“So, you see,” said Will, “my curse can hardly be called nonsense. I have seen it at work. And since that day I have striven to be sure that what happened to Ella will happen to no one else in my life. Can you imagine it? Can you?” He raked his hands through his black hair, letting the tangled strands fall back into his eyes. “Never letting anyone near you. Making everyone who might otherwise love you, hate you. I left my family to distance myself from them, and that they might forget me. Each day I must show cruelty to those I have chosen to make my home with, lest they let themselves feel too much affection for me.”
“Tessa . . .” Magnus’s mind was suddenly full of the serious-faced gray-eyed girl who had looked at Will as if he were a new sun dawning on the horizon. “You think she does not love you?”
“I do not think so. I have been foul enough to her.” Will’s voice was wretchedness and misery and self-loathing all combined. “I think there was a time when she almost—I thought she was dead, you see, and I showed her—I let her see what I felt. I think she might have returned my feelings after that. But I crushed her, as brutally as I could. I imagine she simply hates me now.”
“And Jem,” said Magnus, dreading the answer, knowing it.
“Jem is dying anyway,” Will said in a choked voice. “Jem is what I have allowed myself. I tell myself, if he dies, it is not my fault. He is dying anyway, and in pain. Ella’s death at least was swift. Perhaps through me he can be given a good death.” He looked up miserably, met Magnus’s accusing eyes. “No one can live with nothing,” he whispered. “Jem is all I have.”
“You should have told him,” said Magnus. “He would have chosen to be your parabatai anyway, even knowing the risks.”
“I cannot burden him with that knowledge! He would keep it secret if I asked him to, but it would pain him to know it—and the pain I cause others would only hurt him more. Yet if I were to tell Charlotte, to tell Henry and the rest, that my behavior is a sham—that every cruel thing I have said to them is a lie, that I wander the streets only to give the impression that I have been out drinking and whoring when in reality I have no desire to do either—then I have ceased to push them away.”
“And thus you have never told anyone of this curse? No one but myself, since you were twelve years old?”
“I could not,” Will said. “How could I be sure they would form no attachment to me, once they knew the truth? A story like that might engender pity, pity could become attachment, and then . . .”
Magnus raised his eyebrows. “Are you not concerned about me?”
“That you might love me?” Will sounded genuinely startled. “No, for you hate Nephilim, do you not? And besides, I imagine you warlocks have ways to guard against unwanted emotions. But for those like Charlotte, like Henry, if they knew the persona I presented to them was false, if they knew of my true heart . . . they might come to care for me.”
“And then they would die,” said Magnus.
* * *
Charlotte raised her face slowly from her hands. “And you’ve absolutely no idea where he is?” she asked for the third time. “Will is simply—gone?”
“Charlotte.” Jem’s voice was soothing. They were in the drawing room, with its wallpaper of flowers and vines. Sophie was by the fire, using the poker to coax more flames from the coal. Henry sat behind the desk, fiddling with a set of copper instruments; Jessamine was on the chaise, and Charlotte was in an armchair by the fire. Tessa and Jem sat somewhat primly side by side on the sofa, which made Tessa feel peculiarly like a guest. She was full of sandwiches that Bridget had brought in on a tray, and tea, its warmth slowly thawing her insides. “It isn’t as if this is unusual. When do we ever know where Will is at nighttime?”
“But this is different. He saw his family, or his sister at least. Oh, poor Will.” Charlotte’s voice shook with anxiety. “I had thought perhaps he was finally beginning to forget about them . . .”
“No one forgets about their family,” said Jessamine sharply. She sat on the chaise longue with a watercolor easel and papers propped before her; she had recently made the decision that she had fallen behind in pursuing the maidenly arts, and had begun painting, cutting silhouettes, pressing flowers, and playing on the spinet in the music room, though Will said her singing voice made him think of Church when he was in a particularly complaining mood.
“Well, no, of course not,” said Charlotte hastily, “but perhaps not to live with the memory constantly, as a sort of dreadful weight on you.”
“As if we’d know what to do with Will if he didn’t have the morbs every day,” said Jessamine. “Anyway, he can’t have cared about his family that much in the first place or he wouldn’t have left them.”
Tessa gave a little gasp. “How can you say that? You don’t know why he left. You didn’t see his face at Ravenscar Manor—”
“Ravenscar Manor.” Charlotte was staring blindly at the fireplace. “Of all the places I thought they’d go . . .”
“Pish and tosh,” said Jessamine, looking angrily at Tessa. “At least his family’s alive. Besides, I’ll wager he wasn’t sad at all; I’ll wager you he was shamming. He always is.”
Tessa glanced toward Jem for support, but he was looking at Charlotte, and his look was as hard as a silver coin. “What do you mean,” he said, “of all the places you thought they’d go? Did you know that Will’s family had moved?”
Charlotte started, and sighed. “Jem . . .”
“It’s important, Charlotte.”
Charlotte glanced over at the tin on her desk that held her favorite lemon drops. “After Will’s parents came here to see him, when he was twelve, and he sent them away . . . I begged him to speak to them, just for a moment, but he wouldn’t. I tried to make him understand that if they left, then he could never see them again, and I could never tell him news of them. He took my hand, and he said, ‘Please just promise me you’ll tell me if they die, Charlotte. Promise me.’” She looked down, her fingers knotting in the material of her dress. “It was such an odd request for a little boy to make. I—I had to say yes.”
“So you’ve been looking into the welfare of Will’s family?” Jem asked.
“I hired Ragnor Fell to do it,” Charlotte said. “For the first three years. The fourth year he came back to me and told me that the Herondales had moved. Edmund Herondale—that’s Will’s father—had lost their house gambling. That was all Ragnor was able to glean. The Herondales had been forced to move. He could find no further trace of them.”
“Did you ever tell Will?” Tessa said.
“No.” Charlotte shook her head. “He had made me promise to tell him if they died, that was all. Why add to his unhappiness with the knowledge that they had lost their home? He never mentioned them. I had grown to hope he might have forgotten—”
“He has never forgotten.” There was a force in Jem’s words that stopped the nervous movement of Charlotte’s fingers.
“I should not have done it,” Charlotte said. “I should never have made that promise. It was a contravention of the Law—”