Chain of Gold

“If you want to,” she said.

“This locket was placed around my throat by my mother,” he said. “It contains my last breath.”

“Your last breath?”

“I ought to tell you how I died, I suppose,” he said, perching himself on the windowsill. He seemed to like it there, Lucie thought, just on the threshold. “I was a sickly child. My mother told the Silent Brothers that I wasn’t well enough to withstand being given runes, but I begged and begged. She managed to fight me off until I was seventeen. You might understand that by then, I was desperate to be a Shadowhunter like other Shadowhunters. I told her that if she did not let me get the Marks, I would run away to Alicante and get them myself.”

“And did you? Run away?”

He shook his head. “My mother relented, and the Silent Brothers came to the manor house. The rune ceremony went off without a hitch, and I thought I had triumphed.” He held up his right hand, and she realized what she had thought was a scar was the faint outline of the Voyance rune. “My first rune and my last.”

“What happened?”

“When I returned to my room, I collapsed on my bed. Then I woke in the night burning with fever. I remember screaming, and Grace running into my room. She was half-hysterical. Blood was welling from my skin, turning the sheets to scarlet. I writhed and screamed and tore at the bedspread, but I was weakening, nor could they use healing runes on me. I remember realizing I was dying. I had become so weak. Grace held me as I shivered. She was barefoot, and her nightgown and wrapper were soaked with my blood. I remember my mother coming in. She held the locket to my lips, as if she meant me to kiss it.…”

“Did you?” Lucie whispered.

“No,” said Jesse matter-of-factly. “I died.”

For the first time in her life, Lucie felt a pang of pity for Grace. To have her brother die in her arms like that. She could not imagine the agony.

“I came slowly to understand I was a ghost after that,” said Jesse. “And it took me months of trying before my mother and sister could hear me and speak to me. Even then, I disappeared every morning when the sun came up, and only came back to consciousness with evening. I spent many nights walking alone in Brocelind Forest, with only the dead to see me. And you. A little girl who’d fallen into a faerie trap.”

Lucie blushed.

“I was surprised when you saw me,” he said. “And even more when I was able to touch your hand and lift you out of that pit. I thought perhaps it was because you were so young, but no. There is something unusual about you, Lucie. You have a power that is tied to the dead.”

Lucie sighed. “If only I could have had a power that was tied to bread-and-butter pudding.”

“That would not have helped Cordelia last night,” Jesse said. He let his head fall back against the windowpane, and Lucie saw that of course he was not reflected in the dark glass. “My mother believes that once everything is in order, and she has all the ingredients a warlock will need, the last breath in this locket can be used to resurrect me. But on the riverbank, I was holding it because…”

Lucie raised her eyebrows.

“I thought at first you might have been in the water. Drowning. The life force in the locket could have emptied your lungs and let you breathe.” He hesitated. “I thought, if you were dying, I would use it to bring you back.”

Lucie inhaled sharply. “You would do that? For me?”

His eyes were fathomless deep green, the way Lucie imagined the depth of the ocean. His lips parted as if he meant to answer, just as a shaft of dawn light pierced the window glass. He stiffened, his eyes still locked on hers, as if he had been shot through with an arrow.

“Jesse,” she whispered, but he had already vanished.

DAYS PAST: LONDON, GROSVENOR SQUARE, 1901

On the night of the death of Queen Victoria, the bells of London erupted into clamorous alarm.

Matthew Fairchild also grieved, but not for a dead queen. He grieved for the loss of someone he had never known, for a life that had ended. For a future whose happiness would always be tainted with the shadow of what he had done.

He knelt before the statue of Jonathan Shadowhunter in his family’s parlor, his hands covered in ash. “Bless me,” he said haltingly, “for I have sinned. I have…” He stopped, unable to say the words. “Tonight someone died because of me. Because of my actions. Someone I loved. Someone I didn’t know. But I loved them just the same.”

He had thought the prayer might help. It did not. He had shared his secret with Jonathan Shadowhunter, but he would never share it with anyone else: not his parabatai, not his parents, not a single friend or stranger. From that night on, an impassable chasm opened between Matthew and the whole world. None of them knew it, but he was cut off from them forever in all the ways that mattered.

But that was as it should be, Matthew thought. After all, he had committed murder.

18 DARKNESS STIRS

The dead are sleeping in their sepulchres:

And, mouldering as they sleep, a thrilling sound,

Half sense, half thought, among the darkness stirs,

Breathed from their wormy beds all living things around,

And, mingling with the still night and mute sky,

Its awful hush is felt inaudibly

—Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Summer Evening Churchyard, Lechlade, Gloucestershire”

It was late afternoon by the time James was able to pry himself away from the Institute—it seemed every Enclave member who passed through the gates wanted to interrogate him about Mandikhor demons—and head to Grosvenor Square to meet the rest of the Merry Thieves.

After letting himself into Matthew’s house with his key, James paused for a moment on the steps that led to the cellar. He knew his friends were in the laboratory: he could hear their voices rising up toward him like smoke, could hear Christopher chattering, Matthew’s low and musical tones. He could feel Matthew’s presence, this close to his parabatai, like one magnet coming within range of another.

He found his friends seated around a high, marble-topped laboratory table. Everywhere were instruments of curious design: a galvanometer for measuring electrical currents, a torsion balance machine, and a clockwork orrery of gold, bronze, and silver—a gift from Charlotte to Henry some years ago. A dozen different microscopes, astrolabes, retorts, and measuring devices were scattered across the table and cabinet tops. On a plinth rested the Colt Single Action army revolver Christopher and Henry had been working on for months before all this had happened. Its river-gray nickel plating was deeply engraved with runes and a curving inscription: LUKE 12:49.

Christopher’s brass goggles were pushed up into his hair; he wore a shirt and trousers that had been burned and stained so many times he had been forbidden to wear them outside. Matthew could have been his mirror opposite: in blue-and-gold waistcoat and matching spats, he stood well away from the flames of the Bunsen burners, which had been turned up so high that the room was the temperature of a tropical island. Oscar napped gently at his feet.

“What’s going on, Kit?” said James. “Testing to see the temperature at which Shadowhunters melt?”

“My hair is certainly ruined,” said Matthew, pushing his hands through the sweat-darkened strands. “I believe Christopher is hard at work on the antidote. I am assisting by providing witty observations and trenchant commentary.”

“I’d rather you handed me that beaker,” said Christopher, pointing. Matthew shook his head. James grabbed the beaker and passed it to Christopher, who added a few drops of its contents to the liquid simmering in a retort by his elbow. He frowned. “It’s not going well, I’m afraid. Without this one ingredient, it doesn’t seem likely to work.”

“What ingredient?” James asked.

“Malos root, a rare plant. Shadowhunters aren’t supposed to cultivate it because doing so violates the Accords. I have been searching, and I asked Anna to try to get me some in Downworld, but we’ve had no luck.”

“Why would anyone be forbidden from growing some silly plant?” said Matthew.

“This plant only grows in soil that has been soaked by the blood of murdered mundanes,” said Christopher.

“I stand corrected,” Matthew admitted. “Ugh.”

“Dark magic plants, is it?” James’s eyes narrowed. “Christopher—can you draw me a sketch of the root?”

“Certainly,” said Christopher, as if this were not at all an odd request. He took a notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket and began to scribble on the back. The liquid in the retort had begun to turn black. James eyed it warily.

“There were some forbidden plants growing in Tatiana’s greenhouse,” James explained. “I told Charles about it at the time, and he didn’t seem to feel they were of great concern, but—”

Christopher held up the sketch, of an almost tulip-like plant with sharp-edged white leaves and a black root.

“Yes,” James said, his excitement rising. “I remember those—they were in the greenhouse at Chiswick. They struck me because those leaves looked like knives. We could go there now—is there a carriage free?”

“Yes.” Matthew’s excitement matched James’s own. “Charles had some sort of meeting, but he left the second carriage in the mews. Put your goggles down, Christopher—time for some fieldwork.”

Christopher grumbled slightly. “All right, all right—but I have to go change. I’m not allowed out in these clothes.”

“Just switch off anything that might burn down the house first,” said Matthew, catching hold of James’s arm. “We’ll meet you in the front garden.”

James and Matthew fled through the house (pursued by Oscar, barking in excitement), then paused a moment on the front steps, breathing in the cool air. The sky was heavy with clouds; a bit of weak sunlight peeked through, illuminating the path from the Fairchilds’ front steps to the wall of the front garden, and the gate that led to the street. It had been raining earlier, and the stone was still wet.