Chain of Gold

Page 30

* * *

Moonlight filtered into the greenhouse through shattered glass panes. The Nephilim were long gone, having made their examination of the place and their demands of the mistress of the house. It was finally quiet.

The seedpods the Cerberus demon had dropped in its death throes began to shake and tremble, like eggs about to hatch. Their leathery casings split as thorn-sharp teeth tore them open from within. Covered with a sticky film and hissing like cockroaches, the newborn demons tumbled to the packed-earth floor of the greenhouse, each no bigger than a child’s hand.

But they would not remain that size for long.

DAYS PAST: IDRIS, 1900

Deciding to sneak into Blackthorn Manor as a shadow was one thing, but actually going through with it was another. For days after Grace asked him, James made excuses to himself about why tonight could not be the night: his father up too late to not notice his leaving; weather too foul to roam around outside; moon too bright to give him sufficient cover of darkness.

Then one night James awoke from agitated dreams and found himself flushed and breathless, as though he’d been fleeing something monstrous. The linens of his bed were thrown off. He stood and paced his bedchamber for a time, unable to think of sleep. Then he pulled on trousers and shirt and climbed out of his window.

He had been thinking of Cordelia, not Grace, but he found himself at the wall around Blackthorn Manor nonetheless. Unable to turn back, having come this far, he willed himself into shadow. Quickly enough he found himself through the wall and across the grounds and into the entrance hall.

He hadn’t been prepared for the state of Blackthorn Manor in the middle of the night, its deadly hush, its aura of menace like an opened tomb. Thick silver dust trailed along the edges of banisters and furniture and tangled into cobwebs in every corner. At the edge of his vision was a gray blur: he knew it was the border of the shadow realm. He knew he was courting that world by turning his flesh to shadow.

But he had made a promise.

James could see ghosts, and there were no ghosts here. But this place felt haunted regardless. The shadows seemed to listen intently to his footfalls. Most strange of all, every clock in the house that he passed was stopped at exactly the same hour of twenty to nine.

James went up the stairs. At the end of a long corridor before a turret wall stood a ghastly suit of armor, easily twice as tall as a human. Thankfully, it was only a decoration: fashioned from steel and copper, it resembled nothing so much as a massive human skeleton, with a chest piece in the shape of a rib cage and a helmet and mask that formed a leering skull. It stopped him short, and he stood staring at it until it came to him what it must be: one of Axel Mortmain’s famous clockwork creatures, an empty shell that had once housed a demon. The very monsters that his own parents had defeated when they were only barely older than he was now.

Grace had told him that Tatiana had left the house untouched all these years, but that was not entirely true: she had installed this mechanical creature’s corpse in its gallery. Why? What did it mean to her? Was it admiration of Mortmain, who had nearly destroyed the Shadowhunters?

James hated to turn his back on the thing, but he moved on, and quickly found the door to Tatiana’s study. The room was piled with boxes and crates, stacks of yellowed pages and decaying books. On the wall was a portrait of a boy, about the same age as James, shining green eyes dominating his gaunt face. James knew who it must be, though he had never seen him: Jesse Blackthorn.

There was a metal box set on the low wrought-iron table below the portrait of the dead boy, carved all over with the winding vines that the Blackthorns used to decorate seemingly everything. The lock was built into the lid, presenting a simple keyhole in the smooth surface.

Without looking directly at the box, he lowered his hand to its lid; he felt his body flash into and out of shadow in irregular jerks and for an awful moment saw that other land, the blighted place of twisted trees.

James thrust his ethereal hand through the lid into the box, closed it around a cold serpent of metal, and withdrew it. It was Grace’s mother’s bracelet, just as she had described.

He fled from the room, from the manor itself. The moonlight through the dusty windows of the hallways wavered and writhed like a mass of silver snakes.

Out of the manor grounds and nearly home, James became aware that he remained a shadow. He stopped where he was, a nondescript stretch of road lined on both sides with dense trees and foliage, neither Blackthorn nor Herondale home visible. The sky was dark, the moon a bright sliver. Gray shimmered at the edge of his vision as he closed his eyes and willed himself to become solid again.

Nothing happened.

He was not, at the moment, a being who breathed, but he felt himself breathe anyway, hard and shaky. When he had become a shadow during his scalding fever, it had only been for moments. It had not been much longer at Shadowhunter Academy. But he had not made the change on purpose, either time.

Oddly, his mind turned to Cordelia, to her voice reaching through the fever, through the shadows. He fell to his knees, his hands making no mark in the dirt of the road. He closed his eyes. Let me come back. Let me come back.

Do not leave me alone in these shadows.

He felt a jolt, as if he had fallen and hit the ground hard: his eyes flew open. He was no longer a shadow. He staggered to his feet, gasping in the cold, clear air. The gray had gone from the edge of his vision.

“Well,” he said out loud to nobody, “never again. That’s easily done. Never again.”

* * *

The next night Grace was waiting for him under the shade of a yew tree, just inside the entrance to Brocelind Forest. Without a word he placed the bracelet in her hand.

She turned it thoughtfully over and over between her pale fingers, and he saw the moonlight strike across the engraving laid within the curve of metal.

LOYAULTÉ ME LIE. James knew the meaning. It had been the maxim of a long-dead king of England. Loyalty Binds Me.

“It was the motto of the Cartwrights,” Grace said, her voice very soft. “I was Grace Cartwright once.” A smile touched her lips, faint as winter moonlight. “As I waited for you, I realized how foolish I had been to ask for this. I can’t wear it without my mother seeing. I do not even dare keep it in my room lest she find it.” Grace turned to him. “Would you wear it?” she asked. “As my friend. As my only real friend, truly. Then when I see you, I will be reminded of who I am.”

“Of course,” he said, his heart breaking for her. “Of course I will.”

“Hold out your arm,” she whispered, barely loud enough to be heard, and he did.

He told himself later that he would never forget her fingers on his skin, the way the whole of Brocelind Forest, perhaps all of Idris, gave a great sigh, as Grace gently closed the bracelet on his wrist.

He looked down at Grace. How had he never noticed before that her eyes were almost the precise color of silver, like the bracelet itself?

He wore it through the summer, into the next year and the year after. He had, even now, still not taken it off.

7 FALL OF SONGS

Bright is the ring of words

When the right man rings them,

Fair the fall of songs

When the singer sings them.

—Robert Louis Stevenson, “Bright Is the Ring of Words”

“You have to understand,” said Charles, his eyes glittering earnestly. “The Enclave is extremely annoyed with you, James. Some of them I would even say are angry.”

It was the morning after his odd visit to Chiswick; James was sitting in the chair in front of his father’s desk. Tessa had never redecorated the Institute’s office and it still had a dark Victorian feel to it, with pine-colored wallpaper and Aubusson rugs on the floors. The chair his father sat in was heavy mahogany, the armrests chipped and scratched. Charles Fairchild leaned against the wall near the door, which he had shut and locked after the three of them. His red hair gleamed like a dull old penny in the witchlight.

Lucie had been swept away by Tessa after breakfast to help in the infirmary. The Silent Brothers had put Barbara, Piers, and Ariadne into deep, unwavering enchanted sleep: they had hopes that their bodies would resist the poison while they rested. One could sense the shadow in the house, the sickroom atmosphere, along with the thick tension in this room.

“That seems like it must be very upsetting for the Enclave, then,” said James. “Bad for their dyspepsia.”

He was trying not to glare at Charles but was losing the battle. He’d slept badly the night before after returning to the Institute with his father. It would have been one thing if his father had been angry, but it was clear Will had been more worried than anything else, and James’s insistence that he’d merely gone for a walk and ended up in Chiswick didn’t help matters.

“You need to take this seriously, James,” said Charles. “It was necessary to use a Tracking rune to find you—”

“I wouldn’t say it was necessary,” said James. “I was not in need of help, nor was I lost.”

“James,” his father said calmly. “You disappeared.”

“I should have told you I was going out,” said James. “But—demons attacked us in daylight yesterday. We still have three Shadowhunters in the infirmary, and no cure for their condition. Why is the Enclave focused on me?”

Red flared in Charles’s face. “The Enclave is meeting to discuss the situation with the demons today. But we’re Shadowhunters—life doesn’t simply stop because of a demon attack. According to Tatiana, you went to her house last night and demanded to see Grace, and when she said no, you smashed her greenhouse to pieces—”

Will threw up his hands. “Why would James vandalize a random outbuilding because he couldn’t see a girl? It’s ridiculous, Charles, and you know it.”

James half closed his eyes. He didn’t want to look directly at his father and see Will’s distress: his tie askew and his jacket rumpled and his face showing the evidence of a sleepless night. “I told you, Charles. I never spoke to Mrs. Blackthorn or Grace, either. And there was a Cerberus demon in that greenhouse.”

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