Clockwork Prince (32 page)

“I suppose Gabriel didn’t succeed,” said Tessa. “In strangling you, I mean.”

“Not before I broke his arm,” said Will with relish. “So there you are. That’s why he hates me. I humiliated his sister in public, and what he won’t mention is that I humiliated him, too. He thought he could best me easily. I’d had little formal training, and I’d heard him call me ‘very nearly a mundane’ behind my back. Instead I beat him hollow—snapped his arm, in fact. It was certainly a more pleasant sound than Elise banging away on the spinet.”

Tessa rubbed her gloved hands together to warm them, and sighed. She wasn’t sure what to think. It was hardly the story of seduction and betrayal she had expected, but neither did it show Will in an admirable light.

“Sophie says she’s married now,” she said. “Tatiana. She’s just getting back from traveling the Continent with her new husband.”

“I am sure she is as dull and stupid now as she was then.” Will sounded as if he might fall asleep. He thumbed the curtain closed, and they were in darkness. Tessa could hear his breath, feel the warmth of him sitting across from her. She could see why a proper young lady would never ride in a carriage with a gentleman not related to her. There was something oddly intimate about it. Of course, she had broken the rules for proper young ladies what felt like long ago, now.

“Will,” she said again.

“The lady has another question. I can hear it in her tone. Will you never have done asking questions, Tess?”

“Not until I get all the answers I want,” she said. “Will, if warlocks are made by having one demon parent and one human parent, what happens if one of those parents is a Shadowhunter?”

“A Shadowhunter would never allow that to happen,” said Will flatly.

“But in the
Codex
it says that most warlocks are the result of—of a violation,” Tessa said, her voice hitching on the ugly word, “or shape-changer demons taking on the form of a loved one and completing the seduction by a trick. Jem told me Shadowhunter blood is always dominant. The
Codex
says the off-spring of Shadowhunters and werewolves, or faeries, are always Shadowhunters. So could not the angel blood in a Shadow-hunter cancel out that which was demonic, and produce—”

“What it produces is nothing.” Will tugged at the window curtain. “The child would be born dead. They always are. Stillborn, I mean. The offspring of a demon and a Shadowhunter parent is death.” In the little light he looked at her. “Why do you want to know these things?”

“I want to know what I am,” she said. “I believe I am some . . . combination that has not been seen before. Part faerie, or part—”

“Have you ever thought of transforming yourself into one of your parents?” Will asked. “Your mother, or father? It would give you access to their memories, wouldn’t it?”

“I have thought of it. Of course I have. But I have nothing of my father’s or mother’s. Everything that was packed in my trunks for the voyage here was discarded by the Dark Sisters.”

“What about your angel necklace?” Will asked. “Wasn’t that your mother’s?”

Tessa shook her head. “I tried. I—I could reach nothing of her in it. It has been mine so long, I think, that what made it hers has evaporated, like water.”

Will’s eyes gleamed in the shadows. “Perhaps you are a clockwork girl. Perhaps Mortmain’s warlock father built you, and now Mortmain seeks the secret of how to create such a perfect facsimile of life when all he can build are hideous monstrosities. Perhaps all that beats beneath your chest is a heart made of metal.”

Tessa drew in a breath, feeling momentarily dizzy. His soft voice was so convincing, and yet—“No,” she said sharply. “You forget, I remember my childhood. Mechanical creatures do not change or grow. Nor would that explain my ability.”

“I know,” said Will with a grin that flashed white in the darkness. “I only wanted to see if I could convince
you
.”

Tessa looked at him steadily. “I am not the one who has no heart.”

It was too dark in the carriage for her to tell, but she sensed that he flushed, darkly. Before he could say anything in response, the wheels came to a jerking halt. They had arrived.

Cyril had paused the carriage outside the gates of the property, under the shade of a leafy oak tree. The Lightwoods’ country house in Chiswick, just outside London proper, was massive, built in the Palladian style, with soaring pillars and multiple staircases. The radiance of the moon made everything pearlescent like the inside of an oyster shell. The stone of the house seemed to gleam silver, while the gate that ran around the property had the sheen of black oil. None of the lights in the house seemed to be illuminated—the place was as dark as pitch and grave-silent, the vast grounds stretching all around it, down to the edge of a meander in the Thames River, unlit and deserted. Tessa began to wonder if they had made a mistake in coming here.

As Will left the carriage, helping her down after him, his head turned, his fine mouth hardening. “Do you smell that? Demonic witchcraft. Its stink is on the air.”

Tessa made a face. She could smell nothing unusual—in fact, this far out of the city center, the air seemed cleaner than it had near the Institute. She could smell wet leaves and dirt. She looked over at Will, his face raised to the moonlight, and wondered what weapons lay concealed under his closely fitted frock coat. His hands were sheathed in white gloves, his starched shirtfront immaculate. With the mask, he could have been an illustration of a handsome highwayman in a penny dreadful.

Tessa bit her lip. “Are you certain? The house looks deadly quiet. As if no one were home. Could we be wrong?”

He shook his head. “There is powerful magic at work here. Something stronger than a glamour. A true ward. Someone very much does not want us to know what is happening here tonight.” He glanced down at the invitation in her hand, shrugged, and went up to the gate. There was a bell there, and he rang it, the noise jangling Tessa’s already stretched nerves. She glared at him. He grinned. “
Caelum denique,
angel,” he said, and melted away into the shadows, just as the gate before her opened.

A hooded figure stood before her. Her first thought was of the Silent Brothers, but their robes were the color of parchment, and the figure that stood before her was robed in the color of black smoke. The hood hid its face completely. Wordlessly she held out her invitation.

The hand that took it from her was gloved. For a moment the hidden face regarded the invitation. Tessa could not help but fidget. In any ordinary circumstance, a young lady attending a ball alone would be so improper as to be scandalous. But this was no ordinary circumstance. At last, a voice issued from beneath the hood:

“Welcome, Miss Lovelace.”

It was a gritty voice, a voice like skin being scraped over a rough, tearing surface. Tessa’s spine prickled, and she was glad she could not see beneath the hood. The figure returned the invitation to her and stepped back, gesturing her inside; she followed, forcing herself not to look around to see if Will was following.

She was led around the side of the house, down a narrow garden path. The gardens extended for a good distance out around the house, silvery-green in the moonlight. There was a circular black ornamental pond, with a white marble bench beside it, and low hedges, carefully clipped, running alongside neat paths. The path she was on ended at a tall and narrow entrance set into the house’s side. A strange symbol was carved into the door. It seemed to shift and change as Tessa looked at it, making her eyes hurt. She looked away as her hooded companion opened the door and gestured for her to go inside.

She entered the house, and the door slammed behind her. She turned just as it shut, catching a glimpse, she thought, of the face beneath the hood. She thought she had seen something very like a cluster of red eyes in the center of a dark oval, like the eyes of a spider. She caught her breath as the door clicked shut and she was plunged into darkness.

As she reached, blindly, for the handle of the door, light sprang up all around her. She was standing at the foot of a long, narrow staircase that led upward. Torches burning with a greenish flame—not witchlight—ran up the sides of the stairs.

At the top of the stairs was a door. Another symbol was painted on this one. Tessa felt her mouth go even dryer. It was the
ouroboros
, the double serpent. The symbol of the Pandemonium Club.

For a moment she felt frozen with fear. The symbol brought bleak memories rushing back: the Dark House; the Sisters torturing her, trying to force her to Change; Nate’s betrayal. She wondered what Will had said to her in Latin before he had vanished. “Courage,” no doubt, or some variant of that. She thought of Jane Eyre, bravely facing down the angry Mr. Rochester; Catherine Earnshaw, who when mauled by a savage dog “did not yell out—no! she would have scorned to do it.” And lastly she thought of Boadicea, who Will had told her was “braver than any man.”

It’s just a ball, Tessa,
she told herself, and reached for the knob.
Just a party.

She had never been to a ball before, of course. She knew only a little of what to expect, and all of that was from books. In Jane Austen’s books the characters were constantly waiting for there to be a ball, or arranging a ball, and often an entire village seemed to be involved in the planning and location of the ball. Whereas in other books, such as
Vanity Fair
, they were grand backdrops against which scheming and plotting occurred. She knew that there would be a dressing room for the ladies, where she could leave her shawl, and one for the men, where they could safely dispose of hats, overcoats, and walking sticks. There ought to be a dance card for her, where the names of the men who had asked her to dance could be marked down. It was rude to dance more than a few dances in a row with the same gentleman. There should be a grand, beautifully decorated ballroom, and a smaller refreshment room, where there would be iced drinks and sandwiches and biscuits and tipsy cake . . .

But it was not quite like that. As the door closed behind her, Tessa found no servants hurrying to greet her, to guide her to the ladies’ dressing room and offer to take her shawl or assist her with a missing button. Instead a wash of noise and music and light struck her like a wave. She stood at the entrance to a room so grand, it was hard to believe that it fit somehow into the Lightwoods’ house. A great crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling; it was only after looking at it for several moments that Tessa realized it was shaped like a spider, with eight dangling “legs,” each of which held a collection of massive tapers. The walls, what she could see of them, were a very dark blue, and running all along the side that faced the river were French windows, some propped open to catch the breeze, for the room, despite the cool weather outside, was stifling. Beyond the windows were curved stone balconies, looking out over a view of the city. The walls were largely obscured by great swathes of shimmering fabric, loops and whorls of it hanging over the windows and moving in the faint breeze. The fabric was figured with all manner of patterns, woven in gold; the same shimmering, shifting patterns that had hurt Tessa’s eyes downstairs.

The room was crowded with people. Well, not quite
people
, exactly. The majority looked human enough. She caught sight also of the dead white faces of vampires, and a few of the violet and red-hued ifrits, all dressed in the height of fashion. Most, though not all, of the attendees wore masks—elaborate contraptions of gold and black, beaked Plague Doctor masks with tiny spectacles, red devil masks complete with horns. Some were bare-faced, though, including a group of women whose hair was muted tints of lavender, green, and violet. Tessa did not think they were dyes, either, and they wore their hair loose, like nymphs in paintings. Their clothes were scandalously loose as well. They were clearly uncorseted, dressed in flowing fabrics of velvet, tulle, and satin.

In and among the human guests darted figures of all sizes and shapes. There was a man, far too tall and thin to
be
a man, dressed in topcoat and tails, looming over a young woman in a green cloak whose red hair shone like a copper penny. Creatures that looked like great dogs roamed among the guests, their yellow eyes wide and watchful. They had rows of spikes along their backs, like drawings of exotic animals she had seen in books. A dozen or so little goblin creatures screeched and chattered to one another in an incomprehensible language. They appeared to be fighting over some food-stuff—what looked like a torn-apart frog. Tessa swallowed down bile and turned—

And saw them, where she had not before. Her mind had perhaps dismissed them as decorations, suits of armor, but they were not. Automatons lined the walls, silent and motionless. They were human in shape, like the coachman who had belonged to the Dark Sisters, and wore the livery of the Lightwood household, each with a patterned
ouroboros
over its left breast. Their faces were blank and featureless, like children’s sketches that had not been filled in.