Chain of Thorns (The Last Hours, #3)

Letty blinked. She didn’t look much like someone who had children. Not what Letty imagined a mother to be. But clearly she was half out of her head. Perhaps she’d been different once.

“You must ask Mr. Pangborn about that,” she said. “Or—I know a Silent Brother is coming soon. Perhaps one of them can help you see your children.” Through bars, she thought, but there was no point saying that.

“Yes.” The woman smiled at that, a peculiar, unsettling smile that seemed to stretch across half her face. “A Silent Brother. I would very much like to see him when he comes.”



* * *



Cordelia hadn’t been looking forward to going to Curzon Street. She had imagined something dim and ghostly, a shadow of the place it had been, with dustcloths over the furniture.

But it was nothing like that. It felt like stepping back into the house as she’d left it. Lights were on—Effie’s doing, no doubt—and it was clean and swept. As she wandered through the rooms, she saw that fresh flowers had been placed on the tables in cut-crystal vases. The chess table was set up in the study, as if waiting for a game, though she could not bear to look in the room for very long. A fire burned low in the hearth.

Perhaps this was worse than dustcloths, she thought, passing into the dining room. On the walls hung the Persian miniatures: one depicted a scene from Layla and Majnun, with Layla standing in the doorway of a tent, gazing out. Cordelia had always liked her expression—yearning, seeking. Looking for Majnun, perhaps, or looking for wisdom or answers to her troubles.

She could feel Layla’s yearning in her own longing for this home. She stood here inside it, and yet it was as if it were a lost place. Everything within it called to her; everything had been selected by James with such care and attention, such determination that she would like it.

What had he been thinking? Cordelia wondered, as she went up the stairs to what had been her room. Had he been planning to get rid of it all when Grace became mistress of the house? The miniatures, the chess set, the Carstairs panels over the fireplace? Or could it be true, what he’d said—that he’d never really planned a life with Grace at all?

But that was a dangerous road to go down. Cordelia found the bedroom, like everything, much as she’d left it; she caught up a champagne-colored silk dress from the wardrobe—she’d have to return with something, to bolster the story she’d told Alastair. She carried it downstairs before realizing that hauling around a heavy, beaded dress was not going to help her in her next endeavor. She’d leave it here, on the table near the door, and return for it when she was done.

The cold outside seemed more bitter compared with the warmth inside the house. She wondered idly where Effie had been—asleep downstairs, perhaps, or even out; it might well be her day off.

She touched the Lilith-protection amulet at her throat for reassurance as she reached the end of the street and ducked through an alley, which took her to the brick-lined narrow lanes of Shepherd Market. All was quiet, unusually so: too late for any shopping, too early for the mundanes who prowled this lane at night. Ahead of her rose Ye Grapes, light spilling from its windows. Within the pub a few regulars sat and drank, unaware that just outside was the place her father had been murdered.

A place of death or horror, scarred by tragedy.

She knew where it had happened. James had told her; he had seen the whole thing. She ducked down a narrow street alongside the pub. It was dark here, no gas lamps to pierce the night. Only a milky-colored moon, brushed by threaded clouds, just beginning to rise over the buildings.

She half expected to see her father’s ghost, but that was not unusual. Every once in a while she imagined herself turning and seeing him, smiling at him, saying, Baba joon, as she had when she was very young. To think he had died here, in this dark place that stank of human misery.

She straightened her back. Narrowed her eyes. Thought of Rostam, who had slain the Div-e Sepid, the White Demon.

With a deep breath, she said out loud, her voice echoing from the surrounding stone, “Te invoco a profundus inferni.… Daemon, esto subjecto voluntati meae!”

She said it again, and then again, calling on the deepest Hell, until the words began to blur together and lose their meaning. She became aware of a strange, muffling silence—as if she had been placed for a moment beneath a glass jar and could no longer hear the ordinary sounds of London: the rattle of carriage wheels, the tramp of feet on snow, the jingle of horse bridles.

And then, cutting through the silence, came the hissing.

Cordelia whirled around. It stood before her, grinning. The demon was humanoid, but both taller and skinnier than any human. It was wearing a long, ragged cloak the color of soot. Its skull was egg-shaped, with burned, puckered skin stretched over it; its eye sockets were skin-covered hollows, and its mouth was a slash, a wound in its face lined with pin-like scarlet teeth.

“My, my,” said the demon in a voice like metal scraped against stone. “You haven’t even drawn a pentagram, nor bear you a seraph blade.” As it spoke, gray liquid drooled from its mouth. “Such a foolish mistake, little Shadowhunter.”

“It is no mistake.” Cordelia spoke in her haughtiest tone. “I am no mere Shadowhunter. I am a paladin of Lilith, Mother of Demons, bride of Sammael. If you lay a hand upon me, she will make you regret it.”

The demon spat, a pellet of gray something. The stench in the alley was sickening. “You lie.”

“You know better,” Cordelia said. “You can surely sense her, all around me.”

The demon’s mouth opened, and a purple-gray tongue resembling a calf’s liver emerged from between its red teeth. The tongue slurped at the air, as if tasting it. Cordelia held still; she had not realized how revolting this would be. Her urge to lay hands on a blade, to slay the thing in front of her, was primal, bred in her blood. She felt her hands clench.

“You are a paladin,” it said. “Well then, paladin, why have you summoned me up from Hell? What does the Mother of Demons wish?”

“She seeks knowledge of the doings of the Prince of Hell Belial,” Cordelia said, which was true enough.

“I would be a fool to betray Belial,” the demon said. Cordelia was not sure she had ever heard a demon sound hesitant before.

“You would be a fool to cross Lilith,” she said. She folded her arms and stared the demon down. It was all she could do, of course; she didn’t have so much as a knitting needle on her with which to fight the demon if it came to that. But the demon didn’t know that. “And Belial does not know I am asking you this. Lilith does.”

After a moment, the demon said, “Your mistress rages at Belial because he occupies her realm of Edom. ‘There shall Lilith repose, and find for herself a place to rest,’?” it said in a high voice; it was unnerving to hear a demon quote a holy text. “But Edom is not his goal. He is moving, ever moving. He builds an army.”