“Charlotte would never have made you leave, Tessa. She cannot bear to abandon even a fly caught in a spider’s web. She would not have abandoned you.” There was no life in Will’s voice and no feeling. He was simply stating a fact.
“I thought . . .” Tessa’s elation was fading quickly. “That you would be at least a little pleased. I thought we were becoming friends.” She saw the line of his throat move as he swallowed, hard, his hands tensing again on the rail. “As a friend,” she went on, her voice dropping, “I have come to admire you, Will. To care for you.” She reached out, meaning to touch his hand, but she drew back, startled by the tension in his posture, the whiteness of the knuckles that gripped the metal railing. The red mourning Marks stood out, scarlet against the whitened skin, as if they had been cut there with knives. “I thought perhaps . . .”
At last Will turned to look directly at her. Tessa was shocked at the expression on his face. The shadows under his eyes were so dark, they looked hollow.
She stood and stared at him, willing him to say what the hero in a book would say now, at this moment. Tessa, my feelings for you have grown beyond mere feelings of friendship. They are so much more rare and precious than that. . . .
“Come here,” he said instead. There was nothing welcoming in his voice, or in the way he stood. Tessa fought back her instinct to shy away, and moved toward him, close enough for him to touch her. He reached out his hands and touched her hair lightly, brushing back the stray curls around her face. “Tess.”
She looked up at him. His eyes were the same color as the smoke-stained sky; even bruised, his face was beautiful. She wanted to be touching him, wanted it in some inchoate, instinctive way she could neither explain nor control. When he bent to kiss her, it was all she could do to hold herself back until his lips met hers. His mouth brushed hers and she tasted salt on him, the tang of bruised and tender skin where his lip was cut. He took her by the shoulders and pulled her closer to him, his fingers knotting in the fabric of her dress. Even more than in the attic, she felt caught in the eddy of a powerful wave that threatened to pull her over and under, to crush and break her, to wear her down to softness as the sea might wear down a piece of glass.
She reached to lay her hands on his shoulders, and he drew back, looking down at her, breathing very hard. His eyes were bright, his lips red and swollen now from kissing as well as injuries.
“Perhaps,” he said, “we should discuss our arrangements, then.”
Tessa, still feeling as if she were drowning, whispered, “Arrangements?”
“If you are going to be staying,” he said, “it would be to our advantage to be discreet. It might perhaps be better to use your room. Jem tends to come in and out of mine as if he lives in the place, and he might be puzzled to find the door locked. Your quarters, on the other hand—”
“Use my room?” she echoed. “Use it for what?”
Will’s mouth quirked up at the corner; Tessa, who had been thinking about how beautifully shaped his lips were, took a moment to realize with a sense of distant surprise that the smile was a very cold one. “You cannot pretend you don’t know. . . . You are not entirely ignorant of the world, I think, Tessa. Not with that brother of yours.”
“Will.” The warmth was going out of Tessa like the sea drawing back from the land; she felt cold, despite the summer air. “I am not like my brother.”
“You care for me,” Will said. His voice was cool and sure. “And you know that I admire you, the way that all women know when a man admires them. Now you have come to tell me you will be here, available to me, for as long as I might wish it. I am offering you what I thought you wanted.”
“You cannot mean that.”
“And you cannot have imagined I meant anything more,” Will said. “There is no future for a Shadowhunter who dallies with warlocks. One might befriend them, employ them, but not . . .”
“Marry them?” Tessa said. There was a clear picture in her head of the sea. It had drawn back entirely from the shore, and she could see the small creatures it had left gasping in its wake, flapping and dying on the bare sand.
“How forward.” Will smirked; she wanted to slap the expression off his face. “What did you really expect, Tessa?”
“I did not expect you to insult me.” Tessa’s voice threatened to shake; somehow, she kept it firm.
“It cannot be the unwanted consequences of a dalliance that concern you,” Will mused. “Since warlocks are unable to have children—”
“What?” Tessa stepped back as if he had pushed her. The ground felt unsteady under her feet.
Will looked at her. The sun was nearly completely gone from the sky. In the near darkness the bones of his face looked prominent and the lines at the corners of his mouth were as harsh as if he were racked by physical pain. But his voice when he spoke was even. “You didn’t know that? I thought someone would have told you.”
“No,” Tessa said softly. “No one told me.”
His gaze was steady. “If you are not interested in my offer . . .”
“Stop,” she said. This moment, she thought, was like the edge of a broken bit of glass, clear and sharp and painful. “Jem says you lie to make yourself look bad,” she said. “And perhaps that is true, or perhaps he simply wishes to believe that about you. But there is no reason or excuse for cruelty like this.”
For a moment he looked actually unnerved, as if she had truly startled him. The expression was gone in an instant, like the shifting shape of a cloud. “Then there is nothing more for me to say, is there?”
Without another word she spun on her heel and walked away from him, toward the steps that led back down into the Institute. She did not turn to see him looking after her, a still black silhouette against the last embers of the burning sky.
Lilith’s Children, known also by the name warlocks, are,
in the manner of mules and other crossbreeds, sterile. They
cannot produce offspring. No exceptions to this rule have been
noted. . . .
Tessa looked up from the Codex and stared, unseeing, out the window of the music room, though it was too dark outside for much of a view. She had taken refuge here, not wanting to return to her own room, where she would eventually be discovered moping by Sophie or, worse, Charlotte. The thin layer of dust over everything in this room reassured her that she was much less likely to be found here.
She wondered how she had missed this fact about warlocks before. To be fair, it was not in the Codex’s section on warlocks, but rather in the later section on Downworld crossbreeds such as half faeries and half werewolves. There were no half warlocks, apparently. Warlocks could not have children. Will hadn’t been lying to hurt her; he’d been telling the truth. Which seemed worse, in a way. He would have known that his words weren’t a light blow, easily resolved.
Perhaps he had been correct. What else had she really thought would happen? Will was Will, and she should not have expected him to be anything else. Sophie had warned her, and still she hadn’t listened. She knew what Aunt Harriet would have said about girls who didn’t listen to good advice.
A faint rustling sound broke into her brown study. She turned, and at first saw nothing. The only light in the room came from a single witchlight sconce. Its flickering light played over the shape of the piano, the curving dark mass of the harp covered with a heavy drop cloth. As she stared, two bright points of light resolved themselves, close to the floor, an odd green-yellow color. They were moving toward her, both at the same pace, like twin will-o’-the-wisps.