Chain of Iron

“You think she didn’t even guess at it when they put the rune on Jesse and he died?” Grace demanded. “She destroyed him. Her mistrust killed him. And she never took an ounce of the blame, never spoke a word of regret, only said it was the fault of the Nephilim. But it was her fault. Hers.”

“You have to let me go,” Lucie said. “I have to go after Jesse—stop him—”

“Stop him how?” Grace demanded. “I won’t let you go if you might hurt him—he’ll come back tonight, he has to come back—”

“And let someone else die? Grace, we can’t do that.”

It had been the wrong tactic to take. Grace’s lips tightened. “I haven’t even said I believe you. Just because there was blood in the shed—”

Lucie leaned forward. “Grace. Each Shadowhunter who has been killed is missing a rune, wiped away as if it were never drawn. Elias Carstairs lost his Voyance rune. Filomena di Angelo lost Strength; Lilian Highsmith, Precision. Swiftness, Angelic Power—these are the same runes that have appeared on Jesse. I know it seems impossible—”

Grace had gone a sickly gray color. “To move a rune from one Shadowhunter to another? No—not impossible,” she said. “But why?”

“I don’t know,” Lucie admitted. “But everyone is looking for the killer, Grace. There are day patrols, dozens of Shadowhunters on the streets, all searching. They could find Jesse. The first thing they would do is destroy his body. I almost did it myself—”

“There are things you can do,” Grace said, her pupils very wide. “You can see Jesse, but it’s more than that. You can converse with the dead. Sense them, even. What is it, Lucie? What is your power?”

Something in Lucie rebelled. She could not tell her secret to Grace, not before she told Cordelia, before she told James and her parents. It was bad enough that she had told Malcolm. She already owed Cordelia so much more of the truth. “I cannot say. You will just have to trust me.”

“I cannot trust you. I cannot trust anyone.”

“You trust Jesse,” said Lucie. “You know Jesse. Better than anyone, Grace. He’s talked about you—he worries about you—he says you understand him. That without you, he would have gone mad alone in the house with Tatiana.”

Tears welled up in Grace’s eyes. Her gaze was fixed on Lucie. “I can’t let you hurt him,” she whispered.

“He is being hurt now,” said Lucie. “He is being imprisoned. Controlled. Forced to do what he would never do if he had a choice. Grace, please. Imagine if Jesse knew.”

Grace closed her eyes. Tears spilled from beneath her eyelids, tracking through the dust on her face. There was no sign she was aware of them. Please understand, Lucie prayed. Please understand what this means and help me. Could Grace understand? Grace, who had been brought up by a lunatic in a house of ruin and ghosts?

Grace rose from the chair. “Come with me,” she said, and Lucie scrambled upright, desperate with hope. Grace gestured at her with the fireplace poker. “Go on, then,” she said, sounding like a school headmistress. “We’re going to see him. Jesse.”

Using the poker as a sort of prod, she nudged Lucie down the stairs of the manor house, passing into an entryway lined with portraits of Blackthorns past: dark-haired men and women who gazed haughtily down from the walls. Tatiana must have placed them here at some point, to stake her claim on Chiswick House. Below the portraits were engraved copper plates bearing their names (and a thick coat of verdigris): Felix Blackthorn, John Blackthorn, Adelaide Blackthorn. Annabel Blackthorn, read one engraving, though the portrait above it had been slashed through with a knife, rendering the subject unrecognizable. Just the sort of decoration Tatiana would enjoy, Lucie thought.

“Hurry up.” Grace brandished the poker like an angry old man with an umbrella. “Lucie!”

“But it’s Jesse,” Lucie said, stopping in front of another portrait—though he looked quite a bit healthier in it than she’d ever seen him. His skin was tanned, his green eyes bright.

“It isn’t,” Grace said crossly. “That’s his father, Rupert. Now come along, or I shall hit you with the poker.”

“You won’t, though,” said Lucie, with confidence. Grace muttered but didn’t contradict her, and together they descended the front steps at a run. Outside it had grown warmer, the sun properly up now. Their feet crunched on the frost-scorched weeds as they crossed the garden and ducked into the shed.

Lucie had braced herself for what they would find. Still, she felt her heart give a painful thump: the coffin lid was open, the coffin itself empty. The Blackthorn sword was gone.

Grace made a despairing noise. Lucie wondered if she had quite believed the truth before this moment. “He’s really gone,” she whispered. “We’re too late. We’ll never find him—”

“Yes, we will,” Lucie said. “I will. I can sense him, Grace. Just like you were saying in the ballroom—I can sense the dead. I’ll locate him. And I’ll take Balios; I’ll be faster than Jesse could be on foot.”

Grace nodded, but there was panic on her face. “What should I do?”

“Find Malcolm Fade. Tell him what’s happening. Tell him I need his help.”

Grace hesitated. Feeling as if she had done all she could do, Lucie turned to go—and froze. Grace’s hand had shot out, clamping onto Lucie’s wrist.

“I’ll do it,” she said. “I’ll seek out Fade. But you must swear you won’t let anything happen to Jesse. Swear you’ll bring my brother back safe.”

There was no artifice in Grace’s eyes now, no cunning. Only desperation.

“I swear,” Lucie whispered, and took off at a run.

 

Lilith. The First of All Demons, the mother of warlocks. She was beautiful as a work of art might be beautiful, her face a study in sculpture and symmetry, her hair a cloud that moved of its own accord despite the lack of wind. Cordelia recognized her now from her portrait in the Hell Ruelle, the woman with the serpent’s body twined around a tree.

“Of course I am here,” she said. Her gaze had flicked over James and Cordelia and rested now on Belial. “When you cast me from my realm, Prince of Hell, I came to this world. Beliya’al, liar, ruin-lover, I could not believe you would have broken the trust of millennia—would have tried to take from me the land granted to me by Heaven itself.”

“Heaven,” Belial sneered. “Heaven has no place in Edom, and no use for you, Lilitu.”

“I wandered the voids between the worlds,” Lilith said. “And how the infernal realms were abuzz with the news that Belial had been brought low by his grandson, who could see the shadow realms. How the lower demons chattered that you had been wounded, truly wounded, by the blade Cortana. I realized then that your obsession with this world was an obsession with your own bloodline. That you had managed to sire grandchildren who combine your blood with the blood of Nephilim—and you would never leave that alone.”

“Spoken like the barren creature you are,” sneered Belial. “Your loins bring forth only monsters, thus you must batten on my offspring, Lady of Owls?”