Chain of Thorns (The Last Hours, #3)

She caught at his hand. She knew she was probably crushing his fingers, but she couldn’t help it. “No,” she said again, in a stronger voice. “It’s something in me. I can feel it.” She looked at him anxiously. “When I kiss you, I hear—” She shook her head. “Voices crying out. They seem to be telling me of something terrible, something awful that is happening far away, perhaps in another world.” Her eyes burned. “Somewhere beyond where I, or anyone, should be able to see.”


“Malcolm told me that you walked in shadow when you raised me,” Jesse said softly. “It is possible, I suppose, that some of that shadow still clings to you. But it cannot only be you. I lived very close to the edge of death for a long time, and you have always been able to cross that border. It has to be the two of us combined, somehow. Something amplified when we touch.”

“Then I had better contact Malcolm.” Lucie felt unutterably weary. She had so hoped that part of her life was behind her—bargains with warlocks, desperate conversations about Jesse, the shadow of death touching everything she did or was. “He may know if there’s some way to make it go away.” She flung her head back fiercely. “Because I am not letting you go. Not now.”

“No.” Jesse pressed his lips to her hair. “I do not think I could bear to be let go by you, Lucie Herondale. I think I would follow you, even if you ordered me away. I am alive because of you, but not only because you commanded me to live. I am alive because my life has you in it.”

Lucie’s eyes burned, but tears seemed pointless. Useless. Instead she kissed Jesse—quickly, on the cheek—and let him wrap her in her dressing gown, his arms lingering around her, before she crept back out into the corridor.

She barely recalled returning to her room. It was nearly dark, the fire burning low in the grate. Still, there was some dim moonlight coming through the panes of her windows. It was enough. Sitting down at her desk, she took up her pen and began to write.





14 NEVER SIMPLE




The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

—Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest



In between interrogation sessions, Grace read Christopher’s notes.

His handwriting was cramped, careful, a mix of thoughts and equations that blazed across the loose-leaf pages like a shower of falling stars. In reading them, Grace felt as if she were reading a book in another language, one she almost spoke fluently. There were moments where she sat up, elated at understanding, and moments where she despaired of ever understanding at all.

Brother Zachariah had been kind enough to bring her a workbook and a pen, that she might make her own notes. She found herself distracted enough that she was often surprised when it was time to be taken from her cell to the Speaking Stars for her questioning by the Brothers.

There was no torture, no torment. Only the endless whispering voices inside her head, forcing her to unearth memories long buried and long ignored. When did your mother first take you to the forest? When did you become aware of your power and what it could do? When did you realize you were doing the bidding of a demon? Why did you not run away?

And since Tatiana had escaped from the Adamant Citadel, it had been worse. Where do you think your mother might have gone? Do you know if your mother had a hiding place? Is she with the demon Belial?

There was no response Grace could give, nothing in her mind save that she didn’t know, that her mother had never considered her worthy of confiding in. That she wished more than anyone else that her mother could be caught and punished, penned up somewhere safe where she could never hurt anyone again.

After each interrogation, which left Grace as limp as a rag, Brother Zachariah would escort her back to her cell. He would sit, silently, on a chair outside the barred door, until Grace was no longer huddled on her bed, shuddering. When she could breathe again, he would go—leaving her alone, as she preferred.

Alone, to think about magical equations and chemical weights, about mathematics that bent the laws of physics, and charts that seemed to hover above her bed as she waited for sleep, traced against the stone walls in brilliant lines.

She was at her desk, struggling with a particularly stubborn calculation, when Brother Zachariah appeared at her door. He moved soundlessly through the City, but for her benefit tended to knock at the bars to warn her he was there before startling her by speaking.

You have a visitor, Grace.

She sat up, nearly dropping the pen. Quickly inventoried what she was wearing—a plain ivory dress, her hair tied back with a ribbon. Presentable enough. Grace said, “Is it Christopher?”

There was a momentary pause. Zachariah said, It is your brother, Grace. It is Jesse. He came here from the London Institute.

Grace found that she was cold all over, despite the shawl. It cannot be, she thought. I have been so careful not to ask.… Not about Lucie, and not about—

“Jesse?” she breathed. “Please—oh, please, bring him here.”

Zachariah hesitated, then was gone. Grace rose shakily to her feet. Jesse. He had been real to her, and only her, for such a long time. Now Jesse was alive, someone who had been in the London Institute, someone who could travel from there to here.

Witchlight danced along the walls, illuminating her cell. A moment later, following the light, came Jesse.

Grace caught at the edge of her desk to keep herself from falling. She had hoped that Lucie had brought him back. She’d had faith. But to see him like this—just as he’d been the day before his awful runing ceremony, young and tall and healthy and smiling…

She stared at him as he came over to the door, settling the witchlight torch he carried into a holder on the wall. He was the same, and yet different—she did not remember such curious eyes or such a wry, thoughtful turn to his mouth.

He put his left hand through the bars of the door. A hand marked with a wide black Voyance rune. “Grace,” he said. “Grace. It’s me. It worked.”

Grace Blackthorn did not cry, or at least, she did not truly cry. This was one of the earliest lessons her mother had imparted to her. “The tears of a woman,” she’d said, “are one of the few sources of her power. They should not be freely shed any more than a warrior should throw his sword into a river. If you are to shed tears, you should know, from the first, your purpose in doing so.”

So when she tasted salt in her mouth now, it surprised her. It had been so long. She caught her brother’s hand and held it tightly, and when he said, “Grace, it will all be all right, Grace,” she let herself believe it.



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