Clockwork Prince (The Infernal Devices, #2)

by Cassandra Clare

“I have had five years to live with it. The idea of living with it for even one more frightens me more than the idea of death.” “You are a Shadowhunter; you are not afraid of death.” “Of course I am,” said Will. “Everyone is afraid of death. We may be born of angels, but we have no more knowledge of what comes after death than you do.”

Over the past five years Will had trained himself not to show emotion—surprise, affection, hopefulness, joy. He was fairly sure his expression didn’t change, but he heard the strain in his voice when he said, “Tessa?”

Tessa. Tessa, Tessa, Tessa. Her name rang in Will’s mind like the chime of a bell; he wondered if any other name on earth had such an inescapable resonance to it.

Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death;

“I haven’t abandoned hope,” he said. “I just hope for different things than you do, Tessa Gray.”

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?”

As if he felt the same pull, he bent toward her now. It felt natural, as right as breathing, to lift her head, to meet his lips with hers.

She felt his soft exhalation against her mouth; relief, as if a great weight had been taken from him.

Every day dawns blacker and blacker, and I will lose her forever if you—” “Lose her?” Magnus’s mind fastened on the word; he sat up straight, narrowing his eyes. “This is about Tessa. I knew it was.” Will flushed, a wash of color across the pallor of his face. “Not just her.” “But you love her.” Will stared at him. “Of course I do,” he said finally. “I had come to think I would never love anyone, but I love her.”

“Jem is my great sin,” said Will. “Don’t talk to me about Jem.”

“Jem is dying anyway,” Will said in a choked voice. “Jem is what I have allowed myself. I tell myself, if he dies, it is not my fault. He is dying anyway, and in pain. Ella’s death at least was swift. Perhaps through me he can be given a good death.” He looked up miserably, met Magnus’s accusing eyes. “No one can live with nothing,” he whispered. “Jem is all I have.”

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?”

chance my life is worthless to me anyway.” “Easy enough to say at seventeen,” said Magnus, with no small amount of coldness. “You are in love and you think that is all there is in the world. But the world is bigger than you, Will, and may have need of you.

blinked at her. “Tessa?” Without a word she handed him the note. He glanced up and down the corridor, then gestured her inside the room. She shut the door behind him as he read Magnus’s scrawl once, and then again, before balling it up in his hand, the crackling paper loud in the room. “I knew it,” he said. It was Tessa’s turn to blink. “Knew what?” “That this wasn’t an ordinary sort of absence.” He sat down on the trunk at the foot of his bed and shoved his feet into his shoes. “I felt it. Here.” He put his hand over his chest. “I knew there was something strange. I felt it like a shadow on my soul.”

“No. Don’t be. I like the sound of it on your lips.”

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.”

I remember Jem shouting at me, and you holding me. I knew it was you. You always smell of lavender.”

Will leaned forward. The firelight made odd patterns against his skin, darkening the bruise on his cheek to black. “I do care what other people think,” he said with a surprising intensity, staring into the flames. “It’s all I think about—what others think, what they feel about me, and I about them; it drives me mad. I wanted escape—”

Sometimes he wondered if he did these things just to test himself. To see if the feelings had gone. But they had not. When he saw her, he wanted to be with her; when he was with her, he ached to touch her; when he touched even her hand, he wanted to embrace her. He wanted to feel her against him the way he had in the attic. He wanted to know the taste of her skin and the smell of her hair. He wanted to make her laugh. He wanted to sit and listen to her talk about books until his ears fell off. 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.

“Everyone makes mistakes, Jem.” “Yes,” said Jem. “You just make more of them than most people.” “I—” “You hurt everyone,” said Jem. “Everyone whose life you touch.” “Not you,” Will whispered. “I hurt everyone but you. I never meant to hurt you.” Jem put his hands up, pressing his palms against his eyes. “Will—” “You can’t never forgive me,” Will said, hearing the panic tinging his own voice. “I’d be—” “Alone?” Jem lowered his hands, but he was smiling now, crookedly. “And whose fault is that?” He leaned back against the seat, his eyes half-lidded with tiredness. “I would always have forgiven you,”

“I am not here at her request. James, you are all the family I have.” Will’s voice shook. “I would die for you. You know that. I would die without you. If it were not for you, I would be dead a hundred times over these past five years. I owe you everything, and if you cannot believe I have empathy, perhaps you might at least believe I know honor—honor, and debt—”

“No,” he said. “No, even though you are the perfect picture of Jessamine, I can see Tessa through it somehow—as if, if I were to scrape away a layer of paint, there would be my Tessa underneath.” “I am not your Tessa either.” The light sparkling in his eyes dimmed. “Fair enough,” he said. “I suppose you are not.

Gentleness was not something she would ever have associated with Will. But it was there, in the touch of his hand on her cheek, in the softness of his voice, in his eyes when he looked at her. It was the way she had always dreamed a boy would look at her. But she had never dreamed up someone as beautiful as Will, not in all her imaginings. In the moonlight the curve of his mouth looked pure and perfect, his eyes behind the mask nearly black.

She raised her eyes to his, slow and unwilling, braced for anger or coldness—but his gaze was fixed on hers, his dark blue eyes somber beneath their thick black lashes, and they were stripped of all their usual cool, aloof distance. They were as clear as glass and full of desire. And more than desire—a tenderness she had never seen in them before, had never even associated with Will Herondale.

Her own long, curling dark hair fell down around her shoulders, and Will slid his hands into it. She heard him exhale as he did so, as if he had been holding his breath for months and had only just let it out. She stood as if mesmerized as he gathered her hair in his hands, draping it over one of her shoulders, winding her curls between his fingers. “My Tessa,” he said, and this time she did not tell him that she was not his.

“I have wanted to do this,” he said, “every moment of every hour of every day that I have been with you since the day I met you. But you know that. You must know. Don’t you?” She looked up at him, lips parted in bewilderment. “Know what?” she said, and Will, with a sigh of something like defeat, kissed her.

His lips were soft, so soft. He had kissed her before, wildly and desperately and tasting of blood, but this was different. This was deliberate and unhurried, as if he were speaking to her silently, saying with the brush of his lips on hers what he could not say in words.

“Having a lie-in, no doubt,” said Jem, “and as for him being a witness, well, everyone thinks Will is a lunatic as it is—” “Ah,” said a voice from the doorway, “having your annual everyone-thinks-Will-is-a-lunatic meeting, are you?”

“It’s biannual,” said Jem. “And no, this is not that meeting.”

His eyes moved to the fire; she could see the dancing flames reflected in his pupils. “Then tell me what it is quickly. I have important business to get to. I plan to sulk all afternoon, followed, perhaps, by an evening of Byronic brooding and a nighttime of dissipation.”

“Every time you say that word, ‘friendship,’ it goes into me like a knife,” he said. “To be friends is a beautiful thing, Tessa, and I do not scorn it, but I have hoped for a long time now that we might be more than friends. And then I had thought after the other night that perhaps my hopes were not in vain. But now—” “Now I have ruined everything,” she whispered. “I am so sorry.” He looked toward the window; she could sense that he was fighting some strong emotion. “You should not have to apologize for not returning my feelings.”

“I only regret that it came too soon. I—I would have wanted to—to court you first. To take you driving, with a chaperon.” “A chaperon?” Tessa laughed despite herself. He went on determinedly. “To tell you of my feelings first, before I showed them. To write poetry for you—” “You don’t even like poetry,” Tessa said, her voice catching on a half laugh of relief. “No. But you make me want to write it. Does that not count for anything?”

“Tessa, my Tessa,” he said in his soft voice, as lulling as his violin. “I know you cannot hear me. Brother Enoch says you’re not hurt badly. I can’t say I find that enough to comfort me. It’s rather like when Will assures me that we’re only a little bit lost somewhere. I know it means we won’t be seeing a familiar street again for hours.”

“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.” He closed his eyes as if he were bone-weary, and she saw how thin his eyelids were, like parchment paper, and how tired he looked. “Wo ai ni, Tessa,” he whispered. “Wo bu xiang shi qu ni.”

“You’re seventeen,” Magnus said. “You can’t have wrecked a life you’ve barely lived.

“Your place is with me,” Jem said. “It always will be.” “What do you mean?” He flushed, the color dark against his pale skin. “I mean,” he said, “Tessa Gray, will you do me the honor of becoming my wife?”

Was this what it meant to love someone? That any burden was a burden shared, that they could give you comfort with a word or a touch?

Will looked as if she had slapped him. “I didn’t save your life so you’d be grateful!” “Then, what?” Her voice rose. “You did it because it’s your mandate? Because the Law says—” “I did it because I love you!” he half-shouted, and then, as if registering the shocked look on her face, he said in a more subdued voice, “I love you, Tessa, and I have loved you, almost since the moment I met you.”

Tessa laced her hands together. They were icy cold. “I thought you couldn’t be crueler than you were on the roof that day. I was wrong. This is crueler.” Will stood motionless. Then he shook his head slowly, from side to side, like a patient denying the deadly diagnosis of a physician. “You … don’t believe me?”

“And with every year that passed, and he survived, that seemed more likely. I thought I could learn to live like this. I thought when Jem was gone, after I turned eighteen, 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.”

“Will. It doesn’t matter—” “Nothing matters more!” His voice grew in strength. “I know that if you hate me it is because I forced you to. I know that you have no reason to give me a second chance to be regarded by you in a different light. But I am begging you for that chance. I will do anything. Anything.”

His voice cracked, and she heard the echo of another voice inside it. She saw Jem, looking down at her, all the love and light and hope and expectancy in the world caught up in his eyes.

“I said that Jem proposed to me,” she whispered. “He asked if I would marry him. And I said I would.” Will had gone shockingly white. He said, “Jem. My Jem?” She nodded, without words to say. Will staggered and put his hand on the back of a chair for balance. He looked like someone who had been suddenly, viciously kicked in the stomach. “When?” “This morning. But we have been growing closer, much closer, for a long time.”

Jem grinned. His happiness was printed all over his face, his eyes, Will thought; he had never seen him look like this. He had always thought of Jem as a calm and peaceful presence, always thought that joy, like anger, was too extreme and human an emotion for him. He realized now that he had been quite wrong; Jem had simply not been happy like this before.

He raised his glass of wine. “I do not know two finer people,” he said, “and could not imagine better news. May your lives together be happy and long.” His eyes sought Tessa’s, then slid away from her, fastening on Jem. “Congratulations, brother.”