Clockwork Prince tid-2 Page 10

  “If there are any clues to his whereabouts,” said Jem, gently trying to steer the conversation back onto its track. “We have very little time—”

  “Very well, very well,” snapped Starkweather. “There’s little information about your precious Mortmain in here. More about the parents. It seems suspicion fell on them when it was discovered that the male warlock, John Shade, was in possession of the Book of the White. Quite a powerful spell book, you understand; disappeared from the London Institute’s library under suspicious circumstances back in 1752. The book specializes in binding and unbinding spells—tying the soul to the body, or untying it, as the case may be. Turned out the warlock was trying to animate things. He was digging up corpses or buying them off medical students and replacing the more damaged bits with mechanisms. Then trying to bring them to life. Necromancy—very much against the Law. And we didn’t have the Accords in those days. An Enclave group swept in and slaughtered both warlocks.”

  “And the child?” said Will. “Mortmain?”

  “No hide nor hair of him,” said Starkweather. “We searched, but nothing. Assumed he was dead, till this turned up, cheeky as you please, demanding reparations. Even his address—”

  “His address?” Will demanded. That information had not been included in the scroll they had seen at the Institute. “In London?”

  “Nay. Right here in Yorkshire.” Starkweather tapped the page with a wrinkled finger. “Ravenscar Manor. A massive old pile up north from here. Been abandoned now, I think, for decades. Now that I think about it, can’t figure how he could’ve afforded it in the first place. It’s not where the Shades lived.”

  “Still,” said Jem. “An excellent starting point for us to go looking. If it’s been abandoned since his tenancy, there may be things he left behind. In fact, he may well still be using the place.”

  “I suppose.” Starkweather sounded unenthusiastic about the whole business. “Most of the Shades’ belongings were taken for spoils.”

  “Spoils,” Tessa echoed faintly. She remembered the term from the Codex. Anything a Shadowhunter took from a Downworlder who had been caught breaking the Law belonged to him. Those were the spoils of war. She looked across the table at Jem and Will; Jem’s gentle eyes resting on her with concern, Will’s haunted blue ones holding all their secrets. Did she really belong to a race of creatures that was at war with what Jem and Will were?

  “Spoils,” Starkweather rumbled. He had polished off his wine and started on Will’s untouched glass. “Do those interest you, girl? We’ve quite a collection here in the Institute. Puts the London collection to shame, or so I’m told.” He stood up, nearly knocking over his chair. “Come along. I’ll show them to you, and tell you the rest of this sorry tale, though there’s not that much more to it.”

  Tessa looked quickly to Will and Jem for a cue, but they were already on their feet, following the old man out of the room. Starkweather spoke as he walked, his voice drifting back over his shoulder, making the rest of them hurry to match his long strides.

  “Never thought much of this Reparations business myself,” he said as they passed down another dimly lit, interminably long stone corridor. “Makes Downworlders uppity, thinking they have a right to get something out of us. All the work we do and no thanks, just hands held out for more, more, more. Don’t you think so, gentlemen?”

  “Bastards, all of them,” said Will, who seemed as if his mind were a thousand miles away. Jem looked at him sideways.

  “Absolutely!” barked Starkweather, clearly pleased. “Not that one should use such language in front of a lady, of course. As I was saying, this Mortmain was protesting the death of Anne Shade, the male warlock’s wife—said she’d had nothing to do with her husband’s projects, hadn’t known about them, he claimed. Her death was undeserved. Wanted a trial of those guilty of what he called her ‘murder,’ and his parents’ belongings back.”

  “Was the Book of the White among what he asked for?” Jem inquired. “I know it’s a crime for a warlock to own such a volume . . .”

  “It was. It was retrieved and placed in the London Institute library, where no doubt it remains still. Certainly no one was going to give it to him.”

  Tessa did a quick mental calculation in her head. If he was eighty-nine now, Starkweather would have been twenty-six at the time of the Shades’ deaths. “Were you there?”

  His bloodshot eyes danced over her; she noticed that even now, a little drunk, he didn’t seem to want to look at her too directly. “Was I where?”

  “You said an Enclave group was sent out to deal with the Shades. Were you among them?”

  He hesitated, then shrugged. “Aye,” he said, his Yorkshire accent thickening for a moment. “Dinna take long to get the both of them. They weren’t prepared. Not a bit. I remember them lying there in their blood. The first time I saw dead warlocks, I was surprised they bled red. I could have sworn it’d be another color, blue or green or some such.” He shrugged. “We took the cloaks off them, like skins off a tiger. I was given the keeping of them, or more rightly, my father was. Glory, glory. Those were the days.” He grinned like a skull, and Tessa thought of Bluebeard’s chamber where he kept the remains of the wives he had killed. She felt both very hot and very cold all over.

  “Mortmain never had a chance, did he,” she said quietly. “Filing his complaint like that. He was never going to get his reparations.”

  “Of course not!” barked Starkweather. “Rubbish, all of it—claiming the wife wasn’t involved. What wife isn’t neck-deep in her husband’s business? Besides, he wasn’t even their blood son, couldn’t have been. Probably more of a pet to them than anything else. I’d wager the father’d have used him for spare parts if it came down to it. He was better off without them. He should have been thanking us, not asking for a trial—”

  The old man broke off as he reached a heavy door at the end of the corridor and put his shoulder to it, grinning down at them from beneath beetling brows. “Ever been to the Crystal Palace? Well, this is even better.”

  He shouldered the door open, and light blazed up around them as they passed through into the room beyond. Clearly it was the only well-lit room in the place.

  The room was full of glass-fronted cabinets, and over each cabinet was mounted a lamp of witchlight, illuminating the contents within. Tessa saw Will’s back stiffen, and Jem reached for her, his hand tightening on her arm with an almost bruising grip. “Don’t—,” he began, but she had pushed forward, and was staring at the contents of the cabinets.

  Spoils. A gold locket, open to a daguerreotype of a laughing child. The locket was splattered with dried blood. Behind her Starkweather was talking about digging the silver bullets out of the bodies of freshly killed werewolves and melting them down to recast. There was a dish of such bullets, in fact, in one of the cabinets, filling a bloodstained bowl. Sets of vampire fangs, row on row of them. What looked like sheets of gossamer or delicate fabric, pressed under glass. Only on closer inspection did Tessa realize they were the wings of faeries. A goblin, like the one she had seen with Jessamine in Hyde Park, floating open-eyed in a large jar of preservative fluid.

  And the remains of warlocks. Mummified taloned hands, like Mrs. Black’s. A stripped skull, utterly de-fleshed, human-looking save that it had tusks instead of teeth. Vials of sludgy-looking blood. Starkweather was now talking about how much warlock parts, especially a warlock’s “mark,” could be sold for on the Downworld market. Tessa felt dizzy and hot, her eyes burning.

  Tessa turned around, her hands shaking. Jem and Will stood, looking at Starkweather with mute expressions of horror; the old man was holding up another hunting trophy—a human-looking head mounted to a backing. The skin had shriveled and gone gray, drawn back against the bones. Fleshless spiral horns protruded from the top of its skull. “Got this off a warlock I killed down by Leeds way,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe the fight he put up—”

  Starkweather’s voice hollowed out, and Tessa felt herself sud
denly cut free and floating. Darkness rushed up, and then there were arms around her, and Jem’s voice. Words floated by her in ragged scraps. “My fiancée—never seen spoils before—can’t stand blood—very delicate—”

  Tessa wanted to fight free of Jem, wanted to rush at Stark-weather and strike the old man, but she knew it would ruin everything if she did. She clenched her eyes shut and pressed her face against Jem’s chest, breathing him in. He smelled of soap and sandalwood. Then there were other hands on her, drawing her away from Jem. Starkweather’s maidservants. She heard Starkweather telling them to take her upstairs and help her to bed. She opened her eyes to see Jem’s troubled face as he looked after her, until the door of the spoils room closed between them.

  It took Tessa a long time to fall asleep that night, and when she did, she had a nightmare. In the dream she lay manacled to the brass bed in the house of the Dark Sisters . . .

  Light like thin gray soup seeped through the windows. The door opened and Mrs. Dark came in, followed by her sister, who had no head, only the white bone of her spine protruding from her raggedly severed neck.

  “Here she is, the pretty, pretty princess,” said Mrs. Dark, clapping her hands together. “Just think of what we will get for all the parts of her. A hundred each for her little white hands, and a thousand for the pair of her eyes. We’d get more if they were blue, of course, but one can’t have everything.”

  She chuckled, and the bed began to spin as Tessa screamed and thrashed in the darkness. Faces appeared above her: Mortmain, his narrow features screwed up in amusement. “And they say the worth of a good woman is far above rubies,” he said. “What of the worth of a warlock?”

  “Put her in a cage, I say, and let the groundlings stare at her for pennies,” said Nate, and suddenly the bars of a cage sprang up around her and he was laughing at her from the other side, his pretty face twisted up in scorn. Henry was there too, shaking his head. “I’ve taken her all apart,” he said, “and I can’t see what makes that heart of hers beat. Still, it’s quite a curiosity, isn’t it?” He opened his hand, and there was something red and fleshy on his palm, pulsing and contracting like a fish flipped out of water, gasping for air. “See how it’s divided into two quite equal parts—”

  “Tess,” a voice came, urgently, in her ear. “Tess, you’re dreaming. Wake up. Wake up.” Hands were on her shoulders, shaking her; her eyes flew open, and she was gasping in her ugly gray dimly lit bedroom at the York Institute. The covers were tangled around her, and her nightgown stuck to her back with sweat. Her skin felt as if it were burning. She still saw the Dark Sisters, saw Nate laughing at her, Henry dissecting her heart.

  “It was a dream?” she said. “It felt so real, so utterly real—”

  She broke off.

  “Will,” she whispered. He still wore his dinner clothes, though they were rumpled, his black hair tangled, as if he had fallen asleep without changing for bed. His hands remained on her shoulders, warming her cold skin through the material of her nightgown.

  “What did you dream?” he said. His tone was calm and ordinary, as if there were nothing unusual about her waking up and finding him sitting on the edge of her bed.

  She shuddered at the memory. “I dreamed I was being taken apart—that bits of me were being put on display for Shadowhunters to laugh at—”

  “Tess.” He touched her hair gently, pushing the tangled locks behind her ears. She felt pulled to him, like iron filings to a magnet. Her arms ached to go around him, her head to rest in the crook of his shoulder. “God damn that devil Starkweather for showing you what he did, but you must know it’s not like that anymore. The Accords have forbidden spoils. It was just a dream.”

  But no, she thought. This is the dream. Her eyes had adjusted to the dark; the gray light in the room made his eyes glow an almost unearthly blue, like a cat’s. When she drew a shuddering breath, her lungs felt filled with the scent of him, Will and salt and trains and smoke and rain, and she wondered if he had been out, walking the streets of York as he did in London. “Where have you been?” she whispered. “You smell like nighttime.”

  “Out kicking over the traces. As usual.” He touched her cheek with warm, callused fingers. “Can you sleep now? We’re meant to rise early tomorrow. Starkweather is lending us his carriage so that we might investigate Ravenscar Manor. You, of course, are welcome to remain here. You need not accompany us.”

  She shuddered. “Stay here without you? In this big, gloomy place? I would prefer not to.”

  “Tess.” His voice was ever so gentle. “That must have been quite a nightmare, to have taken the spirit out of you so. Usually you are not afraid of much.”

  “It was awful. Even Henry was in my dream. He was taking apart my heart as if it were made of clockwork.”

  “Well, that settles it,” Will said. “Pure fantasy. As if Henry is a danger to anyone except himself.” When she didn’t smile, he added, fiercely, “I would never let anyone touch a hair on your head. You know that, don’t you, Tess?”

  Their gazes caught and locked. She thought of the wave that seemed to catch at her whenever she was near Will, how she had felt herself drawn over and under, pulled to him by forces that seemed beyond her control—in the attic, on the roof of the Institute. As if he felt the same pull, he bent toward her now. It felt natural, as right as breathing, to lift her head, to meet his lips with hers. She felt his soft exhalation against her mouth; relief, as if a great weight had been taken from him. His hands rose to cup her face. Even as her eyes fluttered shut, she heard his voice in her head, again, unbidden:

  There is no future for a Shadowhunter who dallies with warlocks.

  She turned her face quickly, and his lips brushed her cheek instead of her mouth. He drew back, and she saw his blue eyes open, startled—and hurt. “No,” she said. “No, I don’t know that, Will.” She dropped her voice. “You have made it very clear,” she said, “what kind of use you have for me. You think I am a toy for your amusements. You should not have come in here; it is not proper.”

  He dropped his hands. “You called out—”

  “Not for you.”

  He was silent except for his ragged breathing.

  “Do you regret what you said to me that night on the roof, Will? The night of Thomas’s and Agatha’s funeral?” It was the first time either of them had made reference to the incident since it had happened. “Can you tell me you did not mean what you said?”

  He bent his head; his hair fell forward, hiding his face. She clenched her own hands into fists at her sides to stop herself from reaching out and pushing it back. “No,” he said, very low. “No, the Angel forgive me, I can’t say that.”

  Tessa withdrew, curling in on herself, turning her face away. “Please go away, Will.”

  “Tessa—”

  “Please.”

  There was a long silence. He stood up then, the bed creaking beneath him as he moved. She heard his light tread on the floorboards, and then the door of the bedroom shutting behind him. As if the sound had snapped some cord that held her upright, she fell back against the pillows. She stared up at the ceiling a long time, fighting back in vain against the questions that crowded her mind—What had Will meant, coming to her room like that? Why had he shown her such sweetness when she knew that he despised her? And why, when she knew that he was the worst thing in the world for her, did sending him away seem like such a terrible mistake?

  The next morning dawned unexpectedly blue and beautiful, a balm to Tessa’s aching head and exhausted body. After dragging herself from the bed, where she had spent most of the night tossing and turning, she dressed herself, unable to bear the thought of assistance from one of the ancient, half-blind maidservants. As she did up the buttons on her jacket, she caught sight of herself in the room’s old, splotched mirror. There were half-moons of shadow under her eyes, as if they had been smudged there with chalk.

  Will and Jem had already gathered in the morning room for a breakfast of half-burned toast, wea
k tea, jam, and no butter. By the time Tessa arrived, Jem had already eaten, and Will was busy cutting his toast into thin strips and forming rude pictographs out of them.

  “What is that supposed to be?” Jem asked curiously. “It looks almost like a—” He glanced up, saw Tessa, and broke off with a grin. “Good morning.”

  “Good morning.” She slid into the seat across from Will; he glanced up at her once as she sat, but there was nothing in his eyes or expression to indicate that he recalled that anything had passed between them the night before.

  Jem looked at her with concern. “Tessa, how are you feeling? After last night—” He broke off then, his voice rising, “Good morning, Mr. Starkweather,” he said hastily, jostling Will’s shoulder hard so that Will dropped his fork, and the toast bits slid all over his plate.

  Mr. Starkweather, who had swept into the room, still wrapped in the dark cloak he had worn the night before, regarded him balefully. “The carriage is waiting for you in the courtyard,” he said, his clipped diction as tight as ever. “You’d better cut a stick if you want to get back before dinnertime; I’ll be needing the carriage this evening. I’ve told Gottshall to drop you straight at the station on your return, no need for lingering. I trust you’ve gotten everything you need.”

  It wasn’t a question. Jem nodded. “Yes, sir. You’ve been very gracious.”

  Starkweather’s eyes swept over Tessa again, one last time, before he turned and stalked out of the room, his cloak flapping behind him. Tessa couldn’t get the image of a great black bird of prey—a vulture, perhaps—out of her mind. She thought of the trophy cases full of “spoils,” and shuddered.

  “Eat quickly, Tessa, before he changes his mind about the carriage,” Will advised her, but Tessa shook her head.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “At least have tea.” Will poured it out for her, and ladled milk and sugar into it; it was much sweeter than Tessa would have liked, but it was so rare that Will made a kind gesture like that—even if it was just to hurry her along—that she drank it down anyway, and managed a few bites of toast. The boys went for their coats and the baggage; Tessa’s traveling cloak, hat, and gloves were located, and they soon found themselves on the front steps of the York Institute, blinking in the watery sunlight.