Chain of Thorns (The Last Hours, #3)

Cordelia let out a long exhale and unclenched her hands. “Nothing,” she said. “Just a dream. I dreamed that… that my father was calling to me. Asking me to save him.”


He sat down beside her, the mattress shifting under his weight. He smelled comfortingly of soap and cologne, and he took her hand and held it while her pulse slowed its racing. “You and I are the same,” he said. “We are sick in our souls from old wounds. I know you blame yourself—for Lilith, for James—and you must not, Daisy. We will recover together from our soul-sickness. Here, in Paris, we will conquer the pain.”

He held her hand until she fell asleep.



* * *



James wasn’t sure how he’d expected Lucie to respond to their arrival, but he was startled nonetheless at the fear that flashed across her face.

She took a step back, nearly knocking into the boy standing next to her—Jesse Blackthorn, it was Jesse Blackthorn—and flung her hands up, as if to ward them off. As if to ward off James, and her father.

“Oh, dear,” Magnus muttered.

This struck James as an understatement. He was exhausted—nightmare-plagued sleep interrupted by uncomfortable carriage rides, the unburdening of his soul to Magnus and his father, and a long, wet walk up a slippery cliff path to Malcolm Fade’s house had worn him down to the bone. Still, the look on Lucie’s face—worry, fear—sent protectiveness shooting through his veins.

“Luce,” he said, stepping into the cottage’s entryway. “It’s all right—”

Lucie looked at him gratefully for a moment, then flinched as Will, unsheathing a blade from his weapons belt, strode into the cottage and seized hold of Jesse Blackthorn by his shirtfront. Dagger in his fist, fury in his blue eyes, Will shoved Jesse hard against the wall.

“Foul spirit,” he snarled. “What have you done to my daughter to force her to bring you here? Where is Malcolm Fade?”

“Papa—no, don’t—” Lucie started toward Will, but James caught at her arm. He rarely saw his father angry, but Will had an explosive temper when roused, and threats to his family galvanized his rage more quickly than anything else.

“Tad,” James said urgently; he only used the word for father in Welsh when he was trying to get Will’s attention. “Wait.”

“Yes, please wait,” Lucie broke in. “I’m sorry I left as I did, but you don’t understand—”

“I understand that this was a corpse possessed by Belial,” Will said, holding his blade level with Jesse’s throat. Jesse didn’t move; he hadn’t moved, in fact, since Will had grabbed him, nor had he spoken. He was very pale (well, he would be, wouldn’t he, James thought), his green eyes burning. His hands hung carefully loose at his sides, as if to say, See, I present no threat. “I understand that my daughter is softhearted and thinks she can save every fallen sparrow. I understand that the dead cannot live again, not without exacting a terrible price on the living.”

James, Lucie, and Magnus all started to speak at once. Will said something, angrily, that James could not quite hear. Looking exasperated, Magnus snapped his fingers. Blue sparks leaped from them, and the world went utterly quiet. Even the sound of the wind was gone, swallowed up in Magnus’s spell.

“Enough of this,” the warlock said. He was leaning in the embrasure of the door, hat tipped over his forehead, his posture a study in exaggerated calm. “If we are discussing necromancy, or possible necromancy, that is my area of expertise, not yours.” He looked closely at Jesse, his gold-green eyes thoughtful. “Does he speak?”

Jesse raised his eyebrows.

“Oh, right,” Magnus said, and snapped his fingers again. “No more Silence spell. Proceed.”

“I speak,” Jesse said calmly, “when I have something to say.”

“Interesting,” Magnus murmured. “Does he bleed?”

“Oh no,” said Lucie. “Don’t encourage my father. Papa, don’t you dare—”

“Lucie,” Jesse said. “It’s all right.” He raised his hand—the one with the stolen Voyance rune slashed across the back. He brought his palm up and pressed it to the tip of Will’s dagger.

Blood welled, red and bright, and spilled down his hand, reddening the cuff of his white shirt.

Magnus’s eyes narrowed. “Even more interesting. All right, I’m tired of freezing in this doorway. Malcolm must have some sort of sitting room; he likes his creature comforts. Lucie, lead us to it.”

Once they had piled into the parlor—quainter and prettier than James would have guessed—Will and James sank down onto a long sofa. Lucie, on her feet, watched as Magnus placed Jesse in front of the roaring fire and commenced some kind of full magical examination of him.

“What are you looking for?” Jesse said. James thought he sounded nervous.

Magnus looked up at him briefly, his fingers dancing with blue sparks. Some had caught in Jesse’s hair, bright as scarab beetles.

“Death,” he said.

Jesse looked grimly stoic. James supposed he would have learned to endure unpleasant things, given the life he’d led—or was it a life? It had been once; but what would one call what he’d experienced since? A sort of nightmare life-in-death, like the monster from the Coleridge poem.

“He is not dead,” Lucie said. “He never was. Let me explain.” She sounded weary, as James had felt when spilling his own secrets at the wayside inn. How much trouble could have been avoided if they’d only all trusted one another in the first place? he thought.

“Luce,” James said gently. She looked so tired, he thought, at the same time both younger and older than he’d remembered. “Tell us.”

Much of Lucie’s story James could have guessed, in its broad strokes if not in its details. First came Jesse’s tale: the story of what Belial, and his own mother, had done to him. Much of it James already knew: how Belial had used the corrupt warlock Emmanuel Gast to seed a bit of Belial’s demonic essence inside Jesse when he was just a baby; how that essence had destroyed Jesse when the time came for his first Marks to be placed upon him. How Tatiana had turned her dying son into a sort of living specter: a ghost during the nights, a corpse during the days. How she had preserved his last breath in the gold locket that Lucie now wore about her neck, hoping one day to use it to bring Jesse back to life.

How Jesse had sacrificed that last breath, instead, to save James.

“Really?” Will sat forward, frowning in that way of his that suggested careful thought rather than displeasure. “But how—?”

“It’s true,” James said. “I saw him.”

A boy leaning over him: a boy with hair as black as his own, a boy with green eyes the color of spring leaves, a boy who was already beginning to fade around the edges, like a figure seen in a cloud that disappears when the wind changes.

“You said, ‘Who are you?’?” Jesse said. Magnus seemed to be done examining him; Jesse was leaning against the fireplace mantel, looking as if Lucie’s telling of her story—which was his, too—was draining him as well. “But—I couldn’t answer you.”

“I remember,” James said. “Thank you. For saving my life. I didn’t get to say it before.”

Magnus cleared his throat. “Enough sentimentality,” he said, obviously wishing to forestall Will, who looked as if he were considering leaping up and folding Jesse into a fatherly embrace. “We have a good understanding of what happened to Jesse. What we do not understand, dear Lucie, is how you brought him back from the state he was in. And I am afraid we must ask.”

“Now?” said James. “It’s late, she must be exhausted—”

“It’s all right, Jamie,” Lucie said. “I want to tell it.”

And she did. The story of her discovery of her powers over the dead—that she could not only see them when they wanted to remain hidden, as James and Will could, but could command them, and they were compelled to obey her—reminded James of the discovery of his own power, of the combined sense of strength and shame that it had brought.

He wanted to stand up, wanted to reach out to his sister. Especially as her story went on—as she told how she had raised an army of the drowned and dead to save Cordelia from the Thames. He wanted to tell her how much it meant to him that she had saved Cordelia’s life; wanted to tell her how much bleak horror he felt at the thought that he might have lost Cordelia. But he kept his mouth shut. Lucie had no reason to believe he wasn’t in love with Grace, and he would only look to her like an awful hypocrite.