Daylighter’s Comments (group member since Jan 18, 2010)

Daylighter’s comments from the The Infernal Devices group.

“Aren’t you tired?” she asks, breaking into his thoughts.
There is a hollow in the pit of his stomach, a nervous edginess. He wants to pull her back to himself, to pour into her everything he is feeling: his admiration, his new-born knowledge, his devotion, his need. “I’ve never been more awake.”
She lifts her chin, a quick unconscious movement, and he leans down, cupping her face with her free hand. He doesn’t mean to kiss her here — too public, too easy to be interrupted — but he can’t stop touching his mouth to hers lightly. Her lips part under his and he leans into her and he can’t stop. I am so —
It was at precisely that moment that Simon threw open the bedroom door and stepped out into the hall. And Clary pulls away from him hastily, turning her head aside, and he feels it with the sharp pain of a bandage ripped off his skin.
I am so screwed.

City of Bones: Greenhouse Scene Jace's PoV :

I kissed your lips and broke your heart

The Institute’s bell begins to toll, the deep loud heartbeat of the apex of the night.
Jace sets his knife down. It’s a neat little pocketknife, bone-handled, that Alec gave him when they became parabatai. He’s used it constantly and the grip is worn smooth from the pressure of his fingers.
“Midnight,” he says. He can feel Clary beside him, sitting back amongst the remains of their picnic, her breathing soft in the cool, leaf-smelling air of the greenhouse. He doesn’t look at her, but straight ahead, at the shining closed buds of the medianox plant. He isn’t sure why he doesn’t want to look at her. He remembers the first time he saw the flower bloom, during horticulture class, sitting on a stone bench with Alec and Izzy on either side of him, and Hodge’s fingers on the stem of the blossom — he had woken them up at nearly midnight to show them the marvel, a plant that normally grew only in Idris — and remembered his breath catching in the wintery midnight air, at the sight of something so surprising and so beautiful.
Alec and Isabelle at been interested but not, he remembers, caught by the beauty of it as he had been. He was worried even now, as the bells rang on, that Clary would be the same: interested or even pleased, but not enchanted. He wanted her to feel the way he had about the medianox, though he could not have said why.
A sound escapes her lips, a soft “Oh!” The flower is blooming: opening like the birth of a star, all shimmering pollen and white-gold petals. “Do they bloom every night?”
A wave of relief goes through him. Her green eyes are shining, fixed on it. She is flexing her fingers unconsciously, the way he has come to understand she does when she is wishing she had a pen or pencils to capture the image of something in front of her. Sometimes he wishes he could see as she did: see the world as a canvas to be captured in paint, chalks and watercolors. Sometimes when she looks at him that way he finds himself almost blushing; a feeling so strange he almost doesn’t recognize it. Jace Wayland doesn’t blush.
“Happy birthday, Clarissa Fray,” he says, and her mouth curves into a smile. “I have something for you.” He fumbles, a little, reaching into his pocket, though he doesn’t think she notices. When he presses the witchlight runestone into her hand, he is conscious of how small her fingers are under his — delicate but strong, callused from hours of holding pencils and paintbrushes. The calluses tickle his fingertips. He wonders if contact with his skin speeds her pulse the way his does when he touches hers.
Apparently not, because she draws away from him, her expression showing only curiosity. “You know, when most girls say they want a big rock, they don’t mean, you know, literally a big rock.”
He smiles without meaning to. Which is unusual in and of itself; usually only Alec or Isabelle can startle laughter out of him. He had known Clary was brave the first time he’d met her — walking into that room after Isabelle, unarmed and unprepared, took the kind of guts he didn’t associate with mundanes — but the fact that she made him laugh still surprised him. “Very amusing, my sarcastic friend. It’s not a rock, precisely. All Shadowhunters have a witchlight rune-stone. It will bring you light even among the darkest shadows of this world and others.” They were the same words his father had spoken to him, upon giving him his first runestone. What other worlds? Jace had asked, and his father had only laughed. There are more worlds a breath away from this one than there are grains of sand on a beach.
She smiles at him and makes a joke about birthday presents, but he senses that she is touched; she slips the stone into her pocket carefully. The medianox flower is already shedding petals like a shower of stars, lighting her face with a soft illumination. “When I was twelve, I wanted a tattoo,” she says. A strand of red hair falls across her eyes; Jace fights the urge to reach out and push it back.
“Most Shadowhunters get their first Marks at twelve. It must have been in your blood.”
“Maybe. Although I doubt most Shadowhunters get a tattoo of Donatello from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on their left shoulder.” She is smiling, in that way she does when she says things that are totally inexplicable to him, as if she is fondly remembering. It sends a jealous twinge sparking through his veins, though he isn’t even sure what he is jealous of. Simon, who understands her references to a mundane world Jace can never be a part of? The mundane world itself that she could one day return to, leaving him and his universe of demons and hunters, scars and battle, gratefully behind?
He clears his throat. “You wanted a turtle on your shoulder?”
She nods, and her hair falls back into place. “I wanted to cover my chicken pox scar.” She draws the strap of her tank top aside. “See?”
And he sees: there is some sort of mark on her shoulder, a scar, but he sees more than that: he sees the curve of her collarbone, the light dusting freckles on her skin like a dusting of gold, the downy curve of her shoulder, the pulse at the base of her throat. He sees the shape of her mouth, her lips slightly parted. Her coppery lashes as she lowers them. And he is swept through with a wave of desire, a kind he has never experienced before. He’s desired girls before, certainly, and satisfied that desire: he had always thought of it as hunger, a need for a sort of fuel that the body wanted.
He has never felt desire like this, a clean fire that burned away thought, that made his hands — not tremble, exactly, but thrum with nervous energy. He tears his eyes away from her, hastily. “It’s getting late,” he says. “We should go back downstairs.”
She looks at him, curiously, and he cannot help the feeling that those green eyes can see through him. “Have you and Isabelle ever dated?” she asks.
His heart is still pounding. He doesn’t quite understand the question. “Isabelle?” he echoes. Isabelle? What did Isabelle have to do with anything?
“Simon was wondering,” she says, and he hates the way she says Simon’s name. He has never felt anything like this before: anything that unnerved him like she does. He remembers coming to her in that alleyway behind the coffee shop, the way he had wanted to draw her outside, away from the dark-haired boy she was always with, into his world of shadows. He had felt even then that she belonged where he did, not to the mundane world where people weren’t real, where they passed just beyond his vision like puppets on a stage. But this girl, with her green eyes that pinned him like a butterfly, she was real. Like a voice heard in a dream, that you know comes from the waking world, she was real, piercing the distance he has set so carefully about himself like armor.
“The answer is no. I mean, there may have been a time when one or the other of us considered it, but she’s almost a sister to me. It would be strange.”
“You mean Isabelle and you never—”
“Never.”
“She hates me,” says Clary.
Despite everything, Jace almost laughs; like a brother might, he takes a certain delight in observing Izzy when she’s frustrated. “You just make her nervous, because she’s always been the only girl in a crowd of adoring boys, and now she isn’t anymore.”
“But she’s so beautiful.”
“So are you,” Jace says, automatically, and sees Clary’s expression change. He cannot read her face. It is hardly as if he has never told a girl she’s beautiful before, but he can’t remember a time it wasn’t calculated. That it was accidental. That it made him feel like going to the training room and throwing knives, and kicking and punching and fighting shadows until he was bloody and exhausted and if his skin was flayed open, it was only in the way he was used to.
She just looks at him, quietly. The training room it is, then.
“We should probably go downstairs,” he says again.
“All right.” He can’t tell what she’s thinking from her voice, either; his ability to read people seems to have deserted him and he doesn’t understand why. Moonlight spears down through the glass panes of the greenhouse as they make their way out, Clary slightly in front of him. Something moves ahead of them — a white spark of light — and suddenly she stops short and half-turns to him, already in the circle of his arm, and she is warm and soft and delicate and he is kissing her.
And he is astonished. He doesn’t work like this; his body doesn’t do things without his permission. It is his instrument as much as the piano, and he has always been in perfect command of it. But she tastes sweet, like apples and copper, and her body in his arms is trembling. She is so small; his arms go around her, to steady her, and he is lost. He understands now why kisses in movies are filmed the way they are, with the camera endlessly circling, circling: the ground is unsteady under his feet and he clings to her, small as she is, as if she could hold him up.
His palms smooth down her back. He can feel her breathing against him; a gasp in between kisses. Her thin fingers are in his hair, on the back of his neck, tangling gently, and he remembers the medianox flower and the first time he saw it and thought: here is something too beautiful to properly belong in this world.
The rush of wind is audible to him first, trained as he is to hear it. He draws back from Clary and sees Hugo, perched in the crook of a nearby dwarf cypress. His arms are still around Clary, her weight light against him. Her eyes are half-closed. “Don’t panic, but we’ve got an audience,” he whispers to her. “If Hugo’s here, Hodge won’t be far behind. We should go.”
Her green eyes flutter all the way open, and she looks amused. It pricks his ego slightly. After that kiss, shouldn’t she be fainting at his feet? But she’s grinning. She wants to know if Hodge is spying on them. He reassures her, but he feels her soft laughter travel through their joined hands — how did that happen? — as they make their way downstairs.
And he understands. He understands why people hold hands: he’d always thought it was about possessiveness, saying This is mine. But it’s about maintaining contact. It is about speaking without words. It is about I want you with me and don’t go.
He wants her in his bedroom. And not in that way — no girl has ever been in his bedroom that way. It is his private space, his sanctuary. But he wants Clary there. He wants her to see him, the reality of him, not the image he shows the world. He wants to lie down on the bed with her and have her curl into him. He wants to hold her as she breathes softly through the night; to see her as no one else sees her: vulnerable and asleep. To see her and to be seen.
So when they reach her door, and she thanks him for the birthday picnic, he still doesn’t let go of her hand. “Are you going to sleep?”
She tilts her head up and he can see that her mouth bears the imprint of his kisses: a flush of pink, like the carnations in the greenhouse, and it knots his stomach. By the Angel, he thinks, I am so…

City of Bones: Magnus's Vow

"All copies of the Clockwork Angel paperback are going to come with a short story in the back called "Magnus' Vow." It takes place during City of Bones and is from Magnus' viewpoint."_Cassandra Clare

A SHORT STORY SET DURING CITY OF BONES

Magnus's Vow

Magnus Bane lay on the floor of his Brooklyn loft, looking up at the bare ceiling. The floor was slightly sticky, as was much else in the apartment. Spilled faery wine mixed with blood on the floor, running in rivulets across the splintery floorboards. The bar, which had been a door laid across two dented metal garbage cans, had gotten wrecked at some point during the night during a lively fight between a vampire and a Bat, one of the downtown werwolf pack. Magnus felt satisfied. It wasn't a good party unless something got broken.
Soft footsteps padded across the floor toward him and then something crawled onto his chest: something small, soft, and heavy. He looked up and found himself staring into a pair of golden-green eyes that matched his own. Chairman Meow.
He stroked the cat, who kneaded his claws happily into Magnus's shirt. A bit of Silly String fell from the ceiling and landed on both of them, causing Chairman Meow to leap sideway.
With a yawn, Magnus sat up. He usually felt like this after a party – tired but too wound up to sleep. His mind was humming over the events of the evening, but like a scratched CD, it kept coming back to the same point and spinning there, sending his memories into a whirl.
Those Shadowhunter children. He hadn't been surprised that Clarissa had finally tracked him down: he'd known Jocelyn's stopgap memory spells wouldn't work forever. He'd told her as buch, but she'd been determined to protect the girl as long as she could. Now that he'd met her, conscious and alert, he woundered if she'd really needed all that protecting. She was fiery, impulsive, brave – and lucky, like her mother.
That as if you believed in luck. But something mus have led her to the Shadowhunters of the institute, possibly the only ones who could protect her from Valentine. A pity that Maryse and Robert were gone. He'd dealt with Maryse more than once, but it had been years since he'd seen the younger generation.
He had a vague memory of visiting Maryse and Hodge, and there being two boys in the hallway, about eleven years old, battling back and forth with harmless model seraph blades. A girl with black hair in two braids had been watching them and vociferously complaining about not being included. He had taken very little note of them at the time.
But now- seeing them had shaken him, specially the boys, Jace and Alec. When you had so many memories, sometimes it was hard to identify the exact one you wanted, like flipping through a ten-thousand page book to find the correct paragraph.
This time, however, he knew.
He crawled across the splintery floor and knelt to open the closed door. Inside, he pushed aside clothes and various packets and potions, feeling along the walls for what he wanted. When he emerged, coughing on dust balls, he was dragging a decentsized wooden trunk . Thought he had lived a long time, he tendet to travel light: to keep a very few mementos of his past. He sensed somehow that they would weigh him down, keep spend only so much time looking back.
It had been so long since he'd unlocks the trunk, it came open with a squeal of hinges that sent Chairman Meow skittering under the sofa, his tail twitching.
The heap of objects inside the trunk looked like the hoard of an unfastidious dragon. Some objects gleamed with metal and gems- Magnus drew out an old snuffbox with the initiald WS picked out across the top in winking rubies, and grinned at the bad taste of the thing, and also at the memories it evoked.
Others seemed unremarkable: a faded, cream-colored silk ribbon that had been Camille's; a matchbook from the Cloud Club with the words I know what you are written on the inside cover in a lady's hand; a limerick signed OFOWW; a halfburned piece of stationery from Hong Kong Club- a place he had been barred from not for being a warlock, but for not being white. He touched a piece of twisted rope nearly at the bottom of the pile, and thought of his mother. She had been the daughter of a Dutch colonialist man and an Indonesian woman who had died in childbirth and whose name Magnus had never known.
He was almost at the bottom of the trunk when he found what he was looking for and drew it out, squinting: a black-and-withe paper photograph mounted on hard cardboard.
An object that really shouldn't have existed, and wouldn't if Henry had not been obsessed with photography. Magnus could picture him now, ducking in and out from benrath hos photographer's hood, racing with the wet plates to the darkroom he'd set up in the crypt to develop the film, shouting at his photographic subjects to keep still. Those were the days when in order to render motionless for minutes at a time. Not easy, Magnus thought, the corner of his mouth flicking up, for the crew of the London Institute.
There was Charlotte, her dark hair up in a practical bun. She was smiling, but anxiously, as if squiting into the sun. Beside her was Jessamine in a dress that looked black in the photo, but which Magnus knew had been dark blue. Her hair was curled and ribbons fell like streamers from the brim of her straw bonnet. She looked very pretty, but someone like Isabell: a girl her own age who loved shadowhunting, who showed off her bruises and the scars of her marks as if they were jewelry instead of hiding them with Mechlin lace.
On the other side of Charlotte stood Jem, looking like a photographic negative himself with his silvery hair and eyes turned almost white; his hand rested on his jade dragon-topped cane, and his face was turned toward Tessa's- Tessa- Tessa's hat was in her hand and her long brown curls blew free, slightly blurred by their motion.
There was a faint halo of light around Will: as befitted his nature and would have surprised no one who'd known him, he had not been able to stand still for the photograph. As always, he was hatless, his black hair curling against his temples. It was a loss not to be able to see the color of his eyes, but he was still beautiful and young and a little vulnerable-looking in photograph, with one hand in his pocket an the other behind his neck.
It had been so long since Magnus had looked at the photograph that the resemblance between Will and Jace struck him suddenly. Though it was Alec who had that black hair and those eyes- that very startling dark blue-it was Jace who had more of Will's personality. At least on the surface- The same sharp arrogance hiding something breakable underneath, the same pointed wit...
He traced the halo of light around Will with a finger and smiled. Will had been no angel, thought neither had been a flawed as some might have thought of him. When Magnus thought of Will, even now, he thought of him dripping rainwater on Camille's rug, beggin Magnus for help no one else could give him. It was Will who had introduced him to the idea that Shadowhunters and Downworlders might be friends.
Jem was Will's other, better half. He and Will had been parabatai, like Alec and Jace, and shared that same evident closeness. And though Alec struck Magnus as nothing at all like Jem- Alec was jumpy and sweet, sensitive and worried, while Jem had been calm, rarely bothered, older than his years-both of them were unusual where Shadowhunters were concerned. Alec exuded a bone-deep innocence that was rare among Shadowhunters-a quality that, Magnus had to admit, drew like a moth to a flame, despite all his own cynicism.
Magnus looked at Tessa again. Thought she was not conventionally pretty in the way Jessamine had been pretty, her face was alive with energy an intelligence. Her lips curved up at the corner. She stood, as Magnus supposed was appropriate, between Jem and Will. Tessa. Tessa, who like Magnus, lived forever. Magnus looked at the detritus in the box-memories of love past, some of whose faces stayed with him as clearly as the day he'd first seen them, and some whose name he berely remembered. Tessa, who like him, had loved a mortal, someone destined to die as she was not.
Magnus replaced the photograoh in the trunk. He shook his head, as if he could clear it of memories. There was a reason he rarely opened the trunk. Memories weighed him down, reminded him of what he had once had but did no longer. Jem, Will, Jessamin, Henry, Charlotte- in a way it was amazing that he still remembered their names. But then, knowing them had changed his life.
Knowing Will and his friends had made Magnus swear to himself that he would never again get involved in Shadowhunters' personal business. Because when you got to care about mortals, they broke your heart.
"And I won't," he told Chairman Meow solemnly, perhaps a little drunkenly. "I don't care how charming they are or how brave or even hoy helpless they seem, I will never ever ever-"
Downstairs, the doorbell buzzed, and Magnus got up to answer it.

City of Bones: Deleted Prologue

City of Bones: Deleted Scenes
This was the original prologue for City of Bones. I had wanted to tell some of the story from Jace's point of view, but once I got further into the book I realized it would be better if we mainly saw him from Clary's perspective. It made him more mysterious and a mysterious character is always fun.


Deleted Prologue

The marks on his skin told the story of his life. Jace Wayland had always been proud of them. Some of the other young people in the Clave didn't like the disfiguring black letters, didn't like the burning pain of the stele where it cut into the skin, didn't like the nightmares that came when runes too powerful were inked into the flesh of someone unready. Jace had no sympathy for them. It was their own fault they were not stronger.

He had always been strong. He'd had to be. Most boys got their first Marks when they were fifteen. Alec had been thirteen, and that was very young. Jace had been nine. His father had cut the marks into his skin with a stele made from carved ivory. The runes spelled out his true name, and other things besides. "Now you are a man," his father had said. That night Jace dreamed of cities made of gold and blood, of tall bone towers sharp as splinters. He was almost ten years old and had never seen a city.

That winter his father took him to Manhattan for the first time. The hard pavement was filthy, the buildings crowding too close together, but the lights were bright and beautiful. And the streets were full of monsters. Jace had only seen them before in his father's instructional manuals. Vampires in their finery, faces dead white as paper. Lycanthropes with their too-sharp teeth and their smell of wolf. Warlocks with their cat's-eyes and pointed ears, sometimes a forked tail protruding from the hem of an elegant velvet coat.

"Monsters," his father had said, with distaste. His mouth curled at the corner. "But they bleed as red as men do when you kill them."

"What about demons? Do they bleed red?"

"Some do. Some bleed thin blood like green poison, and some bleed silver or black. I have a scar here from a demon that bled acid the color of sapphires."

Jace gazed at his father's scar in wonder. "And have you killed many demons?"

"I have," said his father. "And some day, you will too. You were born to kill demons, Jace. It's in your bones."

It would be years later that Jace would see a demon for the first time, and by then his father had already been dead for several years. He pulled aside his shirt now and looked at the scar where that first demon had clawed him. Four parallel claw marks that ran from his breastbone to his shoulder, where his father had inked the runes that would make him fast and strong, and hide him from mundane eyes. Swift as the wind, strong as the earth, silent as the forest, invisible as water.

Jace thought of the girl in his dream, the one with the braided scarlet hair. In the dream, he had not been invisible to her. She had looked at him with more than awareness; there had been recognition in her eyes, as if he were familiar to her. But how could a human girl see through his glamour?

He had woken up shivering, cold as if his skin had been stripped
away. It was frightening to feel so vulnerable, more frightening than any demon. He would have to ask Hodge about runes for nightmare protection it in the morning. Perhaps there would be something about it in one of his books.

But there was no time now. There had been reports of dark activity in a nightclub downtown, human bodies found limp and drained as the sun came up. Jace shrugged on his jacket, checked his weaponry, ink-Marked hands skating lightly over cloth and metal. Marks that no human eye could see--and he was glad, thinking of the girl in his dream, the way she had looked at him, as if he were no different than she was. Stripped of their magic, the marks on his body were only marks, after all, of no more power than the scars on his wrists and chest, or the deep scar just over his heart where his father's killer had stabbed him when he was ten years old.

"Jace!"

The sound of his name startled him out of his reverie. They were calling him from the corridor, Alec and Isabelle, impatient, eager for the hunt and the kill. Sweeping thoughts of nightmares from his mind, Jace went to join them.

Clockwork Prince: The Whole of It

Scene cut from Clockwork Prince - Will tells Jem about his secret

The Whole of It

“And that is it?” Jem said. “That is the whole of it? The truth?”
He was sitting at his desk, one of his legs bent up on the chair beneath him; he looked very young. His violin was propped against the side of the chair. He had been playing it when Will had come in and, without preamble, announced that now was the end of pretense: Will had a confession to make, and he meant to make it now.
That had been the end of the music: Jem laying his violin down with a startled look and leaning back, tensed as if he were readying himself for whatever Will might throw at him.
“That is all of it,” said Will, who had been pacing back and forth as he spoke, and had only now paused to look at Jem. “And I do not blame you if you hate me. I could understand it.”
There was a long pause. Jem’s gaze was steady on his face, steady and silver in the wavering light of the fire.“I could never hate you, William.”
Will’s guts contracted as he saw another face, a pair of steady blue-gray eyes looking up at his. “I could never hate you Will, no matter how hard I tried,” she had said.
In that moment he was painfully aware that what he had told Jem was not “the whole of it.” There was more truth. There was his love for Tessa. But it was his burden to bear, not Jem’s. It was something that must be hidden for Jem to be happy. “I deserve it,” Will said, his voice cracking. “I believed I was cursed that all who cared for me would die; yet I let myself care for you, and let you be a brother to me, risking the danger to you —”
“There was no danger.”
“But I believed there was. If I held a pistol to your head, James, and pulled the trigger, would it really matter if I did not know that there were no bullets in the chambers?”
Jem’s eyes widened, and then he laughed, a soft laugh. “Did you think I did not know you had a secret?” he said. “Did you think I walked into my friendship with you with my eyes closed fast? I did not know the nature of the burden you carried. But I knew there was a burden.” His voice softened. “I knew you thought yourself poison to all those around you,” he went on. “I knew you thought there to be some corruptive force about you that would break me. I meant to show you that I would not break. That love was not so fragile. Did I do that?”
Will shrugged once, helplessly. He had almost wished Jem would be angry with him. It would be easier to face. But how could he tell Jem that that forgiveness would haunt him, every time he looked at Tessa and wanted her, every time he remembered how much he wanted what he could not, did not deserve, to have. “You saved my life, James.”
A smile spread across Jem’s face, as brilliant as the sunrise breaking over the Thames. “That is all I ever wanted.”

Clockwork Prince: Will's Love Letter to Tessa

BARNES AND NOBLE in the US will be carrying their own special edition. It contains not just the letter from Will to his family, but ALSO an inscription from Will to Tessa in a copy of Tale of Two Cities.

"INDIGO/CHAPTER will be carrying the same special edition as BARNES AND NOBLE." - Cassandra Clare

Tess, Tess, Tessa.

Was there ever a more beautiful sound than your name? To speak it aloud makes my heart ring like a bell. Strange to imagine that, isn’t it – a heart ringing – but when you touch me that is what it is like: as if my heart is ringing in my chest and the sound shivers down my veins and splinters my bones with joy.

Why have I written these words in this book? Because of you. You taught me to love this book where I had scorned it. When I read it for the second time, with an open mind and heart, I felt the most complete despair and envy of Sydney Carton. Yes, Sydney, for even if he had no hope that the woman he loved would love him, at least he could tell her of his love. At least he could do something to prove his passion, even if that thing was to die.

I would have chosen death for a chance to tell you the truth, Tessa, if I could have been assured that death would be my own. And that is why I envied Sydney, for he was free.

And now at last I am free, and I can finally tell you, without fear of danger to you, all that I feel in my heart.

You are not the last dream of my soul.

You are the first dream, the only dream I ever was unable to stop myself from dreaming. You are the first dream of my soul, and from that dream I hope will come all other dreams, a lifetime’s worth.

With hope at least,
Will Herondale

Clockwork Prince: Chapter 17 "In Dreams" Deleted Scene

I promised my Google Group I'd post something for them when we hit 5,000 members. So here's a deleted scene from Clockwork Prince and, at the bottom, a line from City of Lost Souls. The CP scene never actually shows up in the text and I've redacted some spoilers.

The darkness came and went in waves that grew ever slower. Tessa was beginning to feel lighter, less like an awful weight was pressing her down. She wondered how much time had passed. It was night in the infirmary, and she could see Will a few beds away from her, a curled figure under the blankets, dark head pillowed on his arm. Brother Enoch had given him a tisane to drink once the [redacted] was cut out of his skin, and he had fallen asleep almost instantly, thank God. The sight of him in that much pain had been more harrowing than she could have imagined.
She was in a clean white nightgown now; someone must have cut away her blood-stiffened clothes and washed her hair before bandaging her — it lay softly over his shoulders, no longer twisted into rat-tails of tangles and drying blood.
‘Tessa,” came a whispered voice. “Tess?”
Only Will calls me that. She opened her eyes, but it was Jem seated on the side of her bed, looking down at her. The moonlight spilling through the high ceilings turned him almost transparent, an ethereal angel, all silver but for the gold chain at his throat.
He smiled. “You’re awake.”
“I’ve been awake here and there.” She coughed. “Enough to know I’m all right besides a crack on the head. A lot of fuss about nothing —” Tessa’s eyes dropped, and she saw that Jem was carrying something in his hands: a thick mug of some liquid that sent up a fragrant steam. “What’s that?”
“One of Brother Enoch’s tisanes,” said Jem. “It will help you sleep.”
“All I’ve been doing is sleeping!”
“And very amusing it is to watch,” said Jem. “Did you know you twitch your nose when you sleep, like a rabbit?”
“I do not,” she said, with a whispered laugh.
“You do,” he said. “Fortunately, I like rabbits.” He handed her the cup. “Drink just a little,” He said. “It is right for you to sleep. Brother Enoch says to think of the wounds and shocks to your spirit as you would think of wounds and shocks to your body. You must rest the injured part of yourself before you begin to heal.”
Tessa was dubious, but she took a sip of the tisane anyway, and then another. It had a pleasant taste, like cinnamon. Barely had she swallowed the second mouthful when a feeling of exhaustion swept over her. She lay back against the pillows, listening to his soft voice telling her a story about a beautiful young woman whose husband had died building the Great Wall of China, and who had cried so much over his loss that she had turned into a silvery fish and swum away across a river. As Tessa drifted off into dreams, she felt his gentle hands take the cup from her and set it down on the bedside table. She wanted to thank him, but she was already asleep.

Her chin was raised, determination and candor in her eyes, and her lifted arms welcomed him back to her, enfolding him, drawing him in. “Jem, my Jem,” she was whispering, and he whispered back, losing his words against her mouth, whispering what was true but what he hoped she wouldn’t understand. He whispered in Chinese, worried that if he spoke in English, he would say something profoundly stupid. Wo ai ni. Ni hen piao liang, Tessa. Zhe shi jie shang, wo shi zui ai ni de.

But he saw her eyes darken; he knew she recalled what he had said to her in the carriage. “What does it mean?” she whispered.

He stilled against her body. “It means that you are beautiful. I did not want to tell you before. I did not want you to think I was taking liberties.”

She reached up and touched his cheek. He could feel his heart beating against hers. It felt as if it might beat out of his chest entirely.

“Take them,” she whispered.

His heart soared, and he gathered her up against him, something he had never done before, but she did not seem to mind his clumsiness. Her hands were traveling gently over him, learning his body. Her fingers stroked the bone of his hip, the cup of his collar. They tangled in his shirt and it was up and over his head, and he was leaning into her, shaking silvery hair out of his face. He saw her eyes go wide and felt his insides tighten.

“I know,” he said, looking down at himself — skin like papier-mache, ribs like violin strings. “I am not — I mean, I look —”

“Beautiful,” she said, and the word was a pronouncement. “You are beautiful, James Carstairs.”

Breath eased back into his lungs and they were kissing again, her hands warm and smooth against his bare skin. She touched him with hesitant, curious strokes, mapping a body that seemed to flower under her ministrations into something perfect, healthy: no longer a fragile device of swiftly diminishing flesh lashed to a framework of breakable bones. It was only now, that this was happening, that he realized how sincerely he had believed it never would.

He could feel the soft, nervous puffs of her breath against the sensitive skin of his throat as he drew his hands up and over her body. He touched her as he would touch his violin: it was how he knew to touch something that was precious and loved. He had carried the violin in his arms from Shanghai to London and he had carried Tessa, too, in his heart, for longer than he thought he remembered. When had it happened? His hands touched her through the nightgown, the curve and dip of her waist and hips like the curve of the Guarneri, but the violin did not give gratifying gasps when he touched it, did not seek his mouth out for kisses or have fascinating eyelids that fluttered shut just so when he stroked the sensitive skin at the backs of her knees.

Maybe it had been the day he’d run up the stairs to her and kissed her hand. Mizpah. May the Lord watch between me and thee when we are parted. It was the first time he had thought that there was something more to his regard than the ordinary regard for a pretty girl he could not have; that it had the aspect to it of something holy.

The pearl buttons of her nightdress were smooth under his fingertips. Her body bowed backward, her throat arched, as the material slipped aside, leaving her shoulder bare. Her breath was quick in her throat, the curls of her brown hair stuck to her flushed cheeks and forehead, the material of her dress crushed between them. He was shaking himself as he bent to kiss her bare skin, skin that most likely no one but herself and perhaps Sophie had ever seen, and her hand came up to cup his head, threading through the hair at the back of his neck . . .

There was the sound of a crash. And a choking fog of yin fen filled the room.

It was as if Jem had swallowed fire; he jerked back and away from Tessa with such force that he nearly overbalanced them both. Tessa sat up as well, pulling the front of her night-dress together, her expression suddenly self-conscious. All Jem’s heat was gone; his skin was suddenly freezing — with shame, and with fear for Tessa — he had never dreamed of her being this close to the poisonous stuff that had destroyed his life. But the laquer box was broken: a thick layer of shining powder lay across the floor; and even as Jem drew in a breath to tell her she must go, that she must leave him if she were to be safe, he did not think of the loss of the precious drug, or of the danger to him if it could not be retrieved. He thought only:

No more.

The yin fen has taken so much from me: my family, the years of my life, the strength in my body, the breath in my lungs. It will not take from me this too: the most precious thing we are given by the Angel. The ability to love. I love Tessa Gray.

And I will make sure that she knows it.

Clockwork Prince: An Offering of Moonlight
An Offering of Moonlight: Jem’s Perspective on “Fierce Midnight” in Clockwork Prince

An Offering of Moonlight
I wish to offer you moonlight in a handful — Zhang Jiu Ling
[This takes place in Chapter Nine of Clockwork Prince, entitled "Fierce Midnight. The scene in which Tessa and Jem first kiss from his perspective.


The first thing Jem did the moment he entered his room was stride to the yin fen box on his nightstand.

He usually took the drug in a solution of water, letting it dissolve and drinking it, but he was too impatient now; he took a pinch between his thumb and forefinger, and sucked it from his fingers. It tasted of burned sugar and left the inside of his mouth feeling numb. He slammed the box shut with a feeling of dark satisfaction.

The second thing he did was to retrieve his violin.

The fog was thick against the windows, as if they had been painted over with lead. If it had not been for the witchlight torches burning low, there would not have been enough illumination for him to see what he was doing as he wrenched open the box that held his Guarneri and took the instrument from it. A snatch of one of Bridget’s songs played in his head: It was mirk, mirk night, there was no starlight, and they waded through blood to the knees.

Mirk, mirk night indeed. The sky had had been black as pitch down in Whitechapel. Jem thought of Will, standing on the pavement, dizzy-eyed and grinning. Until Jem had hit him. He had never hit Will before, no matter how maddening his parabatai had been. No matter how destructive to other people, no matter his casual cruelty, no matter his wit that was like the edge of a knife, Jem had never hit him. Until now.

The bow was already rosined; he flexed his fingers before he took hold of it, and drew in several deep breaths. He could feel the yin fen surging through his veins already, lighting his blood like fire lighting gunpowder. He thought of Will again, asleep on the bed in the opium den. He had been flushed, his face smooth and innocent in sleep, like a child with his cheek pillowed on his hand. Jem remembered when Will had been young like that, though never a time when he had been innocent.

He set the bow to the strings and played. He played softly at first. He played Will lost in dreams, finding solace in a drugged haze that muffled his pain. Jem could only envy him that. The yin fen was no balm: he did not find in it whatever opium addicts found in their pipes, or alcoholics in the dregs of a gin bottle. There was only exhaustion and lassitude without it, and with it, energy and fever. But there was no surcease from pain.

Jem’s knees gave out, and he sank to the trunk at the foot of his bed, still playing. He played Will breathing the name Cecily, and he played himself watching the glint of his own ring on Tessa’s hand on the train from York, knowing it was all a charade, knowing, too, that he wished that it wasn’t. He played the sorrow in Tessa’s eyes when she had come into the music room after Will had told her she would never have children. Unforgivable, that, what a thing to do, and yet Jem had forgiven him. Love was forgiveness, he had always believed that, and the things that Will did, he did out of some bottomless well of pain. Jem did not know the source of that pain, but he knew it existed and was real, knew it as he knew of the inevitability of his own death, knew it as he knew that he had fallen in love with Tessa Gray and that there was nothing he or anyone else could do about it.

He played that, now, played all their broken hearts, and the sound of the violin wrapped him and lifted him and he closed his eyes —

His door opened. He heard the sound through the music, but for a moment did not credit it, for it was Tessa’s voice he heard, saying his name. “Jem?”

Surely she was a dream, conjured up by the music and the drug and his own fevered mind. He played on, played his own rage and anger at Will, for however he had always forgiven Will for his cruelty to others, he could not forgive him for endangering himself.

“Jem!” came Tessa’s voice again, and suddenly there were hands on his, wrenching the bow out of his grasp. He let go in shock, staring up at her. “Jem, stop! Your violin — your lovely violin — you’ll ruin it.”

She stood over him, a dressing-gown thrown over her white nightgown. He remembered that nightgown: she had been wearing it the first time he had seen her, when she had come into his room and he had thought for one mad moment that she was an angel. She was breathing hard now, her face flushed, his violin gripped in one hand and the bow in another.

“What does it matter?” he demanded. “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?” She stared at him, her lips parting in astonishment. He stood up and turned away from her. He could no longer bear to look her in the face, to see her disappointment with him, his weakness. “You know it is true.”

“Nothing is decided.” Her voice trembled. “Nothing is inevitable. A cure —”

“There’s no cure. 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 makes sport of what is killing me.”

“But Jem, I don’t think that’s what Will meant to do at all.” She had set down his violin and bow, and was moving toward him. ”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.”

“He knows what it means to me,” he said. She was just behind him: he could smell the faint perfume of her skin: violet-water and soap. The urge to turn about and touch her was overwhelming, but he held himself still. “To see him even toy with what has destroyed my life — “

“But he wasn’t thinking of you —”

“I know that.” How could he say it? How could he explain? How could he tell her that Will was what he had devoted his life to: Will’s rehabilitation, Will’s innate goodness. Will was the cracked mirror of his own soul that he had spent years trying to repair. He could forgive Will harming anyone but his own self. “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.”

“Oh, Jem.” Her voice was so soft that he turned. Her dark hair was unbound: it tumbled around her face and he had the most absurd urge to bury his hands in it, to draw her close, his hands cupping the back of her neck. She reached out a soft hand for him and for a moment, wild hope rose up in him, unstoppable as the tide — but she only laid her hand against his forehead, careful as a nurse. “You’re burning up. You should be resting —”

He jerked away from her before he could stop himself. Her gray eyes widened. “Jem, what it is it? You don’t want me to touch you?”

“Not like that.” The words burst out before he could stop them. The night, Will, the music, the yin fen, all had unlocked something in him — he barely knew his own self, this stranger who spoke the truth and spoke it harshly.

“Like what?” Her confusion was plain on her face. Her pulse beat at the side of her throat; where her nightgown was open he could see the soft curve of her collarbone. He dug his fingers into the palms of his hands. He could not hold back the words any more. It was swim or drown.

“As if you were a nurse and I were your patient,” he told her. “Do you think I do not know 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 —” I might want you. He broke off before he said it. It could not be said. Words of love were one thing: words of desire were dangerous as a rocky shore where a ship could founder. It was hopeless, he knew it was hopeless, and yet —

She shook her head. “This is the fever speaking, not you.”

Hopeless. The despair cut at him like a dull knife, and he said the next words without thinking: “You can’t even believe I could want you. That I am alive enough, healthy enough —”

“No —” She caught at his arm, and it was like having five brands of fire laid across his skin. Desire lanced through him like pain. “James, that isn’t at all what I meant —”

He laid his hand over hers, where she held his arm. He heard her indrawn breath — sharp, surprised. But not horrified. She did not pull away. She did not remove his hand. She let him hold her, and turn her, so that they stood face to face, close enough to breathe each other in.

“Tessa,” he said. She looked up at him. The fever pounded in him like blood, and he no longer knew what was the desire and what was the drug, or if the one simply enhanced the other, and it did not matter, it did not matter because he wanted her, he had wanted her for so long. Her eyes were huge and gray, her pupils dilated, and her lips were parted on a breath as if she were about to speak, but before she could speak he kissed her.

The kiss exploded in his head like fireworks on Guy Fawkes’ Day. He closed his eyes on a whirl of colors and sensations almost to intense to bear: her lips were soft and hot under his and he found himself running his fingers over her face, the curves at her cheekbones, the hammering pulse in her throat, the tender skin at the back of her neck. It took every ounce of control he had to touch her gently, not to crush her against him, and when she raised her arms and twined them around his neck, sighing into his mouth, he had to stifle a gasp and for a moment hold himself very still or they would have been on the floor.

Her own hands on him were gentle, but there was no mistaking their encouragement. Her lips murmured against his, whispering his name, her body soft and strong in his arms. He followed the arch of her back with his hands, feeling the curve of it under her nightgown, and he could not stop himself then: he pulled her so tightly against him that they both stumbled, and collapsed backward onto the bed.

Tessa sank into the cushions and he propped himself over her. Her hair had come out of its plaits and tumbled dark and unbound over the pillows. A flush of blood spread over her face and down to the neckline of her gown, staining her pale skin. The hot press of body to body was dizzying, like nothing he had imagined, more fierce and delicious than the most delirious music. He kissed her again and again, each time harder, savoring the texture of her lips under his, the taste of her mouth, until the intensity of it threatened to tip over from pleasure into pain.

He should stop, he knew. This had gone beyond honor, beyond any bounds of propriety. He had imagined, sometimes, kissing her, carefully cupping her face between his hands, but had never imagined this: that they would be wrapped so tightly around each other that he could hardly tell where he left off and she began. That she would kiss him and stroke him and run her fingers through his hair. That when he hesitated with his fingers on the tie of her dresssing-gown, the reasonable part of his brain commanding his rebellious and unwilling body to stop, that she would neatly solve the dilemma by undoing the fastening herself and lying back as the material fell away around her and she looked up at him in only her thin nightgown.

Clockwork Angel: Will's Letter to His Family

"All print first editions of Clockwork Prince in North America, the UK/Ireland and Australia/NZ are going to come with a beautifully formatted letter from Will to his family, that he never sent, in the back. That’s *ALL FIRST EDITIONS.” So ANY PRINT FIRST EDITION, WHEREVER you buy it, will have the letter."_Cassandra Clare

“London

The Institute

Year of Our Lord 1878

“Mother, Father, my chwaer fach,

It’s my seventeenth birthday today. I know that to write to you is to break the law, I know that I will likely tear this letter into pieces when it is finished. As I have done on all my birthdays past since I was twelve. But I write anyway, to commemorate the occasion - the way some make yearly pilgrimages to a grave, to remember the death of a loved one. For are we not dead to each other?

I wonder if when you woke this morning you remembered that today, seventeen years ago, you had a son? I wonder if you think of me and imagine my life here in the Institute in London? I doubt you could imagine it. It is so very different from our house surrounded by mountains, and the great clear blue sky and the endless green. Here, everything is black and gray and brown, and the sunsets are painted in smoke and blood. I wonder if you worry that I am lonely or, as Mother always used to, that I am cold, that I have gone out into the rain again without a hat? No one here worries about those details. There are so many things that could kill us at any moment; catching a chill hardly seems important.

I wonder if you knew that I could hear you that day you came for me, when I was twelve. I crawled under the bed to block out the sound of you crying my name, but I heard you. I heard mother call for her fach, her little one. I bit my hands until they bled but I did not come down. And, eventually, Charlotte convinced you to go away. I thought you might come again but you never did. Herondales are stubborn like that.

I remember the great sighs of relief you would both give each time the Council came to ask me if I wished to join the Nephilim and leave my family, and each time I said no and I send them away. I wonder if you knew I was tempted by the idea of a life of glory, of fighting, of killing to protect as a man should. It is in our blood - the call to the seraph and the stele, to marks and to monsters.

I wonder why you left the Nephilim, Father? I wonder why Mother chose not to Ascend and to become a Shadowhunter? Is it because you found them cruel or cold? I have no fathom side. Charlotte, especially, is kind to me, little knowing how much I do not deserve it. Henry is mad as a brush, but a good man. He would have made Ella laugh. There is little good to be said about Jessamine, but she is harmless. As little as there is good to say about her, there is as much good to say about Jem: He is the brother Father always thought I should have. Blood of my blood - though we are no relation. Though I might have lost everything else, at least I have gained one thing in his friendship.

And we have a new addition to our household too. Her name is Tessa. A pretty name, is it not? When the clouds used to roll over the mountains from the ocean? That gray is the color of her eyes.

And now I will tell you a terrible truth, since I never intend to send this letter. I came here to the Institute because I had nowhere else to go. I did not expect it to ever be home, but in the time I have been here I have discovered that I am a true Shadowhunter. In some way my blood tells me that this is what I was born to do.If only I had known before and gone with the Clave the first time they asked me, perhaps I could have saved Ella’s life. Perhaps I could have saved my own.

Your Son,

Will”

Clockwork Angel: Chapter 17 "Call The Darkness Down" Deleted Scene

Nate and Tessa discuss Jessamine while she isn't around.

"You know," said Nate, "I'm feeling rather parched—I think I'd like some tea. If we could ring for a servant?"

"Oh, dear, you must be parched. I'm afraid I've been a most negligent hostess." Jessamine rose, all distress. "There are no bells in the library, but I'll get Sophie and have her ask Agnes to make up a tray for you."

She hurried from the room, smoothing her skirts down as she went. Nate watched her go with an appreciative glance before turning back to Tessa, who shot him a dubious look.

"You don't really want tea," she said. "You hate tea."

"I do, but I love my little sister." He grinned at her. "You were looking miserable. I take it you don't like Jessamine much? Why not? She seems delightful to me."

"She is delightful to you. Not so much to the rest of us." Tessa thought of Jessamine clinging to her in Hyde Park and hesitated. "It's just—she's like a child. Cruel sometimes and kind other times, at a whim. Other people aren't real to her. Of course she likes you—you're not a Shadowhunter. She despises Shadowhunters."

"Does she?" Nate's voice deepened the way it did when he was genuinely interested in something.

Clockwork Angel: Chapter 14 "Blackfriars Bridge" Deleted Scene

A deleted bit of the conversation between Jem and Tessa on Blackfriars Bridge in which Jem talks more about his heritage and the state of relations between Britain and China during and after the Opium Wars.

"There was a place in China," said Jem, "called the Yuánmíng Yuán. The Gardens of Perfect Brightness. It was an Imperial residence. My mother went there to visit the Emperor once, a sort of ambassadorial visit from the Nephilim. She said it was the most beautiful place she had ever been. There were exquisite gardens, paintings, music, beautiful pavilions. They called it 'the Garden of gardens.'" He looked out over the water. "Fifteen years ago the British tore it to the ground. Reprisals for something that happened during the Arrow War. They killed the guards, stole anything they thought they could sell, and set the palace on fire. It took three days to burn. There's nothing left of all that beauty now but silent stones and scorched earth."

"I'm sorry," Tessa told him, having no idea what else she could possibly say.

"No one here cares, of course," said Jem. "They have never heard of the Gardens. Lord Elgin was the one who ordered the Gardens burned; for that, they made him viceroy of India. He is a celebrated man now. For what he did in my country I should hate him and all the Englishmen like him."

His voice was cool and clear, and sent a shiver up Tessa's spine. Across the bridge from them, the strolling couple had paused at a parapet; the man seemed to be pointing down at something at the water, the woman nodding as he spoke. "And do you? Hate them?"

"It does not matter," said Jem. "I am more than anything else a Shadowhunter. I am a brother to the Nephilim of England more than I am a brother to any mundane of the land where I was born. And when Nephilim look at me, they see only a Shadowhunter. It is the mundanes who look at me and see something they do not understand—a boy who is not quite white and not quite foreign either."

"Just as I am not human, and not demon either," Tessa said softly.

His eyes softened. "You are human," he said. "Never think you are not. I have seen you with your brother; I know how you care for him. If you can feel hope, guilt, sorrow, love—then you are human."

Her reply came, finally, stiff with hurt and anger. “Very well,” she said, though it was clearly not. He chanced a look at her out of the corner of his eye: she was proud, she would not cry. She did not bother to gather up the hair clips he had scattered; she only rose to her feet and turned her back on him.

He deserved no better, he knew. He he had thrown himself at her with no regard for her reputation or the indecorousness of his passion. Jem would have thought of it. Jem would have been more careful of her feelings. And once upon a time, he thought, as her footsteps receded, so would he. But he no longer knew how to be that person. He had covered up that Will for so long with pretense that it was the pretense he reached for first, and not the reality. He dug his nails into the floorboards, welcoming the pain, for it was little compared to the pain of knowing that he had lost more than Tessa’s good opinion this evening. He had lost Will Herondale. And he did not know if he could ever get him back.

Clockwork Angel: Of Loss
Of Loss: Will’s perspective on the events of Clockwork Angel

OF LOSS: WILL’S PERSPECTIVE ON HIS KISS WITH TESSA IN CLOCKWORK ANGEL, PAGE 285-292


Will Herondale was burning.

This was not the first time he had consumed vampire blood, and he knew the pattern of the sickness. First there was a feeling of giddiness and euphoria, as if one had drunk too much gin — the brief period of pleasant drunkenness before the morbs set in. Then pain, starting at the toes and fingertips, working its way up as if lines of gunpowder had been laid across his body and were burning their way toward his heart.

He had heard the pain was not so great for humans: that their blood, thinner and weaker than Shadowhunter blood, did not fight the demon disease as Nephilim blood did. He was vaguely aware when Sophie came in with the holy water, splashing him with the cool stuff as she set the buckets down and went out again. Sophie’s hatred of him was as reliable as fog in London; he could feel it coming off her whenever she got near him. The force of it lifted him up onto his elbows now. He pulled a bucket close to him and upended it over his head, opening his mouth to swallow what he could.

For a moment, it doused the fire burning through his veins entirely. The pain receded, except for the throbbing in his head. He lay back down carefully, crooking an arm over his face to block the dim illumination coming from the low windows. His fingers seemed to trail light as they moved. He heard’s Jem’s voice in his head, scolding him for risking himself. But the face he saw against his eyelids wasn’t Jem.

She was looking at him. The very darkest voice of his conscience, the reminder that he could protect no one, and last of all himself. Looking the way he had the last time he had seen her; she never changed, which was how he knew she was a figment of his imagination.

“Cecily,” he whispered. “Cecy, for the love of God, let me be.”

“Will?” That startled him; she appeared to him often, but rarely spoke. She reached her hand out, and he would have reached for her, too, had not the clang and clatter of metal brought him out of his reverie. He cleared his throat.

“Back, are you, Sophie?” Will said. “I told you if you brought me another one of those infernal pails, I’d—”

“It’s not Sophie,” came the reply. “It’s me. Tessa.”

The hammering of his own pulse filled his ears. Cecily’s image faded and vanished against his eyelids. Tessa. Why had they sent her? Did Charlotte hate him as much as all that? Was this meant to be a sort of object lesson to her in the indignities and dangers of Downworld? When he opened his eyes he saw her standing in front of him, still in her velvet dress and gloves. Her dark curls were startling against her pale skin and her cheekbone was freckled, lightly, with blood, probably Nathaniel’s.

Your brother, he knew he should say. How is he? It must have been a shock to see him. There is nothing worse than seeing someone you love in danger.

But it had been years, and he had learned to swallow the words he wanted to say, transform them. Somehow they were talking about vampires, about the virus and how it was transmitted. She gave him the pail with a grimace — good, she should be disgusted by him — and he used it again to quench the fire, to still the burning in his veins and throat and chest.

“Does that help?” she asked, watching him with her clear gray eyes. “Pouring it over your head like that?”

Will imagined how he must look to her, sitting on the floor with a bucket over his head, and made a strangled noise, almost a laugh. Oh, the glamour of Shadowhunting! The warrior life he had dreamed of as a child!

“The questions you ask . . .” he began. Someone else, someone not Tessa, might have perhaps apologized for asking but she only stood still, watching him like a curious bird. He did not think he had ever seen someone with eyes the color of hers before: it was the color of gray mist blowing in from the sea in Wales.

You could not lie to someone with eyes that reminded you of your childhood.

“The blood makes me feverish, makes my skin burn,” he admitted. “I can’t get cool. But, yes, the water helps.”

“Will,” Tessa said. When he looked up again, she seemed to be haloed by light like an angel, though he knew it was the vampire blood blurring his vision. Suddenly she was moving toward him, gathering her skirts out of the way to sit by him on the floor. He wondered why she was doing that, and realized to his own horror that he had asked her to. He imagined the vampire disease in his body, breaking down his blood, weakening his will. He knew, intellectually, that he had drunk enough holy water to kill the disease before it could burrow into his bones, and that he could not put his lack of control down to the sickness. And yet — she was so close to him, close enough that he could feel the heat radiating from her body.

“You never laugh,” she was saying. “You behave as if everything is funny to you, but you never laugh. Sometimes you smile when you think no one is paying attention.”

He wanted to close his eyes. Her words went through him like the clean slice of a seraph blade, lighting his nerves on fire. He’d had no idea she had observed him so closely, or so accurately. “You,” he replied. “You make me laugh. From the moment you hit me with that bottle. Not to mention the way that you always correct me. With that funny look on your face when you do it. And the way you shouted at Gabriel Lightwood. And even the way you talked back to de Quincey. You make me . . .”

His voice trailed off. He could feel the cold water trickling down his back, over his chest, against his heated skin. Tessa sat only inches from him, smelling of powder and perfume and perspiration. Her damp curls curled against her cheeks, and her eyes were wide on him, her pale pink lips slightly parted. She reached up to push back a lock of her hair, and, feeling like he was drowning, he reached out for her hand. “There’s still blood,” he said, inarticulately. “On your gloves.”

She began to draw away, but Will would not let her go; he was drowning, still, drowning, and he could not release her. He turned her small right hand over. He had the strongest desire to reach for her entirely, to pull her against him and fold her in his arms, to encompass her slim, strong body with his. He bent his head, glad she could not see his face as the blood rushed up into it. Her gloves were ragged, torn where she had clawed at her brother’s manacles. With a flick of his fingers, he opened the pearl buttons that kept her glove closed, baring her wrist.

He could hear himself breathing. Heat spread through his body — not the unnatural heat of vampire sickness, but the more ordinary flush of desire. The skin of her wrist was translucently pale, the blue veins visible beneath. He could see the flutter of her pulse, feel the warmth of her breath against his cheek. He stroked the softness of her wrist with the tips of his fingers and half-closed his eyes, imagining his hands on her body, the smooth skin of her upper arms, the silkiness of the legs hidden beneath her voluminous skirts. “Tessa,” he said, as if she had the slightest idea the effect she was having on him. There were women who might have, but Tessa was not one of them. “What do you want from me?”

“I—I want to understand you,” she whispered.

The thought was quite horrifying. “Is that really necessary?”

“I’m not sure anyone does understand you,” she breathed, “except possibly Jem.”

Jem. Jem had given up on understanding him long ago, Will thought. Jem was a study in how you could love someone entirely without understanding them at all. But most people were not Jem.

“But perhaps he only wants to know that there is a reason,” she was saying. Her gaze was fierce. Nothing stopped her arguing, he thought, or caring: in that way, she was like Jem: loss did not make her bitter, and betrayal did not beat down her faith. Unconsciously, she moved to draw her hand back, to gesture passionately, and he caught at it, slipping the glove off her hand. She gasped as if he had put his hands on her body, blood rising to stain her cheeks. Her bare, small hand, which curled like a dove inside his, went still. He lifted it to his mouth, his cheek, kissing her skin: brushing his lips across her knuckles, down to her wrist. He heard her cry out in a low voice, and lifted his head to see her sitting perfectly still, her hand held out, her eyes closed and her lips half-open.

He had kissed girls, other girls, when basic physical desire overcame common sense, in dark corners at parties or under the mistletoe. Quick, hurried kisses, most of them, although some surprisingly expert — where had Elspeth Mayburn learned how to do what she did with her teeth, and why had no one ever told her it wasn’t a good idea? — but this was different.

Before there had been controlled tension, a deliberate decision to give into what his body asked for, divorced from any other feeling. Cut free of any emotion at all. But this — this was heat flowering through his chest, shortening his breath, sending a tide of goosebumps over his skin. This was a feeling of pain when he let her hand go, a sickness of loss cured only when he pulled her toward him across the splintery wooden floor, his hands cupping the back of her neck as his lips descended on hers with equal parts tenderness and fierceness.

Her mouth opened under his, hesitant, and some corner of his mind cried out to him to slow his pace, that by any reasonable guess this was her first kiss. He forced his hands to slow down, to gently unclasp the fastenings in her hair and smooth the curls down over her shoulders and back, his fingertips tracing light patterns on her soft cheekbones, her bare shoulders. Her hair felt like warm silk running through his fingers and her body, pressed against his, was all softness. Her hands were light as feathers on the back of his neck, in his hair; when he drew her closer, she made a low sound against his mouth that nearly drove every last thought from his head. He began to bend her back toward the floor, moving his body over hers —

And froze. Panic rushed through his blood in a boiling flood as he saw the whole fragile structure he had built up around himself shatter, all because of this, this girl, who broke his control like nothing else ever had. He tore his mouth from her, pushing her away, the force of his terror nearly knocking her over. She stared at him through the tangled curtain of her hair, her face pale with shock.

“God in Heaven,” he whispered. “What was that?”

Her bewilderment was plain on her face. His heart contracted, pumping self-loathing through his veins. The one time, he thought. The only time —

“Tessa,” he said. “I think you had better go.”

“Go?” Her lips parted; they were swollen from his kisses. It was like looking at a wound he had inflicted, and at the same time, he wanted nothing more than to kiss her again. “I should not have been so forward. I’m sorry —”

“God.” The word surprised him; he had stopped believing in God a long time ago, and now he had invoked him twice. The pain on her face was almost more than he could bear, and not least because he had not intended to hurt her. So often, he intended to hurt and to wound, and this time he had not — not in the least — and he had caused more hurt than he could imagine. He wanted nothing more than to reach out and take her in his arms, not even to satisfy his desire but to impart tenderness. But doing so would only worsen the situation beyond imagining. “ Just leave me alone now,” he heard himself say. “Tessa. I’m begging you. Do you understand? I’m begging you. Please, please leave.”

Clockwork Angel: Why Will Hates Ducks
Why Will Hates Ducks: A Clockwork Angel Extra

Story about why Will is afraid of ducks...
Takes place at the beginning of Chapter Nine of Clockwork Angel, “The Enclave”

Will kicked his heels impatiently against the legs of the library table. If Charlotte were there, she would have told him to stop damaging the furniture, though half the furniture in the library already bore the marks of years of abuse — chips in the pillars where he and Jem had been practicing swordplay outside the training room, scuffed shoe-prints on the windowseats where he’d sat for hours reading. Books with turned-down pages and broken spines, fingerprints on the walls.
Of course if Charlotte were there, they wouldn’t be doing what they were currently doing, either, which was watching Tessa Change form from herself to Camille and back again. Jem sat beside Will on the library table, occasionally calling out encouragement or advice. Will, leaning back on his hands with an apple he had stolen from the kitchen beside him, was pretending to be barely paying attention.
But paying attention he was. Tessa was pacing up and down the room, her hands clenched at her sides in concentration. It was fascinating to watch her Change: there was a ripple, as of the smooth water of a pond disturbed by a thrown pebble, and her dark hair would thread through with blond, her body curving and changing in such a way that Will found it impossible to pull his eyes away. It was not usually considered polite to stare at a lady in such a direct way, and yet he was glad of the chance . . .
He was, wasn’t he? He blinked his eyes as if meaning to clear his head. Camille was beautiful — one of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen. But her beauty left him cold. It was, as he had said to Jem, like a dead flower pressed under glass. If his heart was beating hard and his gaze was caught, it was by Tessa herself. He told himself it was the fascination of such unusual magic, not the rather adorable scowl that twisted her features when she had difficulty capturing Camille’s gliding walk — or the way her dress slipped away from her collarbones and down her shoulder when she turned back into herself, or the way her dark hair, coming unpinned, clung to her cheeks and neck as she shook her head in frustration —
He picked up the apple by his side and began ostentatiously polishing it on his shirtfront, hoping it would hide the sudden shaking in his hands. Feelings for Tessa Gray were not acceptable. Feelings for anyone were dangerous, but feelings for a girl who was actually living in the Institute — someone who had become an intricate part of their plans, who he could not avoid — were especially so.
He knew what he had to do in such a circumstance. Drive her away; hurt her; make her hate him. And yet everything in him rebelled against the idea. It was because she was alone, vulnerable, he told himself. It would be such a great cruelty to do it . . .
She stopped where she was, throwing her arms up, and making a noise of frustration. “I simply cannot walk in that manner!” she exclaimed. “The way Camille simply seems to glide . . .”
“You point your feet out too much when you walk,” Will said, though it wasn’t strictly true. It was as cruel as he felt he could be, and Tessa rewarded him with a sharp look of reproof.. “Camille walks delicately. Like a faun in the woods. Not like a duck.”
“I do not walk like a duck.”
“I like ducks,” Jem said. “Especially the ones in Hyde Park.” He grinned sideways at Will, and Will knew what he was remembering: he was remembering the same thing. “Remember when you tried to convince me to feed a poultry pie to the mallards in the park to see if you could breed a race of cannibal ducks?”
He felt Jem shake with laughter beside him. What Jem did not know was that Will’s feelings about ducks — and yes, he knew it was ridiculous to have complicated feelings about waterfowl, but he could not help it — were caught up with his memories of his childhood. In Wales, there had been a duck pond in front of the manor. As a child, Will had often gone out to throw bits of stale bread to the ducks. It amused him to watch them quacking and fighting over the remains of his breakfast toast. Or it did, until one of the ducks — a particularly large mallard – upon realizing that Will had no more bread in his pockets, raced at the boy and bit him sharply on the finger.
Will had only been six years old, and had retreated posthaste to the house, where Ella, already eight and immeasurably superior, had burst out laughing at his story and then bandaged up his finger. Will would have thought no more about it had it not been that on the next morning, upon leaving the house through the kitchen door, meaning to play the back garden, he had been arrested by the sight of the same black mallard, its beady eyes fixed on him. Before Will could move, it had darted at him and bitten him viciously on his other hand; by the time he had an opportunity to yell, the offending bird had vanished into the shrubbery.
This time, when Ella bandaged his finger, she said, “What did you do to the poor creature, Will? I’ve never heard of a duck planning revenge before.”
“Nothing!” Will protested indignantly. “I just didn’t have any more bread for it, so it bit me.”
Ella gave him a doubting look. But that night, before Will went to bed, he drew back the curtains of his bedroom to look out on the stars — and saw, motionless in the middle of the courtyard, the small black figure of a duck, eyes fixed on his bedroom window.
His yell brought Ella running. Together they stared out the window at the duck, which appeared ready to remain there all night. Finally, Ella shook her head. “I shall manage this,” she said, and with a toss of her black braids, she stalked downstairs.
Through the window, Will saw her come out of the house. She marched up to the duck and bent down over it. For a moment, they appeared to be in intense conversation. After a few minutes, she straightened up, and the duck spun round, and with a final shake of its tailfeathers, strode out of the courtyard. Ella turned and came back inside.
When she returned to Will’s room, he was sitting on the bed and looking up at her with enormous eyes. “What did you do?”
She smiled smugly. “We came to an agreement, the duck and I.”
“What kind of agreement?”
Ella bent down and, brushing aside his thick black curls, kissed his forehead. “Nothing you need to worry about, cariad. Go to sleep.”
Will did, and the duck never bothered him again. For years afterward he would ask Ella what she had done to get rid of the blasted thing, and she would only shake with silent laughter and say nothing. When he had fled from his house after her death, and was halfway to London, he had remembered her kissing him on the forehead — an unusual gesture for Ella, who was not as openly affectionate as Cecily, who he could never seen to detach from clinging on to his sleeves — and the memory had been like a hot knife going into him; he had curled up around the pain and cried.
Throwing poultry pies at the ducks in the park had been helpful, oddly; he had thought Ella, Ella, at first, but Jem’s laughter had blown away some of the pain of the memory, and he had only thought how glad his sister would have been to have seen him laughing there in that green space, and how he had once had people who loved him, and still did now, even if it was only one.
“They ate it too,” Will said, taking a bite of his apple. He was practiced enough now that he knew none of what he had been thinking showed on his face. “Bloodthirsty little beasts. Never trust a duck.”
Tessa looked at him sideways, and for a single moment, Will had the unnerving feeling that perhaps she saw through him better than he had imagined. She was Tessa then; her eyes were gray as the sea, and for a long pause all he could do was look at her, all else forgotten — apples, vampires, ducks, and everything else in the world that was not Tessa Gray.
“Ducks,” Jem muttered beside him, too low for Tessa to hear. “You are mad, you know that?”
Will dropped his eyes from Tessa’s. “Oh, I know.”

Clockwork Angel: Burning Bright

"Walmart will be carrying its own special edition as well. It will have a short story called “Burning Bright” included, which tells the story from Jem’s point of view of how he first met Tessa." - Cassandra Clare

Jem’s father’s violin had been made for him by the luthier Guarnerni, who had made violins for musicians as famous as Paganini. In fact Jem sometimes thought his father might have been a sort of Paganini himself, famous all over the world for his playing, if he had not been a Shadowhunter. Shadowhunters might dabble in music or painting or poetry, especially after retirement from active duty, but they were always Shadowhunters first and foremost.

Jem knew his talent for the violin was not as great as his father’s — who had taught him how to play when he was still young enough to have trouble balancing the heavy instrument — but he played it for reasons that went far beyond art alone.

This evening he had felt too unwell to join the others at dinner — pain in his bones and a creeping lassitude in his limbs — until he had finally given in and taken just enough yin fen to quell the pain and spark a bit of energy. Then had come the annoyance at his own dependence, and when he had gone looking for Will, always his first line of defense against the addiction, his parabatai had —of course — not been there. Out again, Jem thought, walking the streets like Diogenes, though with a less noble purpose.

So Jem had retreated to his room and to his violin. He was playing Chopin now, a piece originally for piano that his father had adapted for violin. The music began with softness and built to a crescendo, one that would wring every ounce of energy, sweat and concentration out of him, leaving him too exhausted to feel the yearning for the drug that plucked at his nerve endings like fire.

It was in fact, one of the pieces his father had wooed his mother with, before they were married. Jem’s father was the romantic, his mother more practical, but the music had moved her nonetheless. His father had insisted Jem learn it — “I played it for my bride, and one day, you will play it for yours.”

But I will never have a bride. He did not think it in a self-pitying way. Jem was like his mother: practical about most things, even his own death. He was able to hold the fact of it at arm’s length and examine it. Every one of the children of the Institute was peculiar, he thought: Jessamine with her bitterness and her dollhouse, Will with his lies and secrets, and Jem — his dying was only another sort of peculiarity.

He paused for a moment, gasping for breath. He was playing by the window, where it was cooler: he had cracked it slightly open, and the bitter London air touched his cheeks and hair like fingertips as the bow in his hand stilled. He stood in a patch of moonlight, silver as yin fen powder . . .

He clamped his eyes shut and threw himself, again, into the music, the bow sawing against the strings like a cry. Sometimes the desire for the drug was almost overpowering, stronger than the desire for food, for water or air, for love . . .

I played it for my bride, and one day, you will play it for yours. Jem held to that thought resolutely. Sometimes he wondered what it would be like to look at girls as Will did, with his dark blue eyes raking them, offering insults and compliments loud enough to get him slapped at nearly every Christmas party. He wanted casual companionship, sometimes, when a pretty girl flirted with him, or when he was especially lonely.

But Jem did not, could not, think of girls that casually: he supposed an affair might be possible, but it was not what he wanted. He wanted what his father had had — the sort of love poets wrote about. The way his parents had looked at each other, the peace that had wrapped them when they were together. The facsimile of love would not bring him that, and were he to waste time on it, he might miss his opportunity for the real thing — and he would not have many.

A twinge went through him as his need for the drug increased, and he sped up his playing. He tried not to look at the box on his nightstand. It was times like this when he asked himself why he did not just take handfuls of the stuff at a time. Most who were addicted to yin fen took it unceasingly until they died for the euphoric feeling of being untiring and indomitable, of having the force and power of a star. It was that euphoria that killed them in the end, burning out their nerves, crushing their lungs and exhausting their hearts.

Sometimes Jem felt as if he wanted to burn. Sometimes he did not know why he struggled against it, why he valued a longer life of suffering over a shorter life without pain. But then he reminded himself that the lack of pain would only be another illusion: like Jessamine’s dollhouse, like Will’s stories of brothels and gin palaces.

And, if he were truly honest, he knew it would end his chances to find the kind of love his parents had once had. For that was what love was, wasn’t it — to burn bright in someone else’s eyes?

He continued to play. The music had risen to a crescendo. He was breathing hard, sweat standing out on his forehead and collarbones despite the chill of the evening air. He heard the click of his bedroom door as it opened behind him and relief spilled through him, though he did not stop playing. “Will,” he said, after a moment. “Will, is that you?”

There was only silence, uncharacteristic of Will. Perhaps Will was annoyed about something. Jem lowered his bow and turned, frowning. “Will —±” he began.

But it wasn’t Will at all. A girl stood hesitantly in the doorway of his room. A girl in a white nightgown with a dressing-gown thrown over it. Her gray eyes were pale in the moonlight, but calm, as if nothing about his appearance startled her. She was the warlock girl, he realized suddenly; the one Will had told him about earlier, but Will had not mentioned the quality of stillness about her that made Jem feel calm despite his longing for the drug, or the small smile on her lips that lit her face. She must have been there for quite a few moments, listening to him play: the evidence that she had enjoyed it was in her expression, in the dreamy tilt of her head.

“You’re not Will,” he said, and immediately realized that this was a terrifically stupid thing to say. As she began to smile, he felt an answering smile beginning on his own lips — for such a long time Will had always been the person he wanted most to see when he was like this, and now, for the first time, he found himself glad not to see his parabatai, but someone else instead.

Clockwork Angel: Chapter 2 "Hell Is Cold" Deleted Scene


A very early conversation between Will and Tessa in which the nature of their escape was much different, and in which the Darke House was actually a working brothel of clockwork prostitutes.

Will handed Tessa up into the carriage, then swung himself up after her, shouting "Thomas! Go! Go!" at the driver, who cracked the reins. The carriage lurched forward as Will yanked the door shut, sending Tessa tumbling again him.

"Steady on," he said, and reached for her, but Tessa had already pulled away, settling into the seat opposite his. She yanked the curtain back from the window and stared out—there was the dirty street, the shabby buildings crowding in on either side. As the carriage whipped forward, they passed the alley she had spent so many days staring at—it was there, and then gone as they careened around a corner, nearly knocking over a costermonger pushing a donkey cart piled high with new potatoes. Tessa screamed.

Will reached past her and yanked the curtain shut. "It's better if you don't look," he told her pleasantly.

"He's going to kill someone. Or get us killed."

"No, he won't. Thomas is an excellent driver."

Tessa glared at him. "Clearly the word excellent means something else on this side of the Atlantic." The carriage lurched again, and Tessa clutched at the seat, squeezing her eyes shut. Her head was spinning, and not just from the movement of the carriage: it was the first time she had been outside the Red Room in over a month, and the sounds of the street outside, even filtered through the closed windows, seemed to echo inside her head like the booming of a drum. She heard Will, distantly, calling something out to the driver; the carriage slowed, and Tessa's grip on the seat relaxed slightly, the dizziness abating. She opened her eyes, and saw Will looking at her curiously. "Did you tell him where we were going?" she croaked.

"Yes," he said, "although I can't help finding it odd that someone like you would have a brother with an address in Mayfair."

Tessa blinked at him. "Someone like me?"

"A prostitute," said Will.

Tessa's mouth dropped open. "I am not a—a—"

"A prostitute?" Will said again, raising his eyebrows.

Tessa shut her mouth with a snap. "What a horrible thing to say. If that's your idea of a joking way to insult me—"

"I never joke," said Will, "or at least, I only joke when the occasion truly warrants it, which this one does not. I assumed you were a prostitute due to your presence in what can only be termed a brothel."

Tessa stared at him.

"You can't expect me to believe you were entirely ignorant of the Darke House's function?" Will inquired. "You must have seen what was going on."

"I told you, I was never allowed out of that room."

"I didn't realize that meant no one else was ever allowed in," Will said.

"What—oh, ugh. Ugh. There's something horribly wrong with you, isn't there? It's like you can't stop saying awful things."

Will's eyebrows went up; despite her anger, confusion, and horror, somehow Tessa couldn't stop herself from noticing that they made perfect dark half-circles above his eyes. "Now you sound like Jem."

"Who's Jem?"

"Never mind that," said Will. "I'm trying to figure out how someone could live in a brothel for a month and not notice. You must be terribly dull-witted."

Tessa glared.

"If it helps at all, it seemed to be quite a high-class establishment. Nicely furnished, fairly clean..."

"Sounds as if you've visited your fair share of brothels," Tessa said, sourly. "Making a study of them?"

"More of a hobby," said Will, and smiled like a bad angel. Before Tessa could say anything in return, the carriage jerked to a stop. "Seems that we're here," Will announced, and Tessa reached past him to pull back the curtain across the window; she stared out and saw that the carriage had drawn up in front of a tall Georgian townhouse in a pretty square lined with trees and other, similar houses. There was a iron-railed fence around the house, the number 89 marked prominently in silver numbers on the gate.

Clockwork Angel: On The Bridge
On the Bridge: Will and Jem before Clockwork Angel


It was past midnight, and London was as quiet as she ever was: the sound of carriages never stopped completely, nor the cries and calls of the dwellers in the city, or the lively chatter of the mudlarks at the side of the river, picking through the detritus the Thames coughed up for any items of value. Will Herondale and James Carstairs sat on the edge of the Victoria Embankment, their legs dangling down over the side. To the left of them, they could see Cleopatra’s Needle, piercing the sky, to their right, Hungerford Bridge.
Will yawned and stretched his arms back. A short-sword, unsheathed, gleamed in his lap. “You know, James, I’ve started to believe this Leviathan demon doesn’t exist. Or if it does, it’s long swum out to sea by now.”
“Well, it won’t be the first time we’ve sat up all night for nothing, nor the last, I’d wager,” said Jem agreeable. His dragon-headed cane was balanced across his shoulders, his arms draped over either end. His bright hair shone as the moon dodged in and out between clouds. “Are you still pursuing that investigation? The dead girls in the East End?”
“It has led me to some quite interesting places,” said Will. “I won sixty pounds off Ragnor Fell at faro the other night. When you join me again—”
“I do not much like those clubs. Fleecing mundanes, setting them at games they cannot possible win, mocking and drugging even Downworlders, it all leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. And you know what Charlotte would say if she caught you gambling.”
“Charlotte worries too much. She is not —” Will broke off, and looked up at the stars, or what could be seen of them at least between smoke and cloud. They lit his eyes, so you could see the blue of them even in the dimness, ameliorated only by the Embankment’s characteristic dolphin lamps.
My mother, Jem knew he had been about to say. It was a way of Will’s, to cut himself off carefully before he ever revealed too much.
“You told you your father used to gamble,” he said with deliberate casualness, tapping his fingers on the head of his cane.
For a moment, Will looked as far away as the stars he was gazing at. “Just the occasional flutter at cards. My mother discouraged anything else. She did not like gambling. And he was never one of those madmen who used to bet on anything — when the sun would go down that day, or whether old Henderson could climb Minith Mawr drunk.”
Jem did not know what Minith Mawr was, and did not ask. Instead he said, “Your father must have loved your mother very much, to give up being a Shadowhunter for her.”
Will winced, almost imperceptibly, but his tone was surprisingly calm as he said, “He did. I asked him once if he was ever sorry, but he said he never was. He said there are thousands of Shadowhunters, but great love comes once in a lifetime if one is lucky, and one would be a fool to let it go.”
“And do you believe that?” Jem spoke with enormous care; talking to Will about anything personal was like trying not to startle away a wild animal.
“I suppose I do,” said Will, after a pause. “Not that it matters for me, but —” He shrugged. “If love is great, then it is worth fighting for.”
“What if it is immoral somehow? Forbidden?”
“Forbidden? But my father’s love for my mother was forbidden, or at least against the law. Or do mean if she is married, or a vampire?”
“Or a married vampire.”
“Well, nevertheless,” Will said, with a grin. “One should fight on. Love conquers all.”
“I shall warn the vampire husbands of the neighborhood,” said Jem dryly.
“And you, Carstairs? You’ve been very quiet with your views.”
Jem unhitched his arms from his cane and sighed. “You know I believe we are reborn,” he said quietly. “I think if two souls are meant to be together, they will remain together on the Wheel and be together again in the life after this one, whatever happens to us now.”
“Is that an official teaching or something you invented yourself?” Will asked.
Jem laughed. “Does it matter?”
Will looked at him curiously. “Do you think you will see me again?” At the change in Jem’s expression, he added, “I mean, is there a chance for me? To have another life after this, a better one?”
As Jem opened his mouth to answer, a rustling came from beneath their feet. Just as they both looked down, a tentacle shot from the surface of the river, wrapped itself around Jem’s ankle, and yanked him beneath the surface of the water. Will bolted to his feet with his blade in hand; the water was still boiling where the creature’s tentacles were thrashing wildly, indicating that Jem was getting some good blows in. Will’s heart pounded, firing blood and the call of battle through his veins.
“Hell,” he said. “Just when it was getting interesting, too,” and he leaped into the water after his friend.

Josey wrote: "Jennifer wrote: "My favorite is when Jem & Tessa first kiss and they start undressing each other on pages 201-207. I also love the scene from Jem's perspective. I wore out those pages. Still so mad..."

They're talking about Clockwork Prince: An Offering of Moonlight

Ana wrote: "Woah..i hope Magnus doesn't destroy anything

Also, now that we're on the topic of names does anyone reckon there's any connection between Tessa Gray and Lucian (Luke) Graymark?? if there is then i..."

There is no connection, Cassie confirmed that before.