Chain of Gold (The Last Hours #1) - Cassandra Clare Page 0,148

winked and shut the door in their faces.

* * *

Sleep eluded Cordelia that night. Long after the boys had dropped her at the house in Kensington, long after she had wearily climbed the steps to her bedroom, long after her new dress had been discarded in a pile of bronze silk on the floor, she lay awake, staring up at the white plaster ceiling of her room. She could still feel James’s lips on hers, the touch of his hands and fingers on her body.

He had kissed her with violent desperation, as if he were dying for her. He had said her name: Daisy, my Daisy. Hadn’t he? Yet when they had reached Kensington, he had helped her down from the carriage and bid her good night casually, as if they were simply the friends they had always been. She tried to hold the memory of what it felt like to kiss him in her mind, but it slipped away and vanished with only the memory of sweetness, like the smoke in the Whispering Room.

16 LEGION

The sea gave up its dead, and death and the grave gave up their dead.

—Revelations 20:13

When Cordelia arrived at the Institute in the late afternoon, she found Lucie and the Merry Thieves in the ballroom, clearly taking advantage of the fact that Will and Tessa had gone on a day patrol. White sheets had been thrown over the furniture and the piano, and the only light came from the arched windows, whose heavy velvet curtains had been pulled back. Even in the short time that had passed since the ball, the floor had grown lightly grained with dust.

Lucie, Christopher, James, Matthew, and Thomas were standing in a circle around an object that had been placed in the middle of the room. As Cordelia drew near them, she recognized it as the Pyxis Anna had handed to James the night before.

In the watery daylight, Cordelia could see it more clearly. It was made of a dark golden wood, with the pattern of the ouroboros, the snake swallowing its own tail, burned into four of its sides. A handle protruded from the top.

“Cordelia!” Lucie exclaimed. “We were just exchanging information. We learned a great deal that was important at the Enclave meeting last night, and it sounds as if you did something or other at the Hell Ruelle. Nothing that compelling, no doubt, but we cannot all be spies.”

“I heard about the meeting from my brother this morning,” said Cordelia, joining the others in their makeshift circle. Like Cordelia, Lucie and the boys were in gear. James wore a Norfolk jacket over his, with the storm collar turned up. Locks of black hair tumbled over his forehead and kissed the tops of his cheekbones. She looked away quickly, before their eyes could meet. “The quarantine and—and all the rest.”

Alastair was still angry at her, but to be fair to him he had been gentle in breaking the bad news about Oliver Hayward. She did not know what to say about it now, though. She had not known Oliver, except as a presence at Barbara’s side, but the others had. She could not imagine what they felt, especially Thomas, who looked even more tense and strained than he had before.

“It seems even more urgent to find and trap the demon responsible for this contagion now, before it attacks anyone else,” she said at last.

Christopher enthusiastically waved an enormous book he was holding, his glasses balanced on the tip of his nose. The words On the Uses of Pyxides and Other Phylacteries were stamped across the front in gold. “It appears that this generation of Pyxis is fairly simple. When you wish to trap a demon, you first wound or weaken it. Then you place the Pyxis on the ground nearby and speak the words ‘Thaam Tholach Thechembaor,’ and the demon will be sucked into the box.”

The Pyxis wobbled sharply, nearly tipping onto its side. Everyone jumped about a foot back.

“It’s alive,” Thomas said, staring. “Not the Pyxis, I mean—well, you know what I mean.”

“Indeed,” said James. “I see a flaw in our plan.”

Matthew nodded. “I do as well. What if the Pyxis has an occupant? There was no real reason to assume the box at Hypatia’s was empty. It could have had a demon in it all these years.”

They all stared at each other.

“What would happen if we tried to put another demon in there?” Cordelia asked at last. “Could they both fit?”

“It isn’t a good idea,” said