“I don’t want to,” Matthew said. “I know I might not survive it myself. But he asked me to be his voice when he no longer had one. And I cannot betray that promise.”
“Let me ask a question,” Alastair said. “Does anyone have a different solution? One in which Belial doesn’t murder everyone in London, and perhaps everyone in the world, and he stops possessing James, and James is never in danger? Because if so, speak up now.”
There was another awful silence.
“I love James like a brother,” said Thomas, “but Math is right. James would never want to live with Belial controlling his every move. That would be torture.”
“James said to believe in him,” Cordelia said. Her chin was up, her jaw set and determined. “And I do.”
Anna nodded. “Fine. That’s our plan, then. We get Cordelia inside the abbey, as close to Belial as possible.” She drew a seraph blade, unlit, from her belt. “Now come along. There’s an entrance around the back we can use to get in.”
She gestured for the others to follow her down Great College Street, a narrow cobbled lane with tall, old-fashioned houses along one side. On the other side was the abbey, protected by a high stone wall topped with spikes. Halfway down the road, they found an alcove set into the wall, containing a small wooden door with no visible latch or knob.
Anna eyed it for a moment before launching a kick at it; it flew open with a sound like a gunshot. They all piled through the doorway and found themselves in a large monastic garden. It was a manicured lawn lined with flowerbeds, and utterly deserted. The blank windows of what seemed to be a dormitory overlooked it; Ari couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to the students who normally lived in the abbey. Were they wandering the streets of London, blank-faced as all the other mundanes?
Together, the Shadowhunters darted silently across the grass and through an archway into a dimly lit tunnel that led into the abbey proper. There was no movement, not a single sign of anyone living. They passed out of the tunnel into a small walled garden, open to the sky, which was a whirlpool of colliding gray-black thunderheads. A fountain at the garden’s center trickled quietly into a stone bowl. Thomas paused for a moment, blinking in the unnatural light.
“If we do succeed,” he said, “if everything goes back to some sort of normal, will the mundanes remember what happened? What all of this was like?”
No one answered; only Alastair touched Thomas gently on the shoulder before they started moving again. Ari noticed that they had grouped themselves loosely around Cordelia, as if they were the escorts of a warrior knight. It had been completely unconscious, but they had all done it.
They cut down a passageway that led into a larger, square garden, surrounded by arcaded walls. The Great Cloister. The dry grass square was surrounded by corridors paved with ancient, pitted stone slabs and lined with arched doorways.
In the silence, the creak of metal hinges was as loud as a shriek. Ari straightened as, from the darkened hallway they’d come from, the telltale white robes of the Watchers appeared. Apparently they’d been seen; apparently they’d been followed; apparently the Watchers could enter the church unimpeded. From the far corner behind them came half a dozen more, moving fast, swarming across the cloister’s lawn toward them. There was nowhere to hide, nothing to duck behind.
Anna whirled on the others. “All of you, go. We have to get Cordelia to James. I’ll hold these off.”
Ari thought of Anna’s face in the corridor, her fierce desperation, her need to stand against the Watchers—and her apparent desire to do it alone.
Cordelia seemed paralyzed, her hand on Cortana, her face a mask of indecision. “Anna—”
“Anna’s right,” Alastair said. “Cordelia. Let’s go.”
Ari said nothing as the others raced from the cloisters, through an arched doorway that led into the abbey. But she did not follow them—only gestured, when Thomas paused to look back at her, that they should go on ahead.
“I’m staying,” she said, and Anna spun to stare at her. She held a seraph blade in one hand, and her expression was furious, her blue eyes blazing.
“Ari—you idiot—get out of here—”
But it was too late for her to protest; they were already surrounded by Watchers. Anna swore and raised her blade: “Kadmiel!”
The glow of the blade seared Ari’s eyes; she reached over her shoulder and drew her khanda free. Her mind was already passing from the place of conscious thought to the place of battle, where her hands and body seemed connected to a force outside herself. An avenging, ruthless force.
She charged at the nearest Watcher. It raised its staff, but not fast enough. Her khanda punched into it with a sickening thud. But it only twisted away, leaving Ari’s sword bright with blood, and the Watcher’s wound already beginning to close.
Ari looked past it, meeting Anna’s blazing eyes with her own. With her gaze, she told Anna what she needed; she could only hope Anna understood as Ari harried the Watcher back, landing blow after blow, making it retreat, maneuvering it into just the right position—
Behind the Watcher, Kadmiel blazed. Blade in hand, Anna tore away the Watcher’s hood, and sliced her weapon across the back of its neck. It crumpled to the ground, its body spasming as the smaller Chimera demon began to worm its way free of the body that could no longer hold it.
Ari didn’t wait for the other Watchers to react; she immediately leaped forward, catching one that was facing away from her, ripping away its hood, destroying the mark of Belial with a single sweep of her khanda. As it folded in on itself, she looked over at Anna in triumph—only to see that Anna, her bloodstained seraph blade held high, was staring past her with a look of sickening dismay.
Ari turned her head and saw why: more Watchers were pouring into the cloister. Too many for the two of them to possibly handle. What had been a risk before, fighting the Watchers on their own, was now far more. Now, it was suicide.
She caught Anna’s eye. They looked at each other for a long moment before, together, they turned to face the demons.
There were four of them now. Matthew, Alastair, Thomas, and Cordelia.
They had fled from the Great Cloister, leaving Anna and Ari to face the Watchers. The thought of it made Thomas feel sick to his stomach—even though he knew both were excellent warriors. Even though he knew that in reality, they’d had no choice.