Chain of Gold

by Cassandra Clare

  “How long have you been able to see the dead?” Jesse asked.

  Lucie blinked and the blond boy vanished. “Most Herondales can see ghosts,” she said. “I’ve always been able to see Jessamine. So can James. I hadn’t thought of it as anything special.”

  Jesse had moved to stand under the chandelier. For someone so calm, he had a surprising amount of restlessness. “No one but my mother and sister have seen me since… since you saw me in Brocelind six years ago.”

  Lucie frowned. “You are a ghost, but not like any other ghost. Even my father and brother can’t see you. It’s so odd. Are you buried?”

  “It’s very forward to ask a gentleman if he’s buried,” said Jesse.

  “How old are you?” Lucie was undeterred.

  Jesse sighed and looked up at the chandelier. “I have two ages,” he said. “I am twenty-four. And I am seventeen.”

  “No one has two ages.”

  “I do,” he said, unruffled. “When I was seventeen, I died. But my mother had—prepared.”

  Lucie licked her dry lips. “What do you mean, prepared?”

  He gestured at himself. “This, what you are looking at, is a manifestation of my soul. After my death, my mother told the Silent Brothers she would never give them my remains, that she refused to allow them to touch me again, to burn my body to ashes. I do not know if they questioned what she did then, but I know she brought a warlock into the room in the hours after I died, to preserve and to safeguard my physical body. My soul was cut free to wander between the real world and the spirit realm. Thus I do not age, I do not breathe, and I live only during the nights.”

  “Which you spend haunting ballrooms and wandering about the forest?”

  He gave her a dark look. “Usually I spend my time reading. Both the manor house in Idris and Chiswick House have well-stocked libraries. I’ve even read my grandfather Benedict’s unpublished papers. They were hidden in the chimney. Horrid stuff—he was obsessed with demons. Socializing with them, crossbreeding them—”

  “Ugh,” said Lucie, waving a quelling hand. Benedict Lightwood’s peculiarities were well known. “What do you do during the day?”

  He smiled faintly. “I vanish.”

  “Really? Vanish where?”

  “You have a great deal of questions.”

  “Yes,” said Lucie. “In fact, I came here to ask you a question. What did you mean last night when you said, ‘There is death here’? Nothing happened at the ball.”

  “But today it did,” said Jesse. “Grace told me.”

  Lucie tried to imagine Grace and Jesse sitting in this shadowy room, exchanging the news of their days:

  I saw a demon attack in Regent’s Park during the daytime.

  Did you, now? Well, I didn’t do much, as you know, I’m still dead.

  She cleared her throat. “So you can see the future?”

  Jesse paused. He looked made out of moonlight and cobwebs, shadows at his temples, in the hollow of his throat, at his wrists. “Before I reveal anything else,” he said, “you must swear you will tell no one about me—not your brother, not Cordelia, not your parents. Understood?”

  “A secret?” Lucie loved and hated secrets. She was always honored to be entrusted with one, and then was immediately tempted to tell it. “Why must it be a secret? Many know I can see ghosts.”

  “But as you have so perspicaciously noted, I am not an ordinary ghost,” said Jesse. “I am kept in this state by necromantic magic and the Clave forbids such things. Should they find out, they would search for my body and burn it, and I would be dead in truth. And forever.”

  Lucie swallowed. “So you still hope—you think you might return? To full life?”

  Jesse leaned back against the wall, his arms folded. “You have not promised.”

  “I give my word. I will tell no one about you. Now explain what you meant last night with your warning.”

  She had thought he might smirk or say something mocking, but he looked very serious. “Being what I am puts me between two worlds,” he said. “I belong here and yet I don’t. Sometimes I can glimpse other things that do not quite belong. Other ghosts, of course—and demons. There was a sinister presence in that ballroom, and I believe it is the same one that returned today.”

  “But why?” Lucie whispered.

  Jesse shook his head. “That, I do not know.”

  “Will they return—?” Lucie began. There was a flare of light. Jesse turned, surprised, toward the back wall of the house: the French doors had lit up, glowing a startling white.

  Lucie darted to one of the windows and looked out. She could see the gardens clearly in all their tangled darkness. A small distance away was the greenhouse, and it was glimmering like a star.

  Witchlight.

  A moment later the light had winked out. Cold fear clawed at Lucie’s chest. “Daisy,” she breathed, and tore the doors open. Tumbling out onto the balcony without another look at Jesse, she flung herself at the wall and began to climb down.

  * * *

  Cordelia scrabbled at the ground with her free hand, her fingers sinking into the dirt as she was hauled into the shadows. The demon tentacle wrapped around her leg was agonizing—it felt as if a million small teeth were biting into her skin—but more horrifying was the heat on the back of her neck, the breath of whatever was hovering over her—

  Something caught her hand. Lucie, she thought. She shrieked as she came to a sudden stop, the painful cord around her leg tightening, jerking her body sideways. She reached up to clutch the hand that had caught hers, and saw who it belonged to.

  The greenhouse was dim, but she knew him instantly. A shock of black hair, pale gold eyes, the face she had memorized. James.

  He wasn’t wearing gear. He was in trousers and shirtsleeves, and his face was pale with shock. Still, he was gripping her wrist firmly, hauling her toward the door, as the cord around her leg tried to drag her farther into the greenhouse. If she did not move fast, she would be torn in two.

  Using James’s grip as an anchor, Cordelia twisted around to free Cortana—it had been trapped beneath her—and surged downward with the blade in her hand. She slashed the sword through the tentacle holding her.

  Cortana sparked gold as it cut through demon flesh. There was a deep, rumbling cry, and suddenly Cordelia was free, sliding toward James in a welter of ichor and her own blood.

  The pain lanced through her like fire as he hauled her to her feet. There was nothing elegant about it, nothing of a gentleman helping a lady. This was the urgency of battle, hands grasping and yanking in desperation. She fell against James, who caught at her. Her witchlight pulsed dimly in the dirt where she had dropped it.

  “What the blazes, Daisy—?” James began.

  She whirled, pulling out of his grasp to snatch up the witchlight. In its renewed glow, she realized that what she had thought was a massive tree rising against the far wall of the greenhouse was something very different.

  It was a demon, but not like any she had seen before. From a distance it almost seemed a butterfly or moth, pinned to the wall, wings outspread. A second, closer look revealed that its wings were membranous extensions, shot through with pulsing red veins. Where the wings joined together, they rose into a sort of central stalk, crowned by three heads. Each head was like a wolf’s, but with black, insectile eyes.

  Extending from the bottom of the stalk was a knot of long tentacles, like the limbs of a squid. Clustered with membranous seedpods, they hit the floor of the greenhouse and stretched out along the dirt like roots. They wound between the trees and the potted plants, they choked the bases of flowering bushes, they reached across the floor toward Cordelia and James.

  The one that Cordelia had severed lay on the ground, pulsing slow freshets of ichor. Not swiftly, but inexorably, the others slipped after it.

  She dropped her witchlight into her pocket. If she was going to need to fight, she wanted both hands free.

  James had apparently had a similar thought: he
slid a dagger from his weapons belt and sighted along his arm, his eyes narrowed. “Daisy,” he said without looking at her. “Run.”

  Did he actually mean to face the thing down with a throwing blade? It would be suicide. Cordelia seized his free arm and bolted, yanking James after her. Too startled to hang back, he followed. She glanced back once and saw the boiling rush of black talons behind them, causing her to put on a frantic burst of speed. Good Raziel, how enormous was this greenhouse?

  She tore past the last of the potted orange trees and came up short. She could see the door at last, but her heart sank: it was wrapped around with black talons, curving along the walls, their tips pressing against the door, holding it shut. Her hand tightened on James’s wrist.

  “Is that the door?” he whispered. She shot him a look of surprise—how could he not know? Hadn’t he come in the same way she had?

  “Yes,” she said. “I have a seraph blade, but only one—we could try—”

  James hurled the dagger, the runes along its blade shining. He moved so fast it was like a blur: one moment he was holding the blade and the next it had plunged into the demon’s membranous wing, shattering the glass behind it. Shrieking, the demon began to pull itself away from the wall.

  James swore and drew two more blades: they were arcs of silver spinning from his hands. The demon screeched, a high and horrible noise, as the knives plunged into its torso. The creature spasmed—it seemed almost to be crumbling, its leathery seedpods pattering to the ground like rain. It gave a last choking hiss and vanished.

  No longer held closed, the greenhouse door swung wide. Amid the shattered glass and the stench of demon blood, James ducked swiftly through the door, pulling Cordelia with him; together they tumbled out into the night.

  * * *

  They raced away from the greenhouse, through overgrown grass and tangled weeds. When they were some distance away, in a clearing near the entrance to what had once been the Italian gardens, James came up short.

  Cordelia nearly stumbled into him. She was dizzy, her vision blurring. The pain in her leg had returned. She slid Cortana into its sheath at her back and sank to the ground.

  They were in a small hollow of overgrowth; the greenhouse was a great dark star in the distance, capping a rise of garden. Dark trees leaned together overhead, their branches knotted. The air was clean and cool.

  James went down on his knees, facing her in the grass. “Daisy, let me see.”

  She nodded. James placed his hands lightly on her ankle, above her low leather boots, and began to raise the hem of her dress. The trim of her petticoat was soaked through with blood, and Cordelia couldn’t hold back a small noise as her ankle was bared.

  The skin looked as if it had been torn with a serrated knife. The top of her boot was drenched in blood.

  “It looks bad,” James said gently, “but it’s just a cut to the skin. There’s no poison.” He drew his stele from his belt. With infinite care, he touched the tip to her calf—the horror, Cordelia thought, that her mother would have experienced at the idea of a boy touching her daughter’s leg—and traced the outlines of a healing rune.

  It felt as if someone had poured cool water over her ankle. She watched as the injured flesh began to knit itself back together, slashed skin sealing up as if weeks of healing had been compressed into seconds.

  “You look as if you’ve never seen what an iratze can do,” James said, a small quirk to the corner of his mouth. “Have you not been injured before?”

  “Not this badly,” said Cordelia. “I know I should have—you must be thinking what a baby I’ve been. And that demon—ugh—I should never have let it knock me off my feet—”

  “Stop that,” James said firmly. “Everyone gets pummeled by a demon now and again; if they didn’t, we wouldn’t need healing runes.” He smiled, that rare lovely smile that cut through the Mask and lit up his face. “I was thinking that you reminded me a bit of Catherine Earnshaw from Wuthering Heights. My mother has a favorite passage about how she was bitten by a bulldog: ‘She did not yell out—no! she would have scorned to do it, if she had been spitted on the horns of a mad cow.’   ”

  Cordelia had not read Wuthering Heights in years, but she felt herself smile. Incredible that James could make her smile after what they’d just been through. “That was impressive,” she said. “To dispatch such a sizable demon with only throwing knives.”

  James threw his head back with a low laugh. “Give the credit to Christopher,” he said. “He made these blades for me—he’s spent years working on ways of developing new substances that can bear even the strongest runes. Most metals would shatter. It does mean there’s hell to pay whenever I lose one, though,” he added, looking ruefully at the greenhouse.

  “Oh, no,” Cordelia said firmly. “You can’t go back in there.”

  “I wouldn’t leave you,” he said simply, melting her heart. “Daisy, if I tell you something, will you promise not to tell anyone else?”

  She could not have said no when he called her Daisy.

  “You know that I can turn into a shadow,” he said. “That at first, I had little control over the change.”

  She nodded; she would never forget the way he had reached out for her when he had the scalding fever, the way she had tried to hold his hand but it had turned into vapor.

  “For years I have worked with your cousin Jem to learn to control it—the change, the visions.” He bit at his lower lip. “And yet tonight I entered the shadow realm under my own will. Once inside, it brought me here.”

  “I don’t understand,” Cordelia said. “Why here of all places?”

  His eyes searched hers. “I saw a light within the shadows,” he said. “I followed it. I believe it was the light of Cortana.”

  She fought the urge to reach back and touch the blade just to make sure it was still there. “It is a special sword,” she admitted. “My father always said that we did not know the extent of what it could do.”

  “When I landed in the greenhouse, I’d no idea where I was,” he said. “I was choking on dust. White-gray dust, like burnt bones. I brought a handful of the stuff back from the other world—” He reached into his trouser pocket and brought out a pinch of what looked like ash. “I am going to bring it to Henry and Christopher. Perhaps they can test what is in it. I have never been able to bring anything back from the shadow realm before; perhaps it happened because I went into the realm willingly.”

  “Do you think it’s because I was fighting the demon—with Cortana—that you were drawn to this place?” she said. “Whatever kind of demon it was—”

  James glanced again at the greenhouse. “It was a Cerberus demon. And it’s probably been here for years.”

  “I’ve seen pictures of Cerberus demons before.” Cordelia wobbled to her feet. James rose and put his arm around her to steady her. She tensed at his nearness. “They don’t look like that.”

  “Benedict Lightwood was a great enthusiast for demons,” said James. “When they cleared this place out after he died, they found a dozen Cerberus demons. They’re watchdog creatures; he’d placed them here to protect his family and property. I suppose they missed the one in the greenhouse.”

  Cordelia moved away from James slightly, though it was the last thing she wanted to do. “And you think over the years, it changed? Became more a part of the place?”

  “Have you read On the Origin of Species?” asked James. “It is all about how animals adapt to their environments through generations. Demons don’t have generations—they don’t die, unless we kill them. This one adapted to its surroundings.”

  “Do you think there are more around?” The raw pain in Cordelia’s ankle had faded to a manageable ache as she twisted around, looking up and down the garden for Lucie. “We could be in danger. Lucie—”

  James went white. “Lucie?”

  Cordelia’s heart skipped a beat. By the Angel. “Lucie and I came here together.”

  “Of all the foolish—” Suddenly he
was worried. She could see it in his face, his eyes. “Why?”

  “Lucie wanted to make sure Grace was all right, and she asked me to come with her,” lied Cordelia. “In fact, she went into the house, where Grace and Tatiana are. Rather foolishly, I wandered off to see the gardens.…”

  An odd look of utter shock passed across James’s face, as if he had just remembered something terribly important.

  “Grace,” he said.

  “I know you might wish to go see her,” said Cordelia. “But I must warn you that Tatiana is in a very bad mood.”

  James continued to look silently stunned. There was a rustle of noise and Lucie burst out of the overgrowth.

  “Cordelia!” she gasped, her face lighting with relief. “And Jamie!” Her face wrinkled up; she came to a dead stop. “Oh, dear. Jamie. What are you doing here?”

  “As if you have a perfectly reasonable excuse for lurching about someone else’s property in the dead of night?” James said, transforming from a worried young man into a towering older brother in a matter of seconds. “Papa and Mam are going to murder you.”

  “Only if you tell them.” Lucie’s eyes flashed. “How else are they going to find out?”

  “Of course they will,” said James darkly. “The existence of a Cerberus demon in the greenhouse could hardly—”

  Lucie’s eyes rounded. “A what in the where?”

  “Cerberus demon in the greenhouse,” James repeated, “where, incidentally, you sent your future parabatai completely alone—”

  “Oh, no, it’s all right, I went in on my own,” Cordelia said, and started. “I was going to move the carriage from the gates. If Tatiana looks out a window and sees it, she’ll be furious.”