Chain of Gold (The Last Hours #1) - Cassandra Clare Page 0,188

it quickly. He and Alastair regarded each other with an awkwardness that felt like a pinch at Thomas’s heart.

Charles started down the steps. Halfway to the bottom, he turned and glared. “Destroy nothing,” he said to Thomas, stalked to the foot of the steps, and vanished round the corner.

“We had best get to the lab—” Thomas began, starting toward the main part of the house.

“Stop,” Alastair said. Thomas froze, more surprised than anything else. Alastair’s eyes were chips of black ice. “I don’t care a whit about the lab,” he said. “I want to know where my sister is in all this madness. Where’s she gone?”

“Highgate Cemetery,” said Thomas. “Entrance to the Silent City.”

“Bloody hell,” said Alastair. “Why? You know what, never mind why. It’ll only make me angry.”

“I’m sorry,” Thomas said. “Not that she’s there—if there were danger, and I don’t think there will be, Cordelia could defend herself admirably—but that all of this is happening. It’s none of our fault, but I’m just—sorry.”

Alastair’s gaze softened, and for a moment, Thomas felt himself back in Paris, hands in his pockets, talking in a low voice to Alastair Carstairs as if it were only the two of them in all the world. “I am sorry as well,” he said. “About your sister. I had not gotten a chance to tell you before.”

Thomas’s breath caught. “Thank you.”

“Do you really think this antidote will work?” Alastair asked.

“I know it will.”

Alastair held Thomas’s gaze for a long moment, then nodded. “And how long will it take to make it?”

“Twenty minutes, if everything goes right.”

Alastair exhaled. “All right,” he said. “Twenty minutes it is. After that, I’m going to find Cordelia.” At Thomas’s puzzled look, he gestured impatiently toward the steps that went down to the laboratory. “I’ll help you,” he said. “Let’s get to work.”

* * *

The Mandikhor was massive. It rose over them like the smoke of a bonfire. There was no mistaking it: though it had grown tremendously in size, it had the same scaled, lion-shaped body, the same triple row of fanged jaws. There was something else about it that was new too—here in the shadow realm, its body was marked with a thousand kinds of disease. As it moved toward them, its claws tearing the sand, Cordelia felt herself gag. Demons as a group were often disgusting; one trained oneself to cope with the horror. But there was something visceral about the markers of death that covered this creature—the ugly buboes of the Black Death decorated its arms, while its torso was bumped with smallpox, its chest cracked and runnelled with leprosy. Patches of its skin were eaten away with acidic rot, while others were red with scarlet fever. Black ichor dripped from its ears and mouth.

James backed up, pulling Cordelia with him, but sand and dirt had piled up all around them in sheer-sided dunes. There was no real way to retreat.

A sharp laugh rang out. Standing atop one of the dunes of sand was a man with pale gray hair and eyes. He looked young, and startlingly beautiful, but there was a dark edge to his beauty—it was like the loveliness of blood in snow, or the gleam of white bone through shadow.

He resembled James. Not in any specific way, but the shape of his eyes, perhaps, the bones in his face, the curve of his mouth. She had to remind herself: This is Belial, Prince of Hell. If he reminds you of James, that is deliberate on his part. In his true form, he may look nothing like this.

As the dust settled around them, he held out a hand toward the Mandikhor demon. The demon seemed to freeze in place as Belial turned to regard Cordelia with a cold gaze. “Tsk-tsk, James,” he said. “Bringing in reinforcements like this is cheating. What of the rules of fair play?”

James drew a gleaming shortsword from his weapons belt. He was breathing hard, and very pale: streaked with dirt and sand, he no longer looked like a young Edwardian gentleman, but something more primal than that. “Let her go back to our world,” he said. “Just leave her be. I’m the one you have business with—”

“No,” Cordelia said sharply. “I won’t abandon you!”

Belial made a bored gesture, a lazy flick of the wrist. Cordelia gasped as black vines exploded from the earth, twining around her feet and legs, pinning her in place. James took a step toward her; she raised Cortana and brought it down, intending to slice through