Chain of Thorns (The Last Hours, #3)

“Well, Cordelia, we all hope you’ll be back before too long,” Will said. “James is positively pining away without you here. Incomplete without his better half, eh, James?” He went away up the stairs and down the corridor, whistling.

“Well,” said James after a long silence. “I thought, when I was ten years old and my father showed everyone the drawings I’d made of myself as Jonathan Shadowhunter, slaying a dragon, that was the most my parents would ever humiliate me. But that is no longer the case. There is a new champion.”

“Your father is something of a romantic, that’s all.”

“So you’ve noticed?” James still had his hand on her back, and Cordelia did not have the willpower to ask him to remove it. She let him guide her downstairs, where she fetched her coat in the entryway while James went to ask Davies, one of the Institute’s footmen, to bring the carriage around.

She joined him on the front step. He had not put on a jacket, and the icy wind stirred the locks of his dark hair where they kissed his cheeks and the back of his neck. When he saw her come outside, he exhaled—a plume of white—and reached into his pocket.

To Cordelia’s surprise, he drew out a pair of gloves. Her gloves. Pale gray kidskin with a tracery of leaves, though they were now very crumpled, and even a bit spotted, as if drops of rain had fallen on them.

“You left these,” James said, his voice very calm, “when you went to Paris. I wanted to return them to you. My apologies—I’ve been carrying them around all this time and meant to give them to you earlier.”

Cordelia took the gloves from him, puzzled. “But—why have you been carrying them around?”

He ran his hands through his hair, a characteristic gesture. “I want to be honest with you,” he said. “Very honest, because I think it is the only hope we have to come out of this. And I do still hope, Daisy. I will not bother you about it—about you and me—but I will not give up on us either.”

She looked at him in surprise. For all he had joked on the stairway about being humiliated, there was only a quiet determination in his face, his eyes. Even a sort of steely pride. He was not ashamed of anything he felt, that much was clear.

“I went after you that night,” he said. “The night you left. I followed you to Matthew’s, and then to the train station. I was on the platform—I saw you board the train. I would have gone after you, but my father had Tracked me to Waterloo. Lucie had disappeared, and I had to go after her.”

She looked down at the gloves in her hand. “You were there? On the train station platform?”

“Yes,” James said. He reached out and folded her hand over the gloves. His own was reddened with cold, his fingernails bitten down to the quick. “I wanted you to know. I went after you the moment I knew you’d left. I didn’t wait until hurt pride settled in or anything like that. I realized you were leaving and I ran after you, because when someone you love is leaving, all you think about is getting them back.”

Someone you love. His face was inches from hers. She thought, I could raise myself up on my toes and kiss him. He would kiss me back. I could put down the dreadful weight I’ve been carrying, this weight of caution that says: Be careful. You could be hurt again.

But the image of Matthew flashed across her field of vision then. Matthew and the lights of Paris, and all the reasons she had run away in the first place. She heard the creak of the wheels of the carriage as it rolled into the courtyard, and like Cinderella’s midnight clock, the spell was broken.

“Thank you,” she said. “For the gloves.”

She turned to descend the steps; she didn’t look back to see if James watched her depart.

As the carriage rumbled away from the Institute and into the purple-and-gray London dusk, she thought, If James saw me get on that train, he can’t have spent more than an hour with Grace, and probably less. And then—he fled from her? But what could possibly have caused his feelings to change so suddenly as that?



* * *



Would anything ever feel familiar again? James was not sure. Here he sat, eating supper with his family in the dining room where he’d eaten thousands of meals before, and yet the experiences of the past weeks had made everything strange. Here was the china cabinet with the glass-paneled doors and delicate inlaid floral marquetry; he remembered his mother ordering it from Shoolbred’s to replace the hideous Victorian monstrosity that had been there before. Here were the slim and elegant dining chairs with their backs carved in the shape of ferns that Lucie, when younger, had liked to pretend were warring pirate ships, and the pale green wallpaper, and the white glass lily-shaped lamps on either side of the fluted porcelain vase on the mantel that Tessa kept filled with fresh flowers every week, even in winter.

None of this had changed. But James had. He had left, after all; he had gotten married, moved into his own house. Very soon he would reach the age of majority, and the Clave would acknowledge him as an adult. But now he felt as though circumstance had forced him back into ill-fitting children’s clothes, a costume he had long outgrown.

“And what do you think, James?” said his mother.

James looked up, feeling guilty. He hadn’t been paying any attention. “Sorry, what was that?”

Lucie said, “We were talking about the Christmas party. It’s only three days away.” She gave James a beady look, as if to say, I know perfectly well you weren’t paying attention, and weren’t we just talking about this earlier?

“Really?” James frowned. “Is everyone still planning to attend?”

His parents were extremely dedicated to the tradition of the Institute Christmas party. It had started under Charlotte and Henry, who, his parents had explained, had decided that it didn’t matter that Shadowhunters didn’t celebrate the mundane holiday. It was so pervasive in London, present in every corner of the city through all of December, that they had realized the value of having something festive for the Enclave to look forward to during the long, cold winter months. The Herondales had continued the tradition of a ball in late December; in fact, James knew that it was at one of the Institute Christmas parties that his parents had become engaged to be married.

“It is odd,” Tessa said. “But the invitations were all sent at the beginning of the month, before any of the troubles we’ve been having. We thought perhaps guests would cancel, but they haven’t.”

“It’s important to the Enclave,” Will said. “And the Angel knows, it’s not a bad thing to keep up morale.”

Lucie moved her doubtful look to her father. “Yes, a completely selfless act, holding the party you love more than all other parties.”

“My dear daughter, I am offended by the insinuation,” Will said. “Everyone will be looking to the Institute to set the tone and demonstrate that as the chosen warriors of the Angel, the Shadowhunters will carry on, a united front against the forces of Hell. ‘Half a league, half a league, half a league’—”

“Will!” Tessa said reproachfully. “What have I said?”

Will looked chastened. “No ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ at the table.”

Tessa patted his wrist. “That’s right.”

Jesse said, “Is there anything particularly dangerous about holding the party?”

It was a sensible question. James had noticed this was Jesse’s way generally: he tended to be quiet and offer thoughts rarely, but when he did, they cut to the heart of things.

“Not where Belial is concerned,” said James. “The Institute’s the safest place in London when it comes to demons; if he did somehow attack, the whole Enclave would retreat here as a matter of policy.”

“I suppose,” said Jesse, still in the same calm voice, “I was thinking of my mother. A party like that, with so many of you collected in one place—it might attract her. Draw her here.”

Will regarded Jesse thoughtfully. “And then she would do what?”

Jesse shook his head. “I don’t know. She is unpredictable, but certainly she hates you all, and she has a special loathing for these Christmas parties—she spoke often to me of having been humiliated at one once, and the Enclave not caring.”

Will sighed. “That was me. I read her diary out loud at a Christmas party, long ago. I was twelve. And I was quite severely punished, so in fact, the Enclave was on her side.”

“Ah,” said Jesse. “When I was a child, I thought it was terrible that she had been so often wronged. Later I came to understand that my mother saw everything as a wrong undertaken against her. She collected grievances, as if they were china figurines. She liked to take them out and speak about them, examining them over and over for new facets of evil and betrayal. She held them closer to her than she ever held her children.”

“The next time she acts, the Clave will not be so lenient with her,” said Will tightly. “This time her Marks will be stripped.”