Cassandra Clare - Clockwork Prince

“That’s curious. Have you ever come across anything like it before?”

Tessa shook her head. “It concerns me. I am afraid Nate will expect me to know something and I will not know it or have the right answer.”

Will leaned forward. On wet days, which was nearly every day, his normally straight dark hair would begin to curl. There was something about the vulnerable curling of his damp hair against his temples that made her heart ache. “You are a good actress, and you know your brother,” he said. “I have every confidence in you.”

She looked at him in surprise. “You do?”

“And,” he went on without answering her question, “in the event that something goes awry, I will be there. Even if you don’t see me, Tess, I’ll be there. Remember that.”

“All right.” She cocked her head to the side. “Will?”

“Yes?”

“There was a third reason you didn’t want to wake up Charlotte and tell her what we were doing, wasn’t there?”

He narrowed his blue eyes at her. “And what’s that?”

“Because you do not yet know if this is simply a foolish flirtation on Jessamine’s part, or something deeper and darker. A true connection to my brother and to Mortmain. And you know that if it is the second, it will break Charlotte’s heart.”

A muscle jumped at the corner of his mouth. “And what do I care if it does? If she is foolish enough to attach herself to Jessamine—”

“You care,” said Tessa. “You are no inhuman block of ice, Will. I have seen you with Jem—I saw you when you looked at Cecily. And you had another sister, didn’t you?”

He looked at her sharply. “What makes you think I had—I have—more than one sister?”

“Jem said he thought your sister was dead,” she said. “And you said, ‘My sister is dead.’ But Cecily is clearly very much alive. Which made me think you had a sister who had died. One that wasn’t Cecily.”

Will let out a long, slow breath. “You’re clever.”

“But am I clever and right, or clever and wrong?”

Will looked as if he were glad for the mask that hid his expression. “Ella,” he said. “Two years older than I. And Cecily, three years younger. My sisters.”

“And Ella . . .”

Will looked away, but not before she saw the pain in his eyes. So Ella was dead.

“What was she like?” Tessa asked, remembering how grateful she had been when Jem had asked that of her, about Nate. “Ella? And Cecily, what kind of girl is she?”

“Ella was protective,” said Will. “Like a mother. She would have done anything for me. And Cecily was a little mad creature. She was only nine when I left. I can’t say if she’s still the same, but she was—like Cathy in Wuthering Heights. She was afraid of nothing and demanded everything. She could fight like a devil and swear like a Billingsgate fishwife.” There was amusement in his voice, and admiration, and . . . love. She had never heard him talk about anyone that way, except perhaps Jem.

“If I might ask—,” she began.

Will sighed. “You know you’ll ask whether I say it’s all right or not.”

“You have a younger sister of your own,” she said. “So what exactly did you do to Gabriel’s sister to make him hate you so?”

He straightened. “Are you serious?”

“Yes,” she said. “I am forced to spend a great deal of time with the Lightwoods, and Gabriel clearly despises you. And you did break his arm. It would ease my mind if I knew why.”

Shaking his head, Will raked his fingers through his hair. “Dear God,” he said. “Their sister—her name is Tatiana, by the way; she was named after her mother’s dear friend, who was Russian—was twelve years old, I think.”

“Twelve?” Tessa was horrified.

Will exhaled. “I see you have already decided for yourself what happened,” he said. “Would it ease your mind further to know that I myself was twelve? Tatiana, she . . . fancied herself in love with me. In that way that little girls do. She would follow me around and giggle and duck behind pillars to stare at me.”

“One does silly things when one is twelve.”

“It was the first Christmas party at the Institute that I attended,” he said. “The Lightwoods were there in all their finery. Tatiana in silver hair ribbons. She had a little book she carried around with her everywhere. She must have dropped it that night. I found it shoved down the back of one of the chaise longues. It was her diary. Filled with poems about me—the color of my eyes, the wedding we would have. She had written ‘Tatiana Herondale’ all over it.”

“That sounds rather adorable.”

“I had been in the drawing room, but I came back into the ballroom with the diary. Elise Penhallow had just finished playing the spinet. I got up beside her and commenced reading from Tatiana’s diary.”

“Oh, Will—you didn’t!”

“I did,” he said. “She had rhymed ‘William’ with ‘million,’ as in ‘You will never know, sweet William / How many are the million / ways in which I love you.’ It had to be stopped.”

“What happened?”

“Oh, Tatiana ran out of the room in tears, and Gabriel leaped onto the stage and attempted to strangle me. Gideon simply stood there with his arms crossed. You’ll notice that’s all he ever does.”

“I suppose Gabriel didn’t succeed,” said Tessa. “In strangling you, I mean.”

“Not before I broke his arm,” said Will with relish. “So there you are. That’s why he hates me. I humiliated his sister in public, and what he won’t mention is that I humiliated him, too. He thought he could best me easily. I’d had little formal training, and I’d heard him call me ‘very nearly a mundane’ behind my back. Instead I beat him hollow—snapped his arm, in fact. It was certainly a more pleasant sound than Elise banging away on the spinet.”

Tessa rubbed her gloved hands together to warm them, and sighed. She wasn’t sure what to think. It was hardly the story of seduction and betrayal she had expected, but neither did it show Will in an admirable light.

“Sophie says she’s married now,” she said. “Tatiana. She’s just getting back from traveling the Continent with her new husband.”

“I am sure she is as dull and stupid now as she was then.” Will sounded as if he might fall asleep. He thumbed the curtain closed, and they were in darkness. Tessa could hear his breath, feel the warmth of him sitting across from her. She could see why a proper young lady would never ride in a carriage with a gentleman not related to her. There was something oddly intimate about it. Of course, she had broken the rules for proper young ladies what felt like long ago, now.

“Will,” she said again.

“The lady has another question. I can hear it in her tone. Will you never have done asking questions, Tess?”

“Not until I get all the answers I want,” she said. “Will, if warlocks are made by having one demon parent and one human parent, what happens if one of those parents is a Shadowhunter?”

“A Shadowhunter would never allow that to happen,” said Will flatly.

“But in the Codex it says that most warlocks are the result of—of a violation,” Tessa said, her voice hitching on the ugly word, “or shape-changer demons taking on the form of a loved one and completing the seduction by a trick. Jem told me Shadowhunter blood is always dominant. The Codex says the off-spring of Shadowhunters and werewolves, or faeries, are always Shadowhunters. So could not the angel blood in a Shadow-hunter cancel out that which was demonic, and produce—”

“What it produces is nothing.” Will tugged at the window curtain. “The child would be born dead. They always are. Stillborn, I mean. The offspring of a demon and a Shadowhunter parent is death.” In the little light he looked at her. “Why do you want to know these things?”