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Chapter 15: Old Voices
15OLD VOICES
All day within the dreamy house,
The doors upon their hinges creak’d;
The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse
Behind the mouldering wainscot shriek’d,
Or from the crevice peer’d about.
Old faces glimmer’d thro’ the doors
Old footsteps trod the upper floors,
Old voices called her from without.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Mariana”
Cordelia had been late gettingout of the house, and she found herself at Chiswick House after the others had already arrived. She climbed out of the carriage, waving at Anna and Ariadne, who were waiting by the steps; the Institute carriage had already pulled up in the circular drive. Cordelia could see a few figures in the distance where James, Jesse, and Lucie seemed to have gone to look at the gardens.
It was a bracing day, cold enough to sting her chest when she breathed. She glanced around as she pulled on her gloves. At night, the house and its grounds had the feel of a classical ruin, like a Roman villa gone to seed—marble and brick chipped and unrepaired, paint peeling, formal gardens now a shaggy war of briars and hedges invading each other’s space. She remembered the effect as quite Gothic, with Grace very much the pale maiden languishing behind the dark walls.
But here in the white winter sun the house looked merely shabby and squalid. Nothing romantic lurked here, she thought. Only the end result of decades of domestic horror, negligence, and cruelty.
As she went to join Ariadne and Anna, the others approached—James, pale but calm, Jesse, seemingly distracted, and Lucie, brightly friendly as she greeted Ariadne and Anna, but careful not to look at Cordelia.
Cordelia had not expected anything different—it was probably why she had dawdled getting started that morning—but it still hurt to have Lucie ignore her. Not, she thought, that she didn’t deserve it.
At least all of them were wearing ordinary clothes, not gear, which was a relief to Cordelia—she had wondered about it herself and finally decided on a simple dress and sturdy boots. It was not as if she could fight anyway, she thought bitterly, if the situation arose. She would have to fling herself behind someone else for protection, like the sort of Victorian heroine she particularly disliked.
Anna glanced around with a languid blue gaze. “I believe that’s all of us,” she said. She wore a Norfolk hunting jacket over a pair of trousers tucked into boots; around her neck was a brightly patterned silk scarf, tucked into the collar of her shirt. Below it dangled the ruby necklace she always wore, which detected the presence of demons. On anyone else the combination would have been odd; on Anna it was dashing.
Cordelia said, without thinking, “What about Matthew?” and saw James glance quickly away.
“He hasn’t come,” said Ariadne. “He’s doing a favor for me today, I’m afraid.”
That was a bit surprising, but, Cordelia reminded herself, Ariadne had been engaged to Matthew’s brother. And Matthew and Anna were very close. She felt a bit left out—she had been missing Anna lately, and even more now that she and Lucie had fallen out.
“I daresay six of us should be more than enough,” James said. “I would suggest we divide into two equal groups.”
“Capital,” said Anna. “Cordelia, would you be kind enough to join Ariadne and me?”
Cordelia felt a rush of gratitude. Anna was being kind, drawing Cordelia away from any potentially awkward interaction with James.
“Of course,” Cordelia said.
“Jesse,” said Ariadne, and Jesse looked surprised. She hesitated. “I just wanted to make sure—I mean, we all know it’s for the greater good, but are you all right with us, you know… ransacking your house?”
Jesse looked at the sky. James said, in some surprise, “Do you mind?”
“It’s not that,” Jesse said. “I was only going to say—you might as well look through my house, because I’ve been in all of yours.”
“Scandalous!” Anna said, delighted. “But why?”
“Nothing indecent,” Jesse said. “I’ve never looked in on any of you in the bath, or anything like that. It’s just, ghosts, we tend to drift about. We don’t really obey property laws. I obey them now, of course,” he added, “and I am perfectly fine with you pillaging this wretched pile. I can’t imagine I’d ever want to live here, even if I do inherit it. Given that I’m Jeremy Blackthorn these days, who knows who will end up with it? I’d say it ought to go back to the Lightwoods, but I doubt you want to be cursed with the place.”
“Do you think there are likely to be any demons or such about?” Lucie said curiously.
“It seems unlikely,” said James, “given how many times the Enclave has been over this place. I suppose one can never be entirely sure.”
“Not where my mother is concerned,” said Jesse. “I can think of a few places she might have hidden things—I’d suggest Anna, Ariadne, and Cordelia search inside, and the rest of us take the gardens and greenhouse area. When we’re finished, we can meet back on these steps.”
James nodded. His dark gold eyes scanned the horizon. “Hard to imagine your mother enjoyed living here, with the place in this state,” he said.
“She liked it like this,” said Jesse. “She’s the one who smashed all the mirrors and stopped the clocks. It was a reminder to her every time she set foot here that she was a victim, and your families were to blame.”
“Some people like being miserable,” said Lucie, staring off above Cordelia’s head. “Some people won’t do things that would make them, and other people, happy, just because.”
“Lucie,” said Anna, “I have no idea what you’re on about. What are we meant to be looking for?”
“Anything that looks off—disturbed dust on the floor, pictures hanging oddly, any hint of demonic activity that might activate your necklace,” said Jesse.
Those who had watches—James, Anna—checked them to set the time, and they were off. Lucie turned away without a glance at Cordelia, following her brother and Jesse into the gardens. She put her hand on James’s elbow to steady herself as they went down a cracked flight of stone steps—a friendly, affectionate gesture—and Cordelia felt an awful jealous pang in her chest. Whether she was jealous of Lucie or of James she was not sure; somehow, that made it worse.
Even on a bright afternoon, the greenhouse at Chiswick House was still a dim, gloomy place. When last James had been here, he had passed through Belial’s realm and arrived choking on ashes in the middle of a fight between Cordelia and a Cerberus demon. Today the dust was gone, and no sign remained of any demonic activity. Whatever had been grown here had long ago been taken over by the briars and the hedges of the gardens outside, which slowly extended their branches and vines a little more every year, to eventually draw the greenhouse itself back into wildness.
James didn’t think Tatiana had hidden anything here; everything was so damp and overgrown that she would never be able to find anything a second time, if it wasn’t destroyed by the plants and the rain and the insects first. But they were gamely searching; Jesse especially thought that the gardens might hold some secrets.
At the other end of the greenhouse James saw the flash of Lucie’s witchlight rune-stone as she and Jesse emerged from behind a crumbling wall. Jesse had been silent and uneasy-looking since he’d come back from seeing Grace in the Silent City that morning.
Part of James was desperate to know what Jesse had discovered. Had Grace told him the truth about her power, about what she’d done? Though James would have expected Jesse to look at him differently if he knew, and he didn’t seem to be doing that. He seemed rather to have retreated inside himself, however hard he was trying to put a good face on things.
Perhaps it had simply been seeing his sister in the Silent City prison that had affected him. For Jesse, Grace represented hope—the hope of family, the hope of orphans clinging together when their parents were dead or lost. But for James, still, thoughts of Grace meant thoughts of darkness, a forever fall into shadow, like Lucifer falling from heaven. From grace itself.
He could not bring himself to ask. And so he schooled his expression into a calm neutrality as Jesse and Lucie approached. There were streaks of dirt on Jesse’s face; he looked discouraged. “There’s nothing here,” he said.
“Or rather, there was a Cerberus demon here,” said Lucie, “until a few months ago, when James killed it.”
“You killed Balthazar?” Jesse said in horror.
“It was a demon,” James began, and broke off as Jesse smiled. He wasn’t doing a bad job pretending things were all right, James had to admit.
“Sorry,” Jesse said. “Just a joke. Never been friends with a demon. Didn’t know the, ah, former… occupant.”
Lucie looked at Jesse. Carefully, she said, “Shall we try the… other structure?”
Jesse’s smile faded immediately. He glanced over at a squat brick building a little ways away, difficult to see behind all the overgrowth of the gardens. It looked like a potting shed, and might have been once, but now its roof was gone. A rickety wooden door hung open on one side.
“Yes,” Jesse said. “I suppose we have to, don’t we?”
Lucie took his hand. James noted the gesture but said nothing. There was no shame in needing support, but not all Shadowhunters—male ones, especially—were brought up to think so. James had been raised by Will, whose central tenet in life was that he would have been dead in a ditch at age fourteen had it not been for Jem. He had always encouraged James to rely on his friends, to depend on his parabatai. It was something James loved about his father, but it also meant he could not approach him to talk about Matthew and Cordelia. He could not admit to his father that he was angry with Matthew. James was sure Will had never been angry with Jem in his life.
James followed Lucie and Jesse through the overgrowth to the brick shed. Jesse went inside first, and the others next; the moment James was inside the place, he froze. The room was empty but for a table in its center, on which sat a carved wooden casket. Suddenly James knew what this place was, and why Lucie had only called it the other structure.
The casket—open now, gaping like a slack mouth—was Jesse’s. This was his tomb.
James could see where rain and damp had warped the wood of the casket over the years, a consequence of the building having no roof. Prongs jutted out from one wall, as if something—a sword, perhaps—had hung there once. One of the walls was smoke-blackened, ashes scattered across the frozen ground.
“Bleak, isn’t it,” said Jesse, with a tight sort of smile. “My mother seemed to feel this was the safest place to leave me; she was always afraid the Enclave would search the house.”
“But not the grounds?” James said quietly. He could not have described the look on Jesse’s face—half pain, half horror; this place must remind him of all he had lost. All the years and time.
“I suspect, though she said otherwise, that she wanted me far away from her,” said Jesse. “I suspect the presence of my… corpse… made her feel guilty. Or perhaps just horrified.”
“She ought to feel guilty,” Lucie said fiercely. “She ought to never have another moment of peace, after what she did to you.”
“I don’t think she has much in the way of peace,” James said, thinking of Tatiana’s wild eyes, of the hatred burning in them. “Do you?”
Jesse seemed about to reply, but before he could, James gasped. Something arrowed across his vision—a slice of darkness, as if he were gazing through a cracked window at Belial’s shadow realm. Something was terribly wrong; something nearby.
Cordelia,he thought, and bolted back toward the house without another word.
The upper floors of Chiswick House were emptier than Cordelia would have expected. Most of the rooms were without pictures, rugs, or furniture. Cordelia knew Tatiana had smashed every mirror in the house when Rupert Blackthorn had died; she had not realized they still hung on the walls, ruined frames of jagged glass.
There was a training room, in which there were no weapons, only cobwebs and mice. And there was one bedroom, plain but furnished, which had a small vanity table, with a silver-backed brush set still laid out on it. There was one hard-looking chair, and a nearly bare iron bed, with torn sheets still on it. On the nightstand was a mug, at whose bottom something ancient—chocolate? milky tea?—had hardened into a moldy green scum.
With a start, Cordelia realized this cheerless place must have been Grace’s bedroom. What kind of dreams had she dreamt, on that plank of a bed? Surrounded by the darkness of this moldering, bitter house?
Surely I cannot be pitying Grace,Cordelia thought, and started when she heard someone cry out. She reached for Cortana—her hand slapped against fabric. Her blade was not there.
She pushed through the hurt, running out into the corridor and up a flight of stairs, following the sound of the cry. She burst into a large ballroom, where the remains of a massive chandelier, easily eight feet across, lay in the middle of the room where it had crashed to the ground at some point. It looked like a massive, jeweled spider that had lost a fight with a much larger spider.
Ariadne, in the center of the room, shot Cordelia a guilty look. “Oh, bother,” she said. “I didn’t mean to make you come running.”
“Ariadne may have thought it was a real spider,” Anna said. “A real, giant spider.”
Anna meant to be teasing, Cordelia knew, but the tone of her voice was… fond. Fonder than either Anna or Ariadne were aware of, Cordelia suspected. They were both smiling as Ariadne teased Anna about whether the spider chandelier might look nice in her flat, and perhaps even make a friend for Percival the stuffed snake.
Cordelia went to examine the rest of the room. There were broken floorboards aplenty, each of which she tested to see if it was loose and perhaps hiding something beneath it. Having made herself sneeze several times by disturbing the dust, she went over to a window to catch her breath.
A moment later Anna joined her. Ariadne was at the other end of the room, examining the dumbwaiter, whose door she had managed to wrench open with a puff of dust and broken paint. For a long moment, Anna and Cordelia stood together, looking out the cracked window at the once-green lawns sloping down toward the River Thames.
“Anna,” Cordelia said, in a small voice. “Is Matthew really doing an errand for Ariadne?”
“Indeed he is,” Anna said. She touched a long finger to the window glass, making a spot in the dust. “Why do you ask?”
Cordelia felt herself flush scarlet. “I suppose I was worried. And there’s no one else I can ask. Is he all right?”
Anna paused in the act of drawing back a curtain. “Does he have a reason not to be?”
“I just thought,” Cordelia said, “since you are close to him, you might know something of his state of mind.”
“My dear,” Anna said gently. “His state of mind is that he loves you. He loves you and he mourns that love as impossible. He fears that you despise him, that everyone does. That is his state of mind, and it is a difficult one indeed.”
Cordelia shot a quick look at Ariadne, who thankfully had her head half-stuck in the dumbwaiter and couldn’t possibly have heard. Then she felt foolish for worrying. My fraught love life is evidently the worst-kept secret in the Enclave, so perhaps I should give up trying to maintain my dignity.
“I do not hate Matthew,” Cordelia whispered. “I regret going to Paris—and yet I cannot regret all of it. He held out a hand to me when I was desperate. He took me out of my despair. I could never, ever despise him.”
“He needs help now,” Anna said, half to herself. “The sort I am afraid I cannot give him, because he will refuse it. I worry—” She broke off, shaking her head. “Cordelia, what happened in Paris?”
“It was lovely at first. We went to museums, dressmakers, the theater. It was a sort of game of pretend, as children play. We pretended we were other people, without troubles, people who could do as they liked.”
“Ah,” said Anna delicately. “You… there isn’t a chance you are with child, is there, Cordelia?”
Cordelia nearly fell out of the window. “No,” she said. “None—we kissed, that’s all. And then James showed up in the middle of it, and saw everything.”
“A very romantic gesture, his rushing to Paris,” Anna noted, “but his timing leaves something to be desired.”
“Except,” said Cordelia, “that James has been in love with Grace for years, before I ever came to London. He was in love with Grace through all of our marriage. He was very plain about it.”
“People’s feelings change.”
“Do they?” Cordelia said. “I didn’t run away to Paris on a lark, you know. I left our house because Grace appeared at our door. And though James didn’t know I could see, I found him in the vestibule, holding her close. As in love as ever, by all appearances.”
“Oh, my poor darling,” Anna said. “What can I say? That must have been dreadful. Only—things are not always as they first appear.”
“I know what I saw.”
“Perhaps,” Anna said. “And perhaps you should ask James what truly happened that night. It may be as you fear. But I am an excellent reader of faces, Daisy. And when I see James looking at Grace, I see nothing at all. But when I see him looking at you, he is transformed. We all carry a light inside ourselves. It burns with the flame of our souls. But there are other people in our lives who add their own flames to ours, creating a brighter conflagration.” She glanced quickly at Ariadne, and then back at Cordelia. “James is special. He has always burned bright. But when he looks at you, his light blazes up like a bonfire.”
“Really?” Cordelia whispered. “Anna, I don’t know—”
Anna jolted, putting her hand to her chest, where her ruby necklace was flashing like a winking eye. At that moment, Ariadne shrieked, reeling back from the dumbwaiter, which had begun to tremble and rattle within the wall. “Demon!” she cried. “Look out!”
The shed appeared untouched since the day Lucie and Grace had found the coffin open and Jesse gone, little knowing the night would end with his resurrection and Grace turning herself in and so much else. Strange—she would have expected the Clave to seek it out, or Tatiana at least, but if anyone had come, they had left no trace; they had not even closed the coffin lid. Lucie found it distressing to be back here; had she really spent so much time in this awful, morbid room?
Despite the sun and the missing roof, the high brick walls cast shadows over the room, which felt dark and small now that Jesse was standing in it, his face tipped up to the sky. When Lucie and Grace had been working to bring him back, it had seemed dramatic to her—a secret crypt from a Gothic novel, the dungeon of a castle. Now she recognized it as a place where Jesse had been imprisoned, where he had been dreadfully controlled. She was grateful that James had ducked out, sensing that being back here would be fraught for Jesse, and even for her.
“Is it hard to be here?” she asked.
Jesse looked around: at the small space, the damp walls, the ashes where she and Grace had burned so very many ineffective ingredients for useless spells. With a visible effort, he turned to Lucie and said, “I was never even aware of being here, really. So what it reminds me is how much work you did, to bring me back.”
“Grace helped,” Lucie said, but Jesse’s expression only hardened. He turned and went over to the coffin. Taking off his glove, he reached inside. Lucie moved to join him. There was nothing inside; Jesse seemed to be running his bare hand over the black velvet lining, now beginning to spot with mold from exposure to the elements. “Jesse,” Lucie said. “Something happened when you went to see Grace in the Silent City, didn’t it?”
He hesitated. “Yes. She told me something that—that I didn’t want to hear, or know.”
Lucie felt a grim little twist of cold at her spine. “What was it?”
“I…” Jesse looked up from the coffin, his green eyes dark. “I will not lie to you, Lucie. But the whole of what I can tell you is that it is not my secret to tell.”
“But if there is a danger… to the Enclave, or to anyone—”
“It’s nothing like that. And the Silent Brothers know it; if there were a danger, they would share it.”
“Oh,” Lucie said. The curious part of her wanted to stamp her feet and demand to be told. The part of her that had been changed by everything that had happened in this past year, the part that had begun to understand patience, won out. “I trust you will tell me when you can.”
Jesse did not reply; he was leaning into the coffin, tearing at the velvet lining—“Aha!” He turned to her, holding up a small wooden box. “I knew it,” he said, almost savagely. “There’s a false bottom in the coffin, under the lining. Where else would my mother hide something than with her most precious possession?”
“You were not her possession,” Lucie said. “You never belonged to her.”
“That’s not what she believed.” Jesse frowned as he opened the box and withdrew an object. He held it up to show her: a hand mirror. Its handle was cut glass, but black—not black adamas, she didn’t think, but it was hard to tell—and around the octagonal looking glass itself she could see tiny carvings that seemed to twist and writhe in the light.
“What is it?” Lucie said. “Do you recognize it?”
“Yes.” Jesse nodded. “It’s the only remaining mirror in Chiswick.” There was an odd look on his face. “And—I believe I know where else we ought to be searching.…”
Cordelia whipped around to see something the size of a small dog explode from the dumbwaiter, shattering it—and a good portion of the wall—apart. The demon had a ratlike face, with long yellow teeth. It was covered in scales and too many skinny limbs, whipping around in a fury, each one tipped with a hooked claw. A Gamigin demon, Cordelia thought, though she’d never seen one in person before.
Ariadne drew a blade from her belt, but it was too fast. One of its skinny limbs shot out, the hook at the end of its claw sinking into the back of Ariadne’s jacket. It flung her away; she skidded across the dusty floor as Anna screamed, “Ari!”
And Anna sprang into motion, racing across the room, her whip suddenly in her hand. The demon was crouched over Ariadne, its yellow-toothed mouth opening wide. She screamed as black demon saliva spattered her neck and face. Then Anna was there, her whip arcing through the air, a wire of golden flame.
With a shriek, the demon sprang away. Anna dropped to her knees—Ariadne was convulsing on the floor—and the demon, hissing, shot across the floor toward Cordelia.
Time seemed to slow. Cordelia could hear Anna, begging Ariadne to hold still, hold still, and the demon was hurtling across the room toward her, leaving a trail of black ichor, and Cordelia knew that if she so much as lifted a broken floorboard to defend herself it would bring Lilith, but she had no choice—
The demon was on her. It lunged, and Cordelia kicked out as hard as she could, her boot colliding with its dense, springy frame. It yowled like a cat, rolling onto its back, but the yowls weren’t just noise, Cordelia realized. They were words.
“They rise,”it hissed. “Soon they will be invincible. No seraph blade will harm them.”
“What?” Throwing caution and sense to the winds, Cordelia ran toward the demon where it crouched on the floor. “Who is rising? Tell me!”
The demon looked up at her—and went limp. Its fanged mouth trembling, it cringed away from her, covering its body with some of its legs. “Paladin,” it rasped. “Oh, forgive me. Thine is the power, thine and thy Lady’s. Forgive me. I did not know—”
A sharp crack sounded. Something punched into the demon’s body—Cordelia thought she saw a hole open between its eyes, a black hole rimmed with fire. The demon spasmed, legs curling in. Then it melted away into smoke.
The stench of ichor on the air was mixed with the sharp smell of cordite. Cordelia knew what she would see even before she looked: James, white-faced, pistol in hand. It was still pointed unerringly at the spot where the demon had just been.
“Daisy.” Lowering his arm, he moved quickly to her side. His gaze raked her, searching for injuries, bruises. “Are you hurt? Did it—”
“You needn’t have shot it,” Cordelia snapped. “I was questioning it. It said, ‘They rise,’ and I—”
His hands still on her shoulders, James’s expression turned incredulous. “You can’t question a demon, Daisy. It’ll just lie.”
“I was managing.” Shock had turned to a hot fury in Cordelia’s veins, a fury that seemed to have a tight hold of her, even as a small part of her mind looked on, appalled. “I didn’t need your help—”
His golden eyes narrowed. “Really? Because you can’t wield a weapon, Cordelia, in case you’ve forgotten—”
“Stop it. Both of you.” It was Anna, speaking more sternly than Cordelia had imagined she could. She and Ariadne had crossed the room to them; Cordelia, intent on James, had not noticed. She wondered how much they had overheard. Anna held her stele in her hand; Ariadne, beside her, sported red welts on the left side of her face, where the demon’s acid saliva had touched her. There was a freshly applied healing rune on her throat. “Whatever’s happening between you may be none of my business, but I won’t have you arguing in the middle of a mission. It puts us all in danger.”
Cordelia felt wretchedly ashamed. Anna was right. “James,” she said, looking at him directly. It hurt to do that; it was like pressing a sharp pin into her hand. He was beautiful, just as he was—breathing hard, his black hair in his eyes, a sheen of sweat along his collarbones. She wished she could make herself immune to his beauty, but it seemed impossible. “I’m sorry, I—”
“Don’t apologize.” The Mask had gone up; he was expressionless. “In fact, I’d rather you didn’t.”
A crash came from downstairs, and a shout. Lucie, Cordelia thought, and a moment later they were all bolting down the steps toward the main floor of the house.
Cordelia, James, Anna, and Ariadne raced back downstairs, only to find Jesse and Lucie in the parlor. More specifically, Lucie was in the parlor: Jesse was halfway up the fireplace, getting covered in soot.
“What happened?” James demanded. “What was that crash?”
Lucie, also streaked with soot, said, “Something fell out of the fireplace into the grate. Jesse?” she called. “Jesse, did you get them?”
A moment later Jesse emerged, the top half of his body nearly caked with soot. He looked as if it had been raining black paint on him. In one hand he held a dirty mirror; in the other, what seemed to be a book with a leather cord wrapped around its binding, which held a number of loose papers.
“Notes,” he said, coughing. “My mother’s notes and bits of old diaries. I remembered seeing her peering up the chimney with this”—he held up the mirror, which James realized was not dirty so much as made of a shiny, reflective black material—“and I realized, she had a hiding place up there you could only see if you shone the mirror up the chimney. Some kind of magical signal beacon. That’s why the Enclave didn’t find it.”
“Does it do anything else?” Anna asked, peering at the mirror curiously. “Besides pointing the way to the chimney hiding place?”
“Might I see it?” James asked, and with a shrug, Jesse handed it over. James could hear the others discussing the demon they’d found upstairs, Jesse wondering aloud how long it had been living in the dumbwaiter, but James’s concentration was all on the mirror.
Before he even touched the mirror’s handle, he felt as though it were in his hand: smooth and cool to the touch, humming with power. It seemed made of black adamas, or something very close to it, surrounding a circle of dark glass. And around the edge of the glass were runes, obviously demonic, though not in a language James recognized.
He touched the glass. When his finger made contact, though, there was a sudden flash, like an unexpected leaping ember from a fire. He sucked in his breath.
“Belial,” he said, and everyone seemed to jump. He was conscious of Cordelia looking at him with wide eyes, darker than the mirror’s glass. He forced himself not to stare at her. “I—cannot tell you what the mirror does; I’ve no idea. But I would swear on my life that Belial gave it to Tatiana. I can feel his touch on it.”
“It looks just like the pithos,” Lucie observed. “Belial’s stele-thingy that he used to steal runes from his victims’ bodies. Maybe Belial gave Tatiana a whole vanity set?”
“Try touching it yourself, Luce,” Anna suggested, and after a moment, Lucie reached out her hand and skated it across the mirror’s surface.
This time, there was a flicker from within the mirror, like a dancing flame. It was faint, but it continued to glow as long as Lucie was touching it.
She drew her hand back, biting her lip. “Indeed,” she said, her voice subdued. “It has Belial’s aura.”
“I doubt it was just a gift,” said Cordelia. “I don’t think Belial would have given it to Tatiana unless it had some darker purpose.”
“More than just looking up chimneys,” Ariadne agreed.
“We should bring the book and the mirror back to the Institute,” Jesse said. “Have a closer look at both. And I’ll start trying to decipher my mother’s notes; they are written in a sort of code, but not a complicated one.”
James nodded. “And I agree about returning to the Institute. It’s warded, for one thing, and I would also rather we not remain at Chiswick after dark, all things considered. Who knows what else might be roaming the grounds?”
