“You’re a werewolf,” he said. “One of the packless ones, buying yin fen off the ifrits down the Chapel. Aren’t you?”
The werewolf’s eyes roamed over them both, and fastened on Jem. His lids narrowed, and his hand shot out, grabbing Jem by the lapels. “You,” he wheezed. “You’re one of us. ’ave you got any of it on you—any of the stuff—”
Jem recoiled. Will seized the werewolf by the wrist and yanked his hand free. It wasn’t difficult; there was very little strength in his nerveless fingers. “Don’t touch him.” Will heard his own voice as if from a distance, clipped and cold. “He doesn’t have any of your filthy powder. It doesn’t work on us Nephilim like it does on you.”
“Will.” There was a plea in Jem’s voice: Be kinder.
“You work for Mortmain,” said Will. “Tell us what you do for him. Tell us where he is.”
The werewolf laughed. Blood splashed up over his lips and dribbled down his chin. Some of it splattered onto Jem’s gear. “As if—I’d know—where the Magister was,” he wheezed. “Bloody fools, the pair of you. Bloody useless Nephilim. If I ’ad—me strength—I’d chop yer into bloody rags—”
“But you don’t.” Will was remorseless. “And maybe we do have some yin fen.”
“You don’t. You think—I don’t know?” The werewolf’s eyes wandered. “When ’e gave it to me first, I saw things—such things as yer can’t imagine—the great crystal city—the towers of Heaven—” Another spasming cough racked him. More blood splattered. It had a silvery sheen to it, like mercury. Will exchanged a look with Jem. The crystal city. He couldn’t help thinking of Alicante, though he had never been there. “I thought I were going ter live forever—work all night, all day, never get tired. Then we started dying off, one by one. The drug, it kills ya, but ’e never said. I came back here to see if maybe there was still any of it stashed somewhere. But there’s none. No point leavin’. I’m dyin’ now. Might as well die ’ere as anywhere.”
“He knew what he was doing when he gave you that drug,” said Jem. “He knew it would kill you. He doesn’t deserve your secrecy. Tell us what he was doing—what he was keeping you working on all night and day.”
“Putting those things together—those metal men. They don’t ’arf give you the willies, but the money were good and the drugs were better—”
“And a great deal of good that money will do you now,” said Jem, his voice uncharacteristically bitter. “How often did he make you take it? The silver powder?”
“Six, seven times a day.”
“No wonder they’re running out of it down the Chapel,” Will muttered. “Mortmain’s controlling the supply.”
“You’re not supposed to take it like that,” said Jem. “The more you take, the faster you die.”
The werewolf fixed his gaze on Jem. His eyes were shot through with red veins. “And you,” he said. “’Ow much longer ’ave you got left?”
Will turned his head. Charlotte was motionless behind him at the top of the stairs, staring. He raised a hand to gesture her over. “Charlotte, if we can get him downstairs, perhaps the Silent Brothers can do something to help him. If you could—”
But Charlotte, to Will’s surprise, had turned a pale shade of green. She clapped her hand over her mouth and dashed downstairs.
“Charlotte!” Will hissed; he didn’t dare shout. “Oh, bloody hell. All right, Jem. You take his legs, I’ll take his shoulders—”
“There’s no point, Will.” Jem’s voice was soft. “He’s dead.”
Will turned back. Indeed, the silver eyes were wide open, glassy, fixed on the ceiling; the chest had ceased to rise and fall. Jem reached to close his eyelids, but Will caught his friend by the wrist.
“Don’t.”
“I wasn’t going to give him the blessing, Will. Just close his eyes.”
“He doesn’t deserve that. He was working with the Magister!” Will’s whisper was rising to a shout.
“He is like me,” said Jem simply. “An addict.”
Will looked at him over their joined hands. “He is not like you. And you will not die like that.”
Jem’s lips parted in surprise. “Will . . .”
They both heard the sound of a door opening, and a voice calling out Jessamine’s name. Will released Jem’s wrist, and both of them dropped flat to the ground, inching to the edge of the gallery to see what was happening on the warehouse floor.
16
MORTAL RAGE
When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defac’d
The rich-proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-raz’d,
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage
—Shakespeare, “Sonnet 64”
It was a peculiar experience walking the streets of London as a boy, Tessa thought as she made her way along the crowded pavement of Eastcheap. The men who crossed her path spared her barely a glance, just pushed past her toward the doors of public houses or the next turn in the street. As a girl, walking alone through these streets at night in her fine clothes, she would have been the object of stares and jeers. As a boy she was—invisible. She had never realized what it was like to be invisible before. How light and free she felt—or would have felt, had she not felt like an aristocrat from A Tale of Two Cities on his way to the guillotine in a tumbrel.
She caught sight of Cyril only once, slipping between two buildings across the road from 32 Mincing Lane. It was a great stone building, and the black iron fence surrounding it, in the vanishing twilight, looked like rows of jagged black teeth. From the front gates dangled a padlock, but it had been left open; she slipped through, and then up the dusty steps to the front door, which was also unlocked.
Inside she found that the empty offices, their windows looking out onto Mincing Lane, were still and dead; a fly buzzed in one, hurling itself over and over against the plated glass panes until it fell, exhausted, to the sill. Tessa shuddered and hurried on.
In each room she walked into, she tensed, expecting to see Nate; in each room, he was not there. The final room had a door that opened out onto the floor of a warehouse. Dim blue light filtered in through the cracks in the boarded-up windows. She looked around uncertainly. “Nate?” she whispered.
He stepped out of the shadows between two flaking plaster pillars. His blond hair shone in the bluish light, under a silk top hat. He wore a blue tweed frock coat, black trousers, and black boots, but his usually immaculate appearance was disheveled. His hair hung lankly in his eyes, and there was a smear of dirt across his cheek. His clothes were wrinkled and creased as if he had slept in them. “Jessamine,” he said, relief evident in his tone. “My darling.” He opened his arms.
She came forward slowly, her whole body tensed. She did not want Nate touching her, but she could see no way to avoid his embrace. His arms went around her. His hand caught the brim of her hat and pulled it free, letting her fair curls tumble down her back. She thought of Will pulling the pins from her hair, and her stomach involuntarily tightened.
“I need to know where the Magister is,” she began in a shaking voice. “It’s terribly important. I overheard some of the Shadowhunters’ plans, you see. I know you didn’t wish to tell me, but . . .”
He pushed her hair back, ignoring her words. “I see,” he said, and his voice was deep and husky. “But first—” He tipped her head up with a finger under her chin. “Come and kiss me, sweet-and-twenty.”
Tessa wished he wouldn’t quote Shakespeare. She’d never be able to hear that sonnet again without wanting to be sick. Every nerve in her body wanted to leap screaming through her skin in revulsion as he leaned toward her. She prayed for the others to burst in as she let him tilt her head up, up—
Nate began to laugh. With a jerk of his wrist, he sent her hat sailing into the shadows; his fingers tightened on her chin, the nails digging in. “My apologies for my impetuous behavior,” he said. “I couldn’t help but be curious to see how far you’d go to protect your Sha
dowhunter friends . . . little sister.”
“Nate.” Tessa tried to jerk backward, out of his grasp, but his grip on her was too strong. His other hand shot out like a snake, spinning her around, pinning her against him with his forearm across her throat. His breath was hot against her ear. He smelled sour, like old gin and sweat.
“Did you really think I didn’t know?” he spat. “After that note arrived at Benedict’s ball, sending me off on that wild goose chase to Vauxhall, I realized. It all made sense. I should have known it was you from the beginning. Stupid little girl.”
“Stupid?” she hissed. “I got you to spill your secrets, Nate. You told me everything. Did Mortmain find out? Is that why you look like you haven’t slept in days?”
He jerked his arm tighter around her, making her gasp with pain. “You couldn’t leave well enough alone. You had to pry into my business. Delighted to see me brought low, are you? What kind of sister does that make you, Tessie?”
“You would have killed me if you had the chance. There is no game you can play, nothing you can say to make me think I’ve betrayed you, Nate. You earned every bit of it. Allying yourself with Mortmain—”
He shook her, hard enough to make her teeth rattle. “As if my alliances are any of your business. I was doing well for myself until you and your Nephilim friends came and meddled. Now the Magister wants my head on a block. Your fault. All your fault. I was almost in despair, till I got that ridiculous note from Jessamine. I knew you were behind it, of course. All the trouble you must have gone through too, torturing her to get her to write me that ridiculous missive—”
“We didn’t torture her,” Tessa ground out. She struggled, but Nate only held her more tightly, the buttons on his waistcoat digging into her back. “She wanted to do it. She wanted to save her own skin.”
“I don’t believe you.” The hand that wasn’t across her throat gripped her chin; his nails dug in, and she yelped with pain. “She loves me.”
“No one could love you,” Tessa spat. “You’re my brother—I loved you—and you have killed even that.”
Nate leaned forward and growled, “I am not your brother.”
“Very well, my half brother, if you must have it—”
“You’re not my sister. Not even by half.” He said the words with a cruel pleasure. “Your mother and my mother were not the same woman.”
“That’s not possible,” Tessa whispered. “You’re lying. Our mother was Elizabeth Gray—”
“Your mother was Elizabeth Gray, born Elizabeth Moore,” said Nate. “Mine was Harriet Moore.”
“Aunt Harriet?”
“She was engaged once. Did you know that? After our parents—your parents—were married. The man died before the wedding could take place. But she was already with child. Your mother raised the baby as hers to spare her sister the shame of the world knowing she had consummated her marriage before it had taken place. That she was a whore.” His voice was as bitter as poison. “I’m not your brother, and I never was. Harriet—she never told me she was my mother. I found out from your mother’s letters. All those years, and she never said a word. She was too ashamed.”
“You killed her,” Tessa said numbly. “Your own mother.”
“Because she was my mother. Because she’d disowned me. Because she was ashamed of me. Because I’ll never know who my father was. Because she was a whore.” Nate’s voice was empty. Nate had always been empty. He had never been anything but a pretty shell, and Tessa and her aunt had dreamed into him empathy and compassion and sympathetic weakness because they had wanted to see it there, not because it was.
“Why did you tell Jessamine that my mother was a Shadow-hunter?” Tessa demanded. “Even if Aunt Harriet was your mother, she and my mother were sisters. Aunt Harriet would have been a Shadowhunter, too, and so would you. Why tell such a ridiculous lie?”
He smirked. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” His grip tightened on her neck, choking her. She gasped and thought suddenly of Gabriel, saying, Aim your kicks at the kneecaps; the pain is agonizing.
She kicked up and backward, the heel of her boot colliding with Nate’s knee, making a dull cracking sound. Nate yelled, and his leg went out from under him. He kept his grip on Tessa as he fell, rolling so that his elbow jammed into her stomach as they tumbled to the ground together. She gasped, the air punched from her lungs, her eyes filling with tears.
She kicked out at him again, trying to scramble backward, and caught him a glancing blow on the shoulder, but he lunged at her, seizing her by the waistcoat. The buttons popped off it in a rain as he dragged her toward him; his other hand gripped her hair as she flailed out at him, raking her nails down his cheek. The blood that sprang immediately to the surface was a savagely satisfying sight.
“Let me go,” she panted. “You can’t kill me. The Magister wants me alive—”
“‘Alive’ is not ‘unhurt,’” Nate snarled, blood running down his face and off his chin. He knotted his hand in her hair and dragged her toward him; she screamed at the pain and lashed out with her boots, but he was nimble, dodging her flailing feet. Panting, she sent up a silent call: Jem, Will, Charlotte, Henry—where are you?
“Wondering where your friends are?” He hauled her to her feet, one hand in her hair, the other fisted in the back of her shirt. “Well, here’s one of them, at least.”
A grinding noise alerted Tessa to a movement in the shadows. Nate dragged her head around by the hair, shaking her. “Look,” he spat. “It’s time you knew what you are up against.”
Tessa stared. The thing that emerged from the shadows was gigantic—twenty feet tall, she guessed, made of iron. There was barely any jointure. It appeared to move as one single fluid mechanism, seamless and almost featureless. Its bottom half did split into legs, each one ending in a foot tipped with metal spikes. Its arms were the same, finishing in clawlike hands, and its head was a smooth oval broken only by a wide jagged-toothed mouth like a crack in an egg. A pair of twisting silvery horns spiraled up from its “head.” A thin line of blue fire crackled between them.
In its enormous hands it carried a limp body, dressed in gear. Against the bulk of the gigantic automaton, she looked even smaller than ever.
“Charlotte!” Tessa screamed. She redoubled her attempts to get away from Nate, whipping her head to the side. Some of her hair tore free and fluttered to the ground—Jessamine’s fair hair, stained now with blood. Nate retaliated by slapping her hard enough that she saw stars; when she sagged, he caught her around the throat, the buttons on his cuffs digging into her windpipe.
Nate chuckled. “A prototype,” he said. “Abandoned by the Magister. Too large and cumbersome for his purposes. But not for mine.” He raised his voice. “Drop her.”
The automaton’s metal hands opened. Charlotte tumbled free and struck the ground with a sickening thump. She lay unmoving. From this distance Tessa could not tell if her chest was rising and falling or not.
“Now crush her,” said Nate.
Ponderously the thing raised its spiked metal foot. Tessa clawed at Nate’s forearms, ripping his skin with her nails.
“Charlotte!” For a moment Tessa thought the voice screaming was her own, but it was too low-pitched for that. A figure darted out from behind the automaton, a figure all in black, topped by a shock of blazing ginger hair, a thin-bladed misericord in hand.
Henry.
Without even a glance at Tessa and Nate, he launched himself at the automaton, bringing his blade down in a long curving arc. There was the clang of metal on metal. Sparks flew, and the automaton staggered back. Its foot came down, slamming into the floor, inches from Charlotte’s supine body. Henry landed, then threw himself at the creature again, slashing out with his blade.
The blade shattered. For a moment Henry simply stood and looked at it with stupid shock. Then the creature’s hand whipped forward and seized him by the arm. He shouted out as it lifted him and threw him with incredible force against one of the pillars; he struck it, c
rumpled, and fell to the floor, where he lay still.
Nate laughed. “Such a display of matrimonial devotion,” he said. “Who would have thought it? Jessamine always said she thought Branwell couldn’t stand his wife.”
“You’re a pig,” Tessa said, struggling in his grasp. “What do you know about the things people do for each other? If Jessamine were burning to death, you wouldn’t look up from your card game. You care for nothing but yourself.”
“Be quiet, or I’ll loosen your teeth for you.” Nate shook her again, and called out, “Come! Over here. You must hold her till the Magister arrives.”
With a grinding of gears the automaton moved to obey. It was not as swift as its smaller brethren, but its size was such that Tessa could not help but follow its movements with an icy fear. And that was not all. The Magister was coming. Tessa wondered if Nate had summoned him yet, if he was on his way. Mortmain. Even the memory of his cold eyes, his icy, controlling smile, made her stomach turn. “Let me go,” she cried, jerking away from her brother. “Let me go to Charlotte—”
Nate shoved her forward, hard, and she sprawled on the ground, her elbows and knees connecting with force with the hard wooden floor. She gasped and rolled sideways, under the shadow of the second-floor gallery, as the automaton lumbered toward her. She cried out—
And they leaped from the gallery above, Will and Jem, each landing on a shoulder of the creature. It roared, a sound like bellows being fed with coal, and staggered back, allowing Tessa to roll out of its path and launch herself to her feet. She glanced from Henry to Charlotte. Henry was pale and still, crumpled beside the pillar, but Charlotte, lying where the automaton had dropped her, was in imminent danger of being crushed by the rampaging machine.
Taking a deep breath, Tessa dashed across the room to Charlotte and knelt down, laying her fingers to Charlotte’s throat; there was a pulse there, fluttering weakly. Putting her hands under Charlotte’s arms, she began to drag her toward the wall, away from the center of the room, where the automaton was spinning and spitting sparks, reaching up with its pincered hands to claw at Jem and Will.
The Infernal Devices Series Page 74