You must leave. Brother Enoch spoke without turning from the bed. Your presence will only slow his healing.
“But Nate asked me to stay—”
Go. The voice in Tessa’s mind was icy.
Tessa looked at her brother; he was still against the pillows, his face gone slack. She turned toward Charlotte, meaning to protest, but Charlotte met her glance with a small shake of the head. Her eyes were sympathetic, but unyielding. “As soon as your brother’s condition changes, I will find you. I promise.”
Tessa looked at Brother Enoch. He had opened the pouch at his waist and was setting objects down on the bedside table, slowly and methodically. Glass vials of powder and liquid, bunches of dried plants, sticks of some black substance like soft coal. “If anything happens to Nate,” Tessa said, “I shall never forgive you. Never.”
It was like speaking to a statue. Brother Enoch did not respond to her with so much as a twitch.
Tessa fled from the room.
After the dimness of Nate’s sickroom, the brightness of the sconces in the corridor stung Tessa’s eyes. She leaned against the wall by the door, willing her tears back. It was the second time that evening she had nearly cried, and she was annoyed with herself. Clenching her right hand into a fist, she slammed it against the wall behind her, hard, sending a shock wave of pain up her arm. That cleared the tears, and her head.
“That looked like it hurt.”
Tessa turned. Jem had come up behind her in the corridor, as silent as a cat. He had changed out of his gear. He wore loose dark trousers tied at the waist, and a white shirt only a few shades lighter than his skin. His fine bright hair was damp, curling against his temples and the nape of his neck.
“It did.” Tessa cradled her hand against her chest. The glove she wore had softened the blow, but her knuckles still ached.
“Your brother,” Jem said. “Is he going to be all right?”
“I don’t know. He’s in there with one of those—those monk creatures.”
“Brother Enoch.” Jem regarded her with sympathetic eyes. “I know how the Silent Brothers look, but they’re really very good doctors. They set great store by healing and medicinal arts. They live a long time, and know a great deal.”
“It hardly seems worth living a long time if you’re going to look like that.”
The corner of Jem’s mouth twitched. “I suppose it depends on what you’re living for.” He looked at her more closely. There was something about the way Jem looked at her, she thought. Like he could see into and through her. But nothing inside her, nothing he saw or heard, could bother or upset or disappoint him.
“Brother Enoch,” she said suddenly. “Do you know what he said? He told me that Nate isn’t like me. He’s fully human. No special powers at all.”
“And that upsets you?”
“I don’t know. On the one hand I wouldn’t wish this—this thing I am—on him, or anyone. But if he isn’t like me, then it means he isn’t completely my brother. He’s my parents’ son. But whose daughter am I?”
“You can’t concern yourself with that. Certainly it would be wonderful if we all knew exactly who we were. But that knowledge doesn’t come from outside, but from inside. ‘Know thyself,’ as the oracle says.” Jem grinned. “My apologies if that sounds like sophistry. I’m only telling you what I’ve learned from my own experience.”
“But I don’t know myself.” Tessa shook her head. “I’m sorry. After the way you fought at de Quincey’s, you must think I’m a terrible coward, crying because my brother isn’t a monster and I don’t have the courage to be a monster all by myself.”
“You’re not a monster,” said Jem. “Or a coward. On the contrary, I was quite impressed by the way you shot at de Quincey. You would almost certainly have killed him if there’d been any more bullets in the gun.”
“Yes, I think I would have. I wanted to kill them all.”
“That’s what Camille asked us to do, you know. Kill them all. Perhaps it was her emotions you were feeling?”
“But Camille has no reason to care about Nate, or what happens to him, and that was when I felt most murderous. When I saw Nate there, when I realized what they were planning to do—” She took a shuddering breath. “I don’t know how much of that was me and how much was Camille. And I don’t even know if it’s right to have those sort of feelings—”
“You mean,” asked Jem, “for a girl to have those feelings?”
“For anyone to have them, maybe—I don’t know. Maybe I mean for a girl to have them.”
Jem seemed to look through her then, as if he were seeing something beyond her, beyond the corridor, beyond the Institute itself. “Whatever you are physically,” he said, “male or female, strong or weak, ill or healthy—all those things matter less than what your heart contains. If you have the soul of a warrior, you are a warrior. Whatever the color, the shape, the design of the shade that conceals it, the flame inside the lamp remains the same. You are that flame.” He smiled then, seeming to have come back to himself, slightly embarrassed. “That’s what I believe.”
Before Tessa could reply, Nate’s door opened, and Charlotte came out. She responded to Tessa’s questioning look with an exhausted-looking nod. “Brother Enoch has helped your brother a great deal,” she said, “but there is much left to be done, and it will be morning before we know more. I suggest you go to sleep, Tessa. Exhausting yourself won’t help Nathaniel.”
With an effort of will Tessa forced herself simply to nod, and not to fling herself at Charlotte with a barrage of questions she knew she wouldn’t get answers to.
“And Jem.” Charlotte turned to him. “If I could talk to you for a few moments? Will you walk with me to the library?”
Jem nodded. “Of course.” He smiled at Tessa, inclining his head. “Tomorrow, then,” he said, and followed Charlotte down the corridor.
The moment they vanished around the corner, Tessa tried the door of Nate’s room. It was locked. With a sigh she turned and headed the other way down the corridor. Perhaps Charlotte was right. Perhaps she ought to get some sleep.
Halfway down the corridor she heard a commotion. Sophie, a metal pail in each of her hands, suddenly appeared in the hallway, banging a door shut behind her. She looked livid. “His Highness is in a particularly fine temper this evening,” she announced as Tessa approached. “He threw a pail at my head, he did.”
“Who?” Tessa asked, and then realized. “Oh, you mean Will. Is he all right?”
“Well enough to throw pails,” Sophie said crossly. “And to call me a nasty name. I don’t know what it meant. I think it was in French, and that usually means someone’s calling you a whore.” She tightened her lips. “I’d best run and get Mrs. Branwell. Maybe she can get him to take the cure, if I can’t.”
“The cure?”
“He must drink this.” Sophie thrust a pail toward Tessa; Tessa couldn’t quite see what was in it, but it looked like ordinary water. “He has to. Or I wouldn’t like to say as what’ll happen.”
A mad impulse took hold of Tessa. “I’ll get him to do it. Where is he?”
“Upstairs, in the attic.” Sophie’s eyes were large. “But I wouldn’t if I was you, miss. He’s downright nasty when he’s like this.”
“I don’t care,” Tessa said, reaching for the pail. Sophie handed it to her with a look of relief and apprehension. It was surprisingly heavy, filled to the brim with water and slopping over. “Will Herondale needs to learn to take his medicine like a man,” Tessa added, and pushed open the door to the attic, Sophie looking after her with an expression that clearly said she thought Tessa had gone out of her head.
Beyond the door was a narrow flight of stairs going up. She held the pail in front of her as she went; it slopped water onto the bodice of her dress, raising goose bumps on her skin. By the time she had reached the top of the steps, she was damp and breathless.
There was no door at the head of the stairs; they ended abruptly at the attic, a huge room whose roof
was so steeply gabled that it gave the impression of being low-ceilinged. Rafters just above Tessa’s head ran the length of the room, and there were very low square windows set at intervals in the walls, through which Tessa could see the gray dawn light. The floor was bare polished boards. There was no furniture at all, and no light beyond the pale illumination that came from the windows. A set of even narrower stairs led to a closed trapdoor in the ceiling.
In the center of the room lay Will, barefoot, flat on his back on the floor. A number of pails surrounded him—and the floor around him, Tessa saw as she approached, was soaked with water. Water ran in rivulets down the boards and pooled in the uneven hollows of the floor. Some of the water was tinged reddish, as if it had been mixed with blood.
Will had an arm thrown over his face, hiding his eyes. He was not lying still, but moving restlessly, as if he were in some pain. As Tessa neared, he said something in a low voice, something that sounded like a name. Cecily, Tessa thought. Yes, it sounded very much as if he had said the name Cecily.
“Will?” she said. “Who are you talking to?”
“Back, are you, Sophie?” Will replied without raising his head. “I told you if you brought me another one of those infernal pails, I’d—”
“It’s not Sophie,” Tessa said. “It’s me. Tessa.”
For a moment Will was silent—and motionless, save for the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed. He wore only a pair of dark trousers and a white shirt, and like the floor around him, he was soaking wet. The fabric of his clothes clung to him, and his black hair was pasted to his head like wet cloth. He must have been freezing cold.
“They sent you?” he said finally. He sounded incredulous, and something else, too.
“Yes,” answered Tessa, though this was not strictly true.
Will opened his eyes and turned his head toward her. Even in the dimness she could see the intensity of his eye color. “Very well, then. Leave the water and go.”
Tessa glanced down at the pail. For some reason her hands did not seem to want to let go of the metal handle. “What is it, then? I mean to say—what am I bringing you, exactly?”
“They didn’t tell you?” He blinked at her in surprise. “It’s holy water. To burn out what’s in me.”
It was Tessa’s turn to blink. “You mean—”
“I keep forgetting everything you don’t know,” Will said. “Do you recall earlier this evening when I bit de Quincey? Well, I swallowed some of his blood. Not much, but it doesn’t take much to do it.”
“To do what?”
“To turn you into a vampire.”
At that, Tessa nearly did drop the pail. “You’re turning into a vampire?”
Will grinned at that, propping himself up on one elbow. “Don’t alarm yourself unduly. It requires days for the transformation to occur, and even then, I would have to die before it took hold. What the blood would do is make me irresistibly drawn to vampires—drawn to them in the hopes that they’d make me one of them. Like their human subjugates.”
“And the holy water . . .”
“Counteracts the effects of the blood. I must keep drinking it. It makes me sick, of course—makes me cough up the blood and everything else in me.”
“Good Lord.” Tessa thrust the pail toward him with a grimace. “I suppose I had better give it to you, then.”
“I suppose you had.” Will sat up, and put his hands out to take the pail from her. He scowled down at the contents, then held it up and tipped it toward his mouth. After swallowing a few mouthfuls, he grimaced and dumped the rest unceremoniously over his head. Finished, he tossed the bucket aside.
“Does that help?” Tessa asked with honest curiosity. “Pouring it over your head like that?”
Will made a strangled noise that was only somewhat of a laugh. “The questions you ask . . .” He shook his head, flinging droplets of water from his hair onto Tessa’s clothes. Water soaked the collar and front of his white shirt, turning it transparent. The way it clung to him, showing the lines of him underneath—the ridges of hard muscle, the sharp line of collarbone, the Marks burning through like black fire—it made Tessa think of the way one might lay thin paper down over a brass engraving, brushing charcoal over it to bring the shape through. She swallowed, hard. “The blood makes me feverish, makes my skin burn,” Will said. “I can’t get cool. But, yes, the water helps.”
Tessa just stared at him. When he had come into her room at the Dark House, she had thought he was the most beautiful boy she’d ever seen, but just now, looking at him—she had never looked at a boy like that, not in this way that brought blood hot to her face, and tightened her chest. More than anything else she wanted to touch him, to touch his wet hair, to see if his arms, corded with muscle, were as hard as they looked, or if his callused palms were rough. To put her cheek against his, and feel his eyelashes brush her skin. Such long lashes . . .
“Will,” she said, and her voice sounded thin to her own ears. “Will, I want to ask you . . .”
He looked up at her. The water made his lashes cling to one another, so that they formed starlike sharp points. “What?”
“You act like you don’t care about anything,” she said on an exhale of breath. She felt as if she had been running, and had crested a hill and was racing down the other side, and there was no stopping now. Gravity was taking her where she had to go. “But—everyone cares about something. Don’t they?”
“Do they?” Will said softly. When she didn’t answer, he leaned back on his hands. “Tess,” he said. “Come over here and sit by me.”
She did. It was cold and damp on the floor, but she sat, gathering her skirts up around her so only the tips of her boots showed. She looked at Will; they were very close together, facing each other. His profile in the gray light was cold and clean; only his mouth had any softness.
“You never laugh,” she said. “You behave as if everything is funny to you, but you never laugh. Sometimes you smile when you think no one is paying attention.”
For a moment he was silent. Then, “You,” he said, half-reluctantly. “You make me laugh. From the moment you hit me with that bottle.”
“It was a jug,” she said automatically.
His lips quirked up at the corners. “Not to mention the way that you always correct me. With that funny look on your face when you do it. And the way you shouted at Gabriel Lightwood. And even the way you talked back to de Quincey. You make me . . .” He broke off, looking at her, and she wondered if she looked the way she felt—stunned and breathless. “Let me see your hands,” he said suddenly. “Tessa?”
She gave them to him, palms up, hardly looking at them herself. She could not look away from his face.
“There’s still blood,” he told her. “On your gloves.” And, looking down, she saw it was true. She had not taken off Camille’s white leather gloves, and they were streaked with blood and dirt, shredded near the fingertips where she had pried at Nate’s manacles.
“Oh,” she said, and began to draw her hands back, meaning to take the gloves off, but Will let go of only her left hand. He continued to hold the right one, lightly, by the wrist. There was a heavy silver ring on his right index finger, she saw, carved with a delicate design of birds in flight. His head was bent, his damp black hair falling forward; she couldn’t see his face. He brushed his fingers lightly over the surface of the glove. There were four pearl buttons fastening it closed at the wrist, and as he ran his fingertips over them, they sprang open and the pad of his thumb brushed against the bare skin of her inner wrist, where the blue veins pulsed.
She nearly jumped out of her skin. “Will.”
“Tessa,” he said. “What do you want from me?”
He was still stroking the inside of her wrist, his touch doing odd delicious things to her skin and nerves. Her voice shook when she spoke. “I—I want to understand you.”
He looked up at her, through his lashes. “Is that really necessary?”
“I don’t know,” Tessa sa
id. “I’m not sure anyone does understand you, except possibly Jem.”
“Jem doesn’t understand me,” Will said. “He cares for me—like a brother might. It’s not the same thing.”
“Don’t you want him to understand you?”
“Dear God, no,” he said. “Why should he need to know my reasons for living my life as I do?”
“Maybe,” Tessa said, “he simply wants to know that there is a reason.”
“Does it matter?” Will asked softly, and with a swift motion he slipped her glove entirely off her hand. The chilly air of the room struck the bare skin of her fingers with a shock, and a shiver passed over Tessa’s entire body, as if she had found herself suddenly naked in the cold. “Do reasons matter when there’s nothing that can be done to change things?”
Tessa reached for an answer, and found none. She was shivering, almost too hard to speak.
“Are you cold?” Lacing his fingers with hers, Will took her hand and pressed it to his cheek. She was startled by the feverish heat of his skin. “Tess,” he said, his voice thick and soft with desire, and she leaned toward him, swaying like a tree whose branches were weighted by snow. Her whole body ached; she ached, as if there were a terrible hollow emptiness inside her. She was more conscious of Will than she had ever been of anything or anyone else in her life, of the faint shine of blue beneath his half-closed lids, of the shadow of light stubble across his jaw where he hadn’t shaved, of faint white scars that dotted the skin of his shoulders and throat—and more than anything else of his mouth, the crescent shape of it, the slight dent in the center of his bottom lip. When he leaned toward her and brushed his lips across hers, she reached for him as if she would otherwise drown.
For a moment their mouths pressed hotly together, Will’s free hand tangling in her hair. Tessa gasped when his arms went around her, her skirts snagging on the floor as he pulled her hard against him. She put her hands lightly around his neck; his skin was burning hot to the touch. Through the thin wet material of his shirt, she could feel the muscles of his shoulders, hard and smooth. His fingers found her jeweled hair clasp and pulled at it, and her hair spilled down around her shoulders, the comb rattling to the floor, and Tessa gave a little cry of surprise against his mouth. And then, without warning, he ripped his hands from her and pushed hard against her shoulders, shoving her away from him with such force that she nearly fell backward, and only stopped herself awkwardly, her hands braced on the floor behind her.
The Infernal Devices Series Page 25