“Come here,” he said instead. There was nothing welcoming in his voice, or in the way he stood. Tessa fought back her instinct to shy away, and moved toward him, close enough for him to touch her. He reached out his hands and touched her hair lightly, brushing back the stray curls around her face. “Tess.”
She looked up at him. His eyes were the same color as the smoke-stained sky; even bruised, his face was beautiful. She wanted to be touching him, wanted it in some inchoate, instinctive way she could neither explain nor control. When he bent to kiss her, it was all she could do to hold herself back until his lips met hers. His mouth brushed hers and she tasted salt on him, the tang of bruised and tender skin where his lip was cut. He took her by the shoulders and pulled her closer to him, his fingers knotting in the fabric of her dress. Even more than in the attic, she felt caught in the eddy of a powerful wave that threatened to pull her over and under, to crush and break her, to wear her down to softness as the sea might wear down a piece of glass.
She reached to lay her hands on his shoulders, and he drew back, looking down at her, breathing very hard. His eyes were bright, his lips red and swollen now from kissing as well as injuries.
“Perhaps,” he said, “we should discuss our arrangements, then.”
Tessa, still feeling as if she were drowning, whispered, “Arrangements?”
“If you are going to be staying,” he said, “it would be to our advantage to be discreet. It might perhaps be better to use your room. Jem tends to come in and out of mine as if he lives in the place, and he might be puzzled to find the door locked. Your quarters, on the other hand—”
“Use my room?” she echoed. “Use it for what?”
Will’s mouth quirked up at the corner; Tessa, who had been thinking about how beautifully shaped his lips were, took a moment to realize with a sense of distant surprise that the smile was a very cold one. “You cannot pretend you don’t know. . . . You are not entirely ignorant of the world, I think, Tessa. Not with that brother of yours.”
“Will.” The warmth was going out of Tessa like the sea drawing back from the land; she felt cold, despite the summer air. “I am not like my brother.”
“You care for me,” Will said. His voice was cool and sure. “And you know that I admire you, the way that all women know when a man admires them. Now you have come to tell me you will be here, available to me, for as long as I might wish it. I am offering you what I thought you wanted.”
“You cannot mean that.”
“And you cannot have imagined I meant anything more,” Will said. “There is no future for a Shadowhunter who dallies with warlocks. One might befriend them, employ them, but not . . .”
“Marry them?” Tessa said. There was a clear picture in her head of the sea. It had drawn back entirely from the shore, and she could see the small creatures it had left gasping in its wake, flapping and dying on the bare sand.
“How forward.” Will smirked; she wanted to slap the expression off his face. “What did you really expect, Tessa?”
“I did not expect you to insult me.” Tessa’s voice threatened to shake; somehow, she kept it firm.
“It cannot be the unwanted consequences of a dalliance that concern you,” Will mused. “Since warlocks are unable to have children—”
“What?” Tessa stepped back as if he had pushed her. The ground felt unsteady under her feet.
Will looked at her. The sun was nearly completely gone from the sky. In the near darkness the bones of his face looked prominent and the lines at the corners of his mouth were as harsh as if he were racked by physical pain. But his voice when he spoke was even. “You didn’t know that? I thought someone would have told you.”
“No,” Tessa said softly. “No one told me.”
His gaze was steady. “If you are not interested in my offer . . .”
“Stop,” she said. This moment, she thought, was like the edge of a broken bit of glass, clear and sharp and painful. “Jem says you lie to make yourself look bad,” she said. “And perhaps that is true, or perhaps he simply wishes to believe that about you. But there is no reason or excuse for cruelty like this.”
For a moment he looked actually unnerved, as if she had truly startled him. The expression was gone in an instant, like the shifting shape of a cloud. “Then there is nothing more for me to say, is there?”
Without another word she spun on her heel and walked away from him, toward the steps that led back down into the Institute. She did not turn to see him looking after her, a still black silhouette against the last embers of the burning sky.
Lilith’s Children, known also by the name warlocks, are,
in the manner of mules and other crossbreeds, sterile. They
cannot produce offspring. No exceptions to this rule have been
noted. . . .
Tessa looked up from the Codex and stared, unseeing, out the window of the music room, though it was too dark outside for much of a view. She had taken refuge here, not wanting to return to her own room, where she would eventually be discovered moping by Sophie or, worse, Charlotte. The thin layer of dust over everything in this room reassured her that she was much less likely to be found here.
She wondered how she had missed this fact about warlocks before. To be fair, it was not in the Codex’s section on warlocks, but rather in the later section on Downworld crossbreeds such as half faeries and half werewolves. There were no half warlocks, apparently. Warlocks could not have children. Will hadn’t been lying to hurt her; he’d been telling the truth. Which seemed worse, in a way. He would have known that his words weren’t a light blow, easily resolved.
Perhaps he had been correct. What else had she really thought would happen? Will was Will, and she should not have expected him to be anything else. Sophie had warned her, and still she hadn’t listened. She knew what Aunt Harriet would have said about girls who didn’t listen to good advice.
A faint rustling sound broke into her brown study. She turned, and at first saw nothing. The only light in the room came from a single witchlight sconce. Its flickering light played over the shape of the piano, the curving dark mass of the harp covered with a heavy drop cloth. As she stared, two bright points of light resolved themselves, close to the floor, an odd green-yellow color. They were moving toward her, both at the same pace, like twin will-o’-the-wisps.
Tessa expelled her held breath suddenly. Of course. She leaned forward. “Here, kitty.” She made a coaxing noise. “Here, kitty, kitty!”
The cat’s answering meow was lost in the noise of the door opening. Light streamed into the room, and for a moment the figure in the doorway was just a shadow. “Tessa? Tessa, is that you?”
Tessa knew the voice immediately—it was so near to the first thing he had ever said to her, the night she had walked into his room: Will? Will, is that you?
“Jem,” she said resignedly. “Yes, it’s me. Your cat seems to have wandered in here.”
“I can’t say that I’m surprised.” Jem sounded amused. She could see him clearly now as he came into the room; witchlight from the corridor flooded in, and even the cat was clearly visible, sitting on the floor and washing its face with a paw. It looked angry, the way Persian cats always did. “He seems to be a bit of a gadabout. It’s as if he demands to be introduced to everyone—” Jem broke off then, his eyes on Tessa’s face. “What’s wrong?”
Tessa was so taken off guard that she stammered. “W-why would you ask me that?”
“I can see it on your face. Something’s happened.” He sat down on the piano stool opposite her. “Charlotte told me the good news,” he said as the cat rose to its feet and slunk across the room to him. “Or at least, I thought it was good news. Are you not pleased?”
“Of course I’m pleased.”
“Hm.” Jem looked unconvinced. Bending down, he held out his hand to the cat, who rubbed its head against the back of his fingers. “Good cat, Church.”
Clockwork Angel (The Infernal Devices #1)
Cassandra Clare's books
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