Chain of Thorns (The Last Hours, #3)

“You are right,” Matthew said, after a long silence. “I don’t like your plan.” He was still leaning against James’s chest, though he’d stopped shivering. “I don’t suppose you have a different, less dangerous one.”

“We haven’t much in the way of other choices,” said James. “Belial rules here; this dead land does his bidding. He wants me to wish to join with him, but he is losing patience; if I simply allow it, even reluctantly, he will accept that as what he can get. He has planned too much, worked too hard, to give up now.”

“He will think you’ve given up. Embraced despair.”

“Good,” said James. “He will assume my great weakness has finally caught up with me: that I care too much, or at all, about other people. To him, that is humiliating frailty. He will not imagine a plan behind it.”

Matthew looked back at him. He had begun to shiver again and was plucking restlessly at the fabric of the coat slung over him with his fingers, like a typhus patient. “Belial has sought possession of your body all this time. Why not do this before? Why wait until now?”

“Two reasons. One, I need him to believe I am desperate. And two, I am terrified. The idea of doing this frightens me more than anything else, and yet—”

Matthew jerked in James’s arms. His whole body seemed to tighten, rigid as a plank, before he went limp, gasping.

James gripped his hand tightly. When Matthew had caught his breath, he said, “Kit said—seizures.”

And heart failure, James thought, feeling sick, but he did not say the words aloud. “I should get you more water.”

“James, no—don’t—” Matthew clawed at James’s wrist before his eyes rolled up and his body began to jerk again. Swift, uncoordinated movements like a puppet being pulled too hard by its strings.

Panic bloomed in James’s chest. Kit had been clear: people could die from this. That Matthew would need a fortnight to physically stop drinking, and it had been nowhere near a fortnight. Matthew could die, he thought, die right there in his arms, and they would be split apart. Divided in half. Never again would James have his parabatai—the infuriating, ridiculous, generous, devoted, exasperating other half of his soul.

With a shaking hand, James yanked his stele from his pocket. He caught hold of Matthew’s flailing arm, held it still. Set the tip of the stele to his skin and drew a healing rune.

It flashed and faded, like a sputtering match. James knew, rationally: runes didn’t work here. But he didn’t stop. He could hear Jem’s voice in his head. Soft, steady. You must build a fortress of control around yourself. You must come to know this power, so that you may master it.

He drew a second iratze. It, too, vanished. Then a third, and then a fourth, and he began to lose count as he scrawled over and over on Matthew’s skin, willing his mind to concentrate on holding the iratze there, on keeping it from vanishing, on somehow forcing it to work.

Remember you are the language of angels, he thought, drawing yet another rune. Remember there is no place in the universe you do not have some power.

He waited for the rune to vanish. Instead it lingered. Not for more than a minute, perhaps, but as James stared, it remained, fading very slowly, on Matthew’s arm.

Matthew had stopped jerking and trembling in James’s grasp. As the healing rune faded slowly, James flew into action: he drew another, and then another and another, starting a new one each time the previous one dwindled.

Matthew was no longer shaking. He was taking deep, steady breaths, looking down in incredulity at his arm, where a crisscrossing map of healing runes—some new, some fading—covered his forearm. “Jamie bach,” he said. “You can’t do this all night.”

“Watch me,” James said grimly, and braced himself against the wall so that he could keep drawing for as long as it took.



* * *



Grace and Jesse had found a bag of miniature explosives in the laboratory and had amused themselves for nearly an hour by setting several of them off in the fireplace. They worked like fireworks, though rather than setting them alight, one tapped them with a stele and then tossed them a distance away, where they would sound a loud crack before exploding.

It was nice to laugh with Jesse a little bit, even if the laughter was really half exhaustion. It was astonishing what one could get used to: dodging Watchers and slinking through abandoned houses. Broken glass and turned-over carriages in the streets. On every face, a blank stare. No worse, perhaps, than living under the roof of Tatiana Blackthorn for eight years.

What Grace couldn’t get used to was her sense of utter frustration. She had all of Christopher’s notes, and her own as well. In her time in the Silent City, she had felt on the verge of a breakthrough, as if the solution to the problem with fire-messages was at the tips of her fingers. Hers and Christopher’s.

But now… With Jesse’s help, she had tried everything she could think of—swapping out ingredients, changing out the runes. Nothing worked. They had not even achieved the level of success Christopher had in managing to send half-burned, illegible messages.

It was the one thing she should have been able to contribute, she thought. She and Jesse had given up on the explosives and were instead staring at a piece of rune-covered vellum spread out on the worktable. The one good thing she could have done, the one way she could have helped after doing so much harm. But it seemed even that would be denied to her.

“How can we tell if it’s working?” Jesse said, eyeing the vellum on the table. “What’s it supposed to do, exactly?”

In a clear sign of rejection by the universe, the scroll of vellum let off a cough of smoke before exploding with a bang, flying backward off the table, and landing on the floor between them, where it continued to burn, not consuming the vellum.

“Not that,” Grace said.

She went to fetch the fireplace tongs leaning against the far corner of the room. These she used to retrieve the vellum—still burning—and deposit it into the fireplace.

“Look on the bright side,” said Jesse. “You’ve invented… ever-burning vellum. Christopher would be proud. He loved when things didn’t stop burning.”

“Christopher,” Grace said, “would have finished this already. Christopher was a scientist. I like science. Those are two very different things.” She stared down at the burning vellum. It was rather pretty, edged in white flame like lacework. “It’s ironic. Belial never asked Mother to kill Christopher. Never thought about him at all. But in murdering him, she may have ensured Belial’s success.”

The words were not enough. She threw her pencil across the room, where it clattered unsatisfactorily against a file cabinet.

Jesse raised an eyebrow. Grace wasn’t given to outbursts. “How long has it been since you’ve eaten anything?” he said.