Cassandra Clare - Clockwork Prince

Tessa wished he wouldn’t quote Shakespeare. She’d never be able to hear that sonnet again without wanting to be sick. Every nerve in her body wanted to leap screaming through her skin in revulsion as he leaned toward her. She prayed for the others to burst in as she let him tilt her head up, up—

Nate began to laugh. With a jerk of his wrist, he sent her hat sailing into the shadows; his fingers tightened on her chin, the nails digging in. “My apologies for my impetuous behavior,” he said. “I couldn’t help but be curious to see how far you’d go to protect your Shadowhunter friends . . . little sister.”

“Nate.” Tessa tried to jerk backward, out of his grasp, but his grip on her was too strong. His other hand shot out like a snake, spinning her around, pinning her against him with his forearm across her throat. His breath was hot against her ear. He smelled sour, like old gin and sweat.

“Did you really think I didn’t know?” he spat. “After that note arrived at Benedict’s ball, sending me off on that wild goose chase to Vauxhall, I realized. It all made sense. I should have known it was you from the beginning. Stupid little girl.”

“Stupid?” she hissed. “I got you to spill your secrets, Nate. You told me everything. Did Mortmain find out? Is that why you look like you haven’t slept in days?”

He jerked his arm tighter around her, making her gasp with pain. “You couldn’t leave well enough alone. You had to pry into my business. Delighted to see me brought low, are you? What kind of sister does that make you, Tessie?”

“You would have killed me if you had the chance. There is no game you can play, nothing you can say to make me think I’ve betrayed you, Nate. You earned every bit of it. Allying yourself with Mortmain—”

He shook her, hard enough to make her teeth rattle. “As if my alliances are any of your business. I was doing well for myself until you and your Nephilim friends came and meddled. Now the Magister wants my head on a block. Your fault. All your fault. I was almost in despair, till I got that ridiculous note from Jessamine. I knew you were behind it, of course. All the trouble you must have gone through too, torturing her to get her to write me that ridiculous missive—”

“We didn’t torture her,” Tessa ground out. She struggled, but Nate only held her more tightly, the buttons on his waistcoat digging into her back. “She wanted to do it. She wanted to save her own skin.”

“I don’t believe you.” The hand that wasn’t across her throat gripped her chin; his nails dug in, and she yelped with pain. “She loves me.”

“No one could love you,” Tessa spat. “You’re my brother—I loved you—and you have killed even that.”

Nate leaned forward and growled, “I am not your brother.”

“Very well, my half brother, if you must have it—”

“You’re not my sister. Not even by half.” He said the words with a cruel pleasure. “Your mother and my mother were not the same woman.”

“That’s not possible,” Tessa whispered. “You’re lying. Our mother was Elizabeth Gray—”

“ Your mother was Elizabeth Gray, born Elizabeth Moore,” said Nate. “Mine was Harriet Moore.”

“Aunt Harriet?”

“She was engaged once. Did you know that? After our parents—your parents—were married. The man died before the wedding could take place. But she was already with child. Your mother raised the baby as hers to spare her sister the shame of the world knowing she had consummated her marriage before it had taken place. That she was a whore.” His voice was as bitter as poison. “I’m not your brother, and I never was. Harriet—she never told me she was my mother. I found out from your mother’s letters. All those years, and she never said a word. She was too ashamed.”

“You killed her,” Tessa said numbly. “Your own mother.”

“ Because she was my mother. Because she’d disowned me. Because she was ashamed of me. Because I’ll never know who my father was. Because she was a whore.” Nate’s voice was empty. Nate had always been empty. He had never been anything but a pretty shell, and Tessa and her aunt had dreamed into him empathy and compassion and sympathetic weakness because they had wanted to see it there, not because it was.

“Why did you tell Jessamine that my mother was a Shadow-hunter?” Tessa demanded. “Even if Aunt Harriet was your mother, she and my mother were sisters. Aunt Harriet would have been a Shadowhunter, too, and so would you. Why tell such a ridiculous lie?”

He smirked. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” His grip tightened on her neck, choking her. She gasped and thought suddenly of Gabriel, saying, Aim your kicks at the kneecaps; the pain is agonizing.

She kicked up and backward, the heel of her boot colliding with Nate’s knee, making a dull cracking sound. Nate yelled, and his leg went out from under him. He kept his grip on Tessa as he fell, rolling so that his elbow jammed into her stomach as they tumbled to the ground together. She gasped, the air punched from her lungs, her eyes filling with tears.

She kicked out at him again, trying to scramble backward, and caught him a glancing blow on the shoulder, but he lunged at her, seizing her by the waistcoat. The buttons popped off it in a rain as he dragged her toward him; his other hand gripped her hair as she flailed out at him, raking her nails down his cheek. The blood that sprang immediately to the surface was a savagely satisfying sight.

“Let me go,” she panted. “You can’t kill me. The Magister wants me alive—”

“‘Alive’ is not ‘unhurt,’” Nate snarled, blood running down his face and off his chin. He knotted his hand in her hair and dragged her toward him; she screamed at the pain and lashed out with her boots, but he was nimble, dodging her flailing feet. Panting, she sent up a silent call: Jem, Will, Charlotte, Henry—where are you?

“Wondering where your friends are?” He hauled her to her feet, one hand in her hair, the other fisted in the back of her shirt. “Well, here’s one of them, at least.”

A grinding noise alerted Tessa to a movement in the shadows. Nate dragged her head around by the hair, shaking her. “Look,” he spat. “It’s time you knew what you are up against.”

Tessa stared. The thing that emerged from the shadows was gigantic—twenty feet tall, she guessed, made of iron. There was barely any jointure. It appeared to move as one single fluid mechanism, seamless and almost featureless. Its bottom half did split into legs, each one ending in a foot tipped with metal spikes. Its arms were the same, finishing in clawlike hands, and its head was a smooth oval broken only by a wide jagged-toothed mouth like a crack in an egg. A pair of twisting silvery horns spiraled up from its “head.” A thin line of blue fire crackled between them.

In its enormous hands it carried a limp body, dressed in gear. Against the bulk of the gigantic automaton, she looked even smaller than ever.

“Charlotte!” Tessa screamed. She redoubled her attempts to get away from Nate, whipping her head to the side. Some of her hair tore free and fluttered to the ground—Jessamine’s fair hair, stained now with blood. Nate retaliated by slapping her hard enough that she saw stars; when she sagged, he caught her around the throat, the buttons on his cuffs digging into her windpipe.

Nate chuckled. “A prototype,” he said. “Abandoned by the Magister. Too large and cumbersome for his purposes. But not for mine.” He raised his voice. “Drop her.”

The automaton’s metal hands opened. Charlotte tumbled free and struck the ground with a sickening thump. She lay unmoving. From this distance Tessa could not tell if her chest was rising and falling or not.