فصل 11

11 FEW ARE ANGELS

We all are men,

In our own natures frail, and capable

Of our flesh; few are angels

—Shakespeare, King Henry VIII

Tessa screamed.

Not a human scream but a vampire scream. She barely recognized the sound that came from her own throat—it sounded like shattering glass. Only later did she even realize that she was screaming words. She would have thought she’d cry her brother’s name, but she didn’t.

“Will!” she screamed. “Will, now! Do it now!”

A gasp ran through the room. Dozens of white faces swung toward Tessa. Her scream had broken through their blood-lust. De Quincey was motionless on the stage; even Nathaniel was looking at her, dazed and staring, as if wondering if her screams were a dream born out of his agony.

Will, his finger on the button of the Phosphor, hesitated. His eyes met Tessa’s across the room. It was only for a split second, but de Quincey saw

their glance. As if he could read it, the look on his face changed, and he swung his hand up to point directly at Will.

“The boy,” he spat. “Stop him!”

Will tore his gaze from Tessa’s. The vampires were already rising to their feet, moving toward him, their eyes glittering with rage and hunger. Will looked past them, at de Quincey, who was staring at Will with fury. There was no fear on Will’s face as his gaze met the vampire’s—no hesitation, and no surprise.

“I am not a boy,” he said. “I am Nephilim.”

And he pressed the button.

Tessa braced herself for a flare of white witchlight. Instead there was a great whoosh of sound as the flames of the candela-bras shot toward the ceiling. Sparks flew, scattering the floor with glowing embers, catching in the curtains, in the skirts of women’s dresses. Suddenly the room was full of billowing black smoke and screams—high-pitched and horrible.

Tessa could no longer see Will. She tried to dart forward, but Magnus—she had nearly forgotten he was there—caught her firmly by the wrist. “Miss Gray, no,” he said, and when she responded by pulling away harder, he added, “Miss Gray! You’re a vampire now! If you catch fire, you’ll go up like kindling wood—” As if to illustrate his point, at that moment a stray spark landed atop Lady Delilah’s white wig. It burst into flames. With a cry she tried to rip it from her head, but as her hands came in contact with the flames, they, too, caught fire as if they were made of paper instead of skin. In less than a second both her arms were burning like torches. Howling, she raced toward the door, but the fire was faster than she was. Within seconds a bonfire raged where she had stood. Tessa could just see the outline of a blackened screaming creature writhing inside it.

“Do you see what I mean?” Magnus shouted in Tessa’s ear, struggling to make himself heard over the howls of the vampires, who were diving this way and that, trying to avoid the flames.

“Let me go!” Tessa shrieked. De Quincey had leaped into the melee; Nathaniel was slumped alone onstage, apparently unconscious, only his manacles holding him to the chair. “That’s my brother up there. My brother!” Magnus stared at her. Taking advantage of his confusion, Tessa jerked her arm free and began to run toward the stage. The room was chaos: vampires rushing to and fro, many of them stampeding toward the doorway. The vampires who had reached the door were pushing and shoving to get through it first; others had turned course and were streaming toward the French doors that looked out over the garden.

Tessa veered to avoid a fallen chair, and nearly ran headlong into the redheaded vampire in the blue dress who had glared at her earlier. She looked terrified now. She plunged toward Tessa—then seemed to stumble. Her mouth opened in a scream, and blood poured from it like a fountain. Her face crumpled, folding in on itself, the skin resolving into dust and raining down from the bones of her skull. Her red hair shriveled and turned gray; the skin of her arms melted and turned to powder, and with a last despairing shriek the vampire woman collapsed into a stringy heap of bones and dust lying atop an empty satin dress.

Tessa gagged, tore her eyes away from the remains, and saw Will. He stood directly in front of her, holding a long silver knife; the blade was smeared with scarlet blood. His face was bloody too, his eyes wild. “What the hell are you still doing here?” he shouted at Tessa. “You unbelievably stupid—” Tessa heard the noise before Will did, a thin whining sound, like a piece of broken machinery. The fair-haired boy in the gray jacket—the human servant Lady Delilah had drunk from earlier—was rushing at Will, a high-pitched wailing sound coming from his throat, his face smeared with tears and blood. He was carrying a torn-off chair leg in one hand; the end of it was ragged and sharp.

“Will, look out!” Tessa shouted, and Will spun. He moved fast, Tessa saw, like a dark blur, and the knife in his hand was a flash of silver in the smoky dimness. When he stopped moving, the boy was lying on the ground, the blade protruding from his chest. Blood welled around it, thicker and darker than vampire blood.

Will, staring down, was ashen. “I thought . . .”

“He would have killed you if he could,” Tessa said.

“You know nothing of it,” Will said. He shook his head, once, as if clearing it of her voice, or of the sight of the boy on the ground. The subjugate looked very young, his twisted face softer in death. “I told you to go—” “That’s my brother,” Tessa said, pointing toward the back of the room. Nathaniel was still unconscious, limp in his manacles. If it weren’t for the blood still flowing from the wound in his neck, she would have thought he was dead. “Nathaniel. In the chair.” Will’s eyes widened in astonishment. “But how—?” he began. He didn’t get a chance to finish his question. At that moment the sound of shattering glass filled the room. The French windows burst inward, and the room was suddenly flooded with Shadowhunters in their dark fighting gear. They were driving before them in a screaming, ragged group the vampires who had fled into the garden. As Tessa stared, more Shadowhunters began flooding in from the other doors as well, herding more vampires in front of them, like dogs herding sheep into a pen. De Quincey staggered before the other vampires, his pale face smeared with black ash, his teeth bared.

Tessa saw Henry among the Nephilim, easily recognizable by his ginger hair. Charlotte was there too, dressed like a man all in dark fighting gear, like the women pictured in Tessa’s Shadowhunter book. She looked small and determined and surprisingly fierce. And then there was Jem. His gear made him appear all the more startlingly pale, and the black Marks on his skin stood out like ink on paper. In the crowd she recognized Gabriel Lightwood; his father, Benedict; slim black-haired Mrs. Highsmith; and behind them all strode Magnus, blue sparks flying from his hands as he gestured.

Will exhaled, some of the color returning to his face. “I wasn’t sure they’d come,” he muttered, “not with the Phosphor malfunctioning.” He tore his eyes away from his friends and looked at Tessa. “Go attend to your brother,” he said. “That’ll get you out of the worst of it. I hope.” He turned and walked away from her without a backward glance. The Nephilim had herded the remaining vampires, those who had not been killed by the fire—or by Will—into the center of a makeshift circle of Shadowhunters. De Quincey towered among the group, his pale face twisted in rage; his shirt was stained with blood—his own or someone else’s, she couldn’t tell. The other vampires huddled behind him like children behind a parent, looking both fierce and wretched at the same time.

“The Law,” de Quincey growled, as Benedict Lightwood advanced on him, a shining blade in his right hand, its surface scored with black runes. “The Law protects us. We surrender to you. The Law—”

“You have broken the Law,” snarled Benedict. “Therefore its protection no longer extends to you. The sentence is death.”

“One mundane,” said de Quincey, sparing a glance toward Nathaniel. “One mundane who has also broken Covenant Law—”

“The Law does not extend to mundanes. They cannot be expected to follow the laws of a world they know nothing of.”

“He is worthless,” de Quincey said. “You do not know how worthless. Do you really desire to shatter our alliance over one worthless mundane?”

“It is more than just one mundane!” Charlotte cried, and from her jacket she drew the paper Will had taken from the library. Tessa had not seen Will pass it to Charlotte, but he must have. “What of these spells? Did you think we would not discover them? This—this black sorcery is absolutely forbidden by the Covenant!” De Quincey’s still face betrayed only a hint of his surprise. “Where did you find that?”

Charlotte’s mouth was a hard thin line. “That doesn’t matter.”

“Whatever it is you think you know—,” de Quincey began.

“We know enough!” Charlotte’s voice was full of passion. “We know you hate and despise us! We know your alliance with us has been a sham!”

“And have you made it against Covenant Law now to dislike Shadowhunters?” de Quincey said, but the sneer was gone from his voice. He sounded ragged.

“Do not play your games with us,” spat Benedict. “After all we’ve done for you, after we passed the Accords into Law—Why? We’ve tried to make you equal to ourselves—”

De Quincey’s face twisted. “Equal? You don’t know what the word means. You cannot let go of your own conviction, let go of your belief in your inherent superiority, for long enough to even consider what that would mean. Where are our seats on the Council? Where is our embassy in Idris?” “But that—that’s ridiculous,” Charlotte said, though she had blanched.

Benedict shot Charlotte an impatient look. “And irrelevant. None of this excuses your behavior, de Quincey. While you sat in council with us, pretending you were interested in peace, behind our backs you broke the Law and mocked our power. Surrender yourself, tell us what we want to know, and we might let your clan survive. Otherwise, there will be no mercy.” Another vampire spoke. It was one of the men who had strapped Nathaniel to his chair, a big flame-haired man with an angry face. “If we needed any further proof that the Nephilim have never meant their promises of peace, here it is. Dare to attack us, Shadowhunters, and you’ll have a war on your hands!” Benedict only grinned. “Then let the war begin here,” he said, and flung the blade at de Quincey. It whipped through the air—and plunged hilt-deep into the chest of the redheaded vampire, who had flung himself in front of his clan leader. He exploded in a shower of blood as the other vampires shrieked. With a howl de Quincey rushed Benedict. The other vampires seemed to awaken from their panicked stupor, and swiftly followed suit. Within seconds the room was a melee of screams and chaos.

The sudden chaos unfroze Tessa as well. Catching up her skirts, she ran for the stage, and dropped to her knees next to Nathaniel’s chair. His head lolled to the side, his eyes closed. The blood from the wound in his neck had flowed to a slow trickle. Tessa caught at his sleeve. “Nate,” she whispered. “Nate, it’s me.” He moaned, but made no other reply. Biting her lip, Tessa went to work on the manacles that fastened his wrists to the chair. They were hard iron, fastened to the sturdy chair arms with rows of nails—clearly designed to withstand even vampire strength. She pulled at them until her fingers bled, but they didn’t budge. If only she had one of Will’s knives.

She glanced out over the room. It was still dark with smoke. In among the swirls of blackness, she could see the bright flashes of weapons, the

Shadowhunters brandishing the brilliant white daggers Tessa knew now were called seraph blades, each one brought into shimmering life by the name of an angel. Vampire blood flew from the blades’ edges, as bright as a scatter of rubies. She realized—with a shock of surprise, for the vampires at first had terrified her—that the vampires were clearly overmatched here. Though the Night Children were vicious and fast, the Shadowhunters were nearly as fast, and had weapons and training on their side. Vampire after vampire fell under the onslaught of the seraph blades. Blood ran in sheets across the floor, soaking the edges of the Persian rugs.

The smoke cleared in a spot, and Tessa saw Charlotte dispatching a burly vampire in a gray morning jacket. She slashed the blade of her knife across his throat, and blood sprayed across the wall behind them. He sank, snarling, to his knees, and Charlotte finished him with a thrust of her blade to his chest.

A blur of motion exploded behind Charlotte; it was Will, followed by a wild-eyed vampire brandishing a silver pistol. He pointed it at Will, aimed, and fired. Will dived out of the way and skidded across the bloody floor. He rolled to his feet, and bounded up onto a velvet-seated chair. Ducking another shot, he leaped again, and Tessa watched with amazement as he ran lightly along the backs of a row of chairs, leaping down from the last of them. He whirled to face the vampire, now a distance from him across the room. Somehow a short-bladed knife gleamed in his hand, though Tessa had not seen him draw it. He threw it. The vampire ducked aside, but was not quite fast enough; the knife sank into his shoulder. He roared in pain and was reaching for the knife when a slim, dark shadow reared up out of nowhere. There was a flash of silver, and the vampire blew apart in a shower of blood and dust. As the mess cleared, Tessa saw Jem, a long blade still raised in his fist. He was grinning, but not at her; he kicked the silver pistol—now lying abandoned among the vampire’s remains—hard, and it skidded across the floor, fetching up at Will’s feet. Will nodded toward Jem with a return of his grin, swept the pistol off the floor, and shoved it through his belt.

“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 make 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.” “Maybe I want a black eye,” said Will peevishly. “Did you think of that?”

Thomas just grinned and swung himself up into the driver’s box at the front of the carriage. Will went back to scrubbing dried vampire blood off his hands and arms. The task was absorbing enough that he was able to almost completely ignore Gabriel Lightwood when the other boy appeared out of the shadows and sauntered over to Will, a superior smile plastered on his face.

“Nice work in there, Herondale, setting the place on fire,” Gabriel observed. “Good thing we were there to clean up after you, or the whole plan would have gone down in flames, along with the shreds of your reputation.” “Are you implying that shreds of my reputation remain intact?” Will demanded with mock horror. “Clearly I have been doing something wrong. Or not doing something wrong, as the case may be.” He banged on the side of the carriage. “Thomas! We must away at once to the nearest brothel! I seek scandal and low companionship.” Thomas snorted and muttered something that sounded like “bosh,” which Will ignored.

Gabriel’s face darkened. “Is there anything that isn’t a joke to you?”

“Nothing that comes to mind.”

“You know,” Gabriel said, “there was a time I thought we could be friends, Will.”

“There was a time I thought I was a ferret,” Will said, “but that turned out to be the opium haze. Did you know it had that effect? Because I didn’t.”

“I think,” Gabriel said, “that perhaps you might consider whether jokes about opium are either amusing or tasteful, given the . . . situation of your friend Carstairs.”

Will froze. Still in the same tone of voice, he said, “You mean his disability?”

Gabriel blinked. “What?”

“That’s what you called it. Back at the Institute. His ‘disability.’” Will tossed the bloody cloth aside. “And you wonder why we aren’t friends.”

“I just wondered,” Gabriel said, in a more subdued voice, “if perhaps you have ever had enough.”

“Enough of what?”

“Enough of behaving as you do.”

Will crossed his arms over his chest. His eyes glinted dangerously. “Oh, I can never get enough,” he said. “Which, incidentally, is what your sister said to me when—”

The carriage door flew open. A hand shot out, grabbed Will by the back of the shirt, and hauled him inside. The door banged shut after him, and Thomas, sitting bolt upright, seized the reins of the horses. A moment later the carriage had lurched forth into the night, leaving Gabriel staring, infuriated, after it.

“What were you thinking?” Jem, having deposited Will onto the carriage seat opposite him, shook his head, his silvery eyes shining in the dimness. He held his cane between his knees, his hand resting lightly atop the dragon’s-head carving. The cane had belonged to Jem’s father, Will knew, and had been designed for him by a Shadowhunter weapons maker in Beijing. “Baiting Gabriel Lightwood like that—why do you do it? What’s the point?” “You heard what he said about you—”

“I don’t care what he says about me. It’s what everyone thinks. He just has the nerve to say it.” Jem leaned forward, resting his chin on his hand. “You know, I cannot function as your missing sense of self-preservation forever. Eventually you will have to learn to manage without me.” Will, as he always did, ignored this. “Gabriel Lightwood is hardly much of a threat.”

“Then forget Gabriel. Is there a particular reason you keep biting vampires?”

Will touched the dried blood on his wrists, and smiled. “They don’t expect it.”

“Of course they don’t. They know what happens when one of us consumes vampire blood. They probably expect you to have more sense.”

“That expectation never seems to serve them very well, does it?”

“It hardly serves you, either.” Jem looked at Will thoughtfully. He was the only one who never fell out of temper with Will. Whatever Will did, the most extreme reaction he seemed to be able to provoke in Jem was mild exasperation. “What happened in there? We were waiting for the signal—” “Henry’s bloody Phosphor didn’t work. Instead of sending up a flare of light, it set the curtains on fire.”

Jem made a choked noise.

Will glared at him. “It’s not funny. I didn’t know whether the rest of you were going to show up or not.”

“Did you really think we wouldn’t come after you when the whole place went up like a torch?” Jem asked reasonably. “They could have been roasting you over a spit, for all we knew.”

“And Tessa, the silly creature, was supposed to be out the door with Magnus, but she wouldn’t leave—”

“Her brother was manacled to a chair in the room,” Jem pointed out. “I’m not sure I would have left either.”

“I see you’re determined to miss my point.”

“If your point is that there was a pretty girl in the room and it was distracting you, then I think I’ve taken your point handily.”

“You think she’s pretty?” Will was surprised; Jem rarely opined on this sort of thing.

“Yes, and you do too.”

“I hadn’t noticed, really.”

“Yes, you have, and I’ve noticed you noticing.” Jem was smiling. Despite the stress of the battle, he looked healthy tonight. There was color in his cheeks, and his eyes were a dark and steady silver. There were times, when the illness was at its worst, when all the color drained even from his eyes, leaving them horribly pale, nearly white, with that black speck of pupil in the center like a speck of black ash on snow. It was times like that when he also became delirious. Will had held Jem down while he’d thrashed about and cried out in another language and his eyes had rolled back into his head, and every time it happened, Will thought that this was it, and Jem was really going to die this time. He sometimes then thought about what he would do afterward, but he couldn’t imagine it, any more than he could look back and remember his life before he had come to the Institute. Neither bore thinking about for very long.

But then there were other times, like this, when he looked at Jem and saw no mark of illness on him, and wondered what it would be like in a world where Jem was not dying. And that did not bear thinking about either. It was a terrible black place in himself that the fear came from, a dark voice he could only silence with anger, risk, and pain.

“Will.” Jem’s voice cut into Will’s unpleasant reverie. “Have you heard a single word I’ve said in the past five minutes?”

“Not really.”

“We needn’t talk about Tessa if you don’t want to, you know.”

“It’s not Tessa.” This was true. Will hadn’t been thinking about Tessa. He was getting good at not thinking about her, really; all it took was determination and practice. “One of the vampires had a human servant who rushed me. I killed him,” said Will. “Without even thinking about it. He was just a stupid human boy, and I killed him.” “He was a darkling,” said Jem. “He was Turning. It would have been a matter of time.”

“He was just a boy,” Will said again. He turned his face toward the window, though the brightness of the witchlight in the carriage meant that all he could see was his own face, reflected back at him. “I’m going to get drunk when we get home,” he added. “I think I’m going to have to.” “No, you won’t,” said Jem. “You know exactly what will happen when we get home.”

Because he was right, Will scowled.

Ahead of Will and Jem, in the first carriage, Tessa sat on the velvet bench seat across from Henry and Charlotte; they were talking in murmurs about the night and how it had gone. Tessa let the words wash over her, barely caring. Only two Shadowhunters had been killed, but de Quincey’s escape was a disaster, and Charlotte was worried that the Enclave would be angry with her. Henry made soothing noises, but Charlotte seemed inconsolable. Tessa would have felt bad for her, if she’d had the energy to feel much at all.

Nathaniel lay across Tessa, his head in her lap. She bent over him, stroking his filthy matted hair with her gloved fingers. “Nate,” she said, so softly that she hoped Charlotte couldn’t hear her. “It’s all right now. Everything’s all right.” Nathaniel’s lashes fluttered and his eyes opened. His hand came up—the fingernails broken, his joints swollen and twisted—and he took tight hold of her hand, lacing his fingers through hers. “Don’t go,” he said thickly. His eyes fluttered shut again; he was clearly drifting in and out of consciousness, if he was really conscious at all. “Tessie—stay.” No one else ever called her that; she shut her eyes, willing the tears back. She did not want Charlotte—or any Shadowhunter—to see her cry.