Chain of Thorns (The Last Hours, #3)

For the third time, Ari put her foot on the Watcher’s chest and, in one clean move, slid her khanda out of its body. She tried to catch her breath. She hadn’t been able to get behind the Watcher yet, and she knew it would only get up again, but she appreciated the moment’s rest while she waited for it to recover. Before it could, though, she felt a tap on her shoulder. She whirled around, ready to strike—but it was Thomas, wearing an urgent expression. “Ari, quick—come with me.”

Ari didn’t ask questions. If Thomas looked this desperate, he had a reason for pulling her out of the battle. As they shoved their way through the thrashing, fighting crowd, he let her know—shouting in between ducking through skirmishes—that Cordelia and Matthew and Lucie had returned, and that there was a plan for getting into the cathedral. He didn’t explain further, but the relief that their friends were back—and that there was any sort of plan—was enough to keep Ari pushing forward.

More Shadowhunters arrived, pouring into the triangular courtyard just as Ari and Thomas were leaving, but she had no time to stop and see if there were any familiar faces. She and Thomas were already running down the street, headed around the side of the cathedral. There they found the others waiting: Alastair, Cordelia, Matthew, and Anna. Thomas immediately went up to Alastair—who was sporting quite a few bruises and cuts; there had been no time to stop for healing runes—and kissed him. Ari wanted to do the same to Anna, but decided to wait, given the ferocious light of battle in Anna’s eyes.

“But why?” Cordelia was saying. She looked more grimy than Ari had ever seen her—her boots were dusty, her gear scratched, and there was dust in her dark red hair. “Why on earth would Belial be in the abbey trying to crown himself king?”

“Indeed,” Anna said, “I would not have thought that would be his priority. But Piers managed to get a look inside. James—Belial—has the Coronation Chair up on the High Altar, and at least some of the crown jewels as well.”

“He also,” said Alastair, “appears to have an archbishop of Canterbury.”

“He’s kidnapped the archbishop of Canterbury?” Ari said, horrified. She wasn’t entirely sure what an archbishop did, but it certainly seemed outside the bounds of propriety to kidnap one.

“Worse.” Anna looked grim. “He’s raised one from the dead. The very, very dead. And is attempting to have him do the honors.”

“Will it make some kind of difference to his power?” Thomas asked. “Crowning himself? Does it solidify his hold over London?”

“It must,” Alastair said. “But most significantly, this may be our last chance to get Cordelia near enough to him to—”

“But she can’t mortally wound him,” Anna interrupted before Alastair could say it. “Not without killing James.”

There was an awful silence. “James told Matthew I had to get as close to him as I could,” Cordelia said. “And I trust him. If that’s what he wanted me to do—”

“James would be willing to sacrifice himself,” Thomas said in a low voice. “We all know that. But we can’t—we can’t lose another—”

Anna looked away.

To Ari’s surprise, it was Matthew who spoke. He stood with his back straight, and there was something very different about him. As if Edom had changed him—not just that he was thinner, and exhausted-looking, but as if the light in his eyes, always there, had changed in its quality. “He would not consider this a sacrifice,” he said. “He would not want to live with Belial possessing him. If there was no other way out, he would take death as a gift.”

“Matthew,” Cordelia said softly.

Anna’s eyes flashed. “You’re his parabatai, Math. Surely you can’t be arguing for his death.”

“I don’t want to,” Matthew said. “I know I might not survive it myself. But he asked me to be his voice when he no longer had one. And I cannot betray that promise.”

“Let me ask a question,” Alastair said. “Does anyone have a different solution? One in which Belial doesn’t murder everyone in London, and perhaps everyone in the world, and he stops possessing James, and James is never in danger? Because if so, speak up now.”

There was another awful silence.

“I love James like a brother,” said Thomas, “but Math is right. James would never want to live with Belial controlling his every move. That would be torture.”

“James said to believe in him,” Cordelia said. Her chin was up, her jaw set and determined. “And I do.”

Anna nodded. “Fine. That’s our plan, then. We get Cordelia inside the abbey, as close to Belial as possible.” She drew a seraph blade, unlit, from her belt. “Now come along. There’s an entrance around the back we can use to get in.”

She gestured for the others to follow her down Great College Street, a narrow cobbled lane with tall, old-fashioned houses along one side. On the other side was the abbey, protected by a high stone wall topped with spikes. Halfway down the road, they found an alcove set into the wall, containing a small wooden door with no visible latch or knob.

Anna eyed it for a moment before launching a kick at it; it flew open with a sound like a gunshot. They all piled through the doorway and found themselves in a large monastic garden. It was a manicured lawn lined with flowerbeds, and utterly deserted. The blank windows of what seemed to be a dormitory overlooked it; Ari couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to the students who normally lived in the abbey. Were they wandering the streets of London, blank-faced as all the other mundanes?

Together, the Shadowhunters darted silently across the grass and through an archway into a dimly lit tunnel that led into the abbey proper. There was no movement, not a single sign of anyone living. They passed out of the tunnel into a small walled garden, open to the sky, which was a whirlpool of colliding gray-black thunderheads. A fountain at the garden’s center trickled quietly into a stone bowl. Thomas paused for a moment, blinking in the unnatural light.

“If we do succeed,” he said, “if everything goes back to some sort of normal, will the mundanes remember what happened? What all of this was like?”

No one answered; only Alastair touched Thomas gently on the shoulder before they started moving again. Ari noticed that they had grouped themselves loosely around Cordelia, as if they were the escorts of a warrior knight. It had been completely unconscious, but they had all done it.