Gideon visits his mad sister Tatiana in new ‘Chain of Gold’ flash fiction

It’s November! Can you believe that the year is almost over and we’ll be entering a new decade in two months?
2020 will bring us the long-awaited sequel to The Infernal Devices and while we’re all waiting, Cassandra Clare is providing us with monthly Chain of Gold flash fiction. This month’s flash fiction is the first part of a Christmas story so enjoy:

London, 1889

Will Herondale was full of Christmas spirit, and Gideon Lightwood found it very annoying.

It wasn’t just Will, actually; he and his wife Tessa had both been raised in mundane circumstances until they were nearly adults, and so their memories of Christmas were of fond family memories and childhood delights. They came alive with it when the city of London did, as it did every year.

Gideon’s memories of Christmas were mostly about overcrowded streets, overrich food, and over-inebriated mundane carolers who needed to be saved from London’s more dangerous elements as they caroused all night, believing all trouble and wickedness was gone from the world right up until they were eaten by Kapre demons disguised as Christmas trees. Just for example.

Born and raised a Shadowhunter, Gideon, of course, did not celebrate Christmas, and had always borne London’s obsession with the holiday with bemused indifference. He had resided in Idris for most of his adult life, where the winter had a kind of Alpine profundity, and there was nary a Christmas wreath or cracker to be found. Winter in Idris felt more solemn than Christmas, so much older than Christmas. It was a strange facet of Idris: where most Shadowhunters ended up celebrating the holidays of their local mundanes, at least the ones that spilled out into street decorations and public festivals, Idris had no holidays at all. Gideon never wondered about this; it seemed obvious to him that Shadowhunters didn’t take days off. It was the blessing and the curse of being one, after all. You were a Shadowhunter all the time.

No wonder some couldn’t bear it, and left for a mundane life. Like Will Herondale’s father Edmund, in fact.

Perhaps that was why Will’s Christmas spirit annoyed him so. He’d come to like Will Herondale, and consider him a good friend. He hoped that when their children were older they too would become friends, if Thomas was all right by then. And he knew Will deliberately presented himself as silly and rather daft, but that he was a sharp and observant Institute head, and a more-than-capable fighter of demons.

But when Will insisted on taking them all to see the window displays at Selfridge’s, he could not help but worry that perhaps Will had a fundamentally unserious mind after all.

“Oxford Street? Days before Christmas? Are you mad?”

“It will be a lark!” Will said, with the slight lilt into his Welsh accent that meant he was a little too excited for his own good. “I’ll take James, you take Thomas, we’ll have a stroll. Have a drink at the Devil on the way back, what?” He clapped Gideon on the back.

Read the rest of the flash fiction on Cassie’s website.

What a cliffhanger! I can’t wait to read whether Gideon will find anything that explains Thomas’s health problems.
Of course we also have art for this flash fiction and it is really, really cute!

While little Tom was absolutely adorable, adult Thomas is hot! Cassie shared his portrait art on her tumblr and also included a Chain of Gold snippet:

I’m already a big fan of Thomas’s tattoo and I can’t wait to find out its meaning. 🙂
What do you think of the flash fiction and the snippet? Sound off in the comments below!

Chain of Gold is published on 3 March 2020! Pre-order your copy now!