Chain of Iron Read online

  Thomas nodded. Matthew was leaning against the back of the sofa now, only his right hand wrapped around James’s wrist, as if he were reassuring himself that James was still there.

  “I did think that rubbish was over,” James admitted.

  “It’s been months,” said Christopher.

  “I thought it couldn’t happen to you anymore,” Thomas said. “I thought Belial’s realm was destroyed.”

  James looked at his friends, wanting to reassure them—it doesn’t mean anything, there could be any sort of reason for it to happen, I’m sure it isn’t important—but the words died on his lips. The bleakness of the place was still too close to him, the acid taste of the air, the distant fortress shrouded in smoke.

  Someone had wanted him to see it, he thought. And it was unlikely to be someone who wished him well.

  “I know,” he said at last. “That’s what I thought too.”

  * * *

  The air outside was so cold it seemed to shimmer as Cordelia, tipsy and giggling, clambered down from the Institute carriage and waved a vigorous goodbye to Lucie. Behind her, Cornwall Gardens was dark and shuttered. “Thank you for the party surprise,” she called, closing the carriage door. “I never expected to spend the night before my wedding playing tiddlywinks with werewolves.”

  “Did you think they were cheating? I thought they were cheating. But it was terribly amusing regardless.” Lucie leaned out the open window and blew Cordelia a dramatic kiss. “Good night, my dear! Tomorrow I will be your suggenes! We will be sisters.”

  Cordelia looked momentarily anxious. “Only for a year.”

  “No,” Lucie said firmly. “Whatever happens, we will always be sisters.”

  Cordelia smiled and turned to go into the house. The front door had opened, and Lucie could see Alastair in the doorway, holding an upraised lamp, like Diogenes looking for an honest man. He nodded at Lucie before pulling the door shut behind his sister; Lucie tapped the side of the carriage, and Balios started up again, the sound of his hooves like muffled rain against the snowy ground.

  She sank back with a sigh against the blue silk seat, suddenly tired. It had been a long night. Anna had slipped away an hour or so after midnight with Lily, a vampire from Peking. Lucie had stood firm—she’d wanted to remain at the Ruelle as long as Cordelia was amused; she knew her friend was half dreading the next day. She couldn’t blame her. Not that people didn’t get married for all sorts of reasons of expediency rather than love, but even if it was temporary, it was very dramatic. Cordelia would have to put on quite a performance tomorrow, as would James.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” said a low voice. Lucie looked up, her mouth curling into a smile.

  Jesse. Sitting opposite her, his face illuminated by the rosy glow of the carriage lamp that filtered through the window. She had trained herself not to jump when he suddenly appeared between one moment and another; in the four months since they had become reacquainted, she had seen him nearly every night.

  He always looked the same. He never gained an inch in height, or his hair an inch in length. He was always reassuringly dressed in the same black trousers and white shirt. His eyes were always deep and green, like verdigris on a tarnished coin.

  And his presence always made her feel as if delicate fingers were walking up her spine. Shivery and warm, all at the same time.

  “A penny is very little,” she said, keeping her voice light with an effort. “My thoughts are most interesting and should require a greater outlay of cash.”

  “Pity I’m stony broke,” he said, indicating his empty pockets. “Did you have a good time at the Ruelle? Anna’s outfits are truly spectacular; I do wish that she could advise me on waistcoats and spats, but, you know…” He raised his arms, gesturing at his never-changing attire.

  Lucie smiled at him. “Were you lurking about? I didn’t see you.”

  It was rare that she didn’t see Jesse if he was present in a room. Four months ago, he had given his last breath—once imprisoned in the golden locket she now wore around her neck—to save James’s life. Lucie had been worried afterward that the loss would mean Jesse might fade away or disappear; while he remained bothersomely insubstantial, he was still very visible, if only to her.

  He leaned his dark head back against the blue-and-gold upholstery. “I may have popped by to make sure you got into the Ruelle safely. There are a lot of suspicious types around Berwick Street at night: thieves, cutpurses, rapscallions.…”

  “Rapscallions?” Lucie was delighted. “That sounds like something from The Beautiful Cordelia.”

  “Speaking of which.” He pointed an accusing finger at her. “When are you going to let me read it?”

  Lucie hesitated. She had allowed him to read some of her earlier novels, like Secret Princess Lucie Is Rescued from Her Terrible Family, which he had enjoyed very much, especially the character of Cruel Prince James. But The Beautiful Cordelia was different. “I’m polishing the book,” she said. “It requires polishing. All novels must be polished, like diamonds.”

  “Or shoes,” he said dryly. “I’ve been thinking of writing a novel myself. It is about a ghost who is very, very bored.”

  “Perhaps,” Lucie suggested, “you should write a novel about a ghost who has a very devoted sister and a very devoted… friend who spend a great deal of their time trying to figure out how to make him not a ghost anymore.”

  Jesse didn’t reply. She’d meant to be amusing, but his eyes had gone dark and serious. How odd that even when one was a ghost, the eyes were the window to the soul. And she knew Jesse had a soul. And that it was as alive as anything else living, desperate to be free in the world once more, not sentenced to a half-existence of consciousness that came only at night.

  Jesse glanced out the window. They were passing through Piccadilly Circus, nearly deserted at such a late hour. The statue of Eros in the center was lightly dusted with snow; a lone tramp slept upon the steps below it. “Don’t have too much hope, Lucie. Sometimes hope is dangerous.”

  “Have you said that to Grace?”

  “She won’t listen. Not a word. I—I don’t wish you to be disappointed.”

  Lucie reached out her hand, still in its blue kid glove. Jesse seemed to be watching her in the faint reflection traced against the inside of the window, though of course he could not also see himself. Perhaps he preferred it that way.

  He turned his own hand over, palm up. Drawing off her glove, she rested her fingers lightly on his. Oh. The feel of him—his hand was cool but slightly insubstantial, like the memory of a touch. And yet it sent sparks through her veins—she could almost see them, like fireflies in the dark.

  She cleared her throat. “Don’t worry about me being disappointed,” she said. “I am terribly busy with important things, and I have a wedding to arrange tomorrow.”

  He looked over at her then, smiling almost reluctantly. “You’re the only one planning this wedding?”

  She tossed her head, making the flowers on her hat tremble. “The only competent one.”

  “Oh, indeed. I recall the scene in Secret Princess Lucie Is Rescued from Her Terrible Family in which Princess Lucie bests Cruel Prince James at the art of flower arranging.”

  “James was very annoyed by that chapter,” said Lucie, with some satisfaction. Light glowed into the carriage as they passed the streetlamps: outside, a lone policeman walked his solitary beat before the Corinthian portico of the Haymarket Theatre.

  She could no longer feel Jesse’s hand against hers. She glanced down and saw that she seemed to be resting her fingers against nothing—he seemed to have gone from slightly to entirely insubstantial. She frowned, but he had already withdrawn his hand, leaving her to wonder if she’d imagined things.

  “I suppose you’ll see Grace tomorrow,” Jesse said. “She seems unbothered by the wedding and appears to wish your brother well.”

  Lucie couldn’t help but wonder. Grace was a subject she and Jesse could only touch on lightly. She never saw t
hem at the same time, since Jesse lay unconscious during the day, and Grace had difficulty getting away from the Bridgestocks and Charles during the night; Jesse often visited her, but she never spoke to Lucie about their conversations. For all that Grace and Lucie were working together to save Jesse, the topic of him as he was, now, was an awkward one.

  Jesse did seem to understand that Grace had gotten engaged to Charles in order to be protected from Tatiana’s influence, and that James and Cordelia were marrying to save Cordelia’s reputation. He even seemed to think it was the right thing to do. But Jesse loved his sister with a great protective love, and Lucie had no desire to discuss with him the fact that she worried Grace had broken James’s heart.

  Especially not while she still needed Grace’s help.

  “Well, I’m glad to hear it,” she said briskly. Turning out of Shoe Lane, they rolled through the iron gateway of the Institute and into the courtyard. The cathedral rose above them, dark and imposing against the sky. “When—when will I see you again?”

  She immediately wished she hadn’t asked. He always turned up, rarely missing more than a night between their meetings. She shouldn’t press him.

  Jesse smiled a little sadly. “Would that I could make an appearance during the wedding. It is a pity. I would have liked to see you in your suggenes dress. It looked like a butterfly’s wings.”

  She had shown him the material—an iridescent peach-lavender shot silk—before; still, she was surprised he recalled it. Lights were coming on in the Institute; Lucie knew that her parents would soon be emerging to welcome her back. She drew away from Jesse, reaching to gather up her discarded glove, as the front door of the Institute opened, spilling warm yellow light across the flagstones.

  “Perhaps tomorrow night—” she began, but Jesse was already gone.

  GRACE: 1893–1896

  Once upon a time, she had been someone else, she remembers that much. A different girl, though she had the same skinny wrists and white-blond hair. When she was still small, her parents sat her down and explained that she and they and everyone they knew were not ordinary people, but the descendants of angels. Nephilim, sworn to protect the world from the monsters that threatened it. The girl had a drawing of an eye on the back of her hand, from before remembering. Her parents put it there, and it marked her as one of the Shadowhunters and allowed her to see the monsters that were invisible to others.

  By all rights, she should be able to remember the details of her parents’ faces, the house they lived in. She had been seven years old—she should be able to remember how she felt in the stone room in Alicante, when a crowd of adults who were strangers to her came and told her that her parents were dead.

  Instead that moment was the end of feeling. The girl who had existed before she went into the stone room—that girl was gone.

  At first the girl thought she would be sent to live with other members of her family, though her parents had been distant from them and they were strangers. Instead she was sent to live with an entirely different stranger. All at once she was a Blackthorn. A carriage of ebony as black and shiny as a pianoforte came to fetch her; it brought her across the summer fields of Idris, to the edge of Brocelind Forest, and through elaborately filigreed iron gates. To Blackthorn Manor, her new home.

  It must have been a shock for the girl, going from a modest house in the lower part of Alicante to the ancestral house of one of the oldest Shadowhunter families. But that shock, and indeed most of her memories of the house in Alicante, were gone like so much else.

  Her new mother was strange. At first she was kind, almost too kind. She would grasp the girl, suddenly, around the waist, and hold her tightly. “I never thought I would have a daughter,” she would murmur, in a tone of wonder, as though she were telling someone in the room who the girl could not see. “And one that came with such a pretty name, too. Grace.”

  Grace.

  There were other, more frightening ways that Tatiana Blackthorn was strange. She took no action to keep up the house in Idris or prevent it from falling into decay; her only servant was a sour-faced and silent maid who Grace rarely saw. Sometimes Tatiana was pleasant; other times she harshly ground out an unending litany of her grievances—against her brothers, against other Shadowhunter families, against Shadowhunters in general. They were responsible for the death of her husband, and the whole bunch of them, Grace came to understand, could go to the devil.

  Grace was grateful for having been taken in, and she was glad to have a family and a place to belong. But it was a strange place, her mother never really knowable, always busying herself with odd magics in unlit back corners of the manor. It would have been a very lonely life, if not for Jesse.

  He was seven years her elder, and pleased to have a sister. He was quiet, and kind, and he read to her and helped her make flower crowns in the garden. She noticed that his face was a blank when their mother went on about her enemies and the vengeance she craved against them.

  If there was anything in the world that Tatiana Blackthorn loved, it was Jesse. With Grace she could be critical, and liberal with the slaps and pinches, but she would never lift a hand to Jesse. Was it because he was a boy, Grace wondered, or was it because he was Tatiana’s child by blood, while Grace was only a ward she had taken in?

  The answer mattered little. Grace didn’t need her mother’s adoration, as long as she had Jesse. He was a companion when she needed one most, and so much older that he seemed almost grown to her.

  It was a good thing they had each other for companionship, since they rarely left the grounds of the manor, save when they went with their mother on her brief trips to Chiswick House, a vast stone estate in England that Tatiana had wrested from her brothers twenty-five years ago and now jealously guarded. Though Chiswick House was near London, and thus a valuable piece of property, Tatiana seemed determined to watch it rot away too.

  Grace was always relieved to return to Idris. Being close to London did not quite remind her of her old life—that had turned to shadows and dreams—but it did recall to her that she had a past, a time before she had belonged to Jesse, to Tatiana, and to Blackthorn Manor. And what was the point of that?

  * * *

  One day Grace heard a queer thumping noise coming from the room above hers. She went to investigate, more curious than worried, and discovered that the source of the noise was, shockingly, Jesse, who had set up a makeshift knife-throwing gallery with some straw bales and a hessian sheet in one of the high-ceilinged, airy rooms on the manor’s top floor. They must have been used as training rooms by the house’s earlier inhabitants, but her mother only ever referred to them as “the ballrooms.”

  “What are you doing?” asked Grace, scandalized. “You know that we aren’t meant to pretend to be Shadowhunters.”

  Jesse went to retrieve a thrown knife from a straw bale. Grace couldn’t help but notice he’d very accurately hit his target. “It’s not pretending, Grace. We are Shadowhunters.”

  “By birth, says Mama,” she said cautiously. “But not by choice. Shadowhunters are brutes and killers, she says. And we’re not allowed to train.”

  Her brother prepared to throw the knife again. “And yet we live in Idris, a secret nation built for and known only by Shadowhunters. You bear a Mark. I—ought to.”

  “Jesse,” Grace said slowly. “Do you really care so much about being a Shadowhunter? About fighting demons with sticks, and all that?”

  “It’s what I was born to do,” he said, his brow dark. “I have taught myself, since I was eight years old—the attic of this house is full of old weapons and training manuals. It’s what you were born to as well.” Grace hesitated, and a rare memory surfaced in her mind—her parents throwing knives into a board hung on the wall of their small house in Alicante. They had fought demons. It was how they had lived and how they had died. Surely that was not all foolishness, as Tatiana claimed. Surely it was not a meaningless life.

  Jesse noticed her odd expression but didn’t press her to tell
him what she was thinking. Instead he went on making his point. “What if one day we were attacked by demons? Someone would have to protect our family.”

  “Will you train me, too?” Grace said, in a rush, and her brother broke into a smile that made her burst into tears, overwhelmed by the sudden feeling of being cared for. Of being cared about. Of belonging to something larger than herself.

  * * *

  They started with the knives. They didn’t dare train during the day, but when their mother was asleep, she was far enough away not to hear the thunks of the blades into the backstop. And Grace, to her own surprise, did well at the training, learning fast. After a few weeks, Jesse gave her a hunting bow and a quiver of beautiful red cured leather—he apologized that they were not new, but she knew he had scrounged them from the attic and spent weeks cleaning and repairing them for her, and that meant more than would have any expensive gift.

  They began archery lessons. This was an altogether more dangerous prospect, involving sneaking out of doors in the middle of the night to practice at the old range behind the house, almost to the walls. Grace would get into bed in all her clothes, wait until the moon was visible through her window, and descend the house’s unlit gloomy stairs to join her brother. Jesse was a patient teacher, gentle and encouraging. She had never thought of having a brother, but now she was grateful every day to have one—and not only grateful in the dutiful way she was grateful to her mother.

  Before she came to live with Tatiana, Grace had never understood how potent a poison loneliness could be. As the months passed, she realized that loneliness had driven her adoptive mother mad. Grace wanted to love Tatiana, but her mother would not allow such love to grow. Her loneliness had become so twisted up on itself that she had grown afraid of love, and rejected the affections of anyone besides Jesse. Slowly Grace came to understand that Tatiana did not want Grace’s love. She wanted only her loyalty.