Clockwork Prince

Page 21

Lying in the bunk was Will, half-tangled in a dark, ragged blanket. He wore nothing but trousers and a shirt; his weapons belt hung on a nail peg inside the bunk. His feet were bare, his eyes half-lidded, their blue only slightly visible beneath the fringe of his dark lashes. His hair was wet with sweat, pasted to his forehead, his cheeks bright red and feverish. His chest rose and fell raggedly, as if he were having trouble drawing breath.
Tessa reached out and put the back of her hand to his forehead. It was burning. "Jem," she said softly. "Jem, we must get him out of here."
The man in the bunk beside them was still singing. Not that he was quite a man, exactly. His body was short and twisted, his shoeless feet ending in cloven hooves.
"When will that be?
Say the bells of Stepney
I do not know,
Says the great bell of Bow"
Jem was still staring down at Will, motionless. He seemed frozen. His face had gone a patchy white and red color.
"Jem!" Tessa whispered. "Please. Help me get him on his feet." When Jem did not move, she reached out, took Will by the shoulder, and shook him. "Will. Will, wake up, please."
Will only groaned and turned away from her, burying his head against his arm. He was a Shadowhunter, she thought, six feet of bone and muscle, far too heavy for her to lift. Unless- "If you do not help me," Tessa said to Jem, "I swear, I Will Change into you, and I Will lift him myself. And then everyone here Will see what you look like in a dress." She fixed him with a look. "Do you understand?"
Very slowly he raised his eyes to hers. He did not look fazed by the idea of being seen by ifrits in a dress; he did not look as if he saw her at all. It was the first time she could remember seeing those silver eyes without any light behind them. "Do you?" he said, and reached into the bunk, catching Will by the arm and hauling him sideways, taking little care, and bumping Will 's head, hard, against the side rail of the bed.
Will groaned and opened his eyes. "Let me go-"
"Help me with him," Jem said without looking at Tessa, and together they wrestled Will out of the bunk. He nearly fell, sliding his arm around Tessa to balance himself as Jem retrieved his weapons belt from the nail it was hanging from.
"Tel me this is not a dream," Will whispered, nuzzling his face into the side of her neck. Tessa jumped. He felt feverishly hot against her skin. His lips grazed her cheekbone; they were as soft as she remembered.
"Jem," Tessa said desperately, and Jem looked over at them; he had been buckling Will 's belt over his own, and it seemed clear he hadn't heard a word Will had said. He knelt down to stuff Will 's feet into his boots, then rose to take his parabatai's arm. Will seemed delighted by this.
"Oh, good," he said. "Now we're all three together."
"Shut up," said Jem.
Will giggled. "Listen, Carstairs, you haven't any of the needful on you, have you? I'd stump up, but I'm flat out."
"What did he say?" Tessa was baffled.
"He wants me to pay for his drugs." Jem's voice was stiff. "Come. We'l get him to the carriage, and I'll come back with the money."
As they struggled toward the door, Tessa heard the voice of the cloven- footed man, following them, thin and as high as music piped through reeds, ending in a high-pitched giggle.
"Here comes a candle to light you to bed, And here comes a chopper to chop off your head!"
* * * Even the dirty Whitechapel air seemed clear and fresh after the cloying incense stench of the faerie drug den. Tessa almost stumbled going down the stairs. The carriage was thankful y still at the curb, and Cyril was swinging himself down out of the seat, heading over to them, concern on his big, open face.
"Is he all right, then?" he said, taking the arm that Will had draped over Tessa's shoulders and draping it over his own. Tessa slipped aside grateful y; her back had begun to ache.
Will predictably, though, did not like this. "Let me go," he said with sudden irritation. "Let me go. I can stand."
Jem and Cyril exchanged glances, then moved apart. Will staggered, but stayed upright. He raised his head, the cold wind lifting the sweaty hair from his neck and forehead, blowing it across his eyes. Tessa thought of him up on the roof of the Institute: A nd I behold London, a human awful wonder of God.
He looked at Jem. His eyes were bluer than blue, his cheeks flushed, his features angelic. He said, "You did not have to come and fetch me like some child. I was having quite a pleasant time."
Jem looked back at him. "God damn you," he said, and hit Will across the face, sending him spinning. Will didn't lose his footing, but fetched up against the side of the carriage, his hand to his cheek. His mouth was bleeding. He looked at Jem with total astonishment.
"Get him into the carriage," Jem said to Cyril, and turned and went back through the red door-to pay for whatever Will had taken, Tessa thought. Will was still staring after him, the blood reddening his mouth.
"James?" he said.
"Come along, then," said Cyril, not unkindly. He really was awful y like Thomas, Tessa thought as he opened the carriage door and helped Will inside, and then Tessa after him. He gave her a handkerchief from his pocket. It was warm and smelled like cheap eau de cologne. She smiled and thanked him as he shut the door.
Will was slumped in the corner of the carriage, his arms around himself, his eyes half-open. Blood had trickled down his chin. She leaned over and pressed the handkerchief to his mouth; he reached up and put his hand over hers, holding it there. "I've made a mess of things," he said. "Haven't I?"
"Dreadful y, I'm afraid," said Tessa, trying not to notice the warmth of his hand over hers. Even in the darkness of the carriage, his eyes were luminously blue. What was it Jem had said, though, about beauty? Beauty is harsh. Would people forgive Will the things he did if he were ugly? And did it help him, in the end, to be forgiven? Though, she could not help but feel he did the things he did not because he loved himself too much but because he hated himself. And she did not know why.
He closed his eyes. "I'm so tired, Tess," he said. "I only wanted pleasant dreams for once."
"That is not the way to get them, Will," she said softly. "You cannot buy or drug or dream your way out of pain."
His hand tightened over hers.
The carriage door opened. Tessa drew back from Will hastily. It was Jem, his face like thunder; he spared a cursory glance at Will, threw himself into a seat, and reached up to rap on the roof. "Cyril, drive home," he called, and after a moment the carriage lurched forward into the night. Jem reached out and drew the curtains across the windows. In the dimness Tessa slipped the handkerchief into her sleeve. It was still damp with Will 's blood.
Jem said nothing all the way back from Whitechapel, merely stared stonily ahead of him with his arms folded while Will slept, a faint smile on his face, in the corner of the carriage. Tessa, across from them both, could think of nothing to say to break Jem's silence. This was so utterly unlike him-Jem, who was always sweet, always kind, always optimistic. His expression now was worse than blank, his nails digging into the fabric of his gear, his shoulders stiff and angular with rage.
The moment they drew up in front of the Institute, he threw the door open and leaped out. She heard him shout something to Cyril about helping Will to his room, and then he stalked away, up the steps, without another word to her. Tessa was so shocked, she could only stare after him for a moment.
She moved to the carriage door; Cyril was already there, his hand up to help her down. Barely had Tessa's shoes hit the cobblestones than she was hurrying after Jem, call ing his name, but he was already inside the Institute.
He had left the door open for her, and she dashed in after him, after only a brief glance to confirm that Will was being helped by Cyril. She hurried up the stairs, dropping her voice as she realized that, of course, the Institute was asleep, the witchlight torches dimmed to their lowest glow.
She went to Jem's room first and knocked; when there was no answer, she sought a few of his most commonly visited haunts-the music room, the library-but, finding nothing, she returned, disconsolate, to her own room to ready herself for bed. In her nightgown, her dress brushed and hung up, she crawled between the sheets of her bed and stared at the ceiling. She even picked up Will 's copy of Vathek from her floor, but for the first time the poem in the front failed to make her smile, and she could not concentrate on the story.
She was startled at her own distress. Jem was angry at Will, not at her.
Still, she thought, it was perhaps the first time he had lost his temper in front of her. The first time he had been curt with her, or not attended with kindness to her words, had not seemed to think of her first before himself. . . .
She had taken him for granted, she thought with surprise and shame, watching the flickering candlelight. She had assumed his kindness was so natural and so innate, she had never asked herself whether it cost him any effort. Any effort to stand between Will and the world, protecting each of them from the other. Any effort to accept the loss of his family with equanimity. Any effort to remain cheerful and calm in the face of his own dying.
A rending noise, the sound of something being wrenched apart, tore through the room. Tessa sat bolt upright. What was that? It seemed to be coming from outside her door-across the hal - Jem?
She leaped to her feet and caught her dressing gown down from its peg.
Hurriedly slipping into it, she darted out the door and into the corridor.
She had been correct-the noise was coming from Jem's room. She remembered the first night she had met him, the lovely violin music that had poured like water through the doorway. This noise sounded nothing like Jem's music. She could hear the saw of bow against string, yet it sounded like screaming, like a person screaming in awful pain. She both longed to go in and felt terrified to do so; finally she took hold of the knob of the door and swung it open, and then ducked inside and pulled the door closed fast after her.
"Jem," she whispered.
The witchlight torches were burning low on the wal s. Jem sat on the trunk at the foot of his bed in just his shirtsleeves and trousers, his silver hair tousled, the violin propped against his shoulder. He was sawing at it viciously with the bow, wringing awful sounds out of it, making it scream. As Tessa watched, one of the violin strings snapped with a shriek.
"Jem!" she cried again, and when he did not look up, she strode across the room and wrenched the bow out of his hand. "Jem, stop! Your violin- your lovely violin-you'l ruin it."
He looked up at her. His pupils were enormous, the silver of his eyes only a thin ring around the black. He was breathing hard, his shirt open at the neck, sweat standing out on his col arbones. His cheeks were flushed. "What does it matter?" he said in a voice so low it was almost a hiss. "What does any of it matter? I'm dying. I won't outlast the decade. What does it matter if the violin goes before I do?"
Tessa was appal ed. He never spoke like this about his il ness, never.
He stood up and turned away from her, toward the window. Only a little moonlight found its way into the room through the fog; there seemed to be shapes visible in the white mist pressed against the window-ghosts, shades, mocking faces. "You know it is true."
"Nothing is decided." Her voice shook. "Nothing is inevitable. A cure-"
"There's no cure." He no longer sounded angry, just detached, which was almost worse. "I Will die, and you know it, Tess. Probably within the next year.
I am dying, and I have no family in the world, and the one person I trusted more than any other made sport of what is kil ing me."
"But, Jem, I don't think that's what Will meant to do at all." Tessa leaned the bow against the footboard and moved closer to him, tentatively, as if he were an animal she was fearful of startling. "He was just trying to escape. He is running from something, something dark and awful. You know he is, Jem.
You saw how he was after-after Cecily."
She stood just behind him now, close enough to reach out and touch him tentatively on the arm, but she did not. His white shirt was stuck to his shoulder blades with sweat. She could see the Marks on his back through the fabric. He dropped the violin almost carelessly onto the trunk and turned to face her. "He knows what it means to me," he said. "To see him even toy with what has destroyed my life-"
"But he wasn't thinking of you-"
"I know that." His eyes were almost all black now. "I tell myself he's better than he makes himself out to be, but, Tessa, what if he isn't? I have always thought, if I had nothing else, I had Will. If I have done nothing else that made my life matter, I have always stood by him. But perhaps I shouldn't."
His chest was rising and fal ing so fast, it alarmed her; she put the back of her hand to his forehead and nearly gasped. "You're burning up. You should be resting-"
He flinched away from her, and she dropped her hand, hurt. "Jem, what is it? You don't want me to touch you?"
"Not like that," he flared, and then flushed even darker than before.
"Like what?" She was honestly bewildered; this was behavior she might have expected from Will, but not from Jem-this mysteriousness, this anger.
"As if you were a nurse and I were your patient." His voice was firm but uneven. "You think because I am il that I am not like-" He drew a ragged breath. "Do you think I do not know," he said, "that when you take my hand, it is only so that you can feel my pulse? Do you think I do not know that when you look into my eyes, it is only to see how much of the drug I have taken? If I were another man, a normal man, I might have hopes, presumptions even; I might-" His words seemed to catch, either because he realized he had said too much or because he had run out of breath; he was gasping, his cheeks flushed.
She shook her head, feeling her plaits tickle her neck. "This is the fever speaking, not you."
His eyes darkened, and he began to turn away from her. "You can't even believe I could want you," he said in a half whisper. "That I am alive enough, healthy enough-"
"No-" Without thinking, she caught at his arm. He stiffened. "James, that isn't at all what I meant-"
He curled his fingers around her hand where it lay on his arm. His own scorched her skin, as hot as fire. And then he turned her and drew her toward him.
They stood face-to-face, chest to chest. His breath stirred her hair. She felt the fever rising off him like mist off the Thames; sensed the pounding of the blood through his skin; saw with a strange clarity the pulse at his throat, the light on the pale curls of his hair where they lay against his paler neck.