Chain of Thorns (The Last Hours, #3)

At last they drew apart. He kept his arms around her, smiling down into her face. There was a little hesitance in his expression, as if he were unsure what she thought of this new, real, and living Jesse. Silly boy, she thought; he ought to be able to read it all in her face. But maybe it was better if he couldn’t?

“Awake at last,” he said. His voice was—well, it was his voice, she knew his voice. But it was so much more physical, more present, than she’d heard it before. And she could feel the vibration in his chest as he spoke. She wondered if she would ever get used to all these new details.

“How long was I asleep?”

“A few days. Nothing much has happened; mostly we’ve just been waiting for you to wake up.” He frowned. “Malcolm said you would be all right eventually, and I thought—” He flinched and held up his right hand. She winced to see the torn red skin. But Jesse seemed delighted. “Blisters,” he said happily. “I’ve got blisters.”

“Rotten luck,” Lucie said sympathetically.

“Not at all. Do you know how long it’s been since I had a blister? A scraped knee? A missing tooth?”

“I hope you don’t knock out all your teeth in your new delight at being alive,” said Lucie. “I don’t think I could lo—like you as well as I do if you were toothless.”

Oh, dear. She had almost said love. At least Jesse seemed too enchanted with his new injuries to have noticed.

“How shallow,” Jesse said, winding a strand of her hair around his finger. “I should like you just as well if you were bald and shriveled like a desiccated acorn.”

Lucie experienced a terrible desire to giggle. She forced herself to scowl ferociously instead. “Honestly, what on earth have you been doing out here chopping wood, anyway? Can’t Malcolm magic up some wood if it’s needed? Where is Malcolm, by the by?”

“Went down into the village,” Jesse said. “Ostensibly to buy supplies. I think he likes the walking; otherwise he’d probably just magic up food, like you said. Most days he’s gone all afternoon.”

“Most days?” Lucie said. “You said a few days—how long has it been?”

“This is the fifth day we’ve been here. Malcolm used his magic to determine that you were safe and only needed natural rest. A great deal of it.”

“Oh.” Lucie stepped back, alarmed. “My family will be coming after us, surely—they’ll want to know everything—they’ll be furious with me—and Malcolm—we must make a plan—”

Jesse frowned again. “They won’t have an easy time finding us. The house has been very heavily warded against Tracking and, I suppose, most everything else.”

Lucie was about to explain that she knew her parents, and they were not going to let something like impenetrable wards stop them from ferreting out where she was, but before she could, Malcolm came around the corner, walking stick in hand, his boots crunching on the frozen ground. He was wearing the white traveling coat he’d had on when she last saw him, in the Institute Sanctuary. He had been angry then; frightened, she thought, of what she’d done. Now he only looked tired, and more disheveled than she’d expected.

“I told you she’d be fine,” he said to Jesse. He glanced at the firewood. “Excellent work,” he added. “You’ll be feeling stronger every day if you keep that up.”

So the task of splitting firewood was more about Jesse’s health than anything else. It made sense. Preserved or not, his body had surely been weakened by seven years of being dead. Of course, Belial had possessed Jesse, used his body as a puppet, driving him to walk miles all over London, to—

But she didn’t want to think about that. That had been in the past, when Jesse did not really inhabit his body. All that was changed now.

Jesse examined the pile of unsplit logs behind him. “Another half hour at most, I think, and I’ll be done.”

Malcolm nodded and turned to Lucie. There was an odd blankness to the way he looked at her, Lucie thought, and felt a stir of unease. “Miss Herondale,” he said. “May I speak to you in the house?”



* * *



“Now, I’ve prepared this sheet with a solution of hartshorn,” Christopher was saying, “and when the flame is applied via a standard combustion rune—Thomas, are you paying attention?”

“All ears,” said Thomas. “Absolutely countless ears.”

They were downstairs at the Fairchilds’ house, in Henry’s laboratory. Christopher had asked Thomas to help him with a new project, and Thomas had leaped at the opportunity for something to distract him.

Christopher pushed his spectacles up his nose. “I see that you’re not sure the application of fire will be necessary,” he said. “But I keep a close eye on the mundanes’ developments in the area of science, you know. They have recently been working on ways of sending messages from one person to another, at a great distance, first through lengths of metal wire, and more recently through the air itself.”

“What’s that got to do with you setting fire to things?” said Thomas—in his opinion, very politely.

“Well, to put it plainly, mundanes have used heat to create most of their technology—electricity, the telegraph—and we Shadowhunters can’t fall behind the mundanes in what we can do, Thomas. It will hardly do if their devices give them powers we can’t match. In this case, they can send messages at a distance, and well—we can’t. But if I can use runes—see, I singe the edge of the parchment here with a flame, and fold it over, and Mark it with a Communication rune here, and an Accuracy rune here and here…”

From upstairs, the doorbell chimed. Christopher ignored it, and for a moment Thomas wondered if he should answer it himself. But at a second and third chime, Christopher sighed, put down his stele, and headed for the stairs.

Overhead, Thomas heard the front door open. It wasn’t his intention to eavesdrop, but when Christopher’s voice drifted down to him, saying, “Oh, hullo, Alastair, you must be here to see Charles. I think he’s upstairs in his study,” he felt his stomach swoop inside him like a bird diving for a fish. (Then he wished he’d come up with a better mental analogy, but one either had a poetic turn of mind, like James, or one didn’t.)

Alastair’s reply was too low for him to hear. Christopher coughed and said, “Oh, just down in the lab, you know. I’ve got quite the new exciting project—”

Alastair interrupted him to say something. Thomas wondered if Christopher would mention that Thomas was there. But he did not; he only said, “Matthew’s still in Paris, as far as we know. Yes, I’m sure Charles wouldn’t mind a visit.…”

The bird in Thomas’s stomach flopped over dead. He leaned his elbows on Christopher’s worktable, trying to breathe through it all. He knew he shouldn’t be surprised. Alastair had made it clear, the last time they saw each other, that there could be nothing between them. And the main reason for that was the hostility between Alastair and Thomas’s friends, the Merry Thieves—who disliked Alastair for very good reason.

Thomas had woken up the next morning with a clear thought in his mind: It’s time—it’s past time—for me to tell my friends about my feelings for Alastair. Perhaps Alastair is right and it is impossible—but it will definitely remain impossible if I never try.

He had meant to do it. He had gotten out of bed absolutely determined to do it.

But then he learned that Matthew and James had both left London in the night, and so his plan had to be delayed. And in fact, not just Matthew and James were gone. Cordelia and Matthew, it seemed, had gone to Paris, while James had gone off with Will to look for Lucie, who had, it seemed, taken it into her head to visit Malcolm Fade at his cottage in Cornwall. Christopher seemed to accept this tale without question; Thomas did not, and he knew Anna didn’t either, but Anna had been firm in her refusal to discuss it. One gossips about one’s acquaintance, not one’s friends, was all she would say. Anna herself looked pale and tired, though perhaps she’d gone back to having a different girl in her room every night. Thomas rather missed Ariadne and he suspected Anna did too, but the one time he’d brought her up, Anna had almost slung a teacup at his head.

Thomas had considered these last few days telling Christopher of his feelings, but while Christopher would be kind about it, he would feel awkward about knowing something James and Matthew didn’t, and it was James and Matthew who truly disliked—hated, even—Alastair in the first place.