The Infernal Devices Series Page 7

  “I am not offended, Mr. Herondale.” Despite her words, Tessa felt her cheeks flame. Well-brought-up young ladies didn’t know what a brothel was, and certainly wouldn’t say the word in mixed company. Murder was one thing, but this . . . “I, ah, don’t see how it could have been a . . . place like that,” she said as firmly as she could. “No one ever came or went, and other than the maidservant and the coachman, I never saw anyone else who lived there.”

  “No, by the time I got there, it was quite deserted,” Will agreed. “Clearly they had decided to suspend business, perhaps in the interests of keeping you isolated.” He glanced over at Charlotte. “Do you think Miss Gray’s brother has the same ability she does? Is that, perhaps, why the Dark Sisters captured him in the first place?”

  Tessa interjected, glad for the change of subject. “My brother never showed any sign of such a thing—but, then, neither did I until the Dark Sisters found me.”

  “What is your ability?” Jessamine demanded. “Charlotte won’t say.”

  “Jessamine!” Charlotte scowled at her.

  “I don’t believe she has one,” Jessamine went on. “I think she’s simply a little sneak who knows that if we believe she’s a Downworlder, we’ll have to treat her well because of the Accords.”

  Tessa set her jaw. She thought of her Aunt Harriet saying Don’t lose your temper, Tessa, and Don’t fight with your brother simply because he teases you. But she didn’t care. They were all looking at her—Henry with curious hazel eyes, Charlotte with a gaze as sharp as glass, Jessamine with thinly veiled contempt, and Will with cool amusement. What if they all thought what Jessamine thought? What if they all thought she was angling for charity? Aunt Harriet would have hated accepting charity even more than she’d disapproved of Tessa’s temper.

  It was Will who spoke next, leaning forward to look intently into her face. “You can keep it a secret,” he said softly. “But secrets have their own weight, and it can be a very heavy one.”

  Tessa raised her head. “It needn’t be a secret. But it would be easier for me to show you than to tell you.”

  “Excellent!” Henry looked pleased. “I enjoy being shown things. Is there anything you require, like a spirit lamp, or—”

  “It’s not a séance, Henry,” Charlotte said wearily. She turned to Tessa. “You don’t need to do this if you don’t want to, Miss Gray.”

  Tessa ignored her. “Actually, I do require something.” She turned to Jessamine. “Something of yours, please. A ring, or a handkerchief—”

  Jessamine wrinkled her nose. “Dear me, it sounds to me rather as if your special power is pickpocketing!”

  Will looked exasperated. “Give her a ring, Jessie. You’re wearing enough of them.”

  “You give her something, then.” Jessamine set her chin.

  “No.” Tessa spoke firmly. “It must be something of yours.” Because of everyone here, you’re the closest to me in size and shape. If I transform into tiny Charlotte, this dress will simply fall off me, Tessa thought. She had considered trying to use the dress itself, but since Jessamine had never worn it, Tessa wasn’t sure the Change would work and didn’t want to take any chances.

  “Oh, very well then.” Petulantly Jessamine detached from her smallest finger a ring with a red stone set in it, and passed it across the table to Tessa. “This had better be worth the trouble.”

  Oh, it will be. Unsmiling, Tessa put the ring in the palm of her left hand and closed her fingers around it. Then she shut her eyes.

  It was always the same: nothing at first, then the flicker of something at the back of her mind, like someone lighting a candle in a dark room. She groped her way toward it, as the Dark Sisters had taught her. It was hard to strip away the fear and the shyness, but she had done it enough times now to know what to expect—the reaching forward to touch the light at the center of the darkness; the sense of light and enveloping warmth, as if she were drawing a blanket, something thick and heavy, around herself, covering every layer of her own skin; and then the light blazing up and surrounding her—and she was inside it. Inside someone else’s skin. Inside their mind.

  Jessamine’s mind.

  She was only at the edge of it, her thoughts skimming the surface of Jessamine’s like fingers skimming the surface of water. Still, it took her breath away. Tessa had a sudden, flashing image of a bright piece of candy with something dark at its center, like a worm at the core of an apple. She felt resentment, bitter hatred, anger—a terrible fierce longing for something—

  Her eyes flew open. She was still sitting at the table, Jessamine’s ring clutched in her hand. Her skin zinged with the sharp pins and needles that always accompanied her transformations. She could feel the oddness that was the different weight of another body, not her own; could feel the brush of Jessamine’s light hair against her shoulders. Too thick to be held back by the pins that had clasped Tessa’s hair, it had come down around her neck in a pale cascade.

  “By the Angel,” breathed Charlotte. Tessa looked around the table. They were all staring at her—Charlotte and Henry with their mouths open; Will speechless for once, a glass of water frozen halfway to his lips. And Jessamine—Jessamine was gazing at her in abject horror, like someone who has seen a vision of their own ghost. For a moment Tessa felt a stab of guilt.

  It lasted only a moment, though. Slowly Jessamine lowered her hand from her mouth, her face still very pale. “Goodness, my nose is enormous,” she exclaimed. “Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

  4

  WE ARE SHADOWS

  Pulvis et umbra sumus.

  —Horace, Odes

  The moment Tessa transformed back to her own shape, she had to suffer a barrage of questions. For people who lived in a shadow world of magic, the assembled Nephilim seemed surprisingly awed by her ability, which only served to underline what Tessa had already begun to suspect—that her shape-changing talent was exceedingly unusual. Even Charlotte, who had known about it before Tessa’s demonstration, seemed fascinated.

  “So you must be holding something that belongs to the person you’re transforming into?” Charlotte asked for the second time. Sophie and the older woman, who Tessa suspected was the cook, had already taken away the dinner plates and had served fancy cake and tea, but none of the diners had touched it yet. “You can’t simply look at someone and—”

  “I explained that already.” Tessa’s head was beginning to hurt. “I must be holding something that belongs to them, or a bit of hair or an eyelash. Something that’s theirs. Otherwise nothing happens.”

  “Do you think a vial of blood would do the trick?” Will asked, in a tone of academic interest.

  “Probably—I don’t know. I’ve never tried it.” Tessa took a sip of her tea, which had grown cold.

  “And you’re saying that the Dark Sisters knew this was your talent? They knew you had this ability before you did?” Charlotte asked.

  “Yes. It’s why they wanted me in the first place.”

  Henry shook his head. “But how did they know? I don’t quite understand that part.”

  “I don’t know,” Tessa said, not for the first time. “They never explained it to me. All I know is what I told you—that they seemed to know exactly what it was I could do, and how to train me to do it. They spent hours with me, every day . . .” Tessa swallowed against the bitterness in her mouth. Memories of how it had been rose up in her mind—the hours and hours in the cellar room at the Dark House, the way they had screamed at her that Nate would die if she couldn’t Change as they wanted her to, the agony when she finally learned to do it. “It hurt, at first,” she whispered. “As if my bones were snapping, melting inside my body. They would force me to Change two, three, then a dozen times a day, until I would finally lose consciousness. And then, the next day, they’d start at it again. I was locked in that room, so I couldn’t try to leave. . . .” She took a ragged breath. “That last day, they tested me by asking me to Change into a girl who had died. She had memories of being attacked wi
th a dagger, being stabbed. Of some thing chasing her into an alley—”

  “Perhaps it was the girl Jem and I found.” Will sat up straight, his eyes shining. “Jem and I guessed she must have escaped from an attack and run out into the night. I believe they sent the Shax demon after her to bring her back, but I killed it. They must have wondered what happened.”

  “The girl I changed into was named Emma Bayliss,” Tessa said, in a half whisper. “She had very fair hair—tied in little pink bows—and she was only a little thing.”

  Will nodded as if the description were familiar to him.

  “Then they did wonder what had happened to her. That’s why they had me Change into her. When I told them she was dead, they seemed relieved.”

  “The poor soul,” Charlotte murmured. “So you can Change into the dead? Not only the living?”

  Tessa nodded. “Their voices speak in my mind when I Change too. The difference is that many of them can remember the moment they died.”

  “Ugh.” Jessamine shuddered. “How morbid.”

  Tessa looked over at Will. Mr. Herondale, she chided herself silently, but it was hard to think of him that way. She felt somehow as if she knew him better than she really did. But that was foolishness. “You found me because you were looking for the murderer of Emma Bayliss,” she said. “But she was only one dead human girl. One dead—what do you call it?—mundane. Why so much time and effort to find out what happened to her?”

  For a moment Will’s eyes met hers, his own a very dark blue. Then his expression changed—only a slight change, but she saw it, though she could not have said what the change meant. “Oh, I wouldn’t have bothered, but Charlotte insisted. She felt there was something larger at work. And once Jem and I infiltrated the Pandemonium Club, and heard rumors of the other murders, we realized there was more going on than the death of one girl. Whether or not we like mundanes particularly, we can’t allow them to be systematically slaughtered. It’s the reason we exist.”

  Charlotte leaned forward across the table. “The Dark Sisters never mentioned what use they intended to make of your abilities, did they?”

  “You know about the Magister,” Tessa said. “They said they were preparing me for him.”

  “For him to do what?” Will asked. “Eat you for dinner?”

  Tessa shook her head. “To—to marry me, they said.”

  “To marry you?” Jessamine was openly scornful. “That’s ridiculous. They were probably going to blood sacrifice you and didn’t want you to panic.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Will said. “I looked in several rooms before I found Tessa. I remember one that was done up surprisingly like a wedding chamber. White hangings on an enormous bed. A white dress hanging in the wardrobe. It looked about your size.” He eyed Tessa thoughtfully.

  “Ceremonial marriage can be a very powerful thing,” Charlotte said. “Performed properly, it could allow someone access to your ability, Tessa, even the power to control you.” She drummed her fingertips thoughtfully on the tabletop. “As for ‘the Magister,’ I’ve researched the term in the archives. It is often used to denote the head of a coven or other group of magicians. The sort of group the Pandemonium Club imagines itself to be. I can’t help but feel that the Magister and the Pandemonium Club are connected.”

  “We’ve investigated them before and never managed to catch them doing anything dodgy,” Henry pointed out. “It isn’t against the Law to be an idiot.”

  “Lucky for you,” Jessamine said under her breath.

  Henry looked hurt, but said nothing. Charlotte cast Jessamine a freezing look.

  “Henry is right,” said Will. “It isn’t as if Jem and I didn’t catch them doing the odd illegal thing—drinking absinthe laced with demon powders, and so forth. As long as they were only hurting themselves, it hardly seemed worth involving ourselves. But if they’ve graduated to harming others . . .”

  “Do you know who any of them are?” Henry asked curiously.

  “The mundanes, no,” Will said dismissively. “There never seemed a reason to find out, and many of them went masked or disguised at club events. But I recognized quite a few of the Downworlders. Magnus Bane, Lady Belcourt, Ragnor Fell, de Quincey—”

  “De Quincey? I hope he wasn’t breaking any laws. You know how much trouble we’ve had finding a head vampire we can see eye to eye with,” fretted Charlotte.

  Will smiled into his tea. “Whenever I saw him, he was being a perfect angel.”

  After a hard look at him, Charlotte turned to Tessa. “Did the servant girl you mentioned—Miranda—have your ability? Or what about Emma?”

  “I don’t think so. If Miranda did, they would have been training her as well, wouldn’t they, and Emma didn’t remember anything like that.”

  “And they never mentioned the Pandemonium Club? Some larger purpose to what they were doing?”

  Tessa racked her brain. What was it the Dark Sisters had talked about when they’d thought she wasn’t listening? “I don’t think they ever said the name of the club, but they would talk sometimes about meetings they were planning on attending, and how the other members would be pleased to see how they were getting on with me. They did say a name once. . . .” Tessa screwed her face up, trying to remember. “Someone else who was in the club. I don’t remember, though I recall thinking the name sounded foreign. . . .”

  Charlotte leaned forward across the table. “Can you try, Tessa? Try to remember?”

  Charlotte meant no harm, Tessa knew, and yet her voice called up other voices in Tessa’s head—voices urging her to try, to reach into herself, to draw out the power. Voices that could turn hard and cold at the slightest provocation. Voices that wheedled and threatened and lied.

  Tessa drew herself upright. “First, what about my brother?”

  Charlotte blinked. “Your brother?”

  “You said that if I gave you information about the Dark Sisters, you’d help me find my brother. Well, I told you what I knew. And I still don’t have any idea where Nate is.”

  “Oh.” Charlotte sat back, looking almost startled. “Of course. We’ll start investigating his whereabouts tomorrow,” she reassured Tessa. “We’ll start with his workplace—speak to his employer and find out if he knows anything. We have contacts in all sorts of places, Miss Gray. Downworld runs on gossip like the mundane world does. Eventually we’ll turn up someone who knows something about your brother.”

  The meal ended not long after that, and Tessa excused herself from the table with a feeling of relief, declining Charlotte’s offer to guide her back to her room. All she wanted was to be alone with her thoughts.

  She made her way down the torchlit corridor, remembering the day she had stepped off the boat at Southampton. She had come to England knowing no one but her brother, and had let the Dark Sisters force her into serving them. Now she had fallen in with the Shadowhunters, and who was to say they would treat her any better? Like the Dark Sisters, they wanted to use her—use her for the information she knew—and now that they were all aware of her power, how long would it be before they wanted to use her for that, too?

  Still lost in thought, Tessa nearly walked directly into a wall. She brought herself up short—and looked around, frowning. She had been walking for much longer than it had taken her and Charlotte to reach the dining room, and still she hadn’t found the room she remembered. In fact, she wasn’t even sure she had found the corridor she remembered. She was in a hallway now, lined with torches and hung with tapestries, but was it the same one? Some of the corridors were very bright, some very dim, the torches burning with varying shades of brightness. Sometimes the torches flared up and then faded as she passed, as if responding to some peculiar stimulus she couldn’t see. This particular corridor was fairly dim. She picked her way to the end of it carefully, where it branched into two more, each identical to this one.

  “Lost?” inquired a voice behind her. A slow, arrogant voice, immediately familiar.

  Will.

/>   Tessa turned and saw that he was leaning carelessly against the wall behind her, as if he were lounging in a doorway, his feet in their scuffed boots crossed in front of him. He held something in his hand: his glowing stone. He pocketed it as she looked at him, dousing its light.

  “You ought to let me show you around the Institute a bit, Miss Gray,” he suggested. “You know, so you don’t get lost again.”

  Tessa narrowed her eyes at him.

  “Of course, you can simply continue wandering about on your own if you really wish to,” he added. “I ought to warn you, though, that there are at least three or four doors in the Institute that you really shouldn’t open. There’s the one that leads to the room where we keep trapped demons, for instance. They can get a bit nasty. Then there is the weapons room. Some of the weapons have a mind of their own, and they are sharp. Then there are the rooms that open onto empty air. They’re meant to confuse intruders, but when you’re as high as the top of a church, you don’t want to accidentally slip and—”

  “I don’t believe you,” Tessa said. “You’re an awful liar, Mr. Herondale. Still—” She bit her lip. “I don’t like wandering about. You can show me around if you promise no tricks.”

  Will promised. And, to Tessa’s surprise, he was true to his word. He guided her down a succession of identical-looking corridors, talking as they walked. He told her how many rooms the Institute had (more than you could count), told her how many Shadowhunters could live in it at once (hundreds), and displayed for her the vast ballroom in which was held an annual Christmas party for the Enclave—which, Will explained, was their term for the group of Shadowhunters who lived in London. (In New York, he added, the term was “Conclave.” American Shadowhunters, it seemed, had their own lexicon.)

  After the ballroom came the kitchen, where the middle-aged woman Tessa had seen in the dining room was introduced as Agatha, the cook. She sat sewing in front of a massive kitchen range and was, to Tessa’s intense mystification, also smoking an enormous pipe. She smiled indulgently around it as Will took several chocolate tarts from the plate where they had been left to cool on the table. Will offered one to Tessa.