Clockwork Prince (46 page)

He lay on his side. His face was white, his breathing shallow. Jem had one hand on his shoulder and was speaking to him in a low, soothing voice, but Will gave no sign of being able to hear him. Blood had pooled under him, smearing the floor, and for a moment Tessa just stared, unable to fathom where it had come from. Then she moved closer and saw his back. His gear had been shredded all along his spine and shoulder blades, the thick material torn by flying shards of razored metal. His skin swam with blood; his hair was soaked with it.

“Will,” Tessa whispered. She felt peculiarly dizzy, as if she were floating.

Charlotte looked up. “Tessa,” she said. “Your brother . . .”

“He’s dead,” Tessa said through her daze. “But Will—?”

“He knocked you down and covered you to protect you from the explosion,” Jem said. There was no blame in his voice. “But there was nothing to protect him. You two were the closest to the blast. The metal fragments shredded his back. He’s losing blood quickly.”

“But isn’t there anything you can do?” Tessa’s voice rose, even as dizziness threatened to envelop her. “What about your healing runes? The
iratzes
?”

“We used an
amissio
, a rune that slows blood loss, but if we attempt a healing rune, his skin will heal over the metal, driving it farther into the soft tissue,” said Henry flatly. “We need to get him back home to the infirmary. The metal must be removed before he can be healed.”

“Then, we must go.” Tessa’s voice was shaking. “We must—”

“Tessa,” said Jem. He still had his hand on Will’s shoulder, but he was looking at her, his eyes wide. “Did you know you’re hurt?”

She gestured impatiently at her shirt. “This isn’t my blood. This is Nate’s. Now we must—Can he be carried? Is there anything—”

“No,” Jem interrupted, sharply enough to surprise her. “Not the blood on your clothes. You’ve a gash on your head. Here.” He touched his temple.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Tessa said. “I’m perfectly all right.” She put her hand up to touch her temple—and felt her hair, thick and stiff with blood, and the side of her face sticky with it, before her fingertips touched the ragged flap of torn skin that ran from the corner of her cheek to her temple. A searing bolt of pain shot through her head.

It was the last straw. Already weak from blood loss and dizzy from repeated shocks, she felt herself begin to crumple. She barely felt Jem’s arms go around her as she fell into the darkness.

Consciousness came and went in a hypnotic rhythm, like the sea appearing and disappearing on the deck of a boat in a storm. Tessa knew she lay in a bed with crisp white sheets in the center of a long room; that there were other beds, all the same, in the room; and that there were windows high above her letting in shadows and then the bloody light of dawn. She closed her eyes against it, and the darkness came again.

She woke to whispering voices, and faces hovering over her, anxious. Charlotte, her hair knotted back neatly, still in her gear, and beside her Brother Enoch. His scarred face was no longer a terror. She could hear his voice in her mind.
The wound to her head is superficial.

“But she fainted,” said Charlotte. To Tessa’s surprise there was real fear in her voice, real anxiety. “With a blow to the head—”

She fainted from repeated shocks. Her brother died in her arms, you said? And she may have thought Will was dead as well. You said he covered her with his body when the explosion occurred. If he had died, he would have given his life for her. That is quite a burden to bear.

“But you do think she’ll be well again?”

When her body and spirit have rested, she will wake. I cannot say when that will be.

“My poor Tessa.” Charlotte touched Tessa’s face lightly. Her hands smelled of lemon soap. “She has no one in the world at all now. . . .”

The darkness returned, and Tessa fell into it, grateful for the respite from light and thought. She wrapped herself in it like a blanket and let herself float, like the icebergs off the coast of Labrador, cradled in the moonlight by icy black water.

A guttural cry of pain cut through her dream of darkness. She was curled on her side in a tangle of sheets, and a few beds away from her lay Will, on his stomach. She realized, though in her state of numbness it was only a faint shock, that he was probably naked; the sheets had been drawn up to his waist, but his back and chest were bare. His arms were folded on the pillows in front of him, his head resting on them, his body tensed like a bowstring. Blood spotted the white sheets beneath him.

Brother Enoch stood at one side of his bed, and beside him Jem, at Will’s head, wearing an anxious expression. “Will,” Jem said urgently. “Will, are you sure you won’t have another pain-killing rune?”

“No—more,” Will ground out, between his teeth. “Just—get it over with.”

Brother Enoch raised what looked like a wickedly sharp pair of silver tweezers. Will gulped and buried his head in his arms, his dark hair startling against the white of the sheets. Jem shuddered as if the pain were his own as the tweezers dug deep into Will’s back and his body tautened on the bed, muscles tensing under the skin, his cry of agony short and muffled. Brother Enoch drew back the tool, a blood-smeared shard of metal gripped in its teeth.

Jem slid his hand into Will’s. “Grip my fingers. It will help the pain. There are only a few more.”

“Easy—for you to say,” Will gasped, but the touch of his
parabatai
’s hand seemed to relax him slightly. He was arched up off the bed, his elbows digging into the mattress, his breath coming in short pants. Tessa knew she ought to look away, but she couldn’t. She realized she had never seen so much of a boy’s body before, not even Jem’s. She found herself fascinated by the way the lean muscle slid under Will’s smooth skin, the flex and swell of his arms, the hard, flat stomach convulsing as he breathed.

The tweezers flashed again, and Will’s hand bore down on Jem’s, both their fingers whitening. Blood welled and spilled down his bare side. He made no sound, though Jem looked sick and pale. He moved his hand as if to touch Will’s shoulder, then drew it back, biting down on his lip.

All this because Will covered my body with his to protect me,
Tessa thought. As Brother Enoch had said, it was a burden to bear indeed.

She lay on her narrow bed in her old room in the New York flat. Through the window she could see gray sky, the rooftops of Manhattan. One of her aunt’s colorful patchwork quilts was on the bed, and she clutched it to her as the door opened and her aunt herself came in.

Knowing what she knew now, Tessa could see the resemblance. Aunt Harriet had blue eyes, faded fair hair; even the shape of her face was like Nate’s. With a smile she came and bent over Tessa, putting a hand on her forehead, cool against Tessa’s hot skin.

“I’m so sorry,” Tessa whispered. “About Nate. It’s my fault he’s dead.”

“Hush,” her aunt said. “It isn’t your fault. It is his and mine. I always felt such guilt, you see, Tessa. Knowing I was his mother but not being able to bear telling him. I let him get away with anything he wanted, until he was spoiled beyond saving. If I had told him that I was really his mother, he would not have felt so betrayed when he discovered the truth, and would not have turned against us. Lies and secrets, Tessa, they are like a cancer in the soul. They eat away what is good and leave only destruction behind.”

“I miss you so much,” Tessa said. “I have no family now. . . .”

Her aunt leaned forward to kiss her on the forehead. “You have more family than you think.”

“We will almost certainly forfeit the Institute now,” said Charlotte. She did not sound brokenhearted, but distant and detached. Tessa was hovering like a ghost over the infirmary, looking down at where Charlotte stood with Jem at the foot of Tessa’s own bed. Tessa could see herself, asleep, her dark hair spread like a fan across her pillows. Will lay asleep a few beds over, his back striped with bandages, an
iratze
black against the back of his neck. Sophie, in her white cap and dark dress, was dusting the windowsills. “We have lost Nathaniel Gray as a source, one of our own has turned out to be a spy, and we are no closer to finding Mortmain than we were a fortnight ago.”

“After all that we have done, have learned? The Clave will understand—”

“They will not. They are already at the end of their tether where I am concerned. I might as well march over to Benedict Lightwood’s house and make over the Institute paperwork in his name. Have done with it.”

“What does Henry say about all this?” asked Jem. He was no longer in gear, and neither was Charlotte; he wore a white shirt and brown cloth trousers, and Charlotte was in one of her drab dark dresses. As Jem turned his hand over, though, Tessa saw that it was still spotted with Will’s dried blood.

Charlotte snorted in an unladylike manner. “Oh, Henry,” she said, sounding exhausted. “I think he’s just so shocked that one of his devices actually worked that he doesn’t know what to do with himself. And he can’t bear to come in here. He thinks it’s his fault that Will and Tessa are hurt.”

“Without that device we might all be dead, and Tessa in the hands of the Magister.”

“You are welcome to explain that to Henry. I have given up the attempt.”

“Charlotte . . .” Jem’s voice was soft. “I know what people say. I know you’ve heard the cruel gossip. But Henry does love you. When he thought you were hurt, at the tea warehouse, he went almost mad. He threw himself against that machine—”

“James.” Charlotte clumsily patted Jem’s shoulder. “I do appreciate your attempt to console me, but falsehoods never do anyone any good in the end. I long ago accepted that Henry loves his inventions first, and me second—if at all.”

“Charlotte,” Jem said wearily, but before he could say another word, Sophie had moved to stand beside them, dust cloth in hand.

“Mrs. Branwell,” she said in a low voice. “If I might speak to you for just a moment.”

Charlotte looked surprised. “Sophie . . .”

“Please, ma’am.”

Charlotte placed a hand on Jem’s shoulder, said something softly into his ear, and then nodded toward Sophie. “Very well. Come with me to the drawing room.”

As Charlotte left the room with Sophie, Tessa realized to her surprise that Sophie was actually taller than her mistress. Charlotte’s presence was such that one often forgot how very small she was. And Sophie was as tall as Tessa herself, as slender as a willow. Tessa saw her again in her mind with Gideon Lightwood, pressed up against the corridor wall, and Tessa worried.

As the door closed behind the two women, Jem leaned forward, his arms crossed over the foot of Tessa’s brass bed. He was looking at her, smiling a little, though crookedly, his hands hanging loose—dried blood across the knuckles, and under the nails.

“Tessa, my Tessa,” he said in his soft voice, as lulling as his violin. “I know you cannot hear me. Brother Enoch says you’re not hurt badly. I can’t say I find that enough to comfort me. It’s rather like when Will assures me that we’re only a little bit lost somewhere. I know it means we won’t be seeing a familiar street again for hours.”

He dropped his voice, so low that Tessa wasn’t sure if what he said next was real or part of the dream darkness rising to claim her, though she fought against it.

“I’ve never minded it,” he went on. “Being lost, that is. I had always thought one could not be truly lost if one knew one’s own heart. But I fear I may be lost without knowing yours.” He closed his eyes as if he were bone-weary, and she saw how thin his eyelids were, like parchment paper, and how tired he looked. “
Wo ai ni
, Tessa,” he whispered.
“Wo bu xiang shi qu ni.”

She knew, without knowing how she knew, what the words meant.

I love you.

And I don’t want to lose you.

I don’t want to lose you, either,
she wanted to say, but the words wouldn’t come. Lassitude rose up instead, in a dark wave, and covered her in silence.

Darkness.

It was dark in the cell, and Tessa was conscious first of a feeling of great loneliness and terror. Jessamine lay in the narrow bed, her fair hair hanging in lank ropes over her shoulders. Tessa both hovered over her and felt somehow as if she were touching her mind. She could feel a great aching sense of loss. Somehow Jessamine knew that Nate was dead. Before, when Tessa had tried to touch the other girl’s mind, she had met resistance, but now she felt only a growing sadness, like the stain of a drop of black ink spreading through water.

Jessie’s brown eyes were open, staring up into the darkness.
I have nothing.
The words were as clear as a bell in Tessa’s mind.
I chose Nate over the Shadowhunters, and now he is dead, and Mortmain will want me dead as well, and Charlotte despises me. I have gambled and lost everything.