She listened for several moments to reassure herself that no one had followed her. The scrape of bare branches against the slate walls of the shed jangled her nerves, but she pressed on and approached the door, which stood slightly ajar. She caught a bitter scent in the air—incense, perhaps, that Grace had been burning as part of some attempt to revive her brother.
Lucie slipped inside, and once her eyes adjusted, she saw Jesse’s body, just as she’d last seen it, laid out peacefully in the glass coffin. His eyes closed, his hands folded on his chest.
Still, she had to make sure. With trembling hands she did something she had never done before, and raised the hinged lid to the glass coffin.
The body before her was not Jesse, she told herself. Jesse was her ghost, a spirit, and not this physical remnant. It still felt like a strange kind of violation as she pulled back the lapels of Jesse’s white funeral jacket.
The broadcloth shirt beneath was spattered with blood.
Half holding her breath, Lucie began to unbutton the top of the shirt, peeling the cold fabric away, the gesture bizarrely intimate.
There, across the pale skin of his chest, was a Strength rune. On his left shoulder, Swiftness and Precision. Voyance on his left hand, though she knew it was not his dominant one. At the inner turn of his arm was the enkeli rune.
Lucie let the fabric slip from her fingers and stared at the black markings on Jesse’s pale, waxy skin. It was as she had feared.
The anchor.
The runes. Jesse had never had any runes. Now he had five. One for each murdered Shadowhunter: Amos Gladstone, Basil Pounceby, Filomena di Angelo, Lilian Highsmith, Elias Carstairs.
Numbly, she went to the far wall and took down the Blackthorn sword. Her steps slowed as she returned to the coffin. The lid was still open, and inside, Jesse lay still—peaceful, and utterly unaware. It was unfair. Horribly unfair. Jesse was innocent.
But those who had been murdered—they had been innocent too.
Lucie had to do it now, before she lost her nerve. She gritted her teeth and raised the sword, gripping the hilt with both hands, ready to swing it down straight and true, as her father had taught her.
“Jesse,” she whispered. “Jesse, I’m so sorry.”
Light flashed off the blade of the sword, just as something slammed into the back of Lucie’s head. The Blackthorn sword fell from her hands. As it glanced off the edge of the glass case and clanged to the hard earth, shadows crept in around the edges of Lucie’s vision, washing her into the dark.
24 HE SHALL RISE
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge sea worms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Kraken”
James was in the shadows and they were around him; he was dreaming, though he had not been asleep.
He could hear his own breath, ragged in his ears. He was prisoned in the shadows, unable to move—unable to see save out of two holes torn in the darkness, like the eyes of a mask.
It was past dawn, the sky the color of cold blue glass. Arching above him as he lurched forward were plane trees, their branches outstretched to catch the attenuated sunlight. His body ached and burned. Dark hair fell across his vision; he reached to push it away. Glancing down, he saw his hands—narrow, pale white hands, clutching a silvery runed box.
His hand, which was not his hand, closed over the box. He was in a familiar space—gardens of some sort. There were hedges, and paths winding among wintry trees. Before him, a church’s gothic spires rose against the clear sky; winding out from its door were footpaths that circled the bronze fountain in the center.
James could hear whistling. His vision was beginning to fade around the edges, but he could see someone—someone in a gear jacket—walking a path, among the laurels and holly bushes, their leaves seared with ice that glittered in the sun.…
Somewhere a hand closed itself around the hilt of a blade. Somewhere there was hatred, that bleak, pitiless hatred James had felt before, and contempt—contempt for the man in the jacket, the Shadowhunter, who he had waited for in the square, had followed from his house, driving him, unawares, toward this place, this confrontation.…
Stop, James whispered. Don’t do this.
Sneering scorn. Begone, child.
And he was hurled free of the vision, crying out, his hands reaching for purchase, something to hold him to the world.
“James!”
It was Cordelia’s voice. She was kneeling over him, and so was Matthew: he lay on the floor of the study, half-stunned, as if he’d been dropped from a great height. He jerked into a sitting position like a puppet yanked upright on too-tight strings. “It’s happening,” he said. “Another murder—”