Chain of Thorns (The Last Hours, #3)

“So summon them. Then they can’t flee.” Hypatia sounded bored. “You are a paladin. Simply find a place—it’s best if it has a dark history, a place of death or horror, scarred by tragedy—and say the words cacodaemon invocat, and—”

“Stop!” Cordelia held up her hands. “I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to do anything that will summon up demons—”

“Well, all right,” said Hypatia, clearly affronted. “It was just an idea.” She looked at Cordelia narrowly, but before she could say anything, the bookcase slid aside like a pocket door, and Magnus emerged, looking elegant in royal blue.

“Hypatia, my sweet,” he said. “It’s time for us to leave, if we wish to arrive in Paris in time for the evening performance.” He winked at Cordelia. “Always a pleasure to see you, my dear.”

“Paris?” Cordelia echoed. “I didn’t realize you were going—I mean, I’m sure you’ll have a lovely time.”

“I thought I’d have a word with Madam Dorothea at the Cabaret de l’Enfer,” he said. “A warlock who claims they can communicate with the dead… well. So many of them are charlatans or fakes.”

“You will never find me near such a grubby place,” Hypatia said, and stood up from her chair. “But there are many other things in the City of Lights to tempt me.” She inclined her head in Cordelia’s direction. “Take care, little warrior.” She gestured toward the main room of the salon. “Your boy is here. He arrived some moments ago, but I was enjoying our discussion too much to mention it. My apologies.”

With that, Hypatia turned and followed Magnus back through the gap of the bookshelf, which slid closed behind them. Cordelia hurried into the main room, where she spotted Matthew at a table by himself, wearing dark green velvet and drinking something fizzy from a tall glass.

He was staring down at his drink, turning the glass around and around, as if it were a scrying bowl and he could see the future in it. Only when Cordelia approached him did he raise his head.

She could see immediately why Anna was worried. There were dark yellow-green circles under his eyes, and bruises at the corners of his mouth. His hands shook as he reached for his glass; his nails were bitten, which she had never seen before—Matthew usually kept his hands immaculate.

“Cordelia?” he said wonderingly. “What are you doing here, in the Ruelle?”

She took the seat across from him. Somehow he had gotten gold paint on his hands, from the glass he was holding, and a little had smeared on his cheekbone as well. It seemed strangely festive, at odds with how unwell he looked. “I came because I thought you would be here.”

“I thought you didn’t want to see me.”

He was right, of course. She had said that, because it was the sensible thing, because not seeing him or James was the sensible path. But nothing in her life was sensible right now. “I was worried about you,” she admitted. “When you didn’t come to Chiswick today. Ariadne said you were doing her a favor, but I wondered…”

“I was doing her a favor,” said Matthew. “A bit of investigative work. I am not entirely useless, you know.”

“I suppose I was worried—not just about you, but that you didn’t want to see me. That that’s why you didn’t come.”

“Surely,” he said, “we are not going to have an argument about which of us doesn’t want to see the other one. It does not seem productive.”

“I don’t want to have an argument at all,” said Cordelia. “I want—” She sighed. “I want you to stop drinking,” she said. “I want you to tell your family the truth about what happened two years ago. I want you to reconcile with your parents, and with James. I want you to be brilliant and wonderful, which you are, and happy, which you are not.”

“Just another way that I’ve failed you,” he said quietly.

“You must stop thinking about it that way,” Cordelia said. “You’re not failing me, you’re not failing your family. You’re failing yourself.”

Impetuously, she held out her hand. He took it, closing his eyes as he threaded their fingers together. He was biting his lower lip, and Cordelia remembered in that moment what it was like to kiss him, the taste of cherries and the softness of his mouth. How it had made her forget everything else; how she had felt like the beautiful Cordelia, a princess in a story.

He pressed his thumb into the center of her palm. Circled it there, the pad of his fingertip against the sensitive skin sending a jolt up her arm. Cordelia shivered. “Matthew…”

He opened his eyes. The velvet jacket turned them to a very dark green, the color of fern leaves or forest moss. My beautiful Matthew, she thought, all the more beautiful for being so broken. “Raziel,” he said, his voice ragged. “This is torture.”

“Then we should stop,” Cordelia said in a low voice, but she did not draw back her hand.

“It is a torture I like,” he said. “The best kind of pain. I felt nothing for so long, held every experience and every passion at arm’s length. And then you—”

“Don’t,” Cordelia said softly.

But he went on, looking not at her but inward, as if at an imagined scene. “They used to make a sort of flat dagger, you know, a narrow thing that could slide through the gaps in armor.”

“A misericorde,” said Cordelia. “Meant to deliver the death stroke to a wounded knight.” She looked at him in some alarm. “Are you saying…?”

Matthew laughed a little breathlessly. “I am saying that with you, I have no armor. I feel everything. For better or worse.”

“We should not be talking like this,” Cordelia said. She squeezed his hand, hard, then drew hers back, clasping her own hands together to prevent herself from reaching out to him again. “Matthew, you must tell James—”

“Tell him what?” said Matthew. He was pale, a sheen of sweat across his forehead and cheekbones. “That I love you? He knows that. I’ve told him. There’s nothing to be gained there.”

“I meant, tell him about what happened,” said Cordelia. “At the Shadow Market. The faerie, the potion—it will be easier to tell him than your parents, and then he can help you tell them. Matthew, this secret is like poison in your blood. You have to draw it off. You told me; you must be able to—”

“I told you because you were a stranger to the situation,” Matthew said. “James has known my mother all his life. She is his godmother.” His voice was flat. “I honestly don’t know whether he could truly forgive me for hurting her.”

“I think he would forgive you for anything.”

Matthew rose to his feet, nearly knocking over his glass. He stood for a moment, holding on to the back of his chair; his hair was stuck to his forehead with sweat, and his eyes looked glazed.

“Matthew,” Cordelia said in alarm. “Matthew, what—”

He bolted from the room. Gathering up her wool skirts, Cordelia raced after him, not bothering to retrieve her coat.

She found Matthew outside the Ruelle, on Berwick Street. Bright light from naphtha torches stabbed at her eyes, throwing him into sharp relief against the snow-frosted carriages rattling by. He was on his knees, being sick in the gutter, his shoulders shaking.

“Matthew!” Cordelia started forward in horror, but he waved her back.

“Stay away,” he said hoarsely. He was shivering, his arms wrapped around himself as his body spasmed. “Please—”

Cordelia hung back as passersby swirling around her, none of them giving Matthew a second look. He wasn’t glamoured, but a gentleman being sick in the gutters of Soho was hardly a rare sight.

At last he clambered to his feet and went over to a lamppost; he leaned his back against it, and with shaking hands, he slipped a flask from inside his jacket.

“Don’t—” Cordelia started toward him.

“It’s water,” he said hoarsely. He drew a linen handkerchief from his breast pocket and cleaned his hands and face. His sweat-damp hair hung into his eyes. There was something intensely painful about watching him, Cordelia thought. About the contrast between his expensive clothes and monogrammed handkerchief and his bruised eyes and trembling hands.

He put the flask away, balled up the handkerchief, and hurled it into the gutter. He raised his bloodshot green eyes to hers. “I know what you said inside. That you wanted me to stop drinking. Well, I’ve been trying. I haven’t had alcohol since—since yesterday.”

“Oh, Matthew,” Cordelia said, wanting to go to him, to put her hand on his arm. But something about his posture—spiky, defensive—held her back. “I don’t think it’s quite that simple. One cannot just stop.”

“I always thought I could,” he said emptily. “I thought I could stop anytime I liked. Then I tried, in Paris, our first day. And I was vilely sick.”

“You hid it well,” she said.