Clockwork Angel (The Infernal Devices #1)

“You think you grieve her loss, Will Herondale?” Mortmain’s voice was full of torment. “Your grief is nothing to mine. Years of work—dreams—more than you could ever imagine, wasted.”

“Then be comforted, for your pain will be of short duration,” said Will, and he lunged forward, blade outstretched. He felt it graze the cloth of Mortmain’s jacket—and meet no further resistance. He stumbled forward, righted himself, and stared. Something clinked to the floor at his feet, a brass button. His blade must have severed it from Mortmain’s jacket. It winked at him from the ground like a mocking eye.

Shocked, Will dropped the seraph blade. Jerahmeel fell to the floor, still burning. Mortmain was gone—entirely gone. He had vanished like a warlock might vanish, a warlock who had trained in the practice of magic for years. For a human, even a human with occult knowledge, to accomplish such a thing . . .

But that didn’t matter; not now. Will could think of only one thing. Tessa. Half in dread, half in hope, he crossed the room to where she lay. The fountain made its wretched soothing noises as he knelt down and lifted her into his arms.

He had held her like this only once before, in the attic, the night they had burned de Quincey’s town house. The memory of it had come to him, unbidden, often enough since. Now it was torture. Her dress was soaked in blood; so was her hair, and her face was streaked with it. Will had seen enough injuries to know that no one could lose blood like this and live.

“Tessa,” he whispered. He crushed her against him; it didn’t matter now what he did. He buried his face in the crook of her neck, where her throat met her shoulder. Her hair, already beginning to stiffen with blood, scratched his cheek. He could feel the beat of her pulse through her skin.

He froze. Her pulse? His heart leaped; he drew away, meaning to lower her to the ground, and found her looking at him with wide gray eyes.

“Will,” she said. “Is it really you, Will?”

Relief crashed over him first, followed instantly by a boiling terror. To have Thomas die before his eyes, and now this, too. Or perhaps she could be saved? Though not with Marks. How were Downworlders healed? It was knowledge only the Silent Brothers had. “Bandages,” Will said, half to himself. “I must get bandages.”

He began to loosen his grip on her, but Tessa caught at his wrist with her hand. “Will, you must be careful. Mortmain—he’s the Magister. He was here—”

Will felt as if he were choking. “Hush. Save your strength. Mortmain’s gone. I must get help—”

“No.” She tightened her grip on him. “No, you needn’t do that, Will. It’s not my blood.”

“What?” he said, staring. Perhaps she was delirious, he thought, but her grip and her voice were surprisingly strong for someone who should have been dead. “Whatever he did to you, Tessa—”

“I did it,” she said in the same firm little voice. “I did it to myself, Will. It was the only way I knew to make him go away. He would never have left me here. Not if he’d thought I was alive.”

“But—”

“I Changed. When the knife touched me, I Changed, just in that moment. It was something that Mortmain had said that gave me the idea—that sleight of hand is a simple trick and that no one ever expects it.”

“I don’t understand. The blood?”

She nodded, her small face alight with relief, with her pleasure in telling him what she had done. “There was a woman, once, that the Dark Sisters made me Change into, who had died of a gunshot wound, and when I Changed her blood poured all over me. Did I tell you that? I thought perhaps I had, but it doesn’t matter—I remembered it, and I Changed into her, just for that moment, and the blood came, as it had before. I turned away from Mortmain so he couldn’t see me change, and crumpled forward as if the knife had truly gone in—and indeed, the force of the Change, doing it so quickly, made me quite sincerely faint. The world went dark, and then I heard Mortmain calling my name. I knew I must have come back to myself, and I knew I must pretend to be dead. I fear he would have certainly found me out had you not arrived.” She looked down at herself, and Will could have sworn there was a faintly smug tone to her voice as she said, “I tricked the Magister, Will! I would not have thought it possible—he was so confident of his superiority over me. But I recalled what you had said about Boadicea. If it had not been for your words, Will . . .”

She looked up at him with a smile. The smile broke what was left of his resistance—shattered it. He had let the walls down when he’d thought she was gone, and there was no time to build them back up. Helplessly he pulled her against him. For a moment she clung to him tightly, warm and alive in his arms. Her hair brushed his cheek. The color had come back into the world; he could breathe again, and for that moment he breathed her in—she smelled of salt, blood, tears, and Tessa.

When she drew back from his embrace, her eyes were shining. “I thought when I heard your voice that it was a dream,” she said. “But you are real.” Her eyes searched his face, and, as if satisfied at what they found there, she smiled. “You are real.”

He opened his mouth. The words were there. He was about to say them when a jolt of terror went through him, the terror of someone who, wandering in a mist, pauses only to realize that they have stopped inches from the edge of a gaping abyss. The way she was looking at him—she could read what was in his eyes, he realized. It must have been written plainly there, like words on the page of a book. There had been no time, no chance, to hide it.

“Will,” she whispered. “Say something, Will.”

But there was nothing to say. There was only the emptiness, as there had been before her. As there always would be.

I have lost everything, Will thought. Everything.





20

AWFUL WONDER


Yet each man kills the thing he loves,

By each let this be heard,

Some do it with a bitter look,

Some with a flattering word,

The coward does it with a kiss,

The brave man with a sword!

—Oscar Wilde, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”

The Marks that denoted mourning were red for Shadowhunters. The color of death was white.

Tessa had not known that, had not read it in the Codex, and so had been startled to see the five Shadowhunters of the Institute going out to the carriage dressed all in white like a wedding party as she and Sophie had watched from the windows of the library. Several members of the Enclave had been killed cleaning out de Quincey’s vampire nest. In name the funeral was for them, though they were also burying Thomas and Agatha. Charlotte had explained that Nephilim burials were generally for Nephilim only, but an exception could be made for those who had died in the service of the Clave.

Sophie and Tessa, though, had been forbidden to go. The ceremony itself was still closed to them. Sophie had told Tessa it was better anyway, that she did not want to see Thomas burn and his ashes scattered in the Silent City. “I would rather remember him as he was,” she’d said, “and Agatha, too.”

The Enclave had left a guard behind them, several Shadowhunters who had volunteered to stay and watch over the Institute. It would be a long time, Tessa thought, before they ever left it unguarded again.