The Infernal Devices 01 - Clockwork Angel (30 page)

She looked up. Jem stood a few feet away, looking very pale. He held the blade in his left hand; his right was empty. There was a long cut along one of his cheeks, but he seemed otherwise uninjured. His hair and eyes gleamed a brutal silver in the light of the dying flames. “I think,” he said, “that that was the last of them.”

Surprised, Tessa glanced around the room. The chaos had subsided. Shadowhunters moved here and there in the wreckage—some were seated on chairs, being attended to by stele-wielding healers—but she could not see a single vampire. The smoke of the burning had subsided as well, though white ash from the torched curtains still floated down over the room like unexpected snow.

Will, blood still dripping from his chin, looked at Jem with his eyebrows raised. “Nice throw,” he said.

Jem shook his head. “You bit de Quincey,” he said. “You fool. He’s a
vampire.
You know what it means to bite a vampire.”

“I had no choice,” said Will. “He was choking me.”

“I know,” Jem said. “But really, Will.
Again?
”

It was Henry, in the end, who freed Nathaniel from the torture chair by the simple expedient of smashing it apart with the flat side of a sword until the manacles came free. Nathaniel slid to the floor, where he lay moaning, Tessa cradling him. Charlotte fussed a bit, bringing wet cloths to clean Nate’s face, and a ragged bit of curtain to throw over him, before she raced off to engage Benedict Lightwood in an energetic conversation—during which she alternated between pointing back at Tessa and Nathaniel and waving her hands in a dramatic manner. Tessa, utterly dazed and exhausted, wondered what on earth Charlotte could be doing.

It hardly mattered, really. Everything seemed to be going on in a dream. She sat on the floor with Nathaniel as the Shadowhunters moved around her, drawing on one another with their steles. It was incredible to watch their injuries vanishing as the healing Marks went onto their skin. They all
seemed equally able to draw the Marks. She watched as Jem, wincing, unbuttoned his shirt to show a long cut along one pale shoulder; he looked away, his mouth tight, as Will drew a careful Mark below the injury.

It wasn’t until Will, having finished with Jem, came sauntering over to her that she realized why she was so tired.

“Back to yourself, I see,” he said. He had a damp towel in one hand but hadn’t yet bothered to clean the blood off his face and neck.

Tessa glanced down at herself. It was true. At some point she had lost Camille and become herself again. She must have been dazed indeed, she thought, not to have noticed the return of her own heartbeat. It pulsed inside her chest like a drum.

“I didn’t know you knew how to use a pistol,” Will added.

“I don’t,” Tessa said. “I think Camille must have. It was—instinctive.” She bit her lip. “Not that it matters, since it didn’t work.”

“We rarely use them. Etching runes into the metal of a gun or bullet prevents the gunpowder from igniting; no one knows why. Henry has tried to address the problem, of course, but not with any success. Since you can’t kill a demon without a runed weapon or a seraph blade, guns aren’t much use to us. Vampires die if you shoot them through the heart, admittedly, and werewolves can be injured if you have a silver bullet, but if you miss the vitals, they’ll just come at you angrier than ever. Runed blades simply work better for our purposes. Get a vampire with a runed blade and it’s much harder for them to recover and heal.”

Tessa looked at him, her gaze steady. “Isn’t it hard?”

Will tossed the damp cloth aside. It was scarlet with blood. “Isn’t
what
hard?”

“Killing vampires,” she said. “They may not be people, but they
look
like people. They feel as people do. They scream and bleed. Isn’t it hard to slaughter them?”

Will’s jaw tightened. “No,” he said. “And if you really knew anything about them—”

“Camille feels,” she said. “She loves and hates.”

“And
she
is still alive. Everyone has choices, Tessa. Those vampires would not have been here tonight if they hadn’t made theirs.” He glanced down at Nathaniel, limp in Tessa’s lap. “Nor, I imagine, would your brother have been.”

“I don’t know why de Quincey wanted him dead,” Tessa said softly. “I don’t know what he could have done to incur the wrath of vampires.”

“Tessa!” It was Charlotte, darting up to Tessa and Will like a hummingbird. She still seemed so tiny, and so harmless, Tessa thought—despite the fighting gear she wore and the black Marks that laced her skin like curling snakes. “We’ve been given permission to bring your brother back to the Institute with us,” she announced, gesturing at Nathaniel with a small hand. “The vampires may well have drugged him. He’s certainly been bitten, and who knows what else? He could turn darkling—or worse, if we don’t prevent it. In any case, I doubt they’ll be able to help him in a mundane hospital. With us, at least the Silent Brothers can see to him, poor thing.”

“Poor thing?” echoed Will rather rudely. “He rather got himself into this, didn’t he? No one told him to run off and get himself involved with a bunch of Downworlders.”

“Really, Will.” Charlotte eyed him coldly. “Can’t you have a little empathy?”

“Dear God,” said Will, looking from Charlotte to Nate and
back again. “Is there anything that makes women sillier than the sight of a wounded young man?”

Tessa slitted her eyes at him. “You might want to clean the rest of the blood off your face before you continue arguing in
that
vein.”

Will threw his arms up into the air and stalked off. Charlotte looked at Tessa, a half smile curving the side of her mouth. “I must say, I rather like the way you manage Will.”

Tessa shook her head. “No one manages Will.”

It was quickly decided that Tessa and Nathaniel would go with Henry and Charlotte in the town coach; Will and Jem would ride home in a smaller carriage borrowed from Charlotte’s aunt, with Thomas as their driver. The Lightwoods and the rest of the Enclave would stay behind to search de Quincey’s house, leaving no evidence of their battle for the mundanes to find in the morning. Will had wanted to stay and take part in the search, but Charlotte had been firm. He had ingested vampire blood and needed to return to the Institute as soon as possible to begin the cure.

Thomas, however, would not allow Will into the carriage as covered in blood as he was. After announcing that he would return in “half a tick,” Thomas had gone off to find a damp piece of cloth. Will leaned against the side of the carriage, watching as the Enclave rushed in and out of de Quincey’s house like ants, salvaging papers and furniture from the remains of the fire.

Returning with a soapy rag, Thomas handed it over to Will, and leaned his big frame against the side of the carriage. It rocked under his weight. Charlotte had always encouraged
Thomas to join Jem and Will for the physical parts of their training, and as the years had gone by, Thomas had grown from a scrawny child to a man so large and muscular that tailors despaired over his measurements. Will might have been the better fighter—his blood made him that—but Thomas’s commanding physical presence was not easy to ignore.

Sometimes Will could not help remembering Thomas as he had first come to the Institute. He belonged to a family that had served the Nephilim for years, but he had been born so frail they’d thought he wouldn’t live. When he’d reached twelve years of age, he’d been sent to the Institute; at that time he’d still been so small that he’d looked barely nine. Will had made fun of Charlotte for wanting to employ him, but had secretly hoped he would stay so that there might be another boy his own age in the house. And they had been friends of a sort, the Shadowhunter and the servant boy—until Jem had come and Will had forgotten Thomas almost completely. Thomas had never seemed to hold it against him, treating Will always with the same friendliness with which he treated everyone else.

“Always rum to see this sort of thing goin’ on, and none of the neighbors out for so much as a gander,” Thomas said now, glancing up and down the street. Charlotte had always demanded that the Institute servants speak “proper” English within its walls, and Thomas’s East End accent tended to come and go depending on whether he remembered.

“There are heavy glamours at work here.” Will scrubbed at his face and neck. “And I would imagine there are quite a few on this street who are not mundanes, who know to mind their own business when Shadowhunters are involved.”

“Well, you are a terrifying lot, that’s true,” Thomas said, so
equably that Will suspected he was being made fun of. Thomas pointed at Will’s face. “You’ll have a stunner of a mouse tomorrow, if you don’t get an
iratze
on there.”

“Maybe I
want
a black eye,” said Will peevishly. “Did you think of that?”

Thomas just grinned and swung himself up into the driver’s box at the front of the carriage. Will went back to scrubbing dried vampire blood off his hands and arms. The task was absorbing enough that he was able to almost completely ignore Gabriel Lightwood when the other boy appeared out of the shadows and sauntered over to Will, a superior smile plastered on his face.

“Nice work in there, Herondale, setting the place on fire,” Gabriel observed. “Good thing we were there to clean up after you, or the whole plan would have gone down in flames, along with the shreds of your reputation.”

“Are you implying that shreds of my reputation remain intact?” Will demanded with mock horror. “Clearly I have been doing something wrong. Or
not
doing something wrong, as the case may be.” He banged on the side of the carriage. “Thomas! We must away at once to the nearest brothel! I seek scandal and low companionship.”

Thomas snorted and muttered something that sounded like “bosh,” which Will ignored.

Gabriel’s face darkened. “Is there
anything
that isn’t a joke to you?”

“Nothing that comes to mind.”

“You know,” Gabriel said, “there was a time I thought we could be friends, Will.”

“There was a time I thought I was a ferret,” Will said, “but
that turned out to be the opium haze. Did you know it had that effect? Because I didn’t.”

“I think,” Gabriel said, “that perhaps you might consider whether jokes about opium are either amusing or tasteful, given the … situation of your friend Carstairs.”

Will froze. Still in the same tone of voice, he said, “You mean his disability?”

Gabriel blinked. “What?”

“That’s what you called it. Back at the Institute. His ‘disability.’” Will tossed the bloody cloth aside. “And you wonder why we aren’t friends.”

“I just wondered,” Gabriel said, in a more subdued voice, “if perhaps you have ever had enough.”

“Enough of what?”

“Enough of behaving as you do.”

Will crossed his arms over his chest. His eyes glinted dangerously. “Oh, I can never get enough,” he said. “Which, incidentally, is what your sister said to me when—”

The carriage door flew open. A hand shot out, grabbed Will by the back of the shirt, and hauled him inside. The door banged shut after him, and Thomas, sitting bolt upright, seized the reins of the horses. A moment later the carriage had lurched forth into the night, leaving Gabriel staring, infuriated, after it.

“What were you thinking?” Jem, having deposited Will onto the carriage seat opposite him, shook his head, his silvery eyes shining in the dimness. He held his cane between his knees, his hand resting lightly atop the dragon’s-head carving. The cane had belonged to Jem’s father, Will knew, and had been designed for him by a Shadowhunter weapons maker in
Beijing. “Baiting Gabriel Lightwood like that—why do you do it? What’s the point?”

“You heard what he said about you—”

“I don’t care what he says about me. It’s what everyone thinks. He just has the nerve to say it.” Jem leaned forward, resting his chin on his hand. “You know, I cannot function as your missing sense of self-preservation forever. Eventually you will have to learn to manage without me.”

Will, as he always did, ignored this. “Gabriel Lightwood is hardly much of a threat.”

“Then forget Gabriel. Is there a particular reason you keep biting vampires?”

Will touched the dried blood on his wrists, and smiled. “They don’t expect it.”

“Of course they don’t. They know what happens when one of us consumes vampire blood.
They
probably expect you to have more sense.”

“That expectation never seems to serve them very well, does it?”

“It hardly serves you, either.” Jem looked at Will thoughtfully. He was the only one who never fell out of temper with Will. Whatever Will did, the most extreme reaction he seemed to be able to provoke in Jem was mild exasperation. “What happened in there? We were waiting for the signal—”

“Henry’s bloody Phosphor didn’t work. Instead of sending up a flare of light, it set the curtains on fire.”

Jem made a choked noise.

Will glared at him. “It’s not funny. I didn’t know whether the rest of you were going to show up or not.”

“Did you really think we wouldn’t come after you when the
whole place went up like a torch?” Jem asked reasonably. “They could have been roasting you over a spit, for all we knew.”

“And Tessa, the silly creature, was supposed to be out the door with Magnus, but she wouldn’t leave—”

“Her brother
was
manacled to a chair in the room,” Jem pointed out. “I’m not sure I would have left either.”

“I see you’re determined to miss my point.”

“If your point is that there was a pretty girl in the room and it was distracting you, then I think I’ve taken your point handily.”

“You think she’s pretty?” Will was surprised; Jem rarely opined on this sort of thing.

“Yes, and you do too.”

“I hadn’t noticed, really.”

“Yes, you have, and I’ve noticed you noticing.” Jem was smiling. Despite the stress of the battle, he looked healthy tonight. There was color in his cheeks, and his eyes were a dark and steady silver. There were times, when the illness was at its worst, when all the color drained even from his eyes, leaving them horribly pale, nearly white, with that black speck of pupil in the center like a speck of black ash on snow. It was times like that when he also became delirious. Will had held Jem down while he’d thrashed about and cried out in another language and his eyes had rolled back into his head, and every time it happened, Will thought that this was it, and Jem was really going to die this time. He sometimes then thought about what he would do afterward, but he couldn’t imagine it, any more than he could look back and remember his life before he had come to the Institute. Neither bore thinking about for very long.