Clockwork Angel

Page 50

“Miss Gray?”
Tessa turned and saw Thomas emerging from one of the doors along the hall. He was in shirtsleeves, his hair tousled as usual, his brown eyes very serious. She felt herself go very still. Oh, God, it’s bad news. “Yes?”
“I’ve found your brother,” Thomas said, to Tessa’s astonishment.
“You have? But where was he?”
“In the drawing room. Got himself a bit of a hiding place, behind the curtains, he had.” Thomas spoke hastily, looking sheepish. “Minute he saw me, he went right off his chump. Started screamin’ and yellin’. Tried to bolt right past me, an’ I nearly had to give him one over the gash to keep him quiet—” At Tessa’s look of incomprehension, Thomas paused, and cleared his throat. “That is to say, I’m afraid I may have frightened him, miss.”
Tessa put her hand over her mouth. “Oh, dear. But he’s all right?”
It seemed that Thomas did not know quite where to look. He was embarrassed to have found Nate cowering behind Charlotte’s curtains, Tessa thought, and she felt a wave of indignation on Nate’s behalf. Her brother wasn’t a Shadowhunter; he hadn’t grown up killing things and risking his life. Of course he was terrified. And he was probably delirious with fever, on top of that. “I had better go in and see him. Just me, you understand? I think he needs to see a familiar face.”
Thomas looked relieved. “Yes, miss. And I’ll wait out here, just for now. You just let me know when you want me to summon the others.”
Tessa nodded and moved past Thomas to push the door open. The drawing room was dim, the only illumination the gray afternoon light that spilled through the tall windows. In the shadows the sofas and armchairs scattered about the room looked like crouched beasts. In one of the larger armchairs by the fire sat Nate. He had found the bloodstained shirt and trousers he had been wearing at de Quincey’s, and had put them on. His feet were bare. He sat with his elbows on his knees, his face in his hands. He looked wretched.
“Nate?” Tessa said softly.
At that he looked up—and sprang to his feet, a look of incredulous happiness on his face. “Tessie!”
With a little cry Tessa rushed across the room and threw her arms around her brother, hugging him fiercely. She heard him give a little whimper of pain, but his arms went around her too, and for a moment, embracing him, Tessa was back in her aunt’s little kitchen in New York, with the smell of cooking all around her and her aunt’s soft laughter as she scolded them for making so much noise.
Nate pulled away first, and looked down at her. “God, Tessie, you look so different… .”
A shudder went through her. “What do you mean?”
He patted her cheek, almost absently. “Older,” he said. “Thinner. You were a round-faced little girl when I left New York, weren’t you? Or is that just the way I remember you?”
Tessa reassured her brother that she was still the same little sister he’d always known, but her mind was only partly engaged with his question. She couldn’t help staring at him worriedly; he no longer looked as gray as he had, but he was still pale, and bruises stood out in blue, black, and yellow patches on his face and neck. “Nate …”
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” he said, reading the anxiety on her face.
“Yes, it is. You should be in bed, resting. What are you doing in here?”
“I was trying to find you. I knew you were here. I saw you, before that bald bastard with the missing eyes got at me. I figured they’d imprisoned you, too. I was going to try to get us out.”
“Imprisoned? Nate, no, it’s not like that.” She shook her head. “We’re safe here.”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “This is the Institute, isn’t it? I was warned about this place. De Quincey said it was run by madmen, monsters who called themselves Nephilim. He said they keep the damned souls of men penned up in some kind of box of theirs, screaming—”
“What, the Pyxis? It holds bits of demon energy, Nate, not men’s souls! It’s perfectly harmless. I’ll show it to you later, in the weapons room, if you don’t believe me.”
Nate looked no less grim. “He said that if the Nephilim got their hands on me, they’d take me apart, piece by piece, for breaking their Laws.”
A cold shiver went up Tessa’s spine; she drew away from her brother, and saw that one of the drawing room windows was open, the curtains fluttering in the breeze. So her shiver had been more than just nerves. “Did you open the window? It’s so cold in here, Nate.”
Nate shook his head. “It was open when I came in.”
Shaking her head, Tessa went across the room and drew the window down. “You’ll catch your death—”
“Never mind my death,” Nate said irritably. “What about the Shadowhunters? Are you saying they haven’t kept you imprisoned here?”
“No.” Tessa turned away from the window. “They haven’t. They’re strange people, but the Shadowhunters have been kind to me. I wanted to stay here. They’ve been generous enough to let me.”
Nate shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
Tessa felt a spark of anger, which surprised her; she pushed it back. It wasn’t Nate’s fault. There was so much he didn’t know. “Where else was I going to go, Nate?” she asked, crossing the room to him and taking his arm. She led him back over to the armchair. “Sit down. You’re exhausting yourself.”
Nate sat obediently, and looked up at her. There was a distant look in his eyes. Tessa knew that look. It meant he was plotting, hatching some mad plan, dreaming a ridiculous dream. “We can still get away from this place,” he said. “Get to Liverpool, get on a steamer. Go back to New York.”
“And do what?” Tessa said as gently as she could. “There’s nothing there for us. Not with Aunt dead. I had to sell all our things to pay for the funeral. The apartment’s gone. There was no rent money. There’s no place for us in New York, Nate.”
“We’ll make a place. A new life.”
Tessa looked at her brother sadly. There was pain in seeing him like this, his face full of hopeless pleading, bruises blossoming on his cheekbones like ugly flowers, his fair hair still matted in places with blood. Nate was not like other people, Aunt Harriet had always said. He had a beautiful innocence about him that had to be protected at all costs.
And Tessa had tried. She and her aunt had hidden Nate’s own weaknesses from him, the consequences of his own flaws and failings. Never telling him of the work Aunt Harriet had had to do to make up the money he had lost gambling, of the taunts Tessa had endured from other children, calling her brother a drunk, a wastrel. They had hidden these things from him to keep him from being hurt. But he had been hurt anyway, Tessa thought. Maybe Jem was right. Maybe the truth was always best.
Sitting down on the ottoman opposite her brother, she looked at him steadily. “It can’t be like that, Nate. Not yet. This mess we’re both in now, it will follow us even if we run. And if we run, we’ll be alone when it does find us. There will be no one to help or protect us. We need the Institute, Nate. We need the Nephilim.”
Nate’s blue eyes were dazed. “I guess so,” he said, and the phrase struck Tessa, who had heard nothing but British voices for nearly two months, as so American that she felt homesick. “It’s because of me that you’re here. De Quincey tortured me. Made me write those letters, send you that ticket. He told me he wouldn’t hurt you once he had you, but then he never let me see you, and I thought—I thought—” He raised his head and looked at her dully. “You ought to hate me.”
Tessa’s voice was firm. “I could never hate you. You’re my brother. You’re my blood.”
“Do you think when all this is over, we can go back home?” Nate asked. “Forget all this ever happened? Live normal lives?”
Live normal lives. The words conjured up an image of herself and Nate in some small, sunny apartment. Nate could get another job, and in the evening she could cook and clean for him, while on weekends they could walk in the park or take the train to Coney Island and ride the carousel, or go to the top of the Iron Tower and watch the fireworks explode at night over the Manhattan Beach Hotel. There would be real sunshine, not like this gray watery version of summer, and Tessa could be an ordinary girl, with her head in a book and her feet planted firmly on the familiar pavement of New York City.
But when she tried to hold this mental picture in her head, the vision seemed to crumble and fall away from her, like a cobweb when you tried to lift it whole in your hands. She saw Will’s face, and Jem’s, and Charlotte’s, and even Magnus’s as he said, Poor thing. Now that you know the truth, you can never go back.
“But we are not normal,” said Tessa. “I am not normal. And you know that, Nate.”
He looked down at the floor. “I know.” He gave a helpless little wave of his hand. “So it’s true. You are what de Quincey said you were. Magical. He said you had the power to change shape, Tessie, to become anything you wanted to be.”
“Did you even believe him? It’s true—well, almost true—but I barely believed it myself at first. It’s so strange—”
“I’ve seen stranger things.” His voice was hollow. “God, it ought to have been me.”
Tessa frowned. “What do you mean?”
But before he could answer, the door swung open. “Miss Gray.” It was Thomas, looking apologetic. “Miss Gray, Master Will is—”
“Master Will is right here.” It was Will, ducking nimbly around Thomas, despite the other boy’s bulk. He was still in the clothes he’d changed into the night before, and they looked rumpled. Tessa wondered if he’d slept in the chair in Jem’s room. There were blue-gray shadows under his eyes, and he looked tired, though his eyes brightened—with relief? amusement? Tessa couldn’t tell—as his gaze fell on Nate.
“Our wanderer, found at last,” he said. “Thomas tells me you were hiding behind the curtains?”
Nate looked at Will dully. “Who are you?”
Quickly Tessa made the introductions, though neither boy seemed all that happy to meet the other. Nate still looked as if he were dying, and Will was regarding Nate as if he were a new scientific discovery, and not a very attractive one at that.
“So you’re a Shadowhunter,” Nate said. “De Quincey told me that you lot were monsters.”
“Was that before or after he tried to eat you?” Will inquired.
Tessa rose quickly to her feet. “Will. Might I speak to you in the corridor for a moment, please?”
If she had expected resistance, she didn’t get it. After a last hostile look at Nate, Will nodded and went with her silently out into the hall, closing the drawing room door behind him.
The illumination in the windowless corridor was variable, the witchlight casting discrete bright pools of light that didn’t quite touch one another. Will and Tessa stood in the shadows between two of the pools, looking at each other—warily, Tessa thought, like angry cats circling in an alley.