Chain of Thorns (The Last Hours, #3)

Perhaps it had simply been seeing his sister in the Silent City prison that had affected him. For Jesse, Grace represented hope—the hope of family, the hope of orphans clinging together when their parents were dead or lost. But for James, still, thoughts of Grace meant thoughts of darkness, a forever fall into shadow, like Lucifer falling from heaven. From grace itself.

He could not bring himself to ask. And so he schooled his expression into a calm neutrality as Jesse and Lucie approached. There were streaks of dirt on Jesse’s face; he looked discouraged. “There’s nothing here,” he said.

“Or rather, there was a Cerberus demon here,” said Lucie, “until a few months ago, when James killed it.”

“You killed Balthazar?” Jesse said in horror.

“It was a demon,” James began, and broke off as Jesse smiled. He wasn’t doing a bad job pretending things were all right, James had to admit.

“Sorry,” Jesse said. “Just a joke. Never been friends with a demon. Didn’t know the, ah, former… occupant.”

Lucie looked at Jesse. Carefully, she said, “Shall we try the… other structure?”

Jesse’s smile faded immediately. He glanced over at a squat brick building a little ways away, difficult to see behind all the overgrowth of the gardens. It looked like a potting shed, and might have been once, but now its roof was gone. A rickety wooden door hung open on one side.

“Yes,” Jesse said. “I suppose we have to, don’t we?”

Lucie took his hand. James noted the gesture but said nothing. There was no shame in needing support, but not all Shadowhunters—male ones, especially—were brought up to think so. James had been raised by Will, whose central tenet in life was that he would have been dead in a ditch at age fourteen had it not been for Jem. He had always encouraged James to rely on his friends, to depend on his parabatai. It was something James loved about his father, but it also meant he could not approach him to talk about Matthew and Cordelia. He could not admit to his father that he was angry with Matthew. James was sure Will had never been angry with Jem in his life.

James followed Lucie and Jesse through the overgrowth to the brick shed. Jesse went inside first, and the others next; the moment James was inside the place, he froze. The room was empty but for a table in its center, on which sat a carved wooden casket. Suddenly James knew what this place was, and why Lucie had only called it the other structure.

The casket—open now, gaping like a slack mouth—was Jesse’s. This was his tomb.

James could see where rain and damp had warped the wood of the casket over the years, a consequence of the building having no roof. Prongs jutted out from one wall, as if something—a sword, perhaps—had hung there once. One of the walls was smoke-blackened, ashes scattered across the frozen ground.

“Bleak, isn’t it,” said Jesse, with a tight sort of smile. “My mother seemed to feel this was the safest place to leave me; she was always afraid the Enclave would search the house.”

“But not the grounds?” James said quietly. He could not have described the look on Jesse’s face—half pain, half horror; this place must remind him of all he had lost. All the years and time.

“I suspect, though she said otherwise, that she wanted me far away from her,” said Jesse. “I suspect the presence of my… corpse… made her feel guilty. Or perhaps just horrified.”

“She ought to feel guilty,” Lucie said fiercely. “She ought to never have another moment of peace, after what she did to you.”

“I don’t think she has much in the way of peace,” James said, thinking of Tatiana’s wild eyes, of the hatred burning in them. “Do you?”

Jesse seemed about to reply, but before he could, James gasped. Something arrowed across his vision—a slice of darkness, as if he were gazing through a cracked window at Belial’s shadow realm. Something was terribly wrong; something nearby.

Cordelia, he thought, and bolted back toward the house without another word.



* * *



The upper floors of Chiswick House were emptier than Cordelia would have expected. Most of the rooms were without pictures, rugs, or furniture. Cordelia knew Tatiana had smashed every mirror in the house when Rupert Blackthorn had died; she had not realized they still hung on the walls, ruined frames of jagged glass.

There was a training room, in which there were no weapons, only cobwebs and mice. And there was one bedroom, plain but furnished, which had a small vanity table, with a silver-backed brush set still laid out on it. There was one hard-looking chair, and a nearly bare iron bed, with torn sheets still on it. On the nightstand was a mug, at whose bottom something ancient—chocolate? milky tea?—had hardened into a moldy green scum.

With a start, Cordelia realized this cheerless place must have been Grace’s bedroom. What kind of dreams had she dreamt, on that plank of a bed? Surrounded by the darkness of this moldering, bitter house?

Surely I cannot be pitying Grace, Cordelia thought, and started when she heard someone cry out. She reached for Cortana—her hand slapped against fabric. Her blade was not there.

She pushed through the hurt, running out into the corridor and up a flight of stairs, following the sound of the cry. She burst into a large ballroom, where the remains of a massive chandelier, easily eight feet across, lay in the middle of the room where it had crashed to the ground at some point. It looked like a massive, jeweled spider that had lost a fight with a much larger spider.

Ariadne, in the center of the room, shot Cordelia a guilty look. “Oh, bother,” she said. “I didn’t mean to make you come running.”

“Ariadne may have thought it was a real spider,” Anna said. “A real, giant spider.”

Anna meant to be teasing, Cordelia knew, but the tone of her voice was… fond. Fonder than either Anna or Ariadne were aware of, Cordelia suspected. They were both smiling as Ariadne teased Anna about whether the spider chandelier might look nice in her flat, and perhaps even make a friend for Percival the stuffed snake.

Cordelia went to examine the rest of the room. There were broken floorboards aplenty, each of which she tested to see if it was loose and perhaps hiding something beneath it. Having made herself sneeze several times by disturbing the dust, she went over to a window to catch her breath.

A moment later Anna joined her. Ariadne was at the other end of the room, examining the dumbwaiter, whose door she had managed to wrench open with a puff of dust and broken paint. For a long moment, Anna and Cordelia stood together, looking out the cracked window at the once-green lawns sloping down toward the River Thames.

“Anna,” Cordelia said, in a small voice. “Is Matthew really doing an errand for Ariadne?”

“Indeed he is,” Anna said. She touched a long finger to the window glass, making a spot in the dust. “Why do you ask?”

Cordelia felt herself flush scarlet. “I suppose I was worried. And there’s no one else I can ask. Is he all right?”

Anna paused in the act of drawing back a curtain. “Does he have a reason not to be?”