a struck link // christopher lightwood {3}

eleven // like there's something to say (i'd like it if you stayed)

{ institute. }

Lucie leaned back against her desk and looked over the top of Grace's letter at the circular rug beyond. She'd received Grace's missive to Jesse tucked inside the envelope with her own, and she'd hidden it away in her desk drawer for safe keeping.

It felt as if there had been such a brief, halcyon high between the mad little adventure right when Christopher returned from America, and then James and Cordelia's wedding, and then James had collapsed and since then it had just been one small disaster after another. Grace was right: better to spend what freedom she had far away from this place.

She would ask Jesse, Lucie decided, if he would rather be with his sister. If she'd like her to find his body, and...but how, exactly, would she mail a body? How did that even work?

Lucie folded up the letter and stored it carefully in the yellow skirt where she stored all of Grace's letters. She'd be sure to wear it, she decided, when she saw Grace again. Grace may not know its significance, but Lucie at least would find it funny.

If, that is, she ever did see Grace again. I don't know that I'm safe from Tatiana. I can't know that. As long as she lives I will never know. The words haunted Lucie. The possibility that Tatiana and her twisted allies might reach Grace before Lucie did. That one day Lucie might place a letter in her magic mailbox, and never get a response back.

< & >

{ grosvenor square. }

"Pluto, take a look at this."

Pluto looked up at Christopher over the top of xyr still-charging computer to find him holding up a jar with one of scraps of paper Lucie had given him as samples from the the mailbox, burnt at the edges now from testing.

"It runs on void magic," said Christopher. "The mailbox does."

"Void magic? You don't mean like the void magic that comes out of Annwyvn. What the Tuath Dé draw on." Tuath Dé. The name that Pluto had learned for them, had taught xyr mouth to form, even knowing that most others in the world called used the Seelie Queen's name for all those who lived beneath the Otherworld's over-lush crust: Aós Sidhe. Those who lived in the Otherworld's deeper layers, below and beyond the domain of the courts, knew it was a cheap umbrella for a vastness of life and magic mostly still unexplored. Much of that was void magic: magic that drew on the foggy margins between each layer of Annwyvn and the next.

"Exactly that kind of void magic," said Christopher.

"Not much help for fire messages, then."

"No." Christopher shook his head. "But it suggests that Vitória has someone from the Otherworld on her side."

"Can I ask about her? Vitória? I still don't know much about who she is, her role in this world."

Christopher set the jar down. "Vitória...it's long, and it's complicated, though I'm sure someone's said those words to you about her already. But the short answer is that nearly a century ago, someone opened up some incredible alchemical discoveries just to see if he could, without stopping to think about whether he should. When he was, inevitably, killed for those discoveries, it fell on Vitória to protect them, to keep them from falling into the wrong hands. Some of the choices she made in the service of that protection were not the best, or the wisest. Or the most legal. And we still don't know what most of those discoveries are. Whether they, too, might be forbidden."

< & >

{ castle. }

Matthew knocked on the door of Pluto's third floor flat at Castle with trepidation. He was hardly proud of his veritable performance at the Devil Tavern the day before. He'd showed up hung over and tired and no doubt with obvious markers of where he'd been, flaunted that, interrupted whatever Christopher and Pluto were working on in the first place, and the moment the two of them were gone, he'd started crying on James's shoulder.