Chain of Thorns (The Last Hours, #3)

Grace blinked. She couldn’t recall.

“I thought so. I’ll search through the pantry, all right? Hoping for biscuits, willing to make do with tinned beans.” He was already headed upstairs. Grace knew he was trying to give her a moment to gather herself, but she could only scrub tiredly at her aching eyes: Jesse wasn’t the problem. The problem was Christopher. She needed Christopher.

She laid her hand against the pitted, discolored wood of the worktable. How many of these blotches had Christopher made? Cutting, burning, spilling acid. Years of work, marked out here in scars, the way the lives of Shadowhunters were marked out in the pale memories of old runes on their skins.

Something flickered at the back of her mind. Something about runes. Runes and fire-messages.

Christopher would have known.

“Christopher,” she said softly, running the tips of her fingers over a long knife-cut in the wooden surface of the table. “I know you’re gone. And yet I feel you everywhere. In every beaker, every sample… every strange method of organization I run across… I see you everywhere, and I only wish I could have told you—that I care about you, Christopher. And I did not think that kind of feeling to be real. I thought it was a conceit of novels and plays, that one could… could want the happiness of another beyond even their own, beyond anything else. I wish I had understood it more when you were… when you were still alive.”

The silence of the laboratory seemed to echo all around her. She closed her eyes.

“Maybe you are here, though,” she said. “Maybe you’re keeping an eye on this place. I know Lucie said you were gone, but—how could you keep away? How could you not be curious beyond even the pull of death to see what happens? So if you are here… please. I’m so close, with the fire-messages. I’ve gone beyond where you were, but I haven’t found the solution yet. I need your help. The world needs your help. Please.”

Something touched her shoulder. A light touch, as if a butterfly had landed there. She stiffened, but something told her not to open her eyes.

“Grace.” A soft voice, unmistakable.

She sucked in her breath. “Oh—Christopher—”

“Don’t turn around,” he said. “Or look at me. I am only a very little bit here, Grace. It is taking all my strength for you to hear me. I cannot also make myself seen.”

Don’t turn around. She thought of Orpheus in the Greek tales, who had been forbidden from turning to look behind him at his dead wife as he escorted her from the underworld. He had failed, and lost her. Grace had always thought he was silly—surely it could not be that difficult simply not to turn around and look at someone.

But it was. She felt the ache inside her like pain, the loss of Christopher. Who had understood her, and not judged her.

“I thought,” she whispered, “ghosts could only return if they had unfinished business. Are the fire-messages yours?”

“I think,” he said, “that you are my unfinished business.”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t need my help to solve this,” said Christopher, and she could see him, behind her eyelids, looking at her with his funny quizzical smile, his eyes such a dark violet behind his spectacles. “You only need to believe that you can solve it. And you can. You are a natural scientist, Grace, and a solver of puzzles. All you have to do is silence the voice in your head that says you aren’t good enough, don’t know enough. I have faith in you.”

“I think you are the only one who does,” Grace said.

“That’s not true. Jesse believes in you. In fact, all of them believe in you. They have left this task in your hands, Grace. Because they believe you can do it. It is only up to you to believe it too.”

Behind her eyelids, now, she saw not Christopher, but the notes he had given her—his observations, his equations, his questions. His handwriting scrolling across the darkness, and then her own notes, intertwining with his, and Christopher believed in her. And Jesse, Jesse believed in her. And just because her mother had never thought she was worth anything didn’t mean her mother had been right.

“It’s not the runes,” she said, almost opening her eyes with the shock of the realization. “It’s not the chemicals, either. It’s the steles.”

“I knew you could do it.” She heard the smile in his voice. “And you’ve invented ever-burning vellum. Splendid work, Grace.”

Something brushed against her temple, tucking her hair behind her ear. A ghostly touch, a goodbye. A moment later, she knew he was gone.

She opened her eyes, turning to look behind her. There was nothing there, yet the wave of despair she had expected did not crash over her. Christopher was not there, but the memory of him was like a presence—and more than that, a new feeling, something blossoming under her rib cage, something that made her push aside the papers in front of her and reach for her stele, ready to get to work.

Something that she imagined felt very like the beginning of believing in herself.



* * *



The walk through London was uneventful; Anna and Ari had to duck down an alley at one point to skirt a Watcher, but otherwise the streets were mostly empty, save for the now-expected blank-faced mundanes. As they passed a shadowy doorway, Ari glanced to the side and saw a goat-faced demon crouched in the shadows, holding four human infants. Each one was suckling at a scaled breast. Ari fought back the urge to retch.

“Don’t look,” said Anna. “It won’t do any good.”

Concentrate on the mission, Ari told herself. On the Silent City. On the end of all this.

St. Peter Westcheap had been utterly destroyed in the Great Fire. Ari had been worried it would have been built over with shops or houses, but they were in luck. At the corner of Cheapside and Wood Street was a small paved area, surrounded by a low iron railing—a piece of the old churchyard, most likely.

They went in through the gate. From the center of the courtyard rose a massive tree, its bare branches forming a sort of canopy over the few old graves that remained, their surfaces too worn to read. Benches had been placed at various intervals, their slatted wooden seats rubbed mostly away by years of rain and snow.

As Oscar bounded through the frozen bushes, Anna went to examine the old gravestones. Ari, however, found herself drawn to the tree in the courtyard’s center. It was a black mulberry; they were not native to Britain but had been brought over by the Romans, before there had ever been Shadowhunters. The bark was not black at all, but a sort of orangey-brown, and as Ari leaned in closer, she saw a pattern slashed into it. A familiar pattern.

An Unseen rune. “Anna!” she called.