Chain of Gold

James stopping clipping. “I hadn’t thought of that.” Maybe I could. He put down the shears in the grass and looked at his hands. He did not know what to do. He thought hard of nothingness, of the gray of the shadow realm. With a start, he stumbled forward through the wall.

He recovered himself. He was still a shadow, though he was not in the shadow realm: he stood very clearly inside the garden walls of Blackthorn Manor. There was overgrown grass everywhere—and Grace, staring at him.

Can you come back? she was mouthing, or possibly saying out loud, and James, with a huge effort, did. Back in his physical form, he clenched and unclenched his fists.

“That was amazing,” Grace said. “I imagine you’d get used to the feeling, if you practiced.”

Maybe. “Do you think I could leave by the gate?”

Grace laughed. At the gate, as he departed, she reached for his arm. “Wait. James. I was thinking. If some night you find yourself unable to sleep, and you find yourself cast into shadow… Perhaps you could come here, and walk through the briars and into the house, and into Mama’s study, and dip your shadowed hand through the top of the right box, and retrieve my bracelet for me.”

James felt a surge of warmth toward Grace. He had feared she might be horrified by his presence as a shadow, but not only did she accept him, she presented an opportunity for his power to be used to help. He felt for some reason that he owed her, though he could not have said why. “I could. I will.”

“Leave me a sign, if you do it,” Grace said, “and the next night I will meet you in the forest. You would be a true friend to me if you could do this.”

“I can,” said James. “I will.”

6 NO MORE OF MIRTH

All within is dark as night:

In the windows is no light;

And no murmur at the door,

So frequent on its hinge before.

Close the door; the shutters close;

Or through the windows we shall see

The nakedness and vacancy

Of the dark deserted house.

Come away: no more of mirth

Is here or merry-making sound.

The house was builded of the earth,

And shall fall again to ground.

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Deserted House”

“This cannot be where they live,” Lucie whispered, half in amazement, half in horror.

Her mother had described Chiswick House to her once. What it had been like years ago, when Tessa had attended a ball there disguised as Jessamine. Her parents couldn’t talk about the ball, in fact, without shooting each other fond, syrupy looks. It was quite disgusting.

Uncle Gabriel had described the house, too, in a much more exciting and suitable story about the way that he, Aunt Cecily, Uncle Jem, Lucie’s parents, and Uncle Gideon had dispatched the evil Benedict Lightwood, who had turned into a demonic worm and marauded through the Lightwood gardens. It was a story with a great deal of blood and excitement, and it had been very clear—to Lucie at least—that the gardens had been glorious. The manor house itself had been glorious: white stone, spreading green lawns down to the Thames. Gorgeous Greek follies seeming to float above the ground. There had been Italian gardens, and moonlight-washed balconies, and tall, proud pillars, a famous reproduction of the Venus de’ Medici from the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, a magnificent avenue of cedars sweeping up to the house.…

“My mother said she heard it had fallen into disrepair, but I did not expect this,” Cordelia whispered back. Her gaze, like Lucie’s, was glued to the outside of the massive gates that closed off the property. Latin words were etched across the top of the ironwork.

ULTIMA FORSAN. The end is closer than you think.

They sent a shiver down Lucie’s spine. She put her hand to her waist, where her weapons belt rested. Bridget had left seraph blades, belts, and steles in the carriage for them, and they had Marked themselves carefully with various runes—Strength, Stealth, Night Vision. One never could be too careful in a possibly haunted place.

Lucie only wished they had been able to change into gear. They were still wearing their dresses from the picnic, torn and bloodstained.

“There is disrepair and then there’s disaster,” Lucie said, reaching for her stele. “How can Grace bear to live here?”

“I suppose she finds other things to make her happy,” Cordelia said in a subdued voice as Lucie scratched an Open rune on the gates and they swung open, scattering a powder of red rust.

They stepped forward onto the broken stones and overgrowth of what had once been a gorgeous avenue lined with potted cypress and cedar trees. The rot of dying cedar filled the air now and tickled the back of Lucie’s throat. The trees overhead had grown into each other, their branches tangling, bending, and snapping. Dead branches littered the ground.

As they came out from the avenue and into the broad circular drive in front of the house, Lucie was struck by the destroyed beauty of the manor. A double set of stairs, wonderfully constructed, led up to a broad entryway: blackened vines twisted their way around fluted columns. If she cast her gaze up she could see the balconies her mother had spoken of—but they had been taken over by clusters of thorns.

“Like Sleeping Beauty’s castle,” Lucie murmured.

“I was just thinking that!” said Cordelia. “Did you ever read the older fairy tales? I remember them being much more frightening. There was one where Sleeping Beauty’s palace was ringed all around with sharp briars, and the bodies of the princes who tried to get through hung on the thorns when they died, and their bones whitened in the sun.”

“Delightful!” said Lucie. “I shall be sure to include that in a book.”

“Not in The Beautiful Cordelia, you won’t,” said Cordelia, moving up to inspect the house more closely. “Lucie, there isn’t a single light on, not a single bit of illumination. Maybe they are not home?”

“Look—there,” Lucie said, and pointed. “I saw a light, darting across one of the windows. If you do not want to knock on the door, you need not. I admit, it is quite alarming here.”

Cordelia squared her shoulders. “I am not alarmed.”

Lucie hid a smile. “Then I am going to seek a ghost while you distract the inhabitants. We will meet back at the gates in a quarter hour.”

Cordelia nodded and began to climb the cracked marble steps to the front door. The sound of her knocking faded as Lucie slipped around the house to the back, where the grass sloped down toward the dark water of the river. She found herself looking up at the stone wall of the manor, cracked with age and veined through with a million thick and twisting vines.

Lucie took a running jump and seized the vines. She began to climb quickly, hand over hand, the way she had always climbed the rope in the training room, hoping to find an open window she could climb through. To her delight, halfway up the wall she realized she had reached a balcony. Even better.

Lucie pulled herself up and over the balcony railing and tumbled onto the ground. She leaped up before any of the thorny briars could penetrate her cloak and give her a nasty scratch. She felt terribly pleased with herself—she wondered if her father would have been proud if he’d known how handily she’d climbed the wall.

Probably not, she had to conclude. Probably he simply would have been murderous that she was here at all. Parents really were unable to see what their children could accomplish, alas. Lucie reached for the handle of the cracked French doors, their glass smeared with black dirt and greenish rot. She pushed inward—

The door flew open, showing a massive, empty ballroom beyond. Well, nearly empty. Jesse Blackthorn stood in front of her, his green eyes blazing with rage.

“What in Raziel’s name are you doing here?” he hissed.

* * *

The shadow realm was piercingly cold. James had never felt the chill before: he had always stood somehow apart from the dark place, but now he was within. It was no longer silent, either. He could hear wind blowing, and a distant sound like shattering glass.

All around him there was blowing dust. Perhaps this place had once been an ocean and had dried up, blowing away with the harsh wind. Certainly there seemed nothing in front of him but an endless sea of sand.

He turned, wondering if he could see any path back to the ballroom. To his surprise, he saw instead the skyline of London—the dome of St. Paul’s, the crenellations of the Tower of London, and the familiar arches of Tower Bridge. Tower Bridge itself seemed to glow, eerily red. James coughed; there was dust in his mouth, bitter as salt.

Bitter as salt. He knelt down and scooped a handful of the bone-colored dirt of this world into his hand. He had never been able to touch anything here before. But the dirt was solid, dusty, like any other dirt. He slid a handful into his trouser pocket and rose to his feet as the vision of London faded.

There was only darkness around him now, lit by a faint, eerie glow whose source he could not see. Trackless waste led in all directions. He tried to push down his rising terror, the part of him that said he would die here, in utter darkness: frozen to the spot with no path to follow.

And then he saw it. A tiny flicker of golden firefly light in the distance.

He moved toward it, slowly at first, and then faster, as the light became a blaze. The cold began to vanish, and the scent of living things surrounded him—roots and leaves and flowers—as he stepped back into the world again.

* * *

Cordelia had almost given up knocking when the front doors of Chiswick House finally swung open. Grace stood on the threshold. Much to Cordelia’s surprise, she was alone. Ladies did not open their own front doors—servants performed that task. But then, what ordinary human being, even one with the Sight, would be willing to work in such a place? No wonder Grace had insisted she be picked up and dropped off at the gates.

Grace was wearing the same dress she’d worn to the picnic earlier, though the hem was torn and it was stained with grass. Not that Cordelia minded. There was something humanizing about Grace exhibiting even small imperfections.

Grace carried a fiery torch in her right hand; behind her, the foyer of the house was dark. There was a dank smell in the air. Grace stared at Cordelia, her expression caught between blankness and surprise.