Tessa stared at him in horror. How could anyone think that to die in agony was fitting retribution for an innocent child? She thought of Jem again, his hands gentle on his violin.
“Elizabeth, your mother, grew up not knowing she was a Shadowhunter. No runes were given to her. I followed her progress, of course, and when she married Richard Gray, I made sure I employed him. I believed that the lack of runes on your mother meant that she could conceive a child who was half-demon, half-Shadowhunter, and to test that theory I sent a demon to her in the shape of your father. She never knew the difference.”
Only the emptiness in Tessa’s stomach kept her from being sick. “You—did what—to my mother? A demon? I am half-demon?”
“He was a Greater Demon, if that comforts you. Most of them were angels once. He was fair enough in his own aspect.” Mortmain smirked. “Before your mother became pregnant, I had worked for years to finish my father’s clockwork angel. I finished it, and after you were conceived, tuned it to your life. My greatest invention.”
“But why would my mother be willing to wear it?”
“To save you,” said Mortmain. “Your mother realized that something was wrong when she became pregnant. To carry a warlock child is not like carrying a human child. I came to her then and gave her the clockwork angel. I told her that wearing it would save her child’s life. She believed me. I was not lying. You are immortal, girl, but you are not invulnerable. You can be killed. The angel is tuned to your life; it is designed to save you if you are dying. It may have saved you a hundred times before you were ever born, and it’s saved you since. Think of the times you have been close to death. Think of the way it intervened.”
Tessa thought back—the way her angel had flown at the automaton choking her, had fended off the blades of the creature that had attacked her near Ravenscar Manor, had kept her from being dashed to pieces on the rocks of the ravine. “But it did not save me from torture, nor injury.”
“No. For those are part of the human condition.”
“So is death,” said Tessa. “I am not human, and you let the Dark Sisters torture me. I could never forgive you for that. Even if you convinced me my brother’s death was his fault, that Thomas’s death was justified, that your hatred was reasonable, I could never forgive you for that.”
Mortmain lifted the box at his feet and upended it. There was a rattling crash as cogs fell from it—cogs and cams and gears, sheared-off bits of metal smeared with black fluid, and lastly, bouncing atop the rest of the rubbish like a child’s red rubber ball, a severed head.
Mrs. Black’s.
“I destroyed her,” he said. “For you. I wished to show you I am sincere, Miss Gray.”
“Sincere in what?” Tessa demanded. “Why did you do all this? Why did you create me?”
His lips twitched slightly; it was not a smile, not really. “For two purposes. The first is so that you could bear children.”
“But warlocks cannot . . .”
“No,” said Mortmain. “But you are no ordinary warlock. In you the blood of demons and the blood of angels has fought its own war in Heaven, and the angels have been victorious. You are not a Shadowhunter, but you are not a warlock, either. You are something new, something entirely other. Shadowhunters,” he spat. “All Shadowhunter and demon hybrids die, and the Nephilim are proud of it, glad that their blood will never be filthied, their lineage tainted by magic. But you. You can do magic. You can have children like any other woman. Not for some years yet, but when you reach your full maturity. The greatest warlocks alive have assured me of it. Together we will start a new race, with the Shadowhunters’ beauty and with no warlock mark. It will be a race that will break the Shadowhunters’ arrogance by replacing them on this earth.”
Tessa’s legs gave out. She slumped to the floor, her dressing gown pooling around her like black water. “You—you want to use me to breed your children?”
Now he did grin. “I am not a man without honor,” he said. “I offer you marriage. I always planned that.” He gestured at the pitiful pile of ragged metal and flesh that had been Mrs. Black. “If I can have your willing participation, I would prefer it. And I can promise I shall deal thus with all your enemies.”
My enemies. She thought of Nate, his hand closing on hers as he died, bloody, in her lap. She thought of Jem again, the way he never railed against his fate but faced it down bravely; she thought of Charlotte, who wept over Jessamine’s death, though Jessie had betrayed her; and she thought of Will, who had laid down his heart for her and Jem to walk upon because he loved them more than he loved himself.
There was human goodness in the world, she thought—all caught up with desires and dreams, regrets and bitterness, resentments and powers, but it was there, and Mortmain would never see it.
“You will never understand,” she said. “You say that you build, that you invent, but I know an inventor—Henry Branwell—and you are nothing like him. He brings things to life; you just destroy. And now you bring me another dead demon, as if it were flowers rather than more death. You have no feelings, Mr. Mortmain, no empathy for anyone. If I had not known it before, it would have been made abundantly clear when you tried to use James Carstairs’s illness to force me to come here. Though he is dying because of you, he wouldn’t allow me to come—wouldn’t take your yin fen. That’s how good people behave.”
She saw the look on his face. Disappointment. It was only there for a moment, though, before it was wiped away with a shrewd look. “Wouldn’t allow you to come?” he said. “So I did not misjudge you; you would have done it. Would have come to me, here, out of love.”
“Not love for you.”
“No,” he said thoughtfully, “not for me,” and he drew from his pocket an object that Tessa recognized immediately.
She stared at the watch he held out to her, dangling on its gold chain. It was clearly unwound. The hands had long ago stopped spinning, the time seemingly frozen at midnight. The initials J.T.S. were carved on the back in elegant script.
“I said there were two reasons I created you,” he said. “This is the second. There are shape-shifters in the world: demons and magicians who can take on the appearance of others. But only you can truly become someone else. This watch was my father’s. John Thaddeus Shade. I beg of you to take this watch and Change into my father so I may speak with him one more time. If you do that, I will send all the yin fen I have in my possession—and it is a considerable amount—to James Carstairs.”
“He will not take it,” Tessa said immediately.
“Why not?” His tone was reasonable. “You are no longer a condition of the drug. It is a gift, freely given. It would be foolish to throw it away, and avail nothing. Whereas by doing this small thing for me, you may well save his life. What do you say to that, Tessa Gray?”
Will. Will, wake up.
It was Tessa’s voice, unmistakably, and it brought Will bolt upright in the saddle. He caught at Balios’s mane to steady himself and looked around blearily.
Green, gray, blue. The vista of Welsh countryside spread out before him. He had passed Welshpool and the England-Wales border sometime around dawn. He remembered little of his journey, only a continuous, tortuous progression of places: Norton, Atcham, Emstrey, Weeping Cross, diverting himself and his horse around Shrewsbury, and finally, finally the border and Welsh hills in the distance. They had been ghostly in the morning light, everything shrouded in mist that had burned off slowly as the sun had risen overhead.