The copse was wide, spreading along the ridgeline. The moment Tessa ducked in among the trees, the light vanished; thick tree branches interweaving above her blocked out the sun. Feeling like Snow White fleeing into the forest, she looked around helplessly for a sign of where the boys had gone—broken branches, trodden leaves—and caught a shimmer of light on metal as the automaton surged out of the dark space between two trees and lunged for her.
She screamed, leaping away, and promptly tripped on her skirts. She went over backward, thumping painfully into the muddy earth. The creature stabbed one of its long insectile arms toward her. She rolled aside and the metal arm sliced into the ground beside her. There was a fallen tree branch near her; her fingers scrabbled at it, closed around it, and lifted it just as the creature’s other arm swung toward her. She swept the branch between them, concentrating on the parrying and blocking lessons she’d gotten from Gabriel.
But it was only a branch. The automaton’s metal arm sheared it in half. The end of the arm sprang open into a multi-fingered metal claw and reached for her throat. But before it could touch her, Tessa felt a violent fluttering against her collarbone. Her angel. She lay frozen as the creature jerked its claw back, one of its “fingers” leaking black fluid. A moment later it gave a high-pitched whine and collapsed backward, a freshet of more black liquid pouring from the hole that had been sliced clean through its chest.
Tessa sat up and stared.
Will stood with a sword in his hand, its hilt smeared with black. He was bareheaded, his thick dark hair tousled and tangled with leaves and bits of grass. Jem stood beside him, a witchlight stone blazing through his fingers. As Tessa watched, Will slashed out with the sword again, cutting the automaton nearly in half. It crumpled to the muddy ground. Its insides were an ugly, horribly biological-looking mess of tubes and wires.
Jem looked up. His gaze met Tessa’s. His eyes were as silver as mirrors. Will, despite having saved her, did not appear to notice she was there at all; he drew back his foot and delivered a savage kick to the metal creature’s side. His boot rang against metal.
“Tell us,” he said through gritted teeth. “What are you doing here? Why are you following us?”
The automaton’s razor-lined mouth opened. Its voice when it spoke sounded like the buzzing and grinding of faulty machinery. “I . . . am . . . a . . . warning . . . from the Magister.”
“A warning to who? To the family in the manor? Tell me!” Will looked as if he were going to kick the creature again; Jem laid a hand on his shoulder.
“It doesn’t feel pain, Will,” he said in a low voice. “And it says it has a message. Let it deliver it.”
“A warning . . . to you, Will Herondale . . . and to all Nephilim . . .” The creature’s broken voice ground out, “The Magister says . . . you must cease your investigation. The past . . . is the past. Leave Mortmain’s buried, or your family will pay the price. Do not dare approach or warn them. If you do, they will be destroyed.”
Jem was looking at Will; Will was still ashy-pale, but his cheeks were burning with rage. “How did Mortmain bring my family here? Did he threaten them? What has he done?”
The creature whirred and clicked, then began to speak again. “I . . . am . . . a . . . warning . . . from . . .”
Will snarled like an animal and slashed down with the sword. Tessa remembered Jessamine, in Hyde Park, tearing a faerie creature to ribbons with her delicate parasol. Will cut at the automaton until it was little more than ribbons of metal; Jem, throwing his arms around his friend and yanking him bodily backward, finally stopped him.
“Will,” he said. “Will, enough.” He glanced up, and the other two followed his gaze. In the distance, through the trees, other shapes moved—more automatons, like this one. “We must go,” Jem said. “If we want to draw them off, away from your family, we must leave.”
Will hesitated.
“Will, you know you cannot go near them,” Jem said desperately. “If nothing else, it is the Law. If we bring danger to them, the Clave will not move to help them in any way. They are not Shadowhunters anymore. Will.”
Slowly Will lowered his arm to his side. He stood, with one of Jem’s arms still around his shoulders, staring down at the pile of scrap metal at his feet. Black liquid dripped from the blade of the sword that dangled in his hand, and scorched the grass below.
Tessa exhaled. She hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath until that moment. Will must have heard her, for he raised his head and his gaze met hers across the clearing. Something in it made her look away. Agony stripped so raw was not meant for her eyes.
In the end they hid the remains of the destroyed automaton as swiftly as possible, by burying them in the soft earth beneath a rotting log. Tessa helped as best she could, hampered by her skirts. By the end of it her hands were as black with dirt and mud as Will’s and Jem’s were.
None of them spoke; they worked in an eerie silence. When they were done, Will led the way out of the copse, guided by the light of Jem’s witchlight rune-stone. They emerged from the woods nearly at the road, where the Starkweather carriage waited, Gottshall dozing in the driver’s seat as if only a few moments had passed since they had arrived.
If their appearances—filthy, smeared with mud, and with leaves caught in their hair—surprised the old man at all, he didn’t show it, nor did he ask them if they had found what they had come looking for. He only grunted a hello and waited for them to climb up into the carriage before he signaled the horses with a click of his tongue to turn around and begin the long journey back to York.
The curtains inside the carriage were drawn back; the sky was heavy with blackish clouds, pressing down on the horizon. “It’s going to rain,” Jem said, pushing damp silvery hair out of his eyes.
Will said nothing. He was staring out the window. His eyes were the color of the Arctic sea at night.
“Cecily,” said Tessa in a much gentler voice than she was used to using with Will these days. He looked so miserable—as bleak and stark as the moors they were passing through. “Your sister—she looks like you.”
Will remained silent. Tessa, seated next to Jem on the hard seat, shivered a little. Her clothes were damp from the wet earth and branches, and the inside of the carriage was cold. Jem reached down and, finding a slightly ragged lap rug, settled it over the both of them. She could feel the heat that radiated off his body, as if he were feverish, and fought the urge to move closer to him to get warm.
“Are you cold, Will?” she asked, but he only shook his head, his eyes still staring, unseeing, at the passing countryside. She looked at Jem in desperation.
Jem spoke, his voice clear and direct. “Will,” he said. “I thought . . . I thought that your sister was dead.”
Will drew his gaze from the window and looked at them both. When he smiled, it was ghastly. “My sister is dead,” he said.
And that was all he would say. They rode the rest of the way back to the city of York in silence.
Having barely slept the night before, Tessa fell in and out of a fitful doze that lasted until they reached the York train station. In a fog she dismounted from the carriage and followed the others to the London platform; they were late for the train, and nearly missed it, and Jem held the door open for her, for her and Will, as both of them stumbled up the steps and into the compartment after him. Later she would remember the way he looked, hanging on to the door, hatless, calling to both of them, and recall staring out the window of the train as it pulled away, seeing Gottshall standing on the platform looking after them with his unsettling dark eyes, his hat pulled low. Everything else was a blur.
There was no conversation this time as the train puffed its way through countryside increasingly darkened by clouds, only silence. Tessa rested her chin on her palm, cradling her head against the hard glass of the window. Green hills flew by, and small towns and villages, each with their own neat small station, the name of it picked out in gold on a red sign. Church spires rose in the di
stance; cities swelled and vanished, and Tessa was aware of Jem whispering to Will, in Latin, she thought—“Me specta, me specta,” and Will not answering. Later she was aware that Jem had left the compartment, and she looked at Will across the small dimming space between them. The sun had begun to go down, and it lent a rosy flush to his skin, belying the blank look in his eyes.
“Will,” she said softly, sleepily. “Last night—” You were kind to me, she was going to say. Thank you.
The glare from his blue eyes stabbed through her. “There was no last night,” he said through his teeth.
At that, she sat up straight, almost awake. “Oh, truly? We just went right from one afternoon on through till the next morning? How odd no one else has remarked on it. I should think it some sort of miracle, a day with no night—”
“Don’t test me, Tessa.” Will’s hands were clenched on his knees, his fingernails, half-moons of dirt under them, digging into the fabric of his trousers.
“Your sister’s alive,” she said, knowing perfectly well that she was provoking him. “Oughtn’t you be glad?”
He whitened. “Tessa—,” he began, and leaned forward as if he meant to do she knew not what—strike the window and break it, shake her by the shoulders, or hold her as if he never meant to let her go. It was all one great bewilderment with him, wasn’t it? Then the compartment door opened and Jem came in, carrying a damp cloth.
He looked from Will to Tessa and raised his silvery eyebrows. “A miracle,” he said. “You got him to speak.”
“Just to shout at me, really,” said Tessa. “Not quite loaves and fishes.”
Will had gone back to staring out the window, and looked at neither of them as they spoke.
“It’s a start,” said Jem, and he sat down beside her. “Here. Give me your hands.”
Surprised, Tessa held her hands out to him—and was horrified. They were filthy, the nails cracked and broken and thick with half-moons of dirt where she had clawed at the Yorkshire earth. There was even a bloody scratch across her knuckles, though she had no memory of having gotten it.
Not a lady’s hands. She thought of Jessamine’s perfect pink and white paws. “Jessie would be horrified,” she said mournfully. “She’d tell me I had charwoman’s hands.”
“And what, pray tell, is dishonorable about that?” said Jem as he gently cleaned the dirt from her scratches. “I saw you chase after us, and that automaton creature. If Jessamine does not know by now that there is honor in blood and dirt, she never will.”
The cool cloth felt good on her fingers. She looked up at Jem, who was intent on his task, his lashes a fringe of lowered silver. “Thank you,” she said. “I doubt I was any help at all, and probably a hindrance, but thank you all the same.”
He smiled at her, the sun coming out from behind clouds. “That’s what we’re training you for, isn’t it?”
She lowered her voice. “Have you any idea what could have happened? Why Will’s family would be living in a house Mortmain once owned?”
Jem glanced over at Will, who was still staring bitterly out the window. They had entered London, and gray buildings were beginning to rise up around them on either side. The look Jem gave Will was a tired, loving sort of look, a familial look, and Tessa realized that, though when she had imagined them as brothers, she had always imagined Will as the older, the caretaker, and Jem as the younger, the reality was far more complicated than that. “I do not,” he said, “though it makes me think that the game Mortmain is playing is a long one. Somehow he knew exactly where our investigations would lead us, and he arranged for this—encounter—to shock us as much as possible. He wishes us to be reminded who it is who has the power.”
Tessa shuddered. “I don’t know what he wants from me, Jem,” she said in a low voice. “When he said to me that he made me, it was as if he were saying he could unmake me just as easily.”
Jem’s warm arm touched hers. “You cannot be unmade,” he said just as softly. “And Mortmain underestimates you. I saw how you used that branch against the automaton—”
“It was not enough. If it had not been for my angel—” Tessa touched the pendant at her throat. “The automaton touched it and recoiled. Another mystery I do not understand. It protected me before, and again this time, but in other situations lies dormant. It is as much a mystery as my talent.”
“Which, fortunately, you did not need to use to Change into Starkweather. He seemed quite happy simply to give us the Shade files.”
“Thank goodness,” said Tessa. “I wasn’t looking forward to it. He seems such an unpleasant, bitter man. But if it ever turns out to be necessary . . .” She took something from her pocket and held it up, something that glinted in the carriage’s dim light. “A button,” she said smugly. “It fell from the cuff of his jacket this morning, and I picked it up.”
Jem smiled. “Very clever, Tessa. I knew we’d be glad we brought you with us—”
He broke off with a cough. Tessa looked at him in alarm, and even Will was roused out of his silent despondency, turning to look at Jem with narrowed eyes. Jem coughed again, his hand pressed to his mouth, but when he took it away, there was no blood visible. Tessa saw Will’s shoulders relax.
“Just some dust in my throat,” Jem reassured them. He looked not ill but very tired, though his exhaustion only served to point up the delicacy of his features. His beauty did not blaze like Will’s did in fierce colors and repressed fire, but it had its own muted perfection, the loveliness of snow falling against a silver-gray sky.
“Your ring!” She started up suddenly as she remembered that she was still wearing it. She put the button back into her pocket, then reached to draw the Carstairs ring off her hand. “I had meant to give it back to you earlier,” she said, placing the silver circlet in his palm. “I forgot . . .”
He curled his fingers around hers. Despite her thoughts of snow and gray skies, his hand was surprisingly warm. “That’s all right,” he said in a low voice. “I like the way it looks on you.”
She felt her cheeks warm. Before she could answer, the train whistle sounded. Voices cried out that they were in London, Kings Cross Station. The train began to slow as the platform came into view. The hubbub of the station rose to assault Tessa’s ears, along with the sound of the train braking. Jem said something, but his words were lost in the noise; it sounded like a warning, but Will was already on his feet, his hand reaching for the compartment door latch. He swung it open and leaped out and down. If he were not a Shadowhunter, Tessa thought, he would have fallen, and badly, but as it was, he simply landed lightly on his feet and began to run, pushing his way among the crowding porters, the commuters, the gentility traveling north for the weekend with their massive trunks and hunting hounds on leashes, the newspaper boys and pickpockets and costermongers and all the other human traffic of the grand station.
Jem was on his feet, hand reaching for the door—but he turned back and looked at Tessa, and she saw an expression cross his face, an expression that said that he realized that if he fled after Will, she could not follow. With another long look at her, he latched the door shut and sank into the seat opposite her as the train came to a stop.
“But Will—,” she began.
“He will be all right,” said Jem with conviction. “You know how he is. Sometimes he just wants to be alone. And I doubt he wishes to take part in recounting today’s experiences to Charlotte and the others.” When she didn’t move her eyes from his, he repeated, gently, “Will can take care of himself, Tessa.”
She thought of the bleak look in Will’s eyes when he had spoken to her, starker than the Yorkshire moors they had just left behind them. She hoped Jem was right.
7
THE CURSE
An orphan’s curse would drag to hell
A spirit from on high;
But oh! more horrible than that
Is the curse in a dead man’s eye!
Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse,
And yet I could n
ot die.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
Magnus heard the sound of the front door opening and the following clatter of raised voices, and thought immediately, Will. And then was amused that he had thought it. The Shadow-hunter boy was becoming like an annoying relative, he thought as he folded down a page of the book he was reading—Lucian’s Dialogues of the Gods; Camille would be furious he had dog-eared her volume—someone whose habits you knew well but could not change. Someone whose presence you could recognize by the sound of their boots in the hallway. Someone who felt free to argue with the footman when he’d been given orders to tell everyone that you were not at home.
The parlor door flew open, and Will stood on the threshold, looking half-triumphant and half-wretched—quite a feat. “I knew you were here,” he announced as Magnus sat up straight on the sofa, swinging his boots to the floor. “Now, will you tell this—this overgrown bat to stop hovering over my shoulder?” He indicated Archer, Camille’s subjugate and Magnus’s temporary footman, who was indeed lurking at Will’s side. His face was set in a look of disapproval, but then it was always set in a look of disapproval. “Tell him you want to see me.”
Magnus set his book down on the table beside him. “But maybe I don’t want to see you,” he said reasonably. “I told Archer to let no one in, not to let no one in but you.”
“He threatened me,” Archer said in his hissing not-quite-human voice. “I shall tell my mistress.”
“You do that,” said Will, but his eyes were on Magnus, blue and anxious. “Please. I have to talk to you.”
Drat the boy, Magnus thought. After an exhausting day spent clearing a memory-blocking spell for a member of the Penhallow family, he had wanted only to rest. He had stopped listening for Camille’s step in the hall, or waiting for her message, but he still preferred this room to others—this room, where her personal touch seemed to cling to the thorned roses on the wallpaper, the faint perfume that rose from the draperies. He had looked forward to an evening spent by the fire here—a glass of wine, a book, and being left strictly alone.
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