Chain of Gold (The Last Hours #1) - Cassandra Clare Page 0,66

the carriage. “I felt rather bad for Grace.”

“James used to feel pity for her,” said Lucie as the carriage started to move. “Then it seems that somehow he fell in love with her. Which is very odd, really. I’ve always thought of pity as the opposite of love—”

She broke off, her face going white. Light was visible through the tangled branches of trees. Figures were hurrying across the road, toward the manor house.

“It’s Papa,” Lucie said, in a grim tone, as if she’d just seen another Cerberus demon. “In fact, it’s everyone.”

Cordelia stared. The road was suddenly full of witchlight. It shone upon the dark gates of the house, upon the rows of beech trees on either side of the road, upon the ragged outline of the manor itself. Lucie might have exaggerated slightly in saying everyone was there, but certainly a large group of Shadowhunters on foot was bearing down on the Blackthorns’ residence. Cordelia could see familiar faces—Gabriel and Cecily Lightwood, Charles Fairchild’s red hair—and of course, Will Herondale.

“What are they doing here?” she wondered. “Should we go back—warn James to make himself scarce?”

But the carriage had already begun speeding up, Xanthos trotting them quickly away while the last of the Enclave members poured through the gates.

As the house receded in the distance, Lucie shook her head, looking grim. “He wouldn’t thank us for it,” she said. She sighed. “He’d just be angry we let ourselves get in trouble too—besides, James is a boy; he won’t be in the same sort of hot water if they do catch him wandering about the place. If they found us, you’d be in awful trouble with your mother. It isn’t in the least fair, but it’s the truth.”

* * *

Moonlight filtered into the greenhouse through shattered glass panes. The Nephilim were long gone, having made their examination of the place and their demands of the mistress of the house. It was finally quiet.

The seedpods the Cerberus demon had dropped in its death throes began to shake and tremble, like eggs about to hatch. Their leathery casings split as thorn-sharp teeth tore them open from within. Covered with a sticky film and hissing like cockroaches, the newborn demons tumbled to the packed-earth floor of the greenhouse, each no bigger than a child’s hand.

But they would not remain that size for long.

DAYS PAST: IDRIS, 1900

Deciding to sneak into Blackthorn Manor as a shadow was one thing, but actually going through with it was another. For days after Grace asked him, James made excuses to himself about why tonight could not be the night: his father up too late to not notice his leaving; weather too foul to roam around outside; moon too bright to give him sufficient cover of darkness.

Then one night James awoke from agitated dreams and found himself flushed and breathless, as though he’d been fleeing something monstrous. The linens of his bed were thrown off. He stood and paced his bedchamber for a time, unable to think of sleep. Then he pulled on trousers and shirt and climbed out of his window.

He had been thinking of Cordelia, not Grace, but he found himself at the wall around Blackthorn Manor nonetheless. Unable to turn back, having come this far, he willed himself into shadow. Quickly enough he found himself through the wall and across the grounds and into the entrance hall.

He hadn’t been prepared for the state of Blackthorn Manor in the middle of the night, its deadly hush, its aura of menace like an opened tomb. Thick silver dust trailed along the edges of banisters and furniture and tangled into cobwebs in every corner. At the edge of his vision was a gray blur: he knew it was the border of the shadow realm. He knew he was courting that world by turning his flesh to shadow.

But he had made a promise.

James could see ghosts, and there were no ghosts here. But this place felt haunted regardless. The shadows seemed to listen intently to his footfalls. Most strange of all, every clock in the house that he passed was stopped at exactly the same hour of twenty to nine.

James went up the stairs. At the end of a long corridor before a turret wall stood a ghastly suit of armor, easily twice as tall as a human. Thankfully, it was only a decoration: fashioned from steel and copper, it resembled nothing so much as a massive human skeleton, with a chest piece in the shape of a rib cage and