Chain of Thorns (The Last Hours, #3)

She told him quickly: everything from her visit to Cordelia to her silent ride home in a hansom cab after nearly falling off the Carstairs’ roof. “It’s like she never wanted to be parabatai at all,” Lucie finished. “There’s nothing more important to me in all the world, and she’s just—throwing it away.”


“It might be easier,” Jesse said, “to behave as if she wants to throw it away than to acknowledge that it’s being taken from her against her will.”

“But if she wanted it—if she wanted to be my parabatai—”

“She can’t, Lucie. As long as she’s the paladin of Lilith, she cannot be your parabatai. So, like you, she shares the loss of the parabatai bond, but unlike you, she knows it’s her fault.”

“If she cared,” Lucie said, knowing she was being stubborn, “she would fight for it. It’s like she’s saying we were never special to each other. We were just ordinary friends. Not like—not like I thought.”

Jesse stroked her hair back from her face, his fingers gentle. Careful. “My Lucie,” he breathed. “You know it’s the people who we love the most who can hurt us the most.”

“I know she is upset.” Lucie pressed her cheek into his hand. They had moved closer to each other, somehow; she was almost in his lap. “I know she feels I kept secrets from her, and I did. But she kept secrets from me. It’s hard to explain, but when someone is your parabatai, or nearly, and you feel distant from them, it is like a piece has been cut out of your heart.” She bit her lip. “I don’t mean to be dramatic.”

“It’s not dramatic.” As if mesmerized, Jesse trailed his fingers along her cheek, to her lips. He touched her mouth with his fingertips, and she saw his eyes darken. “That’s how I feel when I am away from you.”

She lifted her hand to the ribbon that held her dressing gown closed. Her eyes fixed on Jesse, she drew slowly on the ribbon until it came undone, until the dressing gown slipped down her shoulders and fell to the bed, a pool of lace and satin. She was only in her nightgown now, her skin flooded with goose bumps, all her thoughts a silent whisper: I want to forget. Take it all away, all the pain, all the loss.

It was as if he could hear her. Jesse cupped her face in his hands and brought her mouth to his—carefully, reverently, as if he were drinking from the Mortal Cup. Their lips touched lightly at first, and then with increasing pressure, he kissed her over and over as his breathing sped up, his heart racing. She could feel it against her, his live and beating heart, and it made her want to feel even more.

She threw decorum to the winds. She opened her mouth to his, traced his bottom lip with a pointed tongue, caught at the front of his shirt, her body arching into his until he melted into her. Until she was sure no fear of her parents, no misguided sense of duty, was going to tear him away.

She sank back against his pillows and he rose over her. The look on his face was wondering, hungry. She was trembling: she could not imagine what this flood of sensation was like for him, who had felt so little for so long. “Can I touch you?” she whispered.

He squeezed his eyes shut. “Yes. Please.”

She ran her hands over him, his arms and shoulders, the wiry length of his torso. The heat of him, feverish under her touch. He shivered and kissed her throat, making her gasp like a heroine in a novel. She was beginning to understand why heroines in novels did the things they did. It was all rather worth it for experiences like this.

“My turn,” he said, stilling her hands. “Let me touch you. Tell me to stop”—he kissed the corner of her mouth—“if you want me to.”

His fingers, long and pale and clever, traced the lines of her face, over her mouth, down her throat, danced along her collarbones, cupped her bare shoulders. The green of his eyes had burned away to black. He shaped her body under his hands, over the slight curves of her breasts, the dip of her waist, until his hands were bunched in the fabric at her hips.

“I dreamed of this,” he said. “Of being able to touch you. Really touch you. I could always only half feel you—and I imagined what it would be like—I tortured myself with it—”

“It is it like what you thought?” Lucie whispered.

“I think it might break me,” he said, and stretched out above her. “You might break me, Lucie,” and he drove his mouth against hers, hot and demanding. Parting her lips with his, his tongue stroking along hers, making her arch up against him in her desperation to feel his heartbeat close to hers.

“Oh God,” he whispered against her mouth, and she thought, Of course, he’s never learned to call out to the Angel, like we do. “Oh God, Lucie,” and she wanted to fall apart in pieces so that he could fit more closely with her, wanted to break so she could be joined back together with him.

And then the darkness came down. That same darkness she had felt before, the feeling of losing her footing, of falling away from the world. An uncontrolled descent, her stomach dropping, her struggle to surface through a sea of utter darkness. All around her were voices wailing in despair, ragged shadows reaching out to her, crying out because they had been lost, somehow exiled and wandering. Something had been taken from them, something precious. She seemed to see the gleam of a familiar shape, but it had been wrenched out of recognition—

“Lucie! Lucie!” She sat up, gasping, her heart pounding. She was on Jesse’s bed, and he was kneeling over her, his face white with fear. “Lucie, what happened? Please tell me I didn’t hurt you—”

“No,” she whispered. “It wasn’t you—not anything you did—”

“It has to be,” Jesse said, a sudden wrench of self-loathing in his voice. “Because I’m unnatural, because I was dead—”

She caught at his hand. She knew she was probably crushing his fingers, but she couldn’t help it. “No,” she said again, in a stronger voice. “It’s something in me. I can feel it.” She looked at him anxiously. “When I kiss you, I hear—” She shook her head. “Voices crying out. They seem to be telling me of something terrible, something awful that is happening far away, perhaps in another world.” Her eyes burned. “Somewhere beyond where I, or anyone, should be able to see.”

“Malcolm told me that you walked in shadow when you raised me,” Jesse said softly. “It is possible, I suppose, that some of that shadow still clings to you. But it cannot only be you. I lived very close to the edge of death for a long time, and you have always been able to cross that border. It has to be the two of us combined, somehow. Something amplified when we touch.”

“Then I had better contact Malcolm.” Lucie felt unutterably weary. She had so hoped that part of her life was behind her—bargains with warlocks, desperate conversations about Jesse, the shadow of death touching everything she did or was. “He may know if there’s some way to make it go away.” She flung her head back fiercely. “Because I am not letting you go. Not now.”

“No.” Jesse pressed his lips to her hair. “I do not think I could bear to be let go by you, Lucie Herondale. I think I would follow you, even if you ordered me away. I am alive because of you, but not only because you commanded me to live. I am alive because my life has you in it.”

Lucie’s eyes burned, but tears seemed pointless. Useless. Instead she kissed Jesse—quickly, on the cheek—and let him wrap her in her dressing gown, his arms lingering around her, before she crept back out into the corridor.

She barely recalled returning to her room. It was nearly dark, the fire burning low in the grate. Still, there was some dim moonlight coming through the panes of her windows. It was enough. Sitting down at her desk, she took up her pen and began to write.





14 NEVER SIMPLE




The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

—Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest



In between interrogation sessions, Grace read Christopher’s notes.

His handwriting was cramped, careful, a mix of thoughts and equations that blazed across the loose-leaf pages like a shower of falling stars. In reading them, Grace felt as if she were reading a book in another language, one she almost spoke fluently. There were moments where she sat up, elated at understanding, and moments where she despaired of ever understanding at all.

Brother Zachariah had been kind enough to bring her a workbook and a pen, that she might make her own notes. She found herself distracted enough that she was often surprised when it was time to be taken from her cell to the Speaking Stars for her questioning by the Brothers.

There was no torture, no torment. Only the endless whispering voices inside her head, forcing her to unearth memories long buried and long ignored. When did your mother first take you to the forest? When did you become aware of your power and what it could do? When did you realize you were doing the bidding of a demon? Why did you not run away?