Chain of Thorns (The Last Hours, #3)

As they slipped around the house, keeping to the shadow of the wall, Cordelia could hear the noises of fighting from the square. Metal scraping stone, grunts and hisses, the thick sound of a blade colliding with demon flesh, all of it punctuated every few minutes by the sharp report of a gun.

They turned a corner. They were behind the house now, almost up against the fence that divided the Lightwoods’ property from the one next door. An arched window here was lit with a soft radiance; in its glow, Cordelia could see the harsh fury on Anna’s face. Her parents’ home, the place she had grown up, had been invaded.

The three Shadowhunters gathered at the edge of the window and peered inside. There was Gabriel and Cecily’s sitting room, as it always was, with blankets folded in a basket near the comfortable-looking couch, and a Tiffany lamp casting a warm glow over the room.

Before the cold fireplace, Tatiana sat in an armchair, Alexander cradled in her arms. Her lips were moving. Cordelia’s stomach turned. Was she singing to him?

Alexander was struggling, but feebly; Tatiana’s grip on him seemed to be iron-hard. With one hand, she pulled up the jacket of his little suit, and then his shirt, while with the other—with the other, gripping a stele, she began to draw a rune on his bare chest.

Cordelia stifled a moan of horror. You simply couldn’t put runes on a three-year-old; it would be traumatic, painful, very likely dangerous to the child’s survival. It was an act of brutal cruelty: pain for the sake of its own infliction.

Alexander screamed. He twisted and thrashed in Tatiana’s grasp, but Tatiana held him down, her stele slicing like a scalpel across his skin, and Cordelia, without thinking, formed her gloved hand into a fist and punched the window with every bit of her strength.

Her hand slammed into the glass, which cracked and spiderwebbed, a few shards splintering outward. Pain shot up her arm, and Jesse caught hold of her, yanking her aside as Anna, her face like stone, bashed the rest of the window out with her elbow. Cracked as it was, it fell apart in enormous shards; Anna swung herself up onto the sill and dove through the jagged hole.

Jesse followed, turning to pull Cordelia up after him. He caught at her hands, lifting her, and she bit her lip to keep from screaming out in pain. Her glove had not been designed to withstand being driven through a pane of glass; it had torn wide open across her knuckles, and her lacerated hand was bleeding freely.

She landed on a worn Persian carpet. In front of her was Anna, swinging a long blade. She struck Tatiana in the shoulder, and Tatiana cried out, flinging the screaming Alexander away from her.

Anna dropped her sword, diving to catch her little brother. Tatiana bared her teeth, turned, and fled through the nearest open door.

Anna, on her knees, cradled the sobbing Alexander against her chest, frantically stroking his hair. “Baby, baby boy,” she soothed, before turning a wild look on Jesse and Cordelia. “Go after Tatiana! Stop her!”

Cordelia raced through the house with Jesse. It was nearly too dark to see; she fumbled a witchlight from her coat pocket, letting its white glow illuminate the space. Jesse followed her in a mad dash down hallways, past an empty kitchen, and into a library. He stopped to peer into the shadows while Cordelia raced through the next doorway and into a dimly lit music room—where she found Tatiana sitting blank-faced on the bench in front of the piano.

Tatiana was bleeding from the wound Anna had given her. Scarlet drenched the shoulder of her already bloodstained dress. She did not seem bothered by it. She held her pointed silver dagger in her hand and was humming quietly to herself, a soft and eerie tune.

Cordelia sensed Jesse at her side. He had come into the room after her, moving soundlessly, and was staring at his mother in the glare of Cordelia’s witchlight.

Tatiana raised her head. She glanced at Cordelia before turning her attention to Jesse.

“So she raised you,” said Tatiana. “That little Herondale bitch. I thought she might try. I never thought you’d allow it.”

Jesse went rigid. Cordelia bit her tongue before she could say, She did it with Grace’s help. That would make the situation better for no one.

“I thought it was what you wanted, Mother,” Jesse said. Cordelia sensed he was controlling his voice with an effort. Stalling for time until the others could arrive and surround Tatiana. “Me, alive again.”

“Not if it means you are in the thrall of these wretched people,” Tatiana snarled. “The Herondales, the Carstairs—you know better than anyone how badly they have treated us. How they betrayed me. Don’t you know it, my sweet and clever son?”

Her voice had gone sickly sweet; Jesse looked nauseated as she turned her malevolent gaze on Cordelia. If you move toward me, you witch, I will attack you with a broken piano leg and manage whatever Lilith does to me for it, Cordelia thought.

There was a soft hiss. Jesse had drawn his sword—the Blackthorn sword. The thorns on the cross guard gleamed in the witchlight.

Tatiana smiled. Was she pleased to see her son holding the family blade? After all she had just said?

“You are sick, Mother,” said Jesse. “You are sick in your mind. All your beliefs that you are being persecuted, that these people, these families, are trying to harm you, are the refuges you have found in which you can bury your grief over my father’s death. Over your own father—”

“Those are lies,” Tatiana hissed. “I am not sick! They have tried to ruin me!”

“Not true,” said Jesse quietly. “I have come to know them now. There is a truth much harsher. One I think you know. They have not tried to ruin you over all these years. They have not plotted your downfall. They have barely ever thought of you at all.”

Tatiana flinched—a true, unguarded movement, and in that moment Cordelia saw something real in her expression, something unalloyed by delusion or falsehood. A profound bitter hurt, almost savage in its intensity.

She began to rise from the bench. Jesse tightened his grip on his blade. Then quick steps in the hall: the door flew wide, and James came in, longsword in hand.

He was bruised and bleeding, a bad cut over his left eye. He must have found the tableau before him bizarre, Cordelia thought—she and Jesse, unmoving, facing down Tatiana in her bloody dress. But he did not hesitate. He raised his blade and pointed it directly at Tatiana’s chest.

“Enough,” he said. “It’s done. I’ve sent for Brother Zachariah. He’ll be here any moment to complete your arrest.”

Tatiana looked at him with an odd little smile. “James,” she said. “James Herondale. So like your father. You are just the one I wanted to talk to. You still have a chance to earn your grandfather’s support, you know.”

“That,” said James, “is the last thing I want.”

“He has set his sights on his desires,” she said, “and he will have them. They march, you know. Even now, they march.” Her smile widened. “Your only choice will be whether to show your loyalty, or whether to be trampled beneath him, when the time comes.” An ugly look of cunning passed over her face. “I think that you will be clever enough, when the choice is forced, to show your loyalty. Loyalty, after all, binds us.”

James winced, and Cordelia recalled the engraving on the inside of the bracelet Grace had given him. Loyalty binds me. If Tatiana had hoped to endear herself to James by reminding him of it, it did not work. He took two breathless steps forward and set the tip of the sword to the base of her throat.

“Drop the weapon and put out your hands,” he said, “or I’ll slit your throat in front of your son and gladly pay the cost of my sins to Hell when the time has come.”

Tatiana dropped the knife. Still smiling, she held out her arms to James, her palms turned up to show she held no weapon. “You are my master’s blood,” she said. “What choice have I? I will surrender, then, only to you.”

As James bound her wrists with demon wire, Cordelia exchanged a puzzled look with Jesse. It was over, it seemed, and yet she could not shake the feeling that something was wrong. After all that, why had Tatiana not put up more of a fight?



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