AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Tatiana was bleeding from the wound Anna had given her. Scarlet drenched the shoulder of her already bloodstained dress. She did not seem bothered by it. She held her pointed silver dagger in her hand and was humming quietly to herself, a soft and eerie tune.
Cordelia sensed Jesse at her side. He had come into the room after her, moving soundlessly, and was staring at his mother in the glare of Cordelia’s witchlight.
Tatiana raised her head. She glanced at Cordelia before turning her attention to Jesse.
“So she raised you,” said Tatiana. “That little Herondale bitch. I thought she might try. I never thought you’d allow it.”
Jesse went rigid. Cordelia bit her tongue before she could say, She did it with Grace’s help. That would make the situation better for no one.
“I thought it was what you wanted, Mother,” Jesse said. Cordelia sensed he was controlling his voice with an effort. Stalling for time until the others could arrive and surround Tatiana. “Me, alive again.”
“Not if it means you are in the thrall of these wretched people,” Tatiana snarled. “The Herondales, the Carstairs—you know better than anyone how badly they have treated us. How they betrayed me. Don’t you know it, my sweet and clever son?”
Her voice had gone sickly sweet; Jesse looked nauseated as she turned her malevolent gaze on Cordelia. If you move toward me, you witch, I will attack you with a broken piano leg and manage whatever Lilith does to me for it, Cordelia thought.
There was a soft hiss. Jesse had drawn his sword—the Blackthorn sword. The thorns on the cross guard gleamed in the witchlight.
Tatiana smiled. Was she pleased to see her son holding the family blade? After all she had just said?
“You are sick, Mother,” said Jesse. “You are sick in your mind. All your beliefs that you are being persecuted, that these people, these families, are trying to harm you, are the refuges you have found in which you can bury your grief over my father’s death. Over your own father—”
“Those are lies,” Tatiana hissed. “I am not sick! They have tried to ruin me!”
“Not true,” said Jesse quietly. “I have come to know them now. There is a truth much harsher. One I think you know. They have not tried to ruin you over all these years. They have not plotted your downfall. They have barely ever thought of you at all.”
Tatiana flinched—a true, unguarded movement, and in that moment Cordelia saw something real in her expression, something unalloyed by delusion or falsehood. A profound bitter hurt, almost savage in its intensity.
She began to rise from the bench. Jesse tightened his grip on his blade. Then quick steps in the hall: the door flew wide, and James came in, longsword in hand.
He was bruised and bleeding, a bad cut over his left eye. He must have found the tableau before him bizarre, Cordelia thought—she and Jesse, unmoving, facing down Tatiana in her bloody dress. But he did not hesitate. He raised his blade and pointed it directly at Tatiana’s chest.
“Enough,” he said. “It’s done. I’ve sent for Brother Zachariah. He’ll be here any moment to complete your arrest.”
Tatiana looked at him with an odd little smile. “James,” she said. “James Herondale. So like your father. You are just the one I wanted to talk to. You still have a chance to earn your grandfather’s support, you know.”
“That,” said James, “is the last thing I want.”
“He has set his sights on his desires,” she said, “and he will have them. They march, you know. Even now, they march.” Her smile widened. “Your only choice will be whether to show your loyalty, or whether to be trampled beneath him, when the time comes.” An ugly look of cunning passed over her face. “I think that you will be clever enough, when the choice is forced, to show your loyalty. Loyalty, after all, binds us.”
James winced, and Cordelia recalled the engraving on the inside of the bracelet Grace had given him. Loyalty binds me. If Tatiana had hoped to endear herself to James by reminding him of it, it did not work. He took two breathless steps forward and set the tip of the sword to the base of her throat.
“Drop the weapon and put out your hands,” he said, “or I’ll slit your throat in front of your son and gladly pay the cost of my sins to Hell when the time has come.”
Tatiana dropped the knife. Still smiling, she held out her arms to James, her palms turned up to show she held no weapon. “You are my master’s blood,” she said. “What choice have I? I will surrender, then, only to you.”
As James bound her wrists with demon wire, Cordelia exchanged a puzzled look with Jesse. It was over, it seemed, and yet she could not shake the feeling that something was wrong. After all that, why had Tatiana not put up more of a fight?
Grace had worried that Christopher would leave after she’d told him she needed to confess to Cordelia. But he didn’t—he remained, and seemed pleased when she handed over the notes she had taken regarding his experiments in sending messages through the application of runes and fire. She had watched him as he read, concerned that he would be offended—she was not a scientist, and having never been educated properly as a Shadowhunter, she knew only the most basic runes, while Christopher’s knowledge of the Gray Book seemed comprehensive.
But, “This is interesting,” he said, pointing to a note she had made about the application of a new kind of metal to steles. It turned out that what he found helpful was not intricate knowledge, but the willingness to sit with an idea, to turn it over in her mind and examine it from all angles. At some point she realized that it was not only Christopher’s curiosity and imagination that made him a scientist: it was patience. The patience to keep pressing against a problem until it yielded, rather than giving in to the frustrations of failure.
And then, as Christopher was jotting down a summary of their most recent idea, a knock came at the barred door, and suddenly Brother Zachariah was there, his parchment robes flowing silently around him.
And he was speaking in both their heads, and the words were a jumble of nightmare images. The Christmas party, invaded. Grace’s mother, bearing a sharp silver dagger, the blade to the throat of a little boy. The little boy who was Christopher’s brother. Tatiana vanishing, taking Alexander with her, the whole of the Enclave in pursuit.
There was a crash as Christopher shot to his feet, sending his glass of champagne flying. Without stopping to gather up his notes, or even to look at Grace, he bolted from the room. Zachariah regarded Grace for a moment in silence, then followed Christopher, closing the door behind him.
Grace sat on the bed, her blood turning to ice. Mother, she thought. I had made a friend. I had…
