Chain of Gold (The Last Hours #1) - Cassandra Clare Page 0,136

aloud from a new book, and the others would sprawl around the fire; sometimes they would exchange gossip, or Will and Tessa would tell familiar stories from the past. It was a place Lucie associated with great comfort, and afternoons spent scribbling away at the desk. So it was perhaps doubly unnerving when Jesse appeared, evolving out of the shadows in his white shirtsleeves, his face pale under his dark hair.

“You came!” she said, not bothering to hide her astonishment. “I really didn’t know if that was going to work.”

“I don’t suppose you ever wondered if now was a convenient time for me,” he said.

“What could you possibly have been doing?” she wondered aloud.

Jesse made an unghostlike snorting sound and seated himself on the rickety desk. The weight of a live person would likely have tipped it over, but he was not a live person. “You wanted to speak with me. So speak.”

She told him hastily about Emmanuel Gast, how she had found the ghost and what he had said to her. As he listened, Jesse played with the gold locket around his throat.

“I am sorry to disappoint you, but I have heard nothing of this warlock. Still, it is clear these are dark doings,” he said, when she was done. “Why put yourself in the middle of this? Why not let your parents solve these mysteries?”

“Barbara was my cousin,” she said. “I cannot do nothing.”

“You do not need to do this.”

“Perhaps being dead has made you forget how perilous life is,” said Lucie. “I do not think James, or Cordelia, or any of us have chosen to be the ones to solve this mystery. It has chosen us. I am not going to bring danger to my parents, either, when there is nothing they can do.”

“I am not sure there is anything anyone can do,” said Jesse. “There is deliberate evil at work here. A desire to destroy Shadowhunters and to hurt them. It will not be ended soon.”

Lucie sucked in her breath.

“Luce?” The door opened. It was James. Lucie started, and Jesse vanished—not the way Jessamine sometimes disappeared, with a wake of trailing smoke, but simply snapping out of existence between one second and the next. “What are you doing in here?”

“Why shouldn’t I be in the drawing room?” she said, knowing she sounded disagreeable. She felt immediately guilty—he hadn’t known she was in the middle of trying to interrogate a ghost.

James tossed his jacket over a flowered armchair and sat down beside her, picking up a poker from the rack of fireplace instruments.

“I’m sorry about Grace,” she said. “Matthew told Thomas and Christopher.”

James sighed, moving the coals in the fire about restlessly. “Probably better that he did. It isn’t as if I wish to announce the news to everyone.”

“If Grace doesn’t want you, she is a terrible idiot,” Lucie said. “And if she wants to marry Charles, she is even more of a terrible idiot, so she is a terrible idiot twice over.”

James went still, his hand motionless on the poker. The sparks flew upward. “I thought I would feel incredible grief,” he said at last. “Instead I am not sure what I feel. Everything is sharper and clearer, colors and textures are different. Perhaps that is grief. Perhaps it is just that I don’t know how such loss should feel.”

“Charles will be sorry he married her,” said Lucie, with conviction. “She will devil him until the day he dies.” She made a face. “Wait. She’ll be Matthew’s sister, won’t she? Think of the awkward dinner parties.”

“About Matthew.” James set the poker down. “Luce. You know that Matthew has feelings for you, and you don’t return those feelings.”

Lucie blinked. She hadn’t expected the conversation to take this turn, though it was not the first time they’d discussed the matter. “I cannot feel something that I don’t feel.”

“I’m not saying that you should. You don’t owe your feelings to anyone.”

“Besides, it is a fancy,” Lucie said. “He does not really care for me. In fact, I think—”

She broke off. It was a theory she had developed, seeing the way Matthew’s gaze had been drifting the past few days. But she was not ready to share it.

“I don’t disagree.” James’s voice was low. “But I fear that Matthew is in pain for reasons even I do not understand.”

Lucie hesitated. She knew what she ought to say about the way Matthew had chosen to address his pain, but she could not bear to say the words to her brother. A