“Well, they are, aren’t they? Isn’t there anything you love like that? And don’t say ‘spats’ or ‘lawn tennis’ or something silly.”
“Good Lord,” he said with mock horror, “it’s like she knows me already.”
“Everyone has something they can’t live without. I’ll find out what it is for you, never you fear.” She meant to speak lightly, but at the look on his face, her voice trailed off into uncertainty. He was looking at her with an odd steadiness; his eyes were the same dark blue as the velvet binding of the book she held. His gaze passed over her face, down her throat, to her waist, before rising back up to her face, where it lingered on her mouth. Tessa’s heart was pounding as if she had been running up stairs. Something in her chest ached, as if she were hungry or thirsty. There was something she wanted, but she didn’t know what—
“It’s late,” Will said abruptly, looking away from her. “I should show you back to your room.”
“I—” Tessa wanted to protest, but there was no reason to do so. He was right. It was late, the pinprick light of stars visible through the clear panes of the window. She rose to her feet, cradling the book to her chest, and went with Will out into the corridor.
“There are a few tricks to learning your way around the Institute that I ought to teach you,” he said, still not looking at her. There was something oddly diffident in his attitude now that hadn’t been there moments before, as if Tessa had done something to offend him. But what could she have done? “Ways to identify the different doors and turn—”
He broke off, and Tessa saw that someone was coming down the corridor toward them. It was Sophie, a basket of laundry tucked under one of her arms. Seeing Will and Tessa, she paused, her expression growing more guarded.
“Sophie!” Will’s diffidence turned to mischief. “Have you finished putting my room in order yet?”
“It’s done.” Sophie didn’t return his smile. “It was filthy. I hope that in future you can refrain from tracking bits of dead demon through the house.”
Tessa’s mouth fell open. How could Sophie talk to Will like that? She was a servant, and he—even if he was younger than she was—was a gentleman.
And yet Will seemed to take it in stride. “All part of the job, young Sophie.”
“Mr. Branwell and Mr. Carstairs seem to have no problem cleaning their boots,” Sophie said, looking darkly from Will to Tessa. “Perhaps you could learn from their example.”
“Perhaps,” said Will. “But I doubt it.”
Sophie scowled, and started off along the corridor again, her shoulders tightly set with indignation.
Tessa looked at Will in amazement. “What was that?”
Will shrugged lazily. “Sophie enjoys pretending she doesn’t like me.”
“Doesn’t like you? She hates you!” Under other circumstances, she might have asked if Will and Sophie had had a falling out, but one didn’t fall out with servants. If they were unsatisfactory, one ceased to employ them. “Did—did something happen between you?”
“Tessa,” Will said with exaggerated patience. “Enough. There are things you can’t hope to understand.”
If there was one thing Tessa hated, it was being told that there were things she couldn’t understand. Because she was young, because she was a girl—for any of a thousand reasons that never seemed to make any real sense. She set her chin stubbornly. “Well, not if you won’t tell me. But then I’d have to say that it looks a great deal like she hates you because you did something awful to her.”
Will’s expression darkened. “You can think what you like. It’s not as if you know anything about me.”
“I know you don’t like giving straightforward answers to questions. I know you’re probably around seventeen. I know you like Tennyson—you quoted him at the Dark House, and again just now. I know you’re an orphan, as I am—”
“I never said I was an orphan.” Will spoke with unexpected savagery. “And I loathe poetry. So, as it happens, you really don’t know anything about me at all, do you?”
And with that, he spun on his heel and walked away.
5
THE SHADOWHUNTER’S CODEX
Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Higher Pantheism”
It took an age of wandering glumly from corridor to identical corridor before Tessa, by lucky chance, recognized a rip in yet another of the endless tapestries and realized that the door to her bedroom must be one of the ones lining that particular hallway. A few minutes of trial and error later, and she was gratefully shutting the correct door behind her and sliding the bolt home in the lock.
The moment she was back in her nightgown and had slipped under the covers, she opened The Shadowhunter’s Codex and began to read. You’ll never understand us from reading a book, Will had said, but that wasn’t the point really. He didn’t know what books meant to her, that books were symbols of truth and meaning, that this one acknowledged that she existed and that there were others like her in the world. Holding it in her hands made Tessa feel that everything that had happened to her in the past six weeks was real—more real even than living through it had been.
Tessa learned from the Codex that all Shadowhunters descended from an archangel named Raziel, who had given the first of them a volume called the Gray Book, filled with “the language of Heaven”—the black runic Marks that covered the skin of trained Shadowhunters such as Charlotte and Will. The Marks were cut into their skin with a styluslike tool called a stele—the odd penlike object she’d seen Will use to draw on the door at the Dark House. The Marks provided Nephilim with all sorts of protection: healing, superhuman strength and speed, night vision, and even allowed them to hide themselves from mundane eyes with runes called glamours. But they were not a gift anyone could use. Cutting Marks into the skin of a Downworlder or human—or even a Shadowhunter who was too young or improperly trained—would be torturously painful and result in madness or death.
The Marks were not the only way they protected them-selves—they wore tough, enchanted leather garments called gear when they went into battle. There were sketches of men in the gear of different countries. To Tessa’s surprise, there were also sketches of women in long shirts and trousers—not bloomers, such as the sort she’d seen ridiculed in newspapers, but real men’s trousers. Turning the page, she shook her head, wondering if Charlotte and Jessamine really wore such outlandish getups.
The next pages were devoted to the other gifts Raziel had given the first Shadowhunters—powerful magical objects called the Mortal Instruments—and a home country: a tiny piece of land sliced out of what was then the Holy Roman Empire, surrounded with wardings so that mundanes could not enter it. It was called Idris.
The lamp flickered low as Tessa read, her eyelids slipping lower and lower. Downworlders, she read, were supernatural creatures such as faeries, werewolves, vampires, and warlocks. In the case of vampires and werewolves, they were humans infected with demon disease. Faeries, on the other hand, were half-demon and half-angel, and therefore possessed both great beauty and an evil nature. But warlocks—warlocks were the direct offspring of humans and demons. No wonder Charlotte had asked if both her parents were human. But they were, she thought, so I can’t possibly be a warlock, thank God. She stared down at an illustration showing a tall man with shaggy hair, standing in the center of a pentagram chalked onto a stone floor. He looked completely normal, save for the fact that he had eyes with slit pupils like a cat’s. Candles burned at each of the star’s five points. The flames seemed to slide together, blurring as Tessa’s own vision blurred in exhaustion. She closed her eyes—and was instantly dreaming.
In the dream she danced through whirling smoke down a corridor lined with mirrors, and each mirror she passed showed her a different face. She could hear lovely, haunting music. It seemed to come from some distance away, and yet was all around. There was a man walking ahead of her—a boy, really, slender and youthful—but th
ough she felt that she knew him, she could neither see his face nor recognize him. He might have been her brother, or Will, or someone else entirely. She followed, calling to him, but he receded down the corridor as if the smoke carried him with it. The music rose and rose to a crescendo—
And Tessa woke, breathing hard, the book sliding off her lap as she sat up. The dream was gone, but the music remained, high and haunting and sweet. She made her way to the door and peered out into the hallway.
The music was louder in the corridor. In fact, it was coming from the room across the hall. The door was ajar slightly, and notes seemed to pour through the opening like water through the narrow neck of a vase.
A dressing gown hung on a hook by the door; Tessa drew it down and slipped it on over her nightclothes, stepping out into the hallway. As if in a dream, she crossed the corridor and put her hand gently to the door; it swung open under her touch. The room within was dark, lit only by moonlight. She saw that it was not unlike her own bedroom across the hall, the same large four-poster bed, the same dark heavy furniture. The curtains had been pulled back from one tall window, and pale silver light poured into the room like a rain of needles. In the square patch of moonlight before the window, someone was standing. A boy—he seemed too slight to be a grown man—with a violin propped against his shoulder. His cheek rested against the instrument, and the bow sawed back and forth over the strings, wringing notes out of it, notes as fine and perfect as anything Tessa had ever heard.
His eyes were closed. “Will?” he said, without opening his eyes or ceasing to play. “Will, is that you?”
Tessa said nothing. She could not bear to speak, to interrupt the music—but in a moment the boy broke it off himself, lowering his bow and opening his eyes with a frown.
“Will—,” he started, and then, seeing Tessa, his lips parted in surprise. “You’re not Will.” He sounded curious, but not at all annoyed, despite the fact that Tessa had barged into his bedroom in the middle of the night and surprised him playing the violin in his nightclothes, or what Tessa assumed were his nightclothes. He wore a light loose-fitting set of trousers and a collarless shirt, with a black silk dressing gown tied loosely over them. She had been right. He was young, probably the same age as Will, and the impression of youth was heightened by his slightness. He was tall but very slender, and disappearing below the collar of his shirt, she could see the curling edges of the black designs that she had earlier seen on Will’s skin, and on Charlotte’s.
She knew what they were called now. Marks. And she knew what they made him. Nephilim. The descendant of men and angels. No wonder that in the moonlight his pale skin seemed to shine like Will’s witchlight. His hair was pale silver as well, as were his angular eyes.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, clearing her throat. The noise sounded terribly harsh to her, and loud in the silence of the room; she wanted to cringe. “I—I didn’t mean to come in here like this. It’s—My room is across the hall, and . . .”
“That’s all right.” He lowered the violin from his shoulder. “You’re Miss Gray, aren’t you? The shape-changer girl. Will told me a bit about you.”
“Oh,” Tessa said.
“Oh?” The boy’s eyebrows rose. “You don’t sound terribly pleased that I know who you are.”
“It’s that I think Will is angry with me,” Tessa explained. “So whatever he told you—”
He laughed. “Will is angry with everyone,” he said. “I don’t let it color my judgment.”
Moonlight spilled off the polished surface of the boy’s violin as he turned to lay it down on top of the wardrobe, the bow beside it. When he turned back to her, he was smiling. “I should have introduced myself earlier,” he said. “I’m James Carstairs. Please call me Jem—everyone does.”
“Oh, you’re Jem. You weren’t at dinner,” Tessa recalled. “Charlotte said you were ill. Are you feeling better?”
He shrugged. “I was tired, that’s all.”
“Well, I imagine it must be tiring, doing what you all do.” Having just read the Codex, Tessa felt herself burning up with questions about Shadowhunters. “Will said you came from a long way away to live here—were you in Idris?
He raised his eyebrows. “You know of Idris?”
“Or did you come from another Institute? They’re in all the big cities, aren’t they? And why to London—”
He interrupted her, bemused. “You ask a lot of questions, don’t you?”
“My brother always says curiosity is my besetting sin.”
“As sins go, it isn’t the worst one.” He sat down on the steamer trunk at the foot of the bed, and regarded her with a curious gravity. “So go ahead; ask me whatever you want. I can’t sleep anyway, and distractions are welcome.”
Immediately Will’s voice rose up in the back of Tessa’s head. Jem’s parents had been killed by demons. But I can’t ask him about that, Tessa thought. Instead she said, “Will told me you came from very far away. Where did you live before?”
“Shanghai,” Jem said. “You know where that is?”
“China,” said Tessa with some indignation. “Doesn’t everyone know that?”
Jem grinned. “You’d be surprised.”
“What were you doing in China?” Tessa asked, with honest interest. She couldn’t quite picture the place Jem was from. When she thought of China, all that came to mind was Marco Polo and tea. She had the sense that it was very, very far, as if Jem had come from the ends of the earth—east of the sun and west of the moon, Aunt Harriet would have said. “I thought no one went there but missionaries and sailors.”
“Shadowhunters live all over the world. My mother was Chinese; my father was British. They met in London and moved to Shanghai when he was offered the position of running the Institute there.”
Tessa was startled. If Jem’s mother had been Chinese, then so was he, wasn’t he? She knew there were Chinese immigrants in New York—they mostly worked in laundries or sold hand-rolled cigars from stands on the street. She had never seen one of them who looked anything like Jem, with his odd silvery hair and eyes. Perhaps it had something to do with him being a Shadowhunter? But she couldn’t think of a way to ask that didn’t seem horrendously rude.
Fortunately, Jem didn’t seem to be waiting for her to continue the conversation. “I apologize for asking, but—your parents are dead, aren’t they?”
“Did Will tell you that?”
“He didn’t need to. We orphans learn to recognize one another. If I might ask—were you very young when it happened?”
“I was three when they died in a carriage accident. I hardly remember them at all.” Only in tiny flashes—the scent of tobacco smoke, or the pale lilac of my mother’s dress. “My aunt raised me. And my brother, Nathaniel. My aunt, though—” At this, to her surprise, her throat began to tighten. A vivid picture of Aunt Harriet came to her mind, lying in the narrow brass bed in her bedroom, her eyes bright with fever. Not recognizing Tessa at the end and calling her by her mother’s name, Elizabeth. Aunt Harriet had been the only mother Tessa had really ever known. Tessa had held her thin hand while she’d died, there in the room with the priest. She remembered thinking that now she truly was alone. “She died recently. She took a fever unexpectedly. She never had been very strong.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Jem said, and he genuinely did sound sorry.
“It was terrible because my brother was already gone by then. He’d left for England a month before. He’d even sent us back presents—tea from Fortnum and Mason, and chocolates. And then Aunt took sick and died, and I wrote to him over and over, but my letters came back. I was in despair. And then the ticket arrived. A ticket for a steamship to Southampton, and a note from Nate saying he’d meet me at the docks, that I must come live with him in London now that Aunt was gone. Except now I don’t think he ever wrote that note at all—” Tessa broke off, her eyes stinging. “I’m sorry. I’m maundering on. You don’t need to hear all this.”
“What sort of man
is your brother? What is he like?”
Tessa looked at Jem with a little surprise. The others had asked her what he might have done to get himself into his current situation, if she knew where the Dark Sisters might be keeping him, if he had the same power she did. But no one had ever asked what he was like.
“Aunt used to say he was a dreamer,” she said. “He always lived in his head. He never cared about how things were, only how they would be, someday, when he had everything he wanted. When we had everything we wanted,” she corrected herself. “He used to gamble, I think because he couldn’t imagine losing—it wasn’t part of his dreams.”
“Dreams can be dangerous things.”
“No—no.” She shook her head. “I’m not saying it right. He was a wonderful brother. He . . .” Charlotte was right; it was easier to fight back tears if she found something, some object, to fix her gaze on. She stared at Jem’s hands. They were slender and long, and he had the same design on the back of his hand that Will did, the open eye. She pointed at it. “What’s that meant to do?”
Jem seemed not to notice she had changed the subject. “It’s a Mark. You know what those are?” He held his hand out to her, palm down. “This one is the Voyance. It clears our Sight. Helps us to see Downworld.” He turned his hand over, and drew up the sleeve of his shirt. All along the pale inside of his wrist and inner arm were more of the Marks, very black against his white skin. They seemed to thread with the pattern of his veins, as if his blood ran through the Marks, too. “For swiftness, night vision, angelic power, to heal quickly,” he read out loud. “Though their names are more complex than that, and not in English.”
“Do they hurt?”
“They hurt when I received them. They don’t hurt at all now.” He drew his sleeve down and smiled at her. “Now, don’t tell me that’s all the questions you have.”
Oh, I have more than you think. “Why can’t you sleep?”
She saw that she had caught him off guard; a look of hesitancy flashed across his face before he spoke. But why hesitate? she thought. He could always lie, or simply deflect, as Will would have. But Jem, she sensed instinctively, wouldn’t lie. “I have bad dreams.”
The Infernal Devices Series Page 9