The Beautiful Ajatara #4
The Beautiful Cordelia was not the type to simply do as she was told, especially not when told so by a demon. But she was weary and worried, a stranger in a strange land, and was in no position to turn her nose up at answers. She sat. She listened.
“You are familiar, of course, with the dashing and dastardly demon Belial,” Ajatara said haughtily.
“I never thought of him as dashing,” the Beautiful Cordelia replied cheekily, and also accurately. “But yes.”
“What shoddy magic is this?” Lucie complained. “I haven’t used this many adverbs since I was a child!”
James shushed her. They read on.
“I am referring not to the being who strides the dimensions now,” Ajatara continued, “but the original Belial, may he rest in eternal un-peace, devious Prince of Hell and grandfather to your beloved and his ridiculous sister.”
James glared at Lucie, stilling her tongue before she could object to the characterization.
“That Belial is dead,” the Beautiful Cordelia said, “and whatever quarrel you have with him has nothing to do with my family.”
“I beg to differ,” Ajatara said. “And to be clear, quarrel is not the word for what I had with Belial. Your puny mortal heart could never understand what we felt. First we were enemies. Then we were lovers! And such lovers we were, possessed of a tormenting and conquering love that devoured entire worlds in its voracious destruction. It was an all-consuming fire of lust and longing.”
“Sounds very romantic,” the Beautiful Cordelia said. “Although rather dangerous for any wooden furniture.”
“Belial must have loved me very fiercely,” Ajatara said, “and the evidence is in how cruelly he punished me when he severed our relationship. I have, for all the eons since, been imprisoned by him in my own demon realm. I believe it is because he knew if he caught sight of me, he would not be able to resist temptation. A part of me felt great empathy for him and what was clearly his unquenchable desire.”
“That must have been very difficult for him,” the Beautiful Cordelia said, hoping she sounded suitably sympathetic.
“Most of me, however, wanted to tear him limb from limb and drive that blasted sword of yours through his crusty heart. Which, in fairness, may have been another of his reasons for imprisoning me. No matter! Upon his death, I had given up all hope of escape, for only Belial could free me from the prison Belial had built. Or so I thought. And then, can you imagine what I discovered?”
The Beautiful Cordelia sighed, her bosom heaving beautifully. “You found out he had fathered a child, and she had borne two children of her own, and these grandchildren had a connection to Belial in their blood that gave them strange powers of their own.”
“You are indeed more than just a reasonably pretty face,” Ajatara said, impressed.
“This demon is truly despicable,” James muttered.
“But their powers are gone,” said Cordelia. “That connection died when Belial did.”
“But their blood remains their blood. Princes of Hell do not leave traces behind when they die—unless they father a bloodline. To break the curse that keeps me in my prison, I require a powerful object linked to Belial. Imagine my delight when I learned that the female Herondale spawn possessed a powerful grimoire. So I sent my loyal servant Krog into your world to collect the volume.”
“But The Beautiful Cordelia isn’t a spellbook,” Cordelia said. “It’s a novel.”
“Yes, and a very silly one,” said Ajatara, clearly peeved. “Imagine my annoyance when the book was submitted to Krog & Sons and its real nature was discovered.”
“She is despicable,” Lucie said.
“Then I realized something,” Ajatara announced.
“In some ways, it did not matter that it was not magical in nature. Into the book, the Herondale girl had poured her dreams and wishes, her yearnings and fantasies. She had created a universe—every book is a universe, you know—and that is a sort of magic. Perhaps the most powerful magic that exists.”
Ajatara was despicable, Lucie thought, but she did have some interesting ideas about literature.
“It was a universe I could escape to, even if a rather daft one,” Ajatara added. “Belial had sealed all other worlds against my entrance. But he did not seal this one, for he did not know of it. There was only one problem.”
“Oh?” said Cordelia, faintly.
“Yes. The book, you see, is unfinished.”
“But why should that matter?” Cordelia said, to Lucie’s relief. She had been wondering the same thing.
“One cannot escape to an incomplete world, you silly mortal. It would be as pointless as trying to finish a ritual with an incomplete pentagram. I would simply find myself trapped here, which would be no better than being trapped in the prison where Belial left me. Only Lucie Herondale can complete this world, by finishing her novel. And now, my Beautiful Cordelia, she will have ample incentive to do so. Because this is also the only way she can free you. Otherwise, you will remain captive in this incomplete realm for all eternity.”
James made a pained noise, a sort of despairing gasp.
Lucie was too stunned to react. After all, she still woke screaming from nightmares in which Belial returned to take vengeance on her.
The reality of a furious demon seizing Lucie’s book and using it to threaten her parabatai was just as bad.
But Lucie was too enraged to panic. How dare this Ajatara try to seize The Beautiful Cordelia from its own author?
How dare she rush Lucie to an ending? Did she not know that artists worked at their own pace?
A rushed ending could surely never be a good one.
On the other hand, Lucie reminded herself, right now the only ending that mattered was one that would free her Cordelia from demonic clutches.
Words had ceased appearing on the page after Ajatara’s dire warning about eternity. Lucie and James had been staring down at the book, as if willing the narrative to continue. Shaking herself free of her shocked paralysis, Lucie snatched a pen from a nearby desk and wrote:
As soon as Ajatara finished speaking, she was released from Belial’s curse, and Cordelia was returned to Earth, perfectly safe.
A terrible ending, and narratively quite a pivot, but so be it.
Lucie and James stood shoulder to shoulder as they had when they were small children, both holding their breath.
Would Cordelia pop out of the pages of the book like Venus rising from the sea?
Would she appear somewhere else, perhaps back at Curzon Street?
I ought to have been more specific, Lucie fretted.
It was so important in books to be specific—
“Damn it,” James muttered. The sentence Lucie had just written blurred as if water had spilled on it, then vanished off the page. New words appeared instead.
Ajatara rolled her eyes, and looked skyward, as if she half expected to see Lucie there, holding an enormous pen. “It needs a properly satisfying ending, you dolt,” she said. “One with the perfect balance of romance and resolution. Otherwise it will not work.”
“I’m sure Lucie can do that,” the Beautiful Cordelia said, with nary a hint of doubt in her voice. Her radiant skin, her ruby lips, her mesmerizing eyes, her curvaceous form—
“Enough of that,” said James. “It is unnecessary to the plot.”
—none of them had an equal anywhere in this (sadly incomplete) world. But all paled in comparison to the beauty of her heart. The Beautiful Cordelia believed those she loved could do the impossible. And her boundless belief often compelled this into reality. Surely this time it would do the same.
“She had better do it quickly,” Ajatara said. “Unfinished worlds are by their nature unstable, and our presence here is only making it worse. The fastest way to safety is a narratively satisfying happy ending. It just needs to be earned.”
“She says just like it’s easy,” Lucie complained. “An earned happy ending is the hardest kind there is!”
James, understandably, seemed in no mood to hear her complaints. “Write me into the book,” he said. “I’m not leaving Cordelia in there alone.”
“No!” Lucie set down the pen. “Jamie, no. You might never come back out! I can’t lose Daisy and you too!”
But James just shook his head. “Lucie,” he said. “If Cordelia were in another world, do you think I could live in this one without her? Do you think I could live with my heart torn out, trapped in the pages of a book?”
Lucie bit her lip. Shadowhunters all lived knowing they could, and likely would, die young.
They loved the same way—with the understanding that with love came the dark promise of loss.
That the more of yourself you gave to a person, the more you risked losing if they disappeared.
Shadowhunters—and Herondales, especially—loved fiercely, with their entire beings.
If Cordelia died—it was too horrible a phrase to put into words, even in the privacy of her own mind, but she forced herself to face the if—if Cordelia died, James would be shattered beyond mending.
If, on the other hand, Cordelia was trapped eternally in some faraway dimension, fictional or otherwise, James would not hesitate to join her there, leaving the world—and his sister—behind forever.
It would be the right choice, the only choice he could make.
Lucie could not fault her brother for the way his heart worked.
She could only be brave enough to let him go, and trust herself enough to bring them both back.
“I’ll do it,” she told James, and reclaimed the pen. “But—you might not like how you are in this story.”
James arched an eyebrow. Lucie had spent years trying to explain to friends and family that, surface resemblances aside, the characters in her story were not supposed to be them.
So, for example, James Herondale had no reason to be offended that in The Beautiful Cordelia, Cruel Prince James was an arrogant, imperious—some might say egomaniacal—scourge of a man with overly manicured hair.