“It was the first Christmas party at the Institute that I attended,” he said. “The Lightwoods were there in all their finery. Tatiana in silver hair ribbons. She had a little book she carried around with her everywhere. She must have dropped it that night. I found it shoved down the back of one of the chaise longues. It was her diary. Filled with poems about me—the color of my eyes, the wedding we would have. She had written ‘Tatiana Herondale’ all over it.”
“That sounds rather adorable.”
“I had been in the drawing room, but I came back into the ballroom with the diary. Elise Penhallow had just finished playing the spinet. I got up beside her and commenced reading from Tatiana’s diary.”
“Oh, Will—you didn’t!”
“I did,” he said. “She had rhymed ‘William’ with ‘million,’ as in ‘You will never know, sweet William / How many are the million / ways in which I love you.’ It had to be stopped.”
“What happened?”
“Oh, Tatiana ran out of the room in tears, and Gabriel leaped onto the stage and attempted to strangle me. Gideon simply stood there with his arms crossed. You’ll notice that’s all he ever does.”
“I suppose Gabriel didn’t succeed,” said Tessa. “In strangling you, I mean.”
“Not before I broke his arm,” said Will with relish. “So there you are. That’s why he hates me. I humiliated his sister in public, and what he won’t mention is that I humiliated him, too. He thought he could best me easily. I’d had little formal training, and I’d heard him call me ‘very nearly a mundane’ behind my back. Instead I beat him hollow—snapped his arm, in fact. It was certainly a more pleasant sound than Elise banging away on the spinet.”
Tessa rubbed her gloved hands together to warm them, and sighed. She wasn’t sure what to think. It was hardly the story of seduction and betrayal she had expected, but neither did it show Will in an admirable light.
“Sophie says she’s married now,” she said. “Tatiana. She’s just getting back from traveling the Continent with her new husband.”
“I am sure she is as dull and stupid now as she was then.” Will sounded as if he might fall asleep. He thumbed the curtain closed, and they were in darkness. Tessa could hear his breath, feel the warmth of him sitting across from her. She could see why a proper young lady would never ride in a carriage with a gentleman not related to her. There was something oddly intimate about it. Of course, she had broken the rules for proper young ladies what felt like long ago, now.
“Will,” she said again.
“The lady has another question. I can hear it in her tone. Will you never have done asking questions, Tess?”
“Not until I get all the answers I want,” she said. “Will, if warlocks are made by having one demon parent and one human parent, what happens if one of those parents is a Shadowhunter?”
“A Shadowhunter would never allow that to happen,” said Will flatly.
“But in the Codex it says that most warlocks are the result of—of a violation,” Tessa said, her voice hitching on the ugly word, “or shape-changer demons taking on the form of a loved one and completing the seduction by a trick. Jem told me Shadowhunter blood is always dominant. The Codex says the off-spring of Shadowhunters and werewolves, or faeries, are always Shadowhunters. So could not the angel blood in a Shadow-hunter cancel out that which was demonic, and produce—”
“What it produces is nothing.” Will tugged at the window curtain. “The child would be born dead. They always are. Stillborn, I mean. The offspring of a demon and a Shadowhunter parent is death.” In the little light he looked at her. “Why do you want to know these things?”
“I want to know what I am,” she said. “I believe I am some . . . combination that has not been seen before. Part faerie, or part—”
“Have you ever thought of transforming yourself into one of your parents?” Will asked. “Your mother, or father? It would give you access to their memories, wouldn’t it?”
“I have thought of it. Of course I have. But I have nothing of my father’s or mother’s. Everything that was packed in my trunks for the voyage here was discarded by the Dark Sisters.”
“What about your angel necklace?” Will asked. “Wasn’t that your mother’s?”
Tessa shook her head. “I tried. I—I could reach nothing of her in it. It has been mine so long, I think, that what made it hers has evaporated, like water.”
Will’s eyes gleamed in the shadows. “Perhaps you are a clockwork girl. Perhaps Mortmain’s warlock father built you, and now Mortmain seeks the secret of how to create such a perfect facsimile of life when all he can build are hideous monstrosities. Perhaps all that beats beneath your chest is a heart made of metal.”
Tessa drew in a breath, feeling momentarily dizzy. His soft voice was so convincing, and yet—“No,” she said sharply. “You forget, I remember my childhood. Mechanical creatures do not change or grow. Nor would that explain my ability.”
“I know,” said Will with a grin that flashed white in the darkness. “I only wanted to see if I could convince you.”
Tessa looked at him steadily. “I am not the one who has no heart.”
It was too dark in the carriage for her to tell, but she sensed that he flushed, darkly. Before he could say anything in response, the wheels came to a jerking halt. They had arrived.
12
MASQUERADE
So now I have sworn to bury
All this dead body of hate,
I feel so free and so clear
By the loss of that dead weight,
That I should grow light-headed, I fear,
Fantastically merry;
But that her brother comes, like a blight
On my fresh hope, to the Hall to-night.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Maud”
Cyril had paused the carriage outside the gates of the property, under the shade of a leafy oak tree. The Lightwoods’ country house in Chiswick, just outside London proper, was massive, built in the Palladian style, with soaring pillars and multiple staircases. The radiance of the moon made everything pearlescent like the inside of an oyster shell. The stone of the house seemed to gleam silver, while the gate that ran around the property had the sheen of black oil. None of the lights in the house seemed to be illuminated—the place was as dark as pitch and grave-silent, the vast grounds stretching all around it, down to the edge of a meander in the Thames River, unlit and deserted. Tessa began to wonder if they had made a mistake in coming here.
As Will left the carriage, helping her down after him, his head turned, his fine mouth hardening. “Do you smell that? Demonic witchcraft. Its stink is on the air.”
Tessa made a face. She could smell nothing unusual—in fact, this far out of the city center, the air seemed cleaner than it had near the Institute. She could smell wet leaves and dirt. She looked over at Will, his face raised to the moonlight, and wondered what weapons lay concealed under his closely fitted frock coat. His hands were sheathed in white gloves, his starched shirtfront immaculate. With the mask, he could have been an illustration of a handsome highwayman in a penny dreadful.