Clockwork Prince (The Infernal Devices, #2)

by Cassandra Clare

“I can’t explain it. It’s like being among friends, being among these names. Silly, I know . . .” “Not silly at all.” She smiled at him. “How did you know just what I’d want to see?” “How could I not?” he said. “When I think of you, and you are not there, I see you in my mind’s eye always with a book in your hand.”

Memories did one no good, not when one knew the truth in the present. Will was beautiful, but he was not hers; he was not anybody’s. Something in him was broken, and through that break spilled a blind cruelty, a need to hurt and to push away.

“Well, Will won’t need to create a new religion just to be rid of me,” said Jem. “He’ll be free soon enough.” Will looked over sharply, but it was Tessa who spoke. “Don’t say that,” she admonished Jem. “A cure could still be found. I don’t see any reason to abandon all hope.” She almost shrank back at the look Will bent on her: blue, blazing, and furious. Jem seemed not to notice as he replied, calmly and unaffectedly. “I haven’t abandoned hope,” he said. “I just hope for different things than you do, Tessa Gray.”

“It was awful. Even Henry was in my dream. He was taking apart my heart as if it were made of clockwork.” “Well, that settles it,” Will said. “Pure fantasy. As if Henry is a danger to anyone except himself.” When she didn’t smile, he added, fiercely, “I would never let anyone touch a hair on your head. You know that, don’t you, Tess?”

His beauty did not blaze like Will’s did in fierce colors and repressed fire, but it had its own muted perfection, the loveliness of snow falling against a silver-gray sky.

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

“I feel myself diminished, parts of me spiraling away into the darkness, that which is good and honest and true—If you hold it away from yourself long enough, do you lose it entirely? If no one cares for you at all, do you even really exist?”

show it to you.” He half-closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them, he was smiling crookedly. “James,” he said. “Ordinarily only Will calls me that.” “I’m sorry—” “No. Don’t be. I like the sound of it on your lips.”

“Dreadfully, I’m afraid,” said Tessa, trying not to notice the warmth of his hand over hers. Even in the darkness of the carriage, his eyes were luminously blue. What was it Jem had said, though, about beauty? Beauty is harsh. Would people forgive Will the things he did if he were ugly? And did it help him, in the end, to be forgiven? Though, she could not help but feel he did the things he did not because he loved himself too much but because he hated himself. And she did not know why.

“Was there really a need to bring Tessa with you to Whitechapel?” Charlotte asked Jem, sliding her glasses off and placing them on the newspaper. Her brown eyes were reproachful. “Tessa is not made of delicate china,” said Jem. “She will not break.”

She loved Jem, as she loved Will—as she could not help loving them all—and the thought of losing him shattered her heart. Not only for her own loss, but for Will’s. If Jem died, she could not help but feel, he would take all that was still human about Will with him when he went.

But all these were things he could not want, because they were things he could not have, and wanting what you could not have led to misery and madness.

She stared at him. He was so kind, she thought. He seemed to read the fears in her heart and move to dispel them before she could speak them aloud.

“I’ve never minded it,” he went on. “Being lost, that is. I had always thought one could not be truly lost if one knew one’s own heart. But I fear I may be lost without knowing yours.”

Tessa looked down at Jem, kneeling before her with the pendant in his hands, and understood at last what people meant when they said someone’s heart was in their eyes, for Jem’s eyes, his luminous, expressive eyes that she had always found beautiful, were full of love and hope.

I’d go live by myself, not inflict myself or my curse on anyone—and then everything changed. Because of you.” “Me?” said Tessa in a quiet, stunned voice. The ghost of a smile touched his mouth. “When I first met you, I thought you were unlike anyone else I had ever known. You made me laugh. No one but Jem has made me laugh in, good God, five years. And you did it like it was nothing, like breathing.”

“She didn’t,” he said. “I pulled them out of the fire myself. I read them all. Every word you wrote. You and I, Tess, we’re alike. We live and breathe words. It was books that kept me from taking my own life after I thought I could never love anyone, never be loved by anyone again. It was books that made me feel that perhaps I was not completely alone. They could be honest with me, and I with them. Reading your words, what you wrote, how you were lonely sometimes and afraid, but always brave; the way you saw the world, its colors and textures and sounds, I felt—I felt the way you thought, hoped, felt, dreamed. I felt I was dreaming and thinking and feeling with you. I dreamed what you dreamed, wanted what you wanted—and then I realized that truly I just wanted you. The girl behind the scrawled letters. I loved you from the moment I read them. I love you still.”

chain of gold,