Tessa’s voice was firm. “I could never hate you. You’re my brother. You’re my blood.”
“Do you think when all this is over, we can go back home?” Nate asked. “Forget all this ever happened? Live normal lives?”
Live normal lives. The words conjured up an image of herself and Nate in some small, sunny apartment. Nate could get another job, and in the evening she could cook and clean for him, while on weekends they could walk in the park or take the train to Coney Island and ride the carousel, or go to the top of the Iron Tower and watch the fireworks explode at night over the Manhattan Beach Hotel. There would be real sunshine, not like this gray watery version of summer, and Tessa could be an ordinary girl, with her head in a book and her feet planted firmly on the familiar pavement of New York City.
But when she tried to hold this mental picture in her head, the vision seemed to crumble and fall away from her, like a cobweb when you tried to lift it whole in your hands. She saw Will’s face, and Jem’s, and Charlotte’s, and even Magnus’s as he said, Poor thing. Now that you know the truth, you can never go back.
“But we are not normal,” said Tessa. “I am not normal. And you know that, Nate.”
He looked down at the floor. “I know.” He gave a helpless little wave of his hand. “So it’s true. You are what de Quincey said you were. Magical. He said you had the power to change shape, Tessie, to become anything you wanted to be.”
“Did you even believe him? It’s true—well, almost true—but I barely believed it myself at first. It’s so strange—”
“I’ve seen stranger things.” His voice was hollow. “God, it ought to have been me.”
Tessa frowned. “What do you mean?”
But before he could answer, the door swung open. “Miss Gray.” It was Thomas, looking apologetic. “Miss Gray, Master Will is—”
“Master Will is right here.” It was Will, ducking nimbly around Thomas, despite the other boy’s bulk. He was still in the clothes he’d changed into the night before, and they looked rumpled. Tessa wondered if he’d slept in the chair in Jem’s room. There were blue-gray shadows under his eyes, and he looked tired, though his eyes brightened—with relief? amusement? Tessa couldn’t tell—as his gaze fell on Nate.
“Our wanderer, found at last,” he said. “Thomas tells me you were hiding behind the curtains?”
Nate looked at Will dully. “Who are you?”
Quickly Tessa made the introductions, though neither boy seemed all that happy to meet the other. Nate still looked as if he were dying, and Will was regarding Nate as if he were a new scientific discovery, and not a very attractive one at that.
“So you’re a Shadowhunter,” Nate said. “De Quincey told me that you lot were monsters.”
“Was that before or after he tried to eat you?” Will inquired.
Tessa rose quickly to her feet. “Will. Might I speak to you in the corridor for a moment, please?”
If she had expected resistance, she didn’t get it. After a last hostile look at Nate, Will nodded and went with her silently out into the hall, closing the drawing room door behind him.
The illumination in the windowless corridor was variable, the witchlight casting discrete bright pools of light that didn’t quite touch one another. Will and Tessa stood in the shadows between two of the pools, looking at each other—warily, Tessa thought, like angry cats circling in an alley.
It was Will who broke the silence. “Very well. You have me alone in the corridor—”
“Yes, yes,” said Tessa impatiently, “and thousands of women all over England would pay handsomely for the privilege of such an opportunity. Can we put aside the display of your wit for a moment? This is important.”
“You want me to apologize, do you?” Will said. “For what happened in the attic?”
Tessa, caught off guard, blinked. “The attic?”
“You want me to say I’m sorry that I kissed you.”
At the words, the memory rose up again in Tessa with an unexpected clarity—Will’s fingers in her hair, the touch of his hand on her glove, his mouth on hers. She felt herself flush and hoped furiously that it wouldn’t be visible in the dimness. “What—no. No!”
“So you don’t want me to be sorry,” Will said. He was smiling very slightly now, the sort of smile a small child might bend upon the castle he has just built out of toy blocks, before he destroys it with a wave of his arm.
“I don’t care whether you’re sorry or not,” Tessa said. “That’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. I wanted to tell you to be kind to my brother. He’s been through an awful ordeal. He doesn’t need to be interrogated like some sort of criminal.”
Will replied more quietly than Tessa would have thought. “I understand that. But if he’s hiding anything—”
“Everyone hides things!” Tessa burst out, surprising herself. “There are things I know he’s ashamed of, but that doesn’t mean they need to matter to you. It’s not as if you tell everyone everything, do you?”
Will looked wary. “What are you on about?”
What about your parents, Will? Why did you refuse to see them? Why do you have nowhere to go but here? And why, in the attic, did you send me away? But Tessa said none of those things. Instead she said, “What about Jem? Why didn’t you tell me he was ill the way he is?”
“Jem?” Will’s surprise seemed genuine. “He didn’t want me to. He considers it his business. Which it is. You might recall, I wasn’t even in favor of him telling you himself. He thought he owed you an explanation, but he didn’t. Jem owes nothing to anyone. What happened to him wasn’t his fault, and yet he carries the burden of it and is ashamed—”
“He has nothing to be ashamed of.”
“You might think so. Others see no difference between his illness and an addiction, and they despise him for being weak. As if he could just stop taking the drug if he had enough willpower.” Will sounded surprisingly bitter. “They’ve said as much, sometimes to his face. I didn’t want him to have to hear you say it too.”
“I would never have said that.”
“How would I have guessed what you might say?” Will said. “I don’t really know you, Tessa, do I? Any more than you know me.”
“You don’t want anyone to know you,” Tessa snapped. “And very well, I won’t try. But don’t pretend that Jem is just like you. Perhaps he’d rather people knew the truth of who he is.”
“Don’t,” Will said, his blue eyes darkening. “Don’t think you know Jem better than I do.”
“If you care about him so much, why aren’t you doing anything to help him? Why not look for a cure?”
“Do you think we haven’t? Do you think Charlotte hasn’t looked, Henry hasn’t looked, that we haven’t hired warlocks, paid for information, called in favors? Do you imagine Jem’s death is just something we have all accepted without ever fighting against it?”
“Jem told me that he had asked you all to stop looking,” Tessa said, calm in the face of his anger, “and that you had. Haven’t you?”