Clockwork Prince tid-2 Page 18

  “Nothing is decided.” Her voice shook. “Nothing is inevitable. A cure—”

  “There’s no cure.” He no longer sounded angry, just detached, which was almost worse. “I will die, and you know it, Tess. Probably within the next year. I am dying, and I have no family in the world, and the one person I trusted more than any other made sport of what is killing me.”

  “But, Jem, I don’t think that’s what Will meant to do at all.” Tessa leaned the bow against the footboard and moved closer to him, tentatively, as if he were an animal she was fearful of startling. “He was just trying to escape. He is running from something, something dark and awful. You know he is, Jem. You saw how he was after—after Cecily.”

  She stood just behind him now, close enough to reach out and touch him tentatively on the arm, but she did not. His white shirt was stuck to his shoulder blades with sweat. She could see the Marks on his back through the fabric. He dropped the violin almost carelessly onto the trunk and turned to face her. “He knows what it means to me,” he said. “To see him even toy with what has destroyed my life—”

  “But he wasn’t thinking of you—”

  “I know that.” His eyes were almost all black now. “I tell myself he’s better than he makes himself out to be, but, Tessa, what if he isn’t? I have always thought, if I had nothing else, I had Will. If I have done nothing else that made my life matter, I have always stood by him. But perhaps I shouldn’t.”

  His chest was rising and falling so fast, it alarmed her; she put the back of her hand to his forehead and nearly gasped. “You’re burning up. You should be resting—”

  He flinched away from her, and she dropped her hand, hurt. “Jem, what is it? You don’t want me to touch you?”

  “Not like that,” he flared, and then flushed even darker than before.

  “Like what?” She was honestly bewildered; this was behavior she might have expected from Will, but not from Jem—this mysteriousness, this anger.

  “As if you were a nurse and I were your patient.” His voice was firm but uneven. “You think because I am ill that I am not like—” He drew a ragged breath. “Do you think I do not know,” he said, “that when you take my hand, it is only so that you can feel my pulse? Do you think I do not know that when you look into my eyes, it is only to see how much of the drug I have taken? If I were another man, a normal man, I might have hopes, presumptions even; I might—” His words seemed to catch, either because he realized he had said too much or because he had run out of breath; he was gasping, his cheeks flushed.

  She shook her head, feeling her plaits tickle her neck. “This is the fever speaking, not you.”

  His eyes darkened, and he began to turn away from her. “You can’t even believe I could want you,” he said in a half whisper. “That I am alive enough, healthy enough—”

  “No—” Without thinking, she caught at his arm. He stiffened. “James, that isn’t at all what I meant—”

  He curled his fingers around her hand where it lay on his arm. His own scorched her skin, as hot as fire. And then he turned her and drew her toward him.

  They stood face-to-face, chest to chest. His breath stirred her hair. She felt the fever rising off him like mist off the Thames; sensed the pounding of the blood through his skin; saw with a strange clarity the pulse at his throat, the light on the pale curls of his hair where they lay against his paler neck. Prickles of heat ran up and down her skin, bewildering her. This was Jem—her friend, as steady and reliable as a heartbeat. Jem did not set her skin on fire or make the blood rush fast inside her veins until she was dizzy.

  “Tessa,” he said. She looked up at him. There was nothing steady or reliable about his expression. His eyes were dark, his cheeks flushed. As she raised her face, he brought his down, his mouth slanting across hers, and even as she froze in surprise, they were kissing. Jem. She was kissing Jem. Where Will’s kisses were all fire, Jem’s were like pure air after a long time of being closed up in the airless dark. His mouth was soft and firm; one of his hands circled the back of her neck gently, guiding her mouth to his. With his other hand he cupped her face, running his thumb gently across her cheekbone. His lips tasted of burned sugar; the sweetness of the drug, she guessed. His touch, his lips, were tentative, and she knew why. Unlike Will, he would mind that this was the height of impropriety, that he should not be touching her, kissing her, that she should be pulling away.

  But she did not want to pull away. Even as she wondered at the fact that it was Jem she was kissing, Jem making her head swim and her ears ring, she felt her arms rise as if of their own accord, curving around his neck, drawing him closer.

  He gasped against her mouth. He must have been so sure she would push him away that for a moment he went still. Her hands glided over his shoulders, urging him with gentle touches, with a murmur against his lips, not to pause. Hesitantly he returned her caress, and then with greater force—kissing her again and again, each time with increasing urgency, cupping her face between his burning hands, his thin violinist’s fingers stroking her skin, making her shiver. His hands moved to the small of her back, pressing her against him; her bare feet slipped on the carpet, and they half-stumbled backward onto the bed.

  Her fingers wound tightly in his shirt, Tessa drew Jem down onto her, taking the weight of him onto her body with the feeling that she was being given back something that had belonged to her forever, a bit of her that she had missed without knowing she was missing it. Jem was light, hollow-boned like a bird and with the same racing heart; she ran her hands through his hair, and it was as soft as she had always in her most buried dreams thought it would be, like pinfeathers between her fingers. He could not seem to stop running his hands over her in wonder. They traced their way down her body, his breath ragged in her ear as he found the tie of her dressing gown and paused there, with shaking fingers.

  His uncertainty made Tessa’s heart feel as if it were expanding inside her chest, its tenderness big enough to hold them both inside it. She wanted Jem to see her, just as she was, herself, Tessa Gray, with none of the Change on her. She reached down and undid the tie, sliding the dressing gown off her shoulders so that she was revealed before him in only her white batiste nightgown.

  She looked up at him, breathless, shaking her loosened hair out of her face. Propping himself over her, he gazed down, and said again, huskily, what he had said in the carriage before, when he had touched her hair. “Ni hen piao liang.”

  “What does it mean?” she whispered, and this time he smiled and said:

  “It means that you are beautiful. I did not want to tell you before. I did not want you to think I was taking liberties.”

  She reached up and touched his cheek, so close to hers, and then the fragile skin of his throat, where the blood beat hard beneath the surface. His eyelashes fluttered down as he followed the movement of her finger with his eyes, like silvery rain.

  “Take them,” she whispered.

  He bent down to her; their mouths met again, and the shock of sensation was so strong, so overpowering, that she shut her eyes against it as if she could hide in the darkness. He murmured and gathered her against him. They rolled sideways, her legs scissoring around his, their bodies shifting to press each other closer and closer still so it became hard to breathe, and yet they could not stop. She found the buttons on his shirt, but even when she opened her eyes, her hands were shaking almost too hard to undo them. Clumsily she worked them free, tearing the fabric. As he shrugged the shirt free of his shoulders, she saw that his eyes were lightening to a pure silver again. She had only a moment to marvel at that, though; she was too busy marveling at the rest of him. He was so thin, without Will’s cording of muscle, but there was something about his fragility that was lovely, like the spare lines of a poem. Gold to airy thinness beat. Though a layer of muscle still covered his chest, she could see the shadows between his ribs. The pendant of jade Will had given him lay below his angular collarbones.

  “I know,” he said, looki
ng down at himself self-consciously. “I am not—I mean, I look—”

  “Beautiful,” she said, and she meant it. “You are beautiful, James Carstairs.”

  His eyes went wide as she reached to touch him. Her hands had stopped shaking. They were exploratory, fascinated now. Her mother had owned a very old copy of a book once, she remembered, its pages so fragile they were liable to turn to dust when you touched them, and she felt that same responsibility of enormous care now as she brushed her fingers over the Marks on his chest, across the hollows between his ribs and the slope of his stomach, which shuddered under her touch; here was something that was as breakable as it was lovely.

  He did not seem to be able to stop touching her, either. His skilled musician’s hands grazed her sides, skimming up her bare legs beneath her nightdress. He touched her as he usually touched his beloved violin, with a soft and urgent grace that left her breathless. They seemed to share his fever now; their bodies burned, and their hair was wet with sweat, pasted to their foreheads and necks. Tessa didn’t care; she wanted this heat, this near-pain. This was not herself, this was some other Tessa, some dream Tessa, who would behave like this, and she remembered her dream of Jem in a bed surrounded by flames. She had just never dreamed she would burn with him. She wanted more of this feeling, she knew, more of this fire, but none of the novels she had read told her what happened now. Did he know? Will would know, she thought, but Jem, like her, she sensed, must have been following an instinct that ran as deep as her bones. His fingers slipped into the nonexistent space between them, finding the buttons that held her nightdress closed; he bent to kiss her bared shoulder as the fabric slid aside. No one had ever kissed her bare skin there before, and the feeling was so startling that she put out a hand to brace herself, and knocked a pillow from the bed; it hit the small side table. There was the sound of a crash. A sudden sweet dark scent, as of spices, filled the room.

  Jem jerked his hands back, a look of horror on his face. Tessa sat up as well, pulling the front of her nightdress together, suddenly self-conscious. Jem was staring over the side of the bed, and she followed his line of sight. The lacquer box that held his drugs had fallen and broken open. A thick layer of shining powder lay across the floor. A faint silvery mist seemed to rise from it, carrying the sweet, spicy smell.

  Jem pulled her back, his arm around her, but there was fear in his grip now rather than passion. “Tess,” he said in a low voice. “You can’t touch this stuff. To get it on your skin would be—dangerous. Even to breathe it in—Tessa, you must go.”

  She thought of Will, ordering her out of the attic. Was this how it was always going to be—some boy would kiss her, and then order her away as if she were an unwanted servant? “I won’t go,” she flared. “Jem, I can help you clean it up. I am—”

  Your friend, she was about to say. But what they had been doing was not what friends did. What was she to him?

  “Please,” he said softly. His voice was husky. She recognized the emotion. It was shame. “I do not want you to see me on my knees, grubbing around on the floor for the drug that I need to live. That is not how any man wants the girl he—” He took a shaking breath. “I’m sorry, Tessa.”

  The girl he what? But she could not ask; she was over-whelmed—with pity, with sympathy, with shock at what they had done. She leaned forward and kissed his cheek. He didn’t move as she slipped from the bed, retrieved her dressing gown, and went quietly out of the room.

  * * *

  The corridor was the same as it had been when Tessa had crossed it moments—hours—minutes?—before: dim with lowered witchlight stretching far in either direction. She had just slipped into her own bedroom and was about to shut the door when her eye caught a flicker of movement down at the end of the hall. Some instinct held her in place, the door almost shut, her eye pressed to the barely open crack.

  The movement was someone walking down the hall. A fair-haired boy, she thought for a moment, in confusion, but no—it was Jessamine, Jessamine dressed in boys’ clothes. She wore trousers and a jacket open over a waistcoat; a hat was in her hand, and her long fair hair was tied back behind her head. She glanced behind her as she hurried down the hall, as if afraid of being followed. A few moments later she had vanished around the corner, out of sight.

  Tessa slid the door shut, her mind racing. What on earth was that about? What was Jessamine doing, wandering the Institute in the dead of night, dressed like a boy? After hanging up her dressing gown, Tessa went to lie down on her bed. She felt tired down in the marrow of her bones, the sort of tired she had felt the night her aunt died, as if she had exhausted her body’s capacity to feel emotion. When she closed her eyes, she saw Jem’s face, and then Will’s, his hand to his bloody mouth. Thoughts of the two of them swirled together in her head until she fell asleep finally, not sure if she was dreaming of kissing one of them, or the other.

  Chapter 10

  THE VIRTUE OF ANGELS

  The virtue of angels is that they cannot deteriorate;

  their flaw is that they cannot improve. Man’s

  flaw is that he can deteriorate; and his virtue is

  that he can improve.

  —Hasidic saying

  “I suppose you all know by now,” Will remarked at breakfast the next morning, “that I went to an opium den last night.”

  It was a subdued morning. It had dawned rainy and gray, and the Institute felt leadenly weighted down, as if the sky were pressing on it. Sophie passed in and out of the kitchen carrying steaming platters of food, her pale face looking pinched and small; Jessamine slumped tiredly over her tea; Charlotte looked weary and unwell from her night spent in the library; and Will’s eyes were red-rimmed, his cheek bruised where Jem had hit him. Only Henry, reading the paper with one hand while he stabbed at his eggs with the other, seemed to have any energy.

  Jem was conspicuous mainly by his absence. When Tessa had woken up that morning, she had floated for a moment in a blissful state of forgetfulness, the events of the night before a dim blur. Then she had sat bolt upright, absolute horror crashing over her like a wave of scalding water.

  Had she really done all those things with Jem? His bed—his hands on her—the spilled drugs. She had raised her hands and touched her hair. It fell free over her shoulders, where Jem had tugged it out of its plaits. Oh, God, she thought. I really did all that; that was me. She had pressed her hands to her eyes, feeling an overwhelming mix of confusion, terrified happiness—for she could not deny that it had been wonderful in its way—horror at herself, and hideous and total humiliation.

  Jem would think she had utterly lost control of herself. No wonder he couldn’t face her at breakfast. She could barely face herself in the mirror.

  “Did you hear me?” Will said again, clearly disappointed at the reception of his announcement. “I said I went to an opium den last night.”

  Charlotte looked up from her toast. Slowly she folded her newspaper, set it on the table beside her, and pushed her reading glasses down her upturned nose. “No,” she said. “That undoubtedly glorious aspect of your recent activities was unknown to us, in fact.”

  “So is that where you’ve been all this time?” Jessamine asked listlessly, taking a sugar cube from the bowl and biting into it. “Are you quite a hopeless addict now? They say it takes only one or two doses.”

  “It wasn’t really an opium den,” Tessa protested before she could stop herself. “That is to say—they seemed to have more of a trade in magic powders and things like that.”

  “So perhaps not an opium den precisely,” said Will, “but still a den. Of vice!” he added, punctuating this last bit by stabbing his finger into the air.

  “Oh, dear, not one of those places that’s run by ifrits,” sighed Charlotte. “Really, Will—”

  “Exactly one of those places,” said Jem, coming into the breakfast room and sliding into a chair beside Charlotte—quite as far away from Tessa as it was possible to sit, she noticed, with a pinching feeling in her chest.
He didn’t look at her either. “Off Whitechapel High Street.”

  “And how do you and Tessa know so much about it?” asked Jessamine, who appeared revitalized by either her sugar intake or the expectation of some good gossip, or both.

  “I used a tracking spell to find Will last night,” said Jem. “I was growing concerned at his absence. I thought he might have forgotten the way back to the Institute.”

  “You worry too much,” said Jessamine. “It’s silly.”

  “You’re quite right. I won’t make that mistake again,” said Jem, reaching for the dish of kedgeree. “As it turned out, Will wasn’t in need of my assistance at all.”

  Will looked at Jem thoughtfully. “I seem to have woken up with what they call a Monday mouse,” he said, pointing at the bruised skin under his eye. “Any idea where I got it?”

  “None.” Jem helped himself to some tea.

  “Eggs,” said Henry dreamily, looking at his plate. “I do love eggs. I could eat them all day.”

  “Was there really a need to bring Tessa with you to Whitechapel?” Charlotte asked Jem, sliding her glasses off and placing them on the newspaper. Her brown eyes were reproachful.

  “Tessa is not made of delicate china,” said Jem. “She will not break.”

  For some reason this statement, though he said it still without looking at her, sent a flood of images through Tessa’s mind of the night before—of clinging to Jem in the shadows of his bed, his hands gripping her shoulders, their mouths fierce on each other’s. No, he had not treated her as if she were breakable then. A boiling flood of heat seared her cheeks, and she looked down quickly, praying for her blush to go away.

  “You might be surprised to know,” said Will, “that I saw something rather interesting in the opium den.”

  “I’m sure you did,” said Charlotte with asperity.

  “Was it an egg?” Henry inquired.

  “Downworlders,” said Will. “Almost all werewolves.”