Chain of Iron

She knew that Jesse didn’t care. Couldn’t feel the cold. She worried, nonetheless.

Finally she had given up and headed home among cries for her to stay and join another round of games and chatter. Despite her vow to conquer the Enclave, Filomena had spent most of the night in animated conversation with a vampire who shared her admiration for the art nouveau movement sweeping through Europe. After Filomena promised she would find someone to see her safely home, Lucie had maneuvered her way through the room—someone had turned a table over, and people were using it as an impromptu dance floor—toward Matthew, meaning to ask him to take her home in his carriage.

He had smiled at her, then stumbled and nearly knocked over Percival, Anna’s stuffed snake. He was obviously drunk, and Lucie preferred her own company to that of an inebriated Matthew, which hurt her heart and made her want to shake him and ask him why he couldn’t treat himself better. Why he couldn’t see himself the way her brother saw him. Why he was so determined to harm himself and harm James in the process.

As Lucie made her way down Percy Street, a few snowflakes chased each other lazily in the glow of the gaslights, the streets empty and quiet at this hour. London wrapped in snow was a hushed promise of a city, gas lamps strung like a chain of pearls across the sky. Lucie snuggled deeper into her astrakhan coat. At her waist clinked the daggers and seraph blades she’d brought with her tonight. One could never be too careful.

After walking a few blocks, she took out her gloves. She had to admit it was cold, despite the heat rune she’d put on before she left the party. It had been awfully warm inside Anna’s apartment, and as the evening wore on, things had become ever more riotous as the crowd danced and drank and flirted, Anna perched atop the soundboard of the piano, watching them all with her La Gioconda smile. Thomas’s sister Eugenia had danced with Matthew, tossing her long dark hair. At one point Lucie talked briefly to a wide-eyed mundane girl who proclaimed the party the wildest she’d ever attended, and asked Lucie in a rather astonished tone if everyone present were bohemians.

 

Lucie considered replying that they weren’t bohemians, they were vampires, werewolves, and demon hunters, but she didn’t want to shock the poor girl to death. “Yes,” she’d said. “Bohemians.”

“Goodness,” the girl had exclaimed. Later Lucie saw her kissing Anna in a window seat and decided the bohemian lifestyle must have grown on her.

The snow began coming down harder as Lucie passed the silent, deserted bulk of the British Museum. It gleamed palely behind its railings, the stately columns of its entrance frosted all over with a thin layer of ice. A tickle started at the base of her spine. The feeling of being watched. Her breath puffed out in a cold white cloud as she spun around, her hand going to a dagger at her waist.

He was there, a dark shape against a background of white snow and ice-frosted buildings. The snow fell all around him but did not touch him—not his dark hair, or his perennial costume of white shirt and black trousers.

“You startled me!” she cried, her heart pounding.

Jesse smiled thinly. “Well, I am a ghost. I could have jumped out from behind the museum and shouted ‘boo,’ but I restrained myself.”

She had begun to shiver. “I thought you didn’t want to see me again.”

“I never said that.” It was as if he stood beneath a shield of glass, she thought, the snow drifting away from him as though he and the space he occupied were not really there. His eyes, though, were as keen and thoughtful as ever. “In fact, I was curious as to how Princess Lucinda and Lord Jethro were getting along.”

Without looking at him, Lucie started off at a brisk walk. “Don’t make fun of me.”

“I wasn’t,” he said mildly, joining her as they made their way down High Holborn, picking through slush churned up by the last few home-bound carriages, and turned down Chancery Lane. There was no traffic at all here; the silent pavements sparkled with a white, fragile layer of snow. “I’d just like to see you for a bit.”

Lucie rubbed her hands together. They were cold even through the gloves. “I can’t imagine why. You made it very clear how you felt.”

“Did I,” he said in a low voice, and then, “For that, I need to apologize.”

Lucie brightened up. “Oh, well, if there are going to be apologies …”

His green eyes flashed with amusement. “Surely you aren’t out on patrol, dressed like that?”

Lucie looked down at the pale green chiffon peeking from under her coat. “I dressed this way for a party,” she said lightly, “and I went to a party, and now—like a proper young lady—I am being escorted home from a party.”

“Was it a proper party, then?”

“Certainly not! There’s nothing wholly proper about any event hosted by Anna Lightwood. But that’s what makes her parties so good.”

“I’ve never been to a party,” Jesse said. “I would have loved to have attended one of hers.”

“You were at the ball when you first came to London,” Lucie reminded him.

“True. But I couldn’t dance, couldn’t taste the food or the wine.” He cocked his head to the side. “You’re the writer,” he said. “Describe the party to me.”

“Describe it?” They had turned onto St. Bride’s Lane. The neighborhood was smaller, cozier; the snow gave the cobbled streets a fairy-tale feel. Icicles hung from the corners of half-timbered houses, and through leaded glass windowpanes glowing fires could be seen. Lucie put her chin in the air. “I will take your challenge, Jesse Blackthorn. I shall describe tonight’s party to you in such detail, you will feel as though you had been there.”

She launched into a description, painting the scene as if she were writing in her novel. She embroidered on conversations, making them funnier than they had been; she described the taste of everything on offer from the flakiness of the pastries to the fizziness of the punch. She wove a picture of the outrageous polka-dotted cravat Matthew had paired with striped silk trousers and a magenta vest. She remembered that Jesse hadn’t met Filomena, and she told him all about the young Italian girl and her vampiric admirer.

“She’s a very good dancer,” said Lucie. “She taught us a new waltz that she learned in Peru.”

The gates of the Institute rose before them, its spire piercing the clouds overhead. Lucie paused at the gates, turning to Jesse. “Thank you for walking me home. However, I did not hear the apology I was promised. You should not have read my book without asking.”

He leaned against the gatepost. Or at least, he seemed to: Lucie knew that he was insubstantial, and the gatepost solid. “No,” he said. “I shouldn’t have.”

There was something about him, she thought; he was the opposite of Matthew, in his way. Matthew put a bright face on every situation, even if it was dreadful. While Jesse spoke directly, never deflecting.

“And you should not have said I thought of you as a joke, or of your situation that way,” she said. “All I want is to help you. To repair this.”

“To repair death?” he said softly. “Lucie. You were wrong in what you said—but only when you claimed you are not like Princess Lucinda. Not brave or resourceful or clever. You are a thousand times those things. You are better than any imagined heroine. You are my heroine.”