Returning with a soapy rag, Thomas handed it over to Will, and leaned his big frame against the side of the carriage. It rocked under his weight. Charlotte had always encouraged Thomas to join Jem and Will for the physical parts of their training, and as the years had gone by, Thomas had grown from a scrawny child to a man so large and muscular that tailors despaired over his measurements. Will might have been the better fighter—his blood made him that—but Thomas’s commanding physical presence was not easy to ignore.
Sometimes Will could not help remembering Thomas as he had first come to the Institute. He belonged to a family that had served the Nephilim for years, but he had been born so frail they’d thought he wouldn’t live. When he’d reached twelve years of age, he’d been sent to the Institute; at that time he’d still been so small that he’d looked barely nine. Will had made fun of Charlotte for wanting to employ him, but had secretly hoped he would stay so that there might be another boy his own age in the house. And they had been friends of a sort, the Shadowhunter and the servant boy—until Jem had come and Will had forgotten Thomas almost completely. Thomas had never seemed to hold it against him, treating Will always with the same friendliness with which he treated everyone else.
“Always rum to see this sort of thing goin’ on, and none of the neighbors out for so much as a gander,” Thomas said now, glancing up and down the street. Charlotte had always demanded that the Institute servants speak “proper” English within its walls, and Thomas’s East End accent tended to come and go depending on whether he remembered.
“There are heavy glamours at work here.” Will scrubbed at his face and neck. “And I would imagine there are quite a few on this street who are not mundanes, who know to mind their own business when Shadowhunters are involved.”
“Well, you are a terrifying lot, that’s true,” Thomas said, so equably that Will suspected he was being made fun of. Thomas pointed at Will’s face. “You’ll have a stunner of a mouse tomorrow, if you don’t get an iratze on there.”
“Maybe I want a black eye,” said Will peevishly. “Did you think of that?”
Thomas just grinned and swung himself up into the driver’s box at the front of the carriage. Will went back to scrubbing dried vampire blood off his hands and arms. The task was absorbing enough that he was able to almost completely ignore Gabriel Lightwood when the other boy appeared out of the shadows and sauntered over to Will, a superior smile plastered on his face.
“Nice work in there, Herondale, setting the place on fire,” Gabriel observed. “Good thing we were there to clean up after you, or the whole plan would have gone down in flames, along with the shreds of your reputation.”
“Are you implying that shreds of my reputation remain intact?” Will demanded with mock horror. “Clearly I have been doing something wrong. Or not doing something wrong, as the case may be.” He banged on the side of the carriage. “Thomas! We must away at once to the nearest brothel! I seek scandal and low companionship.”
Thomas snorted and muttered something that sounded like “bosh,” which Will ignored.
Gabriel’s face darkened. “Is there anything that isn’t a joke to you?”
“Nothing that comes to mind.”
“You know,” Gabriel said, “there was a time I thought we could be friends, Will.”
“There was a time I thought I was a ferret,” Will said, “but that turned out to be the opium haze. Did you know it had that effect? Because I didn’t.”
“I think,” Gabriel said, “that perhaps you might consider whether jokes about opium are either amusing or tasteful, given the … situation of your friend Carstairs.”
Will froze. Still in the same tone of voice, he said, “You mean his disability?”
Gabriel blinked. “What?”
“That’s what you called it. Back at the Institute. His ‘disability.’” Will tossed the bloody cloth aside. “And you wonder why we aren’t friends.”
“I just wondered,” Gabriel said, in a more subdued voice, “if perhaps you have ever had enough.”
“Enough of what?”
“Enough of behaving as you do.”
Will crossed his arms over his chest. His eyes glinted dangerously. “Oh, I can never get enough,” he said. “Which, incidentally, is what your sister said to me when—”
The carriage door flew open. A hand shot out, grabbed Will by the back of the shirt, and hauled him inside. The door banged shut after him, and Thomas, sitting bolt upright, seized the reins of the horses. A moment later the carriage had lurched forth into the night, leaving Gabriel staring, infuriated, after it.
“What were you thinking?” Jem, having deposited Will onto the carriage seat opposite him, shook his head, his silvery eyes shining in the dimness. He held his cane between his knees, his hand resting lightly atop the dragon’s-head carving. The cane had belonged to Jem’s father, Will knew, and had been designed for him by a Shadowhunter weapons maker in Beijing. “Baiting Gabriel Lightwood like that—why do you do it? What’s the point?”
“You heard what he said about you—”
“I don’t care what he says about me. It’s what everyone thinks. He just has the nerve to say it.” Jem leaned forward, resting his chin on his hand. “You know, I cannot function as your missing sense of self-preservation forever. Eventually you will have to learn to manage without me.”
Will, as he always did, ignored this. “Gabriel Lightwood is hardly much of a threat.”
“Then forget Gabriel. Is there a particular reason you keep biting vampires?”
Will touched the dried blood on his wrists, and smiled. “They don’t expect it.”
“Of course they don’t. They know what happens when one of us consumes vampire blood. They probably expect you to have more sense.”
“That expectation never seems to serve them very well, does it?”
“It hardly serves you, either.” Jem looked at Will thoughtfully. He was the only one who never fell out of temper with Will. Whatever Will did, the most extreme reaction he seemed to be able to provoke in Jem was mild exasperation. “What happened in there? We were waiting for the signal—”
“Henry’s bloody Phosphor didn’t work. Instead of sending up a flare of light, it set the curtains on fire.”
Jem made a choked noise.
Will glared at him. “It’s not funny. I didn’t know whether the rest of you were going to show up or not.”
“Did you really think we wouldn’t come after you when the whole place went up like a torch?” Jem asked reasonably. “They could have been roasting you over a spit, for all we knew.”
“And Tessa, the silly creature, was supposed to be out the door with Magnus, but she wouldn’t leave—”
“Her brother was manacled to a chair in the room,” Jem pointed out. “I’m not sure I would have left either.”
“I see you’re determined to miss my point.”
“If your point is that there was a pretty girl in the room and it was distracting you, then I think I’ve taken your point handily.”