Chain of Thorns (The Last Hours, #3)

“It’s coming from the infirmary,” Anna said, starting toward the sound. “It sounds like Alastair.”


Ari hurried to follow Anna. The infirmary door was closed; Anna opened it cautiously. Inside they found Thomas, who was sitting at the end of one of the beds, and Alastair, who was standing between him and the door. Thomas was glowering. “You cannot make me stay here.”

“I can,” Alastair said with feeling. “I will. I shall sit on you if necessary.”

Thomas folded his arms, and Ari noticed with a start that he looked as though he’d lost a fight. There was blood in his sandy hair, and bruises around one of his eyes, despite two fresh iratzes on his arm. He—and also Alastair, she realized—were scratched up and dusty all over.

“By the Angel,” Anna said, “what happened to you two? You look as though you’ve been in a pub fight. And were quite outnumbered. Whereas I am fairly sure the pubs are all closed.”

“We figured out how to kill the Watchers,” Thomas said eagerly. “Shall I tell you the story?”

“At once,” Anna said, and Thomas did, reporting their trip to Paddington Station and the battle that had ensued there. “There are runes on the backs of their necks,” he said. “A bit like Belial’s sigil, but modified in a few ways.”

“Perhaps to signify possession,” Alastair put in, “though neither of us are exactly experts on demonic runes.”

“If that rune is cut or destroyed,” Thomas went on, “it forces the demon out of the body. And then the demon itself can be killed with little trouble.”

Anna’s eyebrows went up. “Well, I don’t wish to overstate our position, but that seems… like good news? Rather unexpectedly?”

“It is hard to think of a downside,” Alastair said reluctantly. “And I have tried.”

“The downside,” said Ari with a frown, “is that even with this knowledge, a Watcher is a tough fight. One must find an opening to strike the back of the neck without being knocked down by strength or magic.”

Thomas nodded. “And there are a lot of them,” he said. “And only a few of us.”

“What we need is for Jesse and Grace to make the fire-messages work,” said Ari. “What we need is an army.”

“Still, we are one step closer to saving London,” Thomas said.

Alastair gave him a withering look. “I see the blow you have suffered to the head is worse than I had realized. We are nowhere near saving London.”

“Besides, it’s not quite London we’re saving, is it?” said Anna thoughtfully. “London will remain. Only its people will be gone. Its life.”

Alastair waved his hand. “Yes, yes. It has been Roman and Saxon and now it will be demon. It has survived plague and pestilence and fire—”

“Of course!” Anna shouted, causing everyone to jump. “The Great Fire!” With a wild look in her eye, she tore out of the infirmary.

The others looked at the open doorway where she had disappeared. “I don’t think any of us expected that,” Thomas said.

“I’ll go see what’s happened,” Ari said hesitantly.

“Right,” said Thomas. “We’ll fetch Grace and Jesse from wherever they’ve gotten to. They must be told that the Watchers can be beaten.”

He began to get up from the bed; Alastair gently pushed him back down on it. “I will fetch Grace and Jesse,” he said. “You will rest.”

Thomas looked over at Ari with a plaintive look.

“I’m sorry, Thomas, but he’s right,” Ari said. “You must allow yourself some time to recover, or you won’t keep your strength up.”

“But I’m fine—”

Leaving Thomas and Alastair to argue, Ari went and found Anna in the library, standing over one of the study tables. As Ari got closer she could see that Anna had a tattered map, deeply yellowed with age, spread out before her. When she looked up at Ari, there was—for the first time since Christopher’s death—actual excitement in her eyes.

“Have you ever noticed,” she said, “that the entrance to the Silent City is quite far from central London, all the way up in Highgate?”

“I have noticed,” Ari said slowly. “I never thought much about it. I suppose it is a bit far from the Institute.”

“Well, it wasn’t always,” said Anna, jabbing her finger down at the parchment. “They moved it after the Great Fire of London. This map here is from 1654, and this is the old entrance to the Silent City.”

Ari looked. “That is much closer,” she said. “It’s just on the other side of St. Paul’s from us.”

“At the church of St. Peter Westcheap,” Anna said. “Which burned in the Fire, in 1666.” She tapped the map with her finger. “Don’t you see? If we can get into the Silent City through an unguarded entrance, we can find the Path of the Dead. Retrace the route that the Watchers took from the Iron Tombs.”

“You mean if we can make it to the Iron Tombs, then we will have escaped Belial’s sphere of influence. We will be able to contact Alicante.” Ari clasped her hands together. “Or if by some miracle the Blackthorns get fire-messages working, we could have reinforcements meet us at the Tombs—”

“And,” said Anna, “we could then lead those reinforcements into the Silent City, and from there, right back to London.”

Sparked by a sudden rush of hope, Ari leaned across the table and kissed Anna full on the mouth. She pulled back a little, enjoying the look of surprise on Anna’s face. “You are the most devilishly clever schemer.”

Anna smiled. “It’s because you bring out the best in me, darling.”



* * *



Later, James would guess that telling him the story was the hardest thing Matthew had ever done, his greatest act of grit and endurance.

At the time, he only listened. Matthew told the story simply and directly: Alastair’s taunts about his mother, his own visit to the Shadow Market, his purchase of the faerie potion to give to an unknowing Charlotte. His mother’s violent illness, her miscarriage.

“I remember,” James breathed. A wind had come up; he could hear it howling over the plains beyond the courtyard walls. “When your mother lost the baby. Jem treated her—”

“Jem knew,” Matthew said. “He saw it in my mind, I think, though I refused to speak about it with him. Still, I remember what he said then. ‘I will not tell anybody. But you should. A secret kept too long can kill a soul by inches.’ Advice,” Matthew added, “that I, being a fool, did not take.”

“I understand,” James said. “You dreaded to tell it. To tell what happened was to live it again.”