And Jesse, Jesse believed in her. And just because her mother had never thought she was worth anything didn’t mean her mother had been right.

“It’s not the runes,” she said, almost opening her eyes with the shock of the realization. “It’s not the chemicals, either. It’s the steles.”

“I knew you could do it.” She heard the smile in his voice. “And you’ve invented ever-burning vellum. Splendid work, Grace.”

Something brushed against her temple, tucking her hair behind her ear. A ghostly touch, a goodbye. A moment later, she knew he was gone.

She opened her eyes, turning to look behind her. There was nothing there, yet the wave of despair she had expected did not crash over her. Christopher was not there, but the memory of him was like a presence—and more than that, a new feeling, something blossoming under her rib cage, something that made her push aside the papers in front of her and reach for her stele, ready to get to work.

Something that she imagined felt very like the beginning of believing in herself.



* * *