Chain of Gold

Jesse had moved to stand under the chandelier. For someone so calm, he had a surprising amount of restlessness. “No one but my mother and sister have seen me since… since you saw me in Brocelind six years ago.”

Lucie frowned. “You are a ghost, but not like any other ghost. Even my father and brother can’t see you. It’s so odd. Are you buried?”

“It’s very forward to ask a gentleman if he’s buried,” said Jesse.

“How old are you?” Lucie was undeterred.

Jesse sighed and looked up at the chandelier. “I have two ages,” he said. “I am twenty-four. And I am seventeen.”

“No one has two ages.”

“I do,” he said, unruffled. “When I was seventeen, I died. But my mother had—prepared.”

Lucie licked her dry lips. “What do you mean, prepared?”

He gestured at himself. “This, what you are looking at, is a manifestation of my soul. After my death, my mother told the Silent Brothers she would never give them my remains, that she refused to allow them to touch me again, to burn my body to ashes. I do not know if they questioned what she did then, but I know she brought a warlock into the room in the hours after I died, to preserve and to safeguard my physical body. My soul was cut free to wander between the real world and the spirit realm. Thus I do not age, I do not breathe, and I live only during the nights.”

“Which you spend haunting ballrooms and wandering about the forest?”

He gave her a dark look. “Usually I spend my time reading. Both the manor house in Idris and Chiswick House have well-stocked libraries. I’ve even read my grandfather Benedict’s unpublished papers. They were hidden in the chimney. Horrid stuff—he was obsessed with demons. Socializing with them, crossbreeding them—”

“Ugh,” said Lucie, waving a quelling hand. Benedict Lightwood’s peculiarities were well known. “What do you do during the day?”

He smiled faintly. “I vanish.”

“Really? Vanish where?”

“You have a great deal of questions.”

“Yes,” said Lucie. “In fact, I came here to ask you a question. What did you mean last night when you said, ‘There is death here’? Nothing happened at the ball.”

“But today it did,” said Jesse. “Grace told me.”

Lucie tried to imagine Grace and Jesse sitting in this shadowy room, exchanging the news of their days:

I saw a demon attack in Regent’s Park during the daytime.

Did you, now? Well, I didn’t do much, as you know, I’m still dead.

She cleared her throat. “So you can see the future?”

Jesse paused. He looked made out of moonlight and cobwebs, shadows at his temples, in the hollow of his throat, at his wrists. “Before I reveal anything else,” he said, “you must swear you will tell no one about me—not your brother, not Cordelia, not your parents. Understood?”

“A secret?” Lucie loved and hated secrets. She was always honored to be entrusted with one, and then was immediately tempted to tell it. “Why must it be a secret? Many know I can see ghosts.”

“But as you have so perspicaciously noted, I am not an ordinary ghost,” said Jesse. “I am kept in this state by necromantic magic and the Clave forbids such things. Should they find out, they would search for my body and burn it, and I would be dead in truth. And forever.”

Lucie swallowed. “So you still hope—you think you might return? To full life?”

Jesse leaned back against the wall, his arms folded. “You have not promised.”

“I give my word. I will tell no one about you. Now explain what you meant last night with your warning.”

She had thought he might smirk or say something mocking, but he looked very serious. “Being what I am puts me between two worlds,” he said. “I belong here and yet I don’t. Sometimes I can glimpse other things that do not quite belong. Other ghosts, of course—and demons. There was a sinister presence in that ballroom, and I believe it is the same one that returned today.”

“But why?” Lucie whispered.

Jesse shook his head. “That, I do not know.”

“Will they return—?” Lucie began. There was a flare of light. Jesse turned, surprised, toward the back wall of the house: the French doors had lit up, glowing a startling white.

Lucie darted to one of the windows and looked out. She could see the gardens clearly in all their tangled darkness. A small distance away was the greenhouse, and it was glimmering like a star.

Witchlight.

A moment later the light had winked out. Cold fear clawed at Lucie’s chest. “Daisy,” she breathed, and tore the doors open. Tumbling out onto the balcony without another look at Jesse, she flung herself at the wall and began to climb down.

* * *

Cordelia scrabbled at the ground with her free hand, her fingers sinking into the dirt as she was hauled into the shadows. The demon tentacle wrapped around her leg was agonizing—it felt as if a million small teeth were biting into her skin—but more horrifying was the heat on the back of her neck, the breath of whatever was hovering over her—

Something caught her hand. Lucie, she thought. She shrieked as she came to a sudden stop, the painful cord around her leg tightening, jerking her body sideways. She reached up to clutch the hand that had caught hers, and saw who it belonged to.

The greenhouse was dim, but she knew him instantly. A shock of black hair, pale gold eyes, the face she had memorized. James.

He wasn’t wearing gear. He was in trousers and shirtsleeves, and his face was pale with shock. Still, he was gripping her wrist firmly, hauling her toward the door, as the cord around her leg tried to drag her farther into the greenhouse. If she did not move fast, she would be torn in two.

Using James’s grip as an anchor, Cordelia twisted around to free Cortana—it had been trapped beneath her—and surged downward with the blade in her hand. She slashed the sword through the tentacle holding her.

Cortana sparked gold as it cut through demon flesh. There was a deep, rumbling cry, and suddenly Cordelia was free, sliding toward James in a welter of ichor and her own blood.

The pain lanced through her like fire as he hauled her to her feet. There was nothing elegant about it, nothing of a gentleman helping a lady. This was the urgency of battle, hands grasping and yanking in desperation. She fell against James, who caught at her. Her witchlight pulsed dimly in the dirt where she had dropped it.

“What the blazes, Daisy—?” James began.

She whirled, pulling out of his grasp to snatch up the witchlight. In its renewed glow, she realized that what she had thought was a massive tree rising against the far wall of the greenhouse was something very different.

It was a demon, but not like any she had seen before. From a distance it almost seemed a butterfly or moth, pinned to the wall, wings outspread. A second, closer look revealed that its wings were membranous extensions, shot through with pulsing red veins. Where the wings joined together, they rose into a sort of central stalk, crowned by three heads. Each head was like a wolf’s, but with black, insectile eyes.

Extending from the bottom of the stalk was a knot of long tentacles, like the limbs of a squid. Clustered with membranous seedpods, they hit the floor of the greenhouse and stretched out along the dirt like roots. They wound between the trees and the potted plants, they choked the bases of flowering bushes, they reached across the floor toward Cordelia and James.

The one that Cordelia had severed lay on the ground, pulsing slow freshets of ichor. Not swiftly, but inexorably, the others slipped after it.

She dropped her witchlight into her pocket. If she was going to need to fight, she wanted both hands free.

James had apparently had a similar thought: he slid a dagger from his weapons belt and sighted along his arm, his eyes narrowed. “Daisy,” he said without looking at her. “Run.”

Did he actually mean to face the thing down with a throwing blade? It would be suicide. Cordelia seized his free arm and bolted, yanking James after her. Too startled to hang back, he followed. She glanced back once and saw the boiling rush of black talons behind them, causing her to put on a frantic burst of speed. Good Raziel, how enormous was this greenhouse?

She tore past the last of the potted orange trees and came up short. She could see the door at last, but her heart sank: it was wrapped around with black talons, curving along the walls, their tips pressing against the door, holding it shut. Her hand tightened on James’s wrist.

“Is that the door?” he whispered. She shot him a look of surprise—how could he not know? Hadn’t he come in the same way she had?

“Yes,” she said. “I have a seraph blade, but only one—we could try—”

James hurled the dagger, the runes along its blade shining. He moved so fast it was like a blur: one moment he was holding the blade and the next it had plunged into the demon’s membranous wing, shattering the glass behind it. Shrieking, the demon began to pull itself away from the wall.

James swore and drew two more blades: they were arcs of silver spinning from his hands. The demon screeched, a high and horrible noise, as the knives plunged into its torso. The creature spasmed—it seemed almost to be crumbling, its leathery seedpods pattering to the ground like rain. It gave a last choking hiss and vanished.

No longer held closed, the greenhouse door swung wide. Amid the shattered glass and the stench of demon blood, James ducked swiftly through the door, pulling Cordelia with him; together they tumbled out into the night.

* * *

They raced away from the greenhouse, through overgrown grass and tangled weeds. When they were some distance away, in a clearing near the entrance to what had once been the Italian gardens, James came up short.

Cordelia nearly stumbled into him. She was dizzy, her vision blurring. The pain in her leg had returned. She slid Cortana into its sheath at her back and sank to the ground.

They were in a small hollow of overgrowth; the greenhouse was a great dark star in the distance, capping a rise of garden. Dark trees leaned together overhead, their branches knotted. The air was clean and cool.