“Will!” Tessa called to him, though she wasn’t sure if he could hear her over the din. “Will—”
Something seized her by the back of her dress and hauled her up and backward. It was like being caught in the talons of an enormous bird. Tessa screamed once, and found herself flung forward, skidding across the floor. She hit the stack of chairs. They crashed to the floor in a deafening mass, and Tessa, sprawled among the mess, looked up with a shout of pain.
De Quincey stood over her. His black eyes were wild, rimmed with red; his white hair straggled over his face in matted clumps, and his shirt was slashed open across the front, the edges of the tear soaked with blood. He must have been cut, though not deeply enough to kill him, and had healed. The skin under the torn shirt looked unmarked now. “Bitch,” he snarled at Tessa. “Lying traitorous bitch. You brought that boy in here, Camille. That Nephilim.”
Tessa scrambled backward; her back hit the wall of fallen chairs.
“I welcomed you back to the clan, even after your disgusting little—interlude—with the lycanthrope. I tolerate that ridiculous warlock of yours. And this is how you repay me. Repay us.” He held his hands out to her; they were streaked with black ash. “You see this,” he said. “The dust of our dead people. Dead vampires. And you betrayed them for Nephilim.” He spat the word as if it were poison.
Something bubbled up out of Tessa’s throat. Laughter. Not her laughter; Camille’s. “‘Disgusting interlude’?” The words came out of Tessa’s mouth before she could stop them. It was as if she had no control over what she was saying. “I loved him—like you never loved me—like you’ve never loved anything. And you killed him just to show the clan that you could. I want you to know what it is like to lose everything that matters to you. I want you to know, as your home burns and your clan is brought to ashes and your own miserable life ends, that I am the one who is doing this to you.”
And Camille’s voice was gone just as quickly as it had come, leaving Tessa feeling drained and shocked. That didn’t stop her, though, from using her hands, behind her, to scrabble among the smashed chairs. Surely there had to be something, some broken-off piece that she could use as a weapon. De Quincey was staring at her in shock, his mouth open. Tessa imagined that no one had ever talked to him like that. Certainly not another vampire.
“Perhaps,” he said. “Perhaps I underestimated you. Perhaps you will destroy me.” He advanced on her, his hands out, reaching. “But I will bring you with me—”
Tessa’s fingers closed around the leg of a chair; without even thinking about it, she swung the chair up and over and brought it crashing down on de Quincey’s back. She felt elated as he yelled and staggered back. She scrambled to her feet as the vampire straightened up, and she swung the chair at him again. This time a jagged bit of broken chair arm caught him across the face, opening up a long red cut. His lips curled back from his teeth in a silent snarl, and he sprang—there was no other word for it. It was like the silent spring of a cat. He struck Tessa to the ground, landing on top of her and knocking the chair from her hand. He lunged at her throat, teeth bared, and she raked her clawed hand across his face. His blood, where it dripped on her, seemed to burn, like acid. She screamed and struck out at him harder, but he only laughed; his pupils had disappeared into the black of his eyes, and he looked entirely inhuman, like some sort of monstrous predatory serpent.
He caught her wrists in his grasp and forced them down on either side of her, hard against the floor. “Camille,” he said, leaning down over her, his voice thick. “Be still, little Camille. It will be over in moments—”
He threw his head back like a striking cobra. Terrified, Tessa struggled to free her trapped legs, meaning to kick him, kick him as hard as she could—
He yelled. Yelled and writhed, and Tessa saw that there was a hand caught in his hair, yanking his head up and back, dragging him to his feet. A hand inked all over with swirling black Marks.
Will’s hand.
De Quincey was hauled screaming to his feet, his hands clamped to his head. Tessa struggled upright, staring, as Will flung the howling vampire contemptuously away from him. Will wasn’t smiling anymore, but his eyes were glittering, and Tessa could see why Magnus had described their color as the sky in Hell.
“Nephilim.” De Quincey staggered, righted himself, and spat at Will’s feet.
Will drew the pistol from his belt and aimed it at de Quincey. “One of the Devil’s own abominations, aren’t you? You don’t even deserve to live in this world with the rest of us, and yet when we let you do so out of pity, you throw our gift back in our faces.”
“As if we need your pity,” de Quincey replied. “As if we could ever be less than you. You Nephilim, thinking you are—” He stopped abruptly. He was so smeared with filth that it was hard to tell, but it looked as if the cut on his face had already healed.
“Are what?” Will cocked the pistol; the click was loud even above the noise of the battle. “Say it.”
The vampire’s eyes burned. “Say what?”
“‘God,’” said Will. “You were going to tell me that we Nephilim play at God, weren’t you? Except you can’t even say the word. Mock the Bible all you want with your little collection, you still can’t say it.” His finger was white on the trigger of the gun. “Say it. Say it, and I’ll let you live.”
The vampire bared his teeth. “You cannot kill me with that—that stupid human toy.”
“If the bullet passes through your heart,” Will said, his aim unwavering, “you’ll die. And I am a very good shot.”
Tessa stood, frozen, staring at the tableau before her. She wanted to step backward, to go to Nathaniel, but she was afraid to move.
De Quincey raised his head. He opened his mouth. A thin rattle came out as he tried to speak, tried to shape a word his soul would not let him say. He gasped again, choked, and put a hand to his throat. Will began to laugh—
And the vampire sprang. His face twisted in a mask of rage and pain, he launched himself at Will with a howl. There was a blur of movement. Then the gun went off and there was a spray of blood. Will hit the floor, the pistol skidding from his grip, the vampire on top of him. Tessa scrambled to retrieve the pistol, caught it, and turned to see that de Quincey had seized Will from the back, his forearm jammed against Will’s throat.
She raised the pistol, her hand shaking—but she had never used a pistol before, had never shot anything, and how to shoot the vampire without injuring Will? Will was clearly choking, his face suffused with blood. De Quincey snarled something and tightened his grip—
And Will, ducking his head, sank his teeth into the vampire’s forearm. De Quincey yelled and jerked his arm away; Will flung himself to the side, retching, and rolled to his knees to spit blood onto the stage. When he looked up, glittering red blood was smeared across the lower half of his face. His teeth shone red too when he—Tessa couldn’t believe it—grinned, actually grinned, and looking at de Quincey, said, “How do you like it, vampire? You were going to bite that mundane earlier. Now you know what it’s like, don’t you?”
De Quincey, on his knees, stared from Will to the ugly red hole in his own arm, which was already beginning to close up, though dark blood still trickled from it thinly. “For that,” he said, “you will die, Nephilim.”
Will spread his arms wide. On his knees, grinning like a demon, blood dripping from his mouth, he barely looked human himself. “Come and get me.”
De Quincey gathered himself to spring—and Tessa pulled the trigger. The gun kicked back, hard, into her hand, and the vampire fell sideways, blood streaming from his shoulder. She had missed the heart. Damn it.
Howling, de Quincey began to pull himself to his feet. Tessa raised her arm, pulled the trigger on the pistol again—nothing. A soft click let her know the gun was empty.
De Quincey laughed. He was still clutching his shoulder, though the blood flow had already slowed to a trickle. “Camille,” he spat at Tessa. “I will be back for you. I will m
ake you sorry you were ever reborn.”
Tessa felt a chill at the pit of her stomach—not just her fear. Camille’s. De Quincey bared his teeth one last time and whirled with incredible speed. He raced across the room and flung himself into a high glass window. It shattered outward in an explosion of glass, carrying him forward as if his body were being carried on a wave, vanishing into the night.
Will swore. “We can’t lose him—,” he began, and started forward. Then he spun as Tessa screamed. A ragged-looking male vampire had risen up behind her like a ghost appearing out of the air, and had snatched her by the shoulders. She tried to pull free, but his grip was too strong. She could hear him murmuring in her ear, horrible words about how she was a traitor to the Night Children, and how he would tear her open with his teeth.
“Tessa,” Will shouted, and she wasn’t sure if he sounded angry, or something else. He reached for the gleaming weapons at his belt. His hand closed around the hilt of a seraph blade, just as the vampire spun Tessa around. She caught sight of his leering white face, the blood-tipped fangs out, ready to tear. The vampire lunged forward—
And exploded in a shower of dust and blood. He dissolved, the flesh melting away from his face and hands, and Tessa caught sight for a moment of the blackened skeleton beneath before it, too, crumbled, leaving an empty pile of clothes behind. Clothes, and a gleaming silver blade.
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.”
The Infernal Devices Series Page 23