Cassandra Clare - Clockwork Prince

“You should have told him,” said Magnus. “He would have chosen to be your parabatai anyway, even knowing the risks.”

“I cannot burden him with that knowledge! He would keep it secret if I asked him to, but it would pain him to know it—and the pain I cause others would only hurt him more. Yet if I were to tell Charlotte, to tell Henry and the rest, that my behavior is a sham—that every cruel thing I have said to them is a lie, that I wander the streets only to give the impression that I have been out drinking and whoring when in reality I have no desire to do either—then I have ceased to push them away.”

“And thus you have never told anyone of this curse? No one but myself, since you were twelve years old?”

“I could not,” Will said. “How could I be sure they would form no attachment to me, once they knew the truth? A story like that might engender pity, pity could become attachment, and then . . .”

Magnus raised his eyebrows. “Are you not concerned about me?”

“That you might love me?” Will sounded genuinely startled. “No, for you hate Nephilim, do you not? And besides, I imagine you warlocks have ways to guard against unwanted emotions. But for those like Charlotte, like Henry, if they knew the persona I presented to them was false, if they knew of my true heart . . . they might come to care for me.”

“And then they would die,” said Magnus.

Charlotte raised her face slowly from her hands. “And you’ve absolutely no idea where he is?” she asked for the third time. “Will is simply—gone?”

“Charlotte.” Jem’s voice was soothing. They were in the drawing room, with its wallpaper of flowers and vines. Sophie was by the fire, using the poker to coax more flames from the coal. Henry sat behind the desk, fiddling with a set of copper instruments; Jessamine was on the chaise, and Charlotte was in an armchair by the fire. Tessa and Jem sat somewhat primly side by side on the sofa, which made Tessa feel peculiarly like a guest. She was full of sandwiches that Bridget had brought in on a tray, and tea, its warmth slowly thawing her insides. “It isn’t as if this is unusual. When do we ever know where Will is at nighttime?”

“But this is different. He saw his family, or his sister at least. Oh, poor Will.” Charlotte’s voice shook with anxiety. “I had thought perhaps he was finally beginning to forget about them . . .”

“No one forgets about their family,” said Jessamine sharply. She sat on the chaise longue with a watercolor easel and papers propped before her; she had recently made the decision that she had fallen behind in pursuing the maidenly arts, and had begun painting, cutting silhouettes, pressing flowers, and playing on the spinet in the music room, though Will said her singing voice made him think of Church when he was in a particularly complaining mood.

“Well, no, of course not,” said Charlotte hastily, “but perhaps not to live with the memory constantly, as a sort of dreadful weight on you.”

“As if we’d know what to do with Will if he didn’t have the morbs every day,” said Jessamine. “Anyway, he can’t have cared about his family that much in the first place or he wouldn’t have left them.”

Tessa gave a little gasp. “How can you say that? You don’t know why he left. You didn’t see his face at Ravenscar Manor—”

“Ravenscar Manor.” Charlotte was staring blindly at the fireplace. “Of all the places I thought they’d go . . .”

“Pish and tosh,” said Jessamine, looking angrily at Tessa. “At least his family’s alive. Besides, I’ll wager he wasn’t sad at all; I’ll wager you he was shamming. He always is.”

Tessa glanced toward Jem for support, but he was looking at Charlotte, and his look was as hard as a silver coin. “What do you mean,” he said, “of all the places you thought they’d go? Did you know that Will’s family had moved?”

Charlotte started, and sighed. “Jem . . .”

“It’s important, Charlotte.”

Charlotte glanced over at the tin on her desk that held her favorite lemon drops. “After Will’s parents came here to see him, when he was twelve, and he sent them away . . . I begged him to speak to them, just for a moment, but he wouldn’t. I tried to make him understand that if they left, then he could never see them again, and I could never tell him news of them. He took my hand, and he said, ‘Please just promise me you’ll tell me if they die, Charlotte. Promise me.’” She looked down, her fingers knotting in the material of her dress. “It was such an odd request for a little boy to make. I—I had to say yes.”

“So you’ve been looking into the welfare of Will’s family?” Jem asked.

“I hired Ragnor Fell to do it,” Charlotte said. “For the first three years. The fourth year he came back to me and told me that the Herondales had moved. Edmund Herondale—that’s Will’s father—had lost their house gambling. That was all Ragnor was able to glean. The Herondales had been forced to move. He could find no further trace of them.”

“Did you ever tell Will?” Tessa said.

“No.” Charlotte shook her head. “He had made me promise to tell him if they died, that was all. Why add to his unhappiness with the knowledge that they had lost their home? He never mentioned them. I had grown to hope he might have forgotten—”

“He has never forgotten.” There was a force in Jem’s words that stopped the nervous movement of Charlotte’s fingers.

“I should not have done it,” Charlotte said. “I should never have made that promise. It was a contravention of the Law—”

“When Will truly wants something,” said Jem quietly, “when he feels something, he can break your heart.”

There was a silence. Charlotte’s lips were tight, her eyes suspiciously bright. “Did he say anything about where he was going when he left Kings Cross?”

“No,” said Tessa. “We arrived, and he just up and dusted—sorry, got up and ran,” she corrected herself, their blank looks alerting her to the fact that she was using American slang.

“‘Up and dusted,’” said Jem. “I like that. Makes it sound like he left a cloud of dust spinning in his wake. He didn’t say anything, no—just elbowed his way through the crowd and was gone. Nearly knocked down Cyril coming to get us.”

“None of it makes any sense,” Charlotte moaned. “Why on earth would Will’s family be living in a house that used to belong to Mortmain? In Yorkshire of all places? This is not where I thought this road would lead. We sought Mortmain and we found the Shades; we sought him again and found Will’s family. He encircles us, like that cursed ouroboros that is his symbol.”

“You had Ragnor Fell look into Will’s family’s welfare before,” said Jem. “Can you do it again? If Mortmain is somehow entangled with them . . . for whatever reason . . .”

“Yes, yes, of course,” said Charlotte. “I will write to him immediately.”

“There is a part of this I do not understand,” Tessa said. “The reparations demand was filed in 1825, and the complain-ant’s age was listed as twenty-two. If he was twenty-two then, he’d be seventy-five now, and he doesn’t look that old. Maybe forty . . .”

“There are ways,” Charlotte said slowly, “for mundanes who dabble in dark magic to prolong their lives. Just the sort of spell, by the way, that one might find in the Book of the White. Which is why possession of the Book by anyone other than the Clave is considered a crime.”

“All that newspaper business about Mortmain inheriting a shipping company from his father,” Jem said. “Do you think he pulled the vampire trick?”

“The vampire trick?” echoed Tessa, trying in vain to remember such a thing from the Codex .