Chain of Gold (The Last Hours #1) - Cassandra Clare Page 0,64

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