The Last Hours: Chain of Iron

Let conversation stop. Let laughter cease. Here is the place where the dead delight to teach the living.

All one had to do was pretend, she realized, marveling a bit, and everyone else would fall into line pretending along with you.

“So here it is: always tell Cordelia what you feel.” He looked James in the eye. “You may fear what will happen if you speak your heart. You may wish to hide things because you fear hurting others. But secrets have a way of eating at relationships, Jamie. At love, at friendship—they undermine and destroy them until in the end you find you are bitterly alone with the secrets you kept.”

“What I am saying, and I will say the same to Alastair, too, is that I do not want you hovering over me, doting on me until the baby comes. I am a Shadowhunter too, and besides—I want to know you are pursuing your own happiness. It will make me happier than anything else in the world. Otherwise I will be miserable. Do you understand?”

“The child will be lucky, but not because our father is dead. Because it will have you for a brother.”

“I can’t mourn,” he said in a choked voice. “I cannot mourn my own father. What does that say about me?”

“And maybe it’s selfish of me, but now that you know the truth, and I can speak of it to someone, it is an easier burden to bear than I would have imagined.”

“May I have your permission to shout, keeping in mind I am not shouting at you?” he said to Cordelia.

“I do not believe I have spoken to her alone,” he admitted.

But the truth is that sorrow is fleet and loyal. It will always follow you.”

James tilted his head back. The air was full of fog and smoke; he could not see the stars. He wondered if Cordelia could see them yet—if the train had carried her far enough from London for the skies to clear. “I fear it has been following Matthew for a long time,” he said. “I fear that in that time I have been… disconnected from the people I love the most, the people who I should have been able to save from such pain.”

“You cannot save people who do not want to be saved,” said Magnus. “You can only stand by their side and hope that when they wake and realize they need saving, you will be there to help them