Chain of Iron

Lucie’s eyes widened. “James? What does he mean?” She turned to Belial. “Jesse,” she said. “Don’t do this—I know you’re inside there, I know you don’t want this—”

“Be quiet,” Belial snapped. “You, girl, do not matter. Your little talent with ghosts does not matter. When I heard you were born, I wept tears of fire, for you were female, and you could not see the shadow realms. You are useless, do you understand? Useless to me, to the world.”

But Lucie—slight and small, without a weapon in her hand—only looked at him steadily. “Talk all you want,” she said. “You certainly don’t matter. Only Jesse matters.” She held out her hands. “Jesse,” she said. “Be yourself and only yourself. Cast Belial from your body.”

Belial burst into laughter. “Oh, granddaughter, that is adorable. But I am not so easily gotten rid of.”

“Jesse,” Lucie whispered, and there was something about the way she said his name. She loves him, Cordelia thought, with a sudden astonishment. She loves him, and I never even knew he existed. “Jesse, I know you told me never to command you unless you asked me to. But this is different. A terrible thing was done to you.” Lucie’s voice shook. “You have never had any choice. But you can choose now. To trust me. To come to me. Please, Jesse.”

“Ugh.” Belial looked faintly nauseated. “This is quite enough.”

“Jesse Blackthorn. I command you,” Lucie said, her voice rising, “to cast Belial from your body. Be yourself.”

“I said enough,” Belial roared, and then his body jerked, the Blackthorn sword flying from his hand as he doubled over. He fell to one knee, his head thrown back. His mouth and eyes flew open, stretching impossibly wide.

Cordelia staggered to her feet, lifting Cortana. It felt heavy in her hand, as it had not before, but still familiar. Still powerful. She raised the blade.

“Not yet!” Lucie cried. “Daisy, wait—”

Belial spasmed. Dark light burst from his eyes, his mouth: a flood of blackness, pouring into the air like smoke. He turned, twisted, like a bug impaled on a metal spike. His body bent back, an impossible, awful curve, his shoulders nearly touching the ground as his hands flailed, reaching out to catch at nothing.

“Deus meus!” Belial screamed, and Cordelia understood: he was calling out for his Maker, the Creator he had rejected thousands of years ago. “Deus meus respice me quare me dereliquisti longe a salute mea verba delictorum meorum—”

There was the sound of a great tearing. The shadow that poured from Belial’s eyes began to coalesce, a shower of darkness that swirled and turned in the air. Jesse’s body crumpled to the ground, going limp as the animating force of Belial’s spirit left it.

Lucie dropped to her knees next to Jesse, her hands on his chest. She made a little broken keening sound. More than anything, Cordelia wanted to go to her, but she stood where she was, gripping Cortana, knowing it was not yet over.

For above Jesse’s body, his feet not touching the ground of Earth, hovered Belial.

Though it was not quite Belial. He was form and shape, but no substance—translucent as colored air. Cordelia could see through him: he wore a robe of white samite, edged with graphic black runes, jagged as lightning bolts. Behind him, she could see the shadow, the suggestion of wings: great, black, ragged wings, their edges as serrated as knives.

Darkness leaked from a slit in the material over his chest: the still-bleeding wound she had given him in the shadow realm. Malevolent eyes gazed from a face of thunder, fixed on Lucie with loathing. “Oh,” he said, and his voice sounded different now that it was no longer emerging from Jesse Blackthorn’s throat—darker, and freighted with the promise of a terrible threat, “how you do not know what you have done.”

“Leave us,” said James. He had come close to where Lucie and Cordelia were on the path. His eyes were blazing; his hand with the gun in it hung at his side. “This is over.”

“This is no end,” said Belial, “but a beginning you cannot even imagine.” His voice rose, raggedly; it was like listening to the crackle of a fire burning out of control. “‘For I will set my face against you so that you will be struck down before your enemies; and those who hate you will rule over you, and you will flee when no one is pursuing you. If also after these things you do not obey me, then I will punish you seven times more for your sins. I will break down your pride of power; I will make your sky like iron and your earth like bronze—’”

Cordelia’s last thread of control snapped. She charged toward Belial, Cortana in hand; it made a beautiful golden arc through the air, with all her strength behind it—but the blade passed through him without resistance.

She staggered back, despair clutching at her heart. If Cortana could no longer harm him—if there was no substance of him she could strike at—

“Daisy!” Lucie cried. “Be careful!”

“Indeed, be careful,” Belial sneered, drifting closer to her. There was a stench in the air around him, like old rubbish burning. “Little stupid child, little helpless human. You know where your power comes from now—from Lilith. Not from good as you thought, but from evil. She is off now licking her wounds, but she will return, and she owns you. Anytime you draw a weapon, she will be summoned. You will never escape her.”

Cordelia cried out. She raised Cortana again, knowing there was no use, no point—

Suddenly James was there, throwing an arm around her from behind. He seemed heedless of Cortana as he drew her back against him, whispering in her ear, “‘Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor demons, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, shall be able to separate us.’ Do you understand? Keep hold of me, Daisy. Keep hold of me and don’t let go.”

She heard Lucie cry out. Looking down, Cordelia saw that the arm around her had begun to fade at the edges. The tips of James’s fingers turned black—the darkness spread, up his arm, through him. He was becoming a shadow.

But something more was happening. Darkness spread from him and into her at the point of contact between their two bodies. She watched her forearm, where his hand rested, go cloudy and dark. A strange sensation passed through her, a feeling of travel without movement, of transforming into something both less and more than herself.

Was this what it had always been like for James when he tumbled into the shadow realms? For the world had gone dark around her, the trees standing out stark white against a black sky, the paths branching like bones through the skin of a hazy, tenebrous world. The sun glimmered like a coin at the bottom of a murky pool. Lucie was a shadow; Belial a dim shade with gleaming eyes.

The shadows had spread up Cordelia’s arm and down to her wrist, through her hand, passing into Cortana. The blade alone had color. The blade alone shone, golden, in the darkness.

Before Belial could react, Cordelia leaned forward—James’s arm still around her—and plunged the blade into his chest, directly below the wound she’d given him before.

Belial twisted, impaled on her blade as a darker shadow—blood? essence?—spilled from the new wound; head thrown back, he shrieked soundlessly at the sky.

And the sky answered. Briefly, the world seemed to yawn apart—the clouds parted like tearing fabric, and Cordelia saw past them to a vast plain of darkness, starless and infinite. Out in that darkness swirled the great horrors of the voids between worlds, the emptiness where evil grew hungry and intemperate, where the Princes of Hell stalked in all their power, the cold rulers of nothingness.