As if to illustrate his point, at that moment a stray spark landed atop Lady Delilah’s white wig. It burst into flames. With a cry she tried to rip it from her head, but as her hands came in contact with the flames, they, too, caught fire as if they were made of paper instead of skin. In less than a second both her arms were burning like torches. Howling, she raced toward the door, but the fire was faster than she was. Within seconds a bonfire raged where she had stood. Tessa could just see the outline of a blackened screaming creature writhing inside it.
“Do you see what I mean?” Magnus shouted in Tessa’s ear, struggling to make himself heard over the howls of the vampires, who were diving this way and that, trying to avoid the flames.
“Let me go!” Tessa shrieked. De Quincey had leaped into the melee; Nathaniel was slumped alone onstage, apparently unconscious, only his manacles holding him to the chair. “That’s my brother up there. My brother!”
Magnus stared at her. Taking advantage of his confusion, Tessa jerked her arm free and began to run toward the stage. The room was chaos: vampires rushing to and fro, many of them stampeding toward the doorway. The vampires who had reached the door were pushing and shoving to get through it first; others had turned course and were streaming toward the French doors that looked out over the garden.
Tessa veered to avoid a fallen chair, and nearly ran headlong into the redheaded vampire in the blue dress who had glared at her earlier. She looked terrified now. She plunged toward Tessa—then seemed to stumble. Her mouth opened in a scream, and blood poured from it like a fountain. Her face crumpled, folding in on itself, the skin resolving into dust and raining down from the bones of her skull. Her red hair shriveled and turned gray; the skin of her arms melted and turned to powder, and with a last despairing shriek the vampire woman collapsed into a stringy heap of bones and dust lying atop an empty satin dress.
Tessa gagged, tore her eyes away from the remains, and saw Will. He stood directly in front of her, holding a long silver knife; the blade was smeared with scarlet blood. His face was bloody too, his eyes wild. “What the hell are you still doing here?” he shouted at Tessa. “You unbelievably stupid—”
Tessa heard the noise before Will did, a thin whining sound, like a piece of broken machinery. The fair-haired boy in the gray jacket—the human servant Lady Delilah had drunk from earlier—was rushing at Will, a high-pitched wailing sound coming from his throat, his face smeared with tears and blood. He was carrying a torn-off chair leg in one hand; the end of it was ragged and sharp.
“Will, look out!” Tessa shouted, and Will spun. He moved fast, Tessa saw, like a dark blur, and the knife in his hand was a flash of silver in the smoky dimness. When he stopped moving, the boy was lying on the ground, the blade protruding from his chest. Blood welled around it, thicker and darker than vampire blood.
Will, staring down, was ashen. “I thought . . .”
“He would have killed you if he could,” Tessa said.
“You know nothing of it,” Will said. He shook his head, once, as if clearing it of her voice, or of the sight of the boy on the ground. The subjugate looked very young, his twisted face softer in death. “I told you to go—”
“That’s my brother,” Tessa said, pointing toward the back of the room. Nathaniel was still unconscious, limp in his manacles. If it weren’t for the blood still flowing from the wound in his neck, she would have thought he was dead. “Nathaniel. In the chair.”
Will’s eyes widened in astonishment. “But how—?” he began. He didn’t get a chance to finish his question. At that moment the sound of shattering glass filled the room. The French windows burst inward, and the room was suddenly flooded with Shadowhunters in their dark fighting gear. They were driving before them in a screaming, ragged group the vampires who had fled into the garden. As Tessa stared, more Shadowhunters began flooding in from the other doors as well, herding more vampires in front of them, like dogs herding sheep into a pen. De Quincey staggered before the other vampires, his pale face smeared with black ash, his teeth bared.
Tessa saw Henry among the Nephilim, easily recognizable by his ginger hair. Charlotte was there too, dressed like a man all in dark fighting gear, like the women pictured in Tessa’s Shadowhunter book. She looked small and determined and surprisingly fierce. And then there was Jem. His gear made him appear all the more startlingly pale, and the black Marks on his skin stood out like ink on paper. In the crowd she recognized Gabriel Lightwood; his father, Benedict; slim black-haired Mrs. Highsmith; and behind them all strode Magnus, blue sparks flying from his hands as he gestured.
Will exhaled, some of the color returning to his face. “I wasn’t sure they’d come,” he muttered, “not with the Phosphor malfunctioning.” He tore his eyes away from his friends and looked at Tessa. “Go attend to your brother,” he said. “That’ll get you out of the worst of it. I hope.”
He turned and walked away from her without a backward glance. The Nephilim had herded the remaining vampires, those who had not been killed by the fire—or by Will—into the center of a makeshift circle of Shadowhunters. De Quincey towered among the group, his pale face twisted in rage; his shirt was stained with blood—his own or someone else’s, she couldn’t tell. The other vampires huddled behind him like children behind a parent, looking both fierce and wretched at the same time.
“The Law,” de Quincey growled, as Benedict Lightwood advanced on him, a shining blade in his right hand, its surface scored with black runes. “The Law protects us. We surrender to you. The Law—”
“You have broken the Law,” snarled Benedict. “Therefore its protection no longer extends to you. The sentence is death.”
“One mundane,” said de Quincey, sparing a glance toward Nathaniel. “One mundane who has also broken Covenant Law—”
“The Law does not extend to mundanes. They cannot be expected to follow the laws of a world they know nothing of.”
“He is worthless,” de Quincey said. “You do not know how worthless. Do you really desire to shatter our alliance over one worthless mundane?”
“It is more than just one mundane!” Charlotte cried, and from her jacket she drew the paper Will had taken from the library. Tessa had not seen Will pass it to Charlotte, but he must have. “What of these spells? Did you think we would not discover them? This—this black sorcery is absolutely forbidden by the Covenant!”
De Quincey’s still face betrayed only a hint of his surprise. “Where did you find that?”
Charlotte’s mouth was a hard thin line. “That doesn’t matter.”
“Whatever it is you think you know—,” de Quincey began.
“We know enough!” Charlotte’s voice was full of passion. “We know you hate and despise us! We know your alliance with us has been a sham!”
“And have you made it against Covenant Law now to dislike Shadowhunters?” de Quincey said, but the sneer was gone from his voice. He sounded ragged.
“Do not play your games with us,” spat Benedict. “After all we’ve done for you, after we passed the Accords into Law—Why? We’ve tried to make you equal to ourselves—”