There was a chorus of laughter and argument. The afternoon sun was sinking in the sky, its rays catching the jeweled hilts of the knives in Anna’s mantelpiece. They cast shimmering rainbow patterns on the gold-and-green walls. The light illuminated Anna’s shabby-bright flat, making something in Cordelia’s heart ache. It was such a homey place, in a way that her big cold house in Kensington was not.

“What about you, Cordelia?” said Lucie.

“One,” said Cordelia. “That’s everyone’s dream, isn’t it, really? Instead of many who give you little pieces of themselves—one who gives you everything.”

Anna laughed. “Searching for the one is what leads to all the misery in this world,” she said. “Searching for many is what leads to all the fun.”

Cordelia met James’s eyes, half by accident. She saw the worry in his—there had been something brittle in Anna’s laugh. “Then this should be fun,” Cordelia said quickly. “Seducing Hypatia. After all, what are rules for if not to be broken?”

“You make an excellent point,” said Matthew, finagling a piece of cake from Lucie’s plate. She slapped at his hand.

“And getting this Pyxis might help quite a few people,” said Cordelia. “It could have helped Barbara. It could still help Ariadne.”

The blue of Anna’s eyes darkened. “Oh, very well. Let’s try it. Might be a lark. However.”

“However what?” said Christopher. “If you haven’t got the proper clothes, I could lend you my new waistcoat. It’s orange.”

Anna shuddered. “Orange is not the color of seduction, Christopher. Orange is the color of despair, and pumpkins. Regardless, I have all the clothes I need. However”—she held up a finger, the nail clipped quite short—“the Hell Ruelle is not assembled every night. The next salon is tomorrow.”

“Then we will go tomorrow,” said James.

“We cannot possibly all go to the Hell Ruelle,” said Anna. “Hypatia wouldn’t like it if we all show up in a gaggle. A gaggle is not dignified.”

“It makes sense for me to go,” said Matthew. “They know me there.”

“I should go as well,” said James. “It is possible my shadow power might be useful. I have utilized it before to—to acquire certain things.”

Everyone looked puzzled, but James’s expression was not one that suggested a request for clarification would be welcome.

Anna smiled her slow, scotch-and-honey smile. “And Cordelia as well, of course,” she said. “A beautiful girl is always a distraction, and we will need to be very distracting indeed.”

James and Matthew both glanced at Cordelia. I will not blush, she told herself fiercely. I will not. She had a suspicion she looked as if she might be choking.

“Bother,” said Lucie. “I can already tell I’m going to be left out.”

Anna turned toward her. “Lucie, you are very much needed. At the Institute. You see, there is a meeting of all the Enclave tomorrow night, and I had planned to attend. Apparently there is some significant news.”

Lucie looked puzzled. Enclave meetings were restricted to Clave members who were eighteen and older. Only Anna and Thomas qualified.

“I can attend,” said Thomas, with some reluctance. “Though I am not keen on sitting in a room full of people looking at me bloody pityingly.”

They all looked at him in surprise; Thomas rarely swore.

“I was not thinking of attendance,” said Anna. “They may moderate what they have to say if you are there. Better to spy on them.”

“Oh, spying,” said Lucie. “Perfect. They’ll be meeting in the library; I know which room is over it. We can spy on them from overhead. Christopher shall be able to analyze what they say from a scientific perspective, and Thomas can recall it all with his excellent memory.”

She beamed, and Cordelia found herself wanting to smile. Hidden in Lucie’s practicality was a great kindness, she knew—Thomas had lost his sister and was desperate for something to do, some action to take. Lucie was giving him just that.

Thomas seemed to understand as well. He smiled at Lucie—the first smile Cordelia had seen on his face since Barbara’s death. “Espionage it is,” he said. “At last, something to look forward to.”

14 AMONG LIONS

She dropped her glove, to prove his love, then looked at him and smiled;

He bowed, and in a moment leaped among the lions wild:

The leap was quick, return was quick, he has regained his place,

Then threw the glove, but not with love, right in the lady’s face.

“By God!” said Francis, “rightly done!” and he rose from where he sat:

“Not love,” quoth he, “but vanity, sets love a task like that.”

—Leigh Hunt, “The Glove and the Lions”

James insisted on walking Cordelia home, though it was a distance from Percy Street to Kensington. Anna had whisked Matthew away on a secret errand, and Thomas, Christopher, and Lucie had returned to the Devil Tavern to research the working of Pyxis boxes. Cordelia had wished she could stay with them, but she knew the limits of her mother’s patience. Sona would be wondering where she was.

It was getting on toward twilight, the shade thickening under the trees on Cromwell Road. Only a few horse-drawn carriages clipped by in the blue light. It felt almost as if they had the city to themselves; they weren’t glamoured, but still no one cast them more than glances of idle curiosity as they passed by the great brick pile of the Natural History Museum. They were probably looking at James, Cordelia thought: like his father, he drew glances without trying. In the darkening light, his eyes reminded her of the eyes of tigers she had seen in Rajasthan, golden and watchful.

“It was clever of you to think of Anna,” said James. Cordelia looked at him in some surprise; they had been chatting rather desultorily about their educations: Cordelia had been taught by Sona and an ever-changing group of tutors. James had gone to Shadowhunter Academy for only a few months; he’d met Thomas, Matthew, and Christopher there, and they’d promptly blown up a wing of the school. They’d all been expelled, save Thomas, who hadn’t wanted to stay at the Academy without his friends and returned to London willingly at the end of the school year. For the past three years the Merry Thieves had been taught by Henry Fairchild and Sophie Lightwood. “I was grateful to have you with us today.”

“The calming presence of a feminine hand?” Cordelia teased. “Lucie could do that.”

James laughed. There was a graceful lightness to his walk that she had not noticed when she had first come to London. As if he had laid down something heavy he had been carrying, though that made little sense in the circumstances. “Lucie wouldn’t want to bother. Familiarity breeds contempt, I fear, and to us we are her ridiculous brother and his ridiculous friends. I worry sometimes—”

He broke off. The wind caught the edges of his black morning coat. They flew like wings at his sides.

“You worry about Lucie?” asked Cordelia, a little puzzled.

“It’s not that,” James said. “I suppose I worry we all tumble into our roles too easily—Christopher the scientist, Thomas the kind one, Matthew the libertine. And I—I don’t know what I am, exactly.”

“You are the leader,” said Cordelia.

He looked amused. “Am I?”

“The four of you are tightly knit,” said Cordelia. “Anyone could see that. And none of you is so simple. Thomas is more than just kind, and Christopher more than beakers and test tubes, Matthew more than wit and waistcoats. Each of you follows his own star—but you are the thread that binds all four together. You are the one who sees what everyone needs, if anyone requires extra care from their friends, or even to be left alone. Some groups of friends drift apart, but you would never let that happen.”

James’s amusement had gone. There was a little roughness in his voice when he said, “So I am the one who cares the most, is that it?”

“You have a great power of caring in you,” Cordelia said, and for a moment, it was a relief to say those words, to say what she had always thought about James. Even when she had watched him loving Grace, and felt the pain of it, she had thought, too, of what it would mean to be loved by someone with such a capacity for loving. “It is your strength.”

James looked away.

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

“That night at Battersea Bridge,” he said. They had reached Cordelia’s house but remained on the pavement, in the shadow of a beech tree. “Grace asked me if I would run away with her. Cut my ties with my family, marry her in Scotland, and start over as mundanes.”

“But—but your parents, and Lucie—” Cordelia’s thoughts went immediately to her friend. How shattered Lucie would have been to lose her brother like that. As if he had died, but worse almost, because he would have chosen to have left them.

“Yes,” said James. “And my parabatai. All my friends.” His tiger eyes glittered in the dark. “I refused. I failed her. I failed to love as I should have. I am not sure caring could be my strength.”

“That was not love she asked for,” said Cordelia, suddenly furious. “That is not love. That is a test. And love should not be tested like that.” She paused. “I am sorry,” she said. “I should not—I cannot understand Grace, so I should not judge her. But surely that is not the reason your understanding has ended?”

“I am not sure I do know the real reason,” James said, locking his hands behind his back. “But I know it is final. She took back her bracelet. And she is marrying Charles.”

Cordelia froze. She must have heard wrong. “Charles?”

“Matthew’s older brother,” said James, looking surprised, as if he thought perhaps she had forgotten.

“No,” Cordelia breathed. “She cannot. They cannot.”