Chain of Thorns (The Last Hours, #3)

“Some people like being miserable,” said Lucie, staring off above Cordelia’s head. “Some people won’t do things that would make them, and other people, happy, just because.”


“Lucie,” said Anna, “I have no idea what you’re on about. What are we meant to be looking for?”

“Anything that looks off—disturbed dust on the floor, pictures hanging oddly, any hint of demonic activity that might activate your necklace,” said Jesse.

Those who had watches—James, Anna—checked them to set the time, and they were off. Lucie turned away without a glance at Cordelia, following her brother and Jesse into the gardens. She put her hand on James’s elbow to steady herself as they went down a cracked flight of stone steps—a friendly, affectionate gesture—and Cordelia felt an awful jealous pang in her chest. Whether she was jealous of Lucie or of James she was not sure; somehow, that made it worse.



* * *



Even on a bright afternoon, the greenhouse at Chiswick House was still a dim, gloomy place. When last James had been here, he had passed through Belial’s realm and arrived choking on ashes in the middle of a fight between Cordelia and a Cerberus demon. Today the dust was gone, and no sign remained of any demonic activity. Whatever had been grown here had long ago been taken over by the briars and the hedges of the gardens outside, which slowly extended their branches and vines a little more every year, to eventually draw the greenhouse itself back into wildness.

James didn’t think Tatiana had hidden anything here; everything was so damp and overgrown that she would never be able to find anything a second time, if it wasn’t destroyed by the plants and the rain and the insects first. But they were gamely searching; Jesse especially thought that the gardens might hold some secrets.

At the other end of the greenhouse James saw the flash of Lucie’s witchlight rune-stone as she and Jesse emerged from behind a crumbling wall. Jesse had been silent and uneasy-looking since he’d come back from seeing Grace in the Silent City that morning.

Part of James was desperate to know what Jesse had discovered. Had Grace told him the truth about her power, about what she’d done? Though James would have expected Jesse to look at him differently if he knew, and he didn’t seem to be doing that. He seemed rather to have retreated inside himself, however hard he was trying to put a good face on things.

Perhaps it had simply been seeing his sister in the Silent City prison that had affected him. For Jesse, Grace represented hope—the hope of family, the hope of orphans clinging together when their parents were dead or lost. But for James, still, thoughts of Grace meant thoughts of darkness, a forever fall into shadow, like Lucifer falling from heaven. From grace itself.

He could not bring himself to ask. And so he schooled his expression into a calm neutrality as Jesse and Lucie approached. There were streaks of dirt on Jesse’s face; he looked discouraged. “There’s nothing here,” he said.

“Or rather, there was a Cerberus demon here,” said Lucie, “until a few months ago, when James killed it.”

“You killed Balthazar?” Jesse said in horror.

“It was a demon,” James began, and broke off as Jesse smiled. He wasn’t doing a bad job pretending things were all right, James had to admit.

“Sorry,” Jesse said. “Just a joke. Never been friends with a demon. Didn’t know the, ah, former… occupant.”

Lucie looked at Jesse. Carefully, she said, “Shall we try the… other structure?”

Jesse’s smile faded immediately. He glanced over at a squat brick building a little ways away, difficult to see behind all the overgrowth of the gardens. It looked like a potting shed, and might have been once, but now its roof was gone. A rickety wooden door hung open on one side.

“Yes,” Jesse said. “I suppose we have to, don’t we?”

Lucie took his hand. James noted the gesture but said nothing. There was no shame in needing support, but not all Shadowhunters—male ones, especially—were brought up to think so. James had been raised by Will, whose central tenet in life was that he would have been dead in a ditch at age fourteen had it not been for Jem. He had always encouraged James to rely on his friends, to depend on his parabatai. It was something James loved about his father, but it also meant he could not approach him to talk about Matthew and Cordelia. He could not admit to his father that he was angry with Matthew. James was sure Will had never been angry with Jem in his life.

James followed Lucie and Jesse through the overgrowth to the brick shed. Jesse went inside first, and the others next; the moment James was inside the place, he froze. The room was empty but for a table in its center, on which sat a carved wooden casket. Suddenly James knew what this place was, and why Lucie had only called it the other structure.

The casket—open now, gaping like a slack mouth—was Jesse’s. This was his tomb.

James could see where rain and damp had warped the wood of the casket over the years, a consequence of the building having no roof. Prongs jutted out from one wall, as if something—a sword, perhaps—had hung there once. One of the walls was smoke-blackened, ashes scattered across the frozen ground.

“Bleak, isn’t it,” said Jesse, with a tight sort of smile. “My mother seemed to feel this was the safest place to leave me; she was always afraid the Enclave would search the house.”

“But not the grounds?” James said quietly. He could not have described the look on Jesse’s face—half pain, half horror; this place must remind him of all he had lost. All the years and time.

“I suspect, though she said otherwise, that she wanted me far away from her,” said Jesse. “I suspect the presence of my… corpse… made her feel guilty. Or perhaps just horrified.”

“She ought to feel guilty,” Lucie said fiercely. “She ought to never have another moment of peace, after what she did to you.”

“I don’t think she has much in the way of peace,” James said, thinking of Tatiana’s wild eyes, of the hatred burning in them. “Do you?”

Jesse seemed about to reply, but before he could, James gasped. Something arrowed across his vision—a slice of darkness, as if he were gazing through a cracked window at Belial’s shadow realm. Something was terribly wrong; something nearby.

Cordelia, he thought, and bolted back toward the house without another word.



* * *



The upper floors of Chiswick House were emptier than Cordelia would have expected. Most of the rooms were without pictures, rugs, or furniture. Cordelia knew Tatiana had smashed every mirror in the house when Rupert Blackthorn had died; she had not realized they still hung on the walls, ruined frames of jagged glass.

There was a training room, in which there were no weapons, only cobwebs and mice. And there was one bedroom, plain but furnished, which had a small vanity table, with a silver-backed brush set still laid out on it. There was one hard-looking chair, and a nearly bare iron bed, with torn sheets still on it. On the nightstand was a mug, at whose bottom something ancient—chocolate? milky tea?—had hardened into a moldy green scum.

With a start, Cordelia realized this cheerless place must have been Grace’s bedroom. What kind of dreams had she dreamt, on that plank of a bed? Surrounded by the darkness of this moldering, bitter house?

Surely I cannot be pitying Grace, Cordelia thought, and started when she heard someone cry out. She reached for Cortana—her hand slapped against fabric. Her blade was not there.

She pushed through the hurt, running out into the corridor and up a flight of stairs, following the sound of the cry. She burst into a large ballroom, where the remains of a massive chandelier, easily eight feet across, lay in the middle of the room where it had crashed to the ground at some point. It looked like a massive, jeweled spider that had lost a fight with a much larger spider.

Ariadne, in the center of the room, shot Cordelia a guilty look. “Oh, bother,” she said. “I didn’t mean to make you come running.”

“Ariadne may have thought it was a real spider,” Anna said. “A real, giant spider.”

Anna meant to be teasing, Cordelia knew, but the tone of her voice was… fond. Fonder than either Anna or Ariadne were aware of, Cordelia suspected. They were both smiling as Ariadne teased Anna about whether the spider chandelier might look nice in her flat, and perhaps even make a friend for Percival the stuffed snake.

Cordelia went to examine the rest of the room. There were broken floorboards aplenty, each of which she tested to see if it was loose and perhaps hiding something beneath it. Having made herself sneeze several times by disturbing the dust, she went over to a window to catch her breath.