“You had Ragnor Fell look into Will’s family’s welfare before,” said Jem. “Can you do it again? If Mortmain is somehow entangled with them . . . for whatever reason . . .”
“Yes, yes, of course,” said Charlotte. “I will write to him immediately.”
“There is a part of this I do not understand,” Tessa said. “The reparations demand was filed in 1825, and the complainant’s age was listed as twenty-two. If he was twenty-two then, he’d be seventy-five now, and he doesn’t look that old. Maybe forty . . .”
“There are ways,” Charlotte said slowly, “for mundanes who dabble in dark magic to prolong their lives. Just the sort of spell, by the way, that one might find in the Book of the White. Which is why possession of the Book by anyone other than the Clave is considered a crime.”
“All that newspaper business about Mortmain inheriting a shipping company from his father,” Jem said. “Do you think he pulled the vampire trick?”
“The vampire trick?” echoed Tessa, trying in vain to remember such a thing from the Codex.
“It’s a way vampires have of keeping their money over time,” said Charlotte. “When they have been too long in one place, long enough that people have started to notice that they never age, they fake their own death and leave their inheritance to a long-lost son or nephew. Voila—the nephew shows up, bears an uncanny resemblance to his father or uncle, but there he is and he gets the money. And they go on like that for generations sometimes. Mortmain could easily have left the company to himself to disguise the fact that he wasn’t aging.”
“So he pretended to be his own son,” said Tessa. “Which would also have given him a reason to be seen changing the direction of the company—to return to Britain and begin interesting himself in mechanisms, that sort of thing.”
“And is probably also why he left the house in Yorkshire,” said Henry.
“Though that does not explain why it is being inhabited by Will’s family,” mused Jem.
“Or where Will is,” added Tessa.
“Or where Mortmain is,” put in Jessamine, with a sort of dark glee. “Only nine more days, Charlotte.”
Charlotte put her head back into her hands. “Tessa,” she said, “I hate to ask this of you, but it is, after all, why we sent you to Yorkshire, and we must leave no stone unturned. You still have the button from Starkweather’s coat?”
Wordlessly Tessa took the button from her pocket. It was round, pearl and silver, strangely cold in her hand. “You want me to Change into him?”
“Tessa,” Jem said quickly. “If you do not want to do this, Charlotte—we—would never require it.”
“I know,” Tessa said. “But I offered, and I would not go back on my word.”
“Thank you, Tessa.” Charlotte looked relieved. “We must know if there is anything he is hiding from us—if he was lying to you about any part of this business. His involvement in what happened to the Shades . . .”
Henry frowned. “It will be a dark day when you cannot trust your fellow Shadowhunters, Lottie.”
“It is a dark day already, Henry dear,” Charlotte replied without looking at him.
“You won’t help me, then,” Will said in a flat voice. Using magic, Magnus had built the fire up in the grate. In the glow of the leaping flames, the warlock could see more of the details of Will—the dark hair curling close at the nape of his neck, the delicate cheekbones and strong jaw, the shadow cast by his lashes. He reminded Magnus of someone; the memory tickled at the back of his mind, refusing to come clear. After so many years, it was hard sometimes to pick out individual memories, even of those you had loved. He could no longer remember his mother’s face, though he knew she had looked like him, a mixture of his Dutch grandfather and his Indonesian grandmother.
“If your definition of ‘help’ involves dropping you into the demon realms like a rat into a pit full of terriers, then no, I won’t help you,” said Magnus. “This is madness, you know. Go home. Sleep it off.”
“I’m not drunk.”
“You might as well be.” Magnus ran both hands through his thick hair and thought, suddenly and irrationally, of Camille. And was pleased. Here in this room, with Will, he had gone nearly two hours without thinking of her at all. Progress. “You think you’re the only person who’s ever lost anyone?”
Will’s face twisted. “Don’t make it sound like that. Like some ordinary sort of grief. It’s not like that. They say time heals all wounds, but that presumes the source of the grief is finite. Over. This is a fresh wound every day.”
“Yes,” said Magnus, leaning back against the cushions. “That is the genius of curses, isn’t it.”
“It would be one thing if I had been cursed so that everyone I loved would die,” said Will. “I could keep myself from loving. To keep others from caring for me—it is an odd, exhausting procedure.” He sounded exhausted, Magnus thought, and dramatic in that way that only seventeen-year-olds could be. He also doubted the truth of Will’s statement that he could have kept himself from loving, but understood why the boy would want to tell himself such a story. “I must play the part of another person all day, each day—bitter and vicious and cruel—”
“I rather liked you that way. And don’t tell me you don’t enjoy yourself at least a little, playing the devil, Will Herondale.”
“They say it runs in our blood, that sort of bitter humor,” said Will, looking at the flames. “Ella had it. So did Cecily. I never thought I did until I found I needed it. I have learned good lessons in how to be hateful over all these years. But I feel myself losing myself—” He groped for words. “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?”
He said this last so softly that Magnus had to strain to hear him. “What was that?”
“Nothing. Something I read somewhere once.” Will turned to him. “You would be doing me a mercy, sending me to the demon realms. I might find what I am looking for. It is my only chance—and without that 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. You are a Shadowhunter. You serve a greater cause. Your life is not yours to throw away.”
“Then nothing is mine,” said Will, and pushed himself away from the mantel, staggering a little as if he really were drunk. “If I don’t even own my own life—”
“Who ever said we were owed happiness?” Magnus said softly, and in his mind he saw the house of his childhood, and his mother flinching away from him with frightened eyes, and her husband, who was not his father, burning. “What about what we owe to others?”
“I’ve given them everything I have already,” said Will, seizing his coat off the back of the chair. “They’ve had enough out of me, and if this is what you have to say to me, then so have you—warlock.”