Fierce midnights and famishing morrows,
And the loves that complete and control
All the joys of the flesh, all the sorrows
That wear out the soul.
—Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Dolores”
Tessa kept the curtain on her side of the carriage pulled back, her eyes on the glass of the window, as they rolled along Fleet Street toward Ludgate Hill. The yellow fog had thickened, and she could make out little through it—the dark shapes of people hurrying to and fro, the hazy words of advertising signs painted on the sides of buildings. Every once in a while the fog would part and she would get a clear glimpse of something—a little girl carrying bunches of wilting lavender, leaning against a wall, exhausted; a knife grinder rolling his cart wearily homeward; a sign for Bryant and May’s Lucifer Matches looming suddenly out of the gloom.
“Chuckaways,” said Jem. He was leaning back against the seat across from her, his eyes bright in the dimness. She wondered if he had taken some of the drug before they left, and if so, how much.
“Pardon?”
He mimed the act of striking a match, blowing it out, and tossing the remainder over his shoulder. “That’s what they call matches here—chuckaways, because you toss them aside after one use. It’s also what they call the girls who work at the match factories.”
Tessa thought of Sophie, who could easily have become one of those “chuckaways,” if Charlotte hadn’t found her. “That’s cruel.”
“It’s a cruel part of the city we’re going into. The East End. The slums.” He sat forward. “I want you to be careful, and to stay close by me.”
“Do you know what Will’s doing there?” Tessa asked, half-afraid of the answer. They were passing by the great bulk of St. Paul’s now, looming up above them like a giant’s glimmering marble tombstone.
Jem shook his head. “I don’t. I only got a sense—a fleeting image of the street—from the tracking spell. I will say, though, that there are few harmless reasons for a gentleman to go ‘down to Chapel’ after dark.”
“He could be gambling . . .”
“He could be,” Jem agreed, sounding as if he doubted it.
“You said you would sense it. Here.” Tessa touched herself over the heart. “If something had happened to him. Is that because you’re parabatai?”
“Yes.”
“So there’s more to being parabatai than just swearing to look out for each other. There’s something—mystical about it.”
Jem smiled at her, that smile that was like a light suddenly being turned on in every room of a house. “We’re Nephilim. Every one of our life’s passages has some mystical component—our births, our deaths, our marriages, everything has a ceremony. There is one as well if you wish to become someone’s parabatai. First you must ask them, of course. It’s no small commitment—”
“You asked Will,” Tessa guessed.
Jem shook his head, still smiling. “He asked me,” he said. “Or rather he told me. We were training, up in the training room, with longswords. He asked me and I said no, he deserved someone who was going to live, who could look out for him all his life. He bet me he could get the sword away from me, and if he succeeded, I’d have to agree to be his blood brother.”
“And he got it away from you?”
“In nine seconds flat.” Jem laughed. “Pinned me to the wall. He must have been training without my knowing about it, because I’d never have agreed if I’d thought he was that good with a longsword. Throwing daggers have always been his weapons.” He shrugged. “We were thirteen. They did the ceremony when we were fourteen. Now it’s been three years and I can’t imagine not having a parabatai.”
“Why didn’t you want to do it?” Tessa asked a little hesitantly. “When he first asked you.”
Jem ran a hand through his silvery hair. “The ceremony binds you,” he said. “It makes you stronger. You have each other’s strength to draw on. It makes you more aware of where the other one is, so you can work seamlessly together in a fight. There are runes you can use if you are part of a pair of parabatai that you can’t use otherwise. But . . . you can choose only one parabatai in your life. You can’t have a second, even if the first one dies. I didn’t think I was a very good bet, considering.”
“That seems a harsh rule.”
Jem said something then, in a language she didn’t understand. It sounded like “khalepa ta kala.”
She frowned at him. “That isn’t Latin?”
“Greek,” he said. “It has two meanings. It means that that which is worth having—the good, fine, honorable, and noble things—are difficult to attain.” He leaned forward, closer to her. She could smell the sweet scent of the drug on him, and the tang of his skin underneath. “It means something else as well.”
Tessa swallowed. “What’s that?”
“It means ‘beauty is harsh.’”
She glanced down at his hands. Slim, fine, capable hands, with blunt-cut nails, and scars across the knuckles. Were any of the Nephilim unscarred? “These words, they have a special appeal to you, don’t they?” she asked softly. “These dead languages. Why is that?”
He was leaning close enough to her that she felt his warm breath on her cheek when he exhaled. “I cannot be sure,” he said, “though I think it has something to do with the clarity of them. Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, they contain pure truths, before we cluttered our languages with so many useless words.”
“But what of your language?” she said softly. “The one you grew up speaking?”
His lips twitched. “I grew up speaking English and Mandarin Chinese,” he said. “My father spoke English, and Chinese badly. After we moved to Shanghai, it was even worse. The dialect there is barely intelligible by someone who speaks Mandarin.”
“Say something in Mandarin,” said Tessa with a smile.
Jem said something rapidly, that sounded like a lot of breathy vowels and consonants run together, his voice rising and falling melodically: “Ni hen piao liang.”
“What did you say?”
“I said your hair is coming undone. Here,” he said, and reached out and tucked an escaping curl back behind her ear. Tessa felt the blood spill hot up into her cheeks, and was glad for the dimness of the carriage. “You have to be careful with it,” he said, taking his hand back slowly, his fingers lingering against her cheek. “You don’t want to give the enemy anything to grab hold of.”
“Oh—yes—of course.” Tessa looked quickly toward the window—and stared. The yellow fog hung heavy over the streets, but she could see well enough. They were in a narrow thoroughfare—though broad, perhaps, by London’s standards. The air seemed thick and greasy with coal dust and fog, and the streets were lined with people. Filthy, dressed in rags, they slumped against the walls of tipsy-looking buildings, their eyes watching the carriage go by like hungry dogs following the progress of a bone. Tessa saw a woman wrapped in a shawl, a basket of flowers drooping from one hand, a baby folded into a corner of the shawl propped against her shoulder. Its eyes were closed, its skin as pale as curd; it looked sick, or dead. Barefoot children, as dirty as homeless cats, played together in the streets; women sat leaning against one another on the stoops of buildings, obviously drunk. The men were worst of all, slumped against the sides of houses, dressed in dirty, patched topcoats and hats, the looks of hopelessness on their faces like etchings on gravestones.
“Rich Londoners from Mayfair and Chelsea like to take midnight tours of districts like these,” said Jem, his voice uncharacteristically bitter. “They call it slumming.”
“Do they stop and—and help in some way?”
“Most of them, no. They just want to stare so they can go home and talk at their next tea party about how they saw real ‘mug-hunters’ or ‘dollymops’ or ‘Shivering Jemmys.’ Most of them never get out of their carriages or omnibuses.”
“What’s a Shivering Jemmy?”
Jem looked at her with flat silver eyes. “A freezing, ragged beggar,” he said. “Someone likely to die of the cold.”
Tessa thought of the thick paper pasted over the cracks in the windowpanes in her New York apartment. But at least she had had a bedroom, a place to lie down, and Aunt Harriet to make her hot soup or tea over the small range. She had been lucky.
The carriage came to a stop at an unprepossessing corner. Across the street the lights of an open public house spilled out onto the street, along with a steady stream of drunkards, some with women leaning on their arms, the women’s brightly colored dresses stained and dirty and their cheeks highly rouged. Somewhere someone was singing “Cruel Lizzie Vickers.”
Jem took her hand. “I can’t glamour you against the glances of mundanes,” he said. “So keep your head down and keep close to me.”
Tessa smiled crookedly but didn’t take her hand out of his. “You said that already.”
He leaned close and whispered into her ear. His breath sent a shiver racing through her whole body. “It’s very important.”
He reached past her for the door and swung it open. He leaped down onto the pavement and helped her down after him, pulling her close against his side. Tessa looked up and down the street. There were some incurious stares from the crowds, but the two of them were largely ignored. They headed toward a narrow door painted red. There were steps around it, but unlike all the other steps in the area, they were bare. No one was sitting on them. Jem took them quickly, pulling her up after him, and rapped sharply on the door.
It was opened after a moment by a woman in a long red dress, fitted so tightly to her body that Tessa’s eyes widened. She had black hair piled on her head, kept in place by a pair of gold chopsticks. Her skin was very pale, her eyes rimmed with kohl—but on closer examination Tessa realized she was white, not foreign. Her mouth was a sulky red bow. It turned down at the corners as her gaze came to rest on Jem.
“No,” she said. “No Nephilim.”
She moved to shut the door, but Jem had raised his cane; the blade shot out from the base of it, holding the door open wide. “No trouble,” he said. “We’re not here for the Clave. It’s personal.”
She narrowed her eyes.
“We’re looking for someone,” he said. “A friend. Take us to him, and we won’t bother you further.”
At that, she threw her head back and laughed. “I know who you’re looking for,” she said. “There’s only one of your kind here.” She turned away from the door with a shrug of contempt. Jem’s blade slid back into its casing with a hiss, and he ducked under the low lintel, drawing Tessa after him.
Beyond the door was a narrow corridor. A heavy sweet smell hung on the air, like the smell that hung about Jem’s clothing after he had taken his drug. Her hand tightened involuntarily on his. “This is where Will comes to buy the—to buy what I need,” he whispered, inclining his head so that his lips nearly touched her ear. “Although why he would be here now . . .”
The woman who had opened the door for them glanced back over her shoulder as she set off down the hall. There was a slit up the back of her dress, showing much of her legs—and the end of a long, slender forked tail, marked with black and white markings like the scales of a snake. She’s a warlock, Tessa thought with a dull thud at her heart. Ragnor, the Dark Sisters, this woman—why was it that warlocks always seemed so—sinister? With the exception of Magnus perhaps, but she had the feeling Magnus was an exception to many rules.
The corridor widened out into a large room, its walls painted dark red. Great lamps, their sides carved and painted with delicate traceries that threw patterned light against the walls, hung down from the ceiling. Along the walls were ranged beds, in bunks, like the inside of a ship. A large round table dominated the center of the room. At it sat a number of men, their skin the same blood-red as the walls, their black hair clipped close to their heads. Their hands ended in blue-black talons that had also been clipped, probably to allow them to more easily count and sift and mix the various powders and concoctions they had spread out before them. The powders seemed to glimmer and shine under the lamplight, like pulverized jewels.
“Is this an opium den?” Tessa whispered into Jem’s ear.
His eyes were raking the room anxiously. She could sense the tension in him, a thrum just under the skin, like the fast-beating heart of a hummingbird. “No.” He sounded distracted. “Not really—mostly demon drugs and faerie powders. Those men at the table, they’re ifrits. Warlocks without powers.”
The woman in the red dress was leaning over the shoulder of one of the ifrits. Together they looked up and over at Tessa and Jem, their eyes lingering on Jem. Tessa didn’t like the way they were looking at him. The warlock woman was smiling; the ifrit’s look was calculating. The woman straightened up and swayed over to them, her hips moving like a metronome under the tight satin of her dress.
“Madran says we have what you want, silver boy,” said the warlock woman, raking a blood-red nail across Jem’s cheek. “No need for pretense.”
Jem flinched back from her touch. Tessa had never seen him look so unnerved. “I told you, we’re here for a friend,” he snapped. “A Nephilim. Blue eyes, black hair—” His voice rose. “Ta xian zai zai na li?”
She looked at him for a moment, then shook her head. “You are foolish,” she said. “There is little of the yin fen left, and when it is gone, you will die. We struggle to obtain more, but lately the demand—”
“Spare us your attempts to sell your merchandise,” said Tessa, suddenly angry. She couldn’t bear the look on Jem’s face, as if each word were the cut of a knife. No wonder Will bought his poisons for him. “Where is our friend?”
The warlock woman hissed, shrugged, and pointed toward one of the bunk beds bolted to the wall. “There.”
Jem whitened as Tessa stared. Their occupants were so still that at first she had thought the beds were empty, but she realized now, looking more closely, that each was taken up by a sprawled figure. Some lay on their sides, arms trailing over the edges of the bed, hands splayed; most were on their backs, eyes open, staring at the ceiling or the bunk above them.
Without another word Jem began to stalk across the room, Tessa on his heels. As they drew closer to the beds, she realized that not all the occupants were human. Blue, violet, red, and green skin flashed past; green hair as long and netted as a web of seaweed brushed restlessly against a dirty pillow; taloned fingers gripped the wooden sides of a bunk as someone moaned. Someone else was giggling softly, hopelessly, a sound sadder than weeping; another voice repeated a children’s rhyme over and over and over again:
“Oranges and lemons
Say the bells of St. Clement’s
When will ye pay me?
Ring the bells at Old Bailey
When I grow rich
Say the bells of Shoreditch—”
“Will,” whispered Jem. He had stopped at a bunk halfway down the wall, and leaned against it, as if his legs threatened to give way.
Lying in the bunk was Will, half-tangled in a dark, ragged blanket. He wore nothing but trousers and a shirt; his weapons belt hung on a nail peg inside the bunk. His feet were bare, his eyes half-lidded, their blue only slightly visible beneath the fringe of his dark lashes. His hair was wet with sweat, pasted to his forehead, his cheeks bright red and feverish. His chest rose and fell raggedly, as if he were having trouble drawing breath.
Tessa reached out and put the back of her hand to his forehead. It was burning. “Jem,” she said softly. “Jem, we must get him out of here.”
The man in the bunk beside them was still singing. Not that he was quite a man, exactly. His body was short and twisted, his shoeless feet ending in cloven hooves.
“When will that be?
Say the bells of Stepney
I do not know,
Says the great bell of Bow”
Jem was still staring down at Will, motionless. He seemed frozen. His face had gone a patchy white and red color.
“Jem!” Tessa whispered. “Please. Help me get him on his feet.” When Jem did not move, she reached out, took Will by the shoulder, and shook him. “Will. Will, wake up, please.”
Will only groaned and turned away from her, burying his head against his arm. He was a Shadowhunter, she thought, six feet of bone and muscle, far too heavy for her to lift. Unless—
“If you do not help me,” Tessa said to Jem, “I swear, I will Change into you, and I will lift him myself. And then everyone here will see what you look like in a dress.” She fixed him with a look. “Do you understand?”
Very slowly he raised his eyes to hers. He did not look fazed by the idea of being seen by ifrits in a dress; he did not look as if he saw her at all. It was the first time she could remember seeing those silver eyes without any light behind them. “Do you?” he said, and reached into the bunk, catching Will by the arm and hauling him sideways, taking little care, and bumping Will’s head, hard, against the side rail of the bed.
Will groaned and opened his eyes. “Let me go—”
“Help me with him,” Jem said without looking at Tessa, and together they wrestled Will out of the bunk. He nearly fell, sliding his arm around Tessa to balance himself as Jem retrieved his weapons belt from the nail it was hanging from.
“Tell me this is not a dream,” Will whispered, nuzzling his face into the side of her neck. Tessa jumped. He felt feverishly hot against her skin. His lips grazed her cheekbone; they were as soft as she remembered.
“Jem,” Tessa said desperately, and Jem looked over at them; he had been buckling Will’s belt over his own, and it seemed clear he hadn’t heard a word Will had said. He knelt down to stuff Will’s feet into his boots, then rose to take his parabatai’s arm. Will seemed delighted by this.
“Oh, good,” he said. “Now we’re all three together.”
“Shut up,” said Jem.
Will giggled. “Listen, Carstairs, you haven’t any of the needful on you, have you? I’d stump up, but I’m flat out.”
“What did he say?” Tessa was baffled.
“He wants me to pay for his drugs.” Jem’s voice was stiff. “Come. We’ll get him to the carriage, and I’ll come back with the money.”
As they struggled toward the door, Tessa heard the voice of the cloven-footed man, following them, thin and as high as music piped through reeds, ending in a high-pitched giggle.
“Here comes a candle to light you to bed,
And here comes a chopper to chop off your head!”
Even the dirty Whitechapel air seemed clear and fresh after the cloying incense stench of the faerie drug den. Tessa almost stumbled going down the stairs. The carriage was thankfully still at the curb, and Cyril was swinging himself down out of the seat, heading over to them, concern on his big, open face.
“Is he all right, then?” he said, taking the arm that Will had draped over Tessa’s shoulders and draping it over his own. Tessa slipped aside gratefully; her back had begun to ache.
Will predictably, though, did not like this. “Let me go,” he said with sudden irritation. “Let me go. I can stand.”
Jem and Cyril exchanged glances, then moved apart. Will staggered, but stayed upright. He raised his head, the cold wind lifting the sweaty hair from his neck and forehead, blowing it across his eyes. Tessa thought of him up on the roof of the Institute: And I behold London, a human awful wonder of God.
He looked at Jem. His eyes were bluer than blue, his cheeks flushed, his features angelic. He said, “You did not have to come and fetch me like some child. I was having quite a pleasant time.”
Jem looked back at him. “God damn you,” he said, and hit Will across the face, sending him spinning. Will didn’t lose his footing, but fetched up against the side of the carriage, his hand to his cheek. His mouth was bleeding. He looked at Jem with total astonishment.
“Get him into the carriage,” Jem said to Cyril, and turned and went back through the red door—to pay for whatever Will had taken, Tessa thought. Will was still staring after him, the blood reddening his mouth.
“James?” he said.
“Come along, then,” said Cyril, not unkindly. He really was awfully like Thomas, Tessa thought as he opened the carriage door and helped Will inside, and then Tessa after him. He gave her a handkerchief from his pocket. It was warm and smelled like cheap eau de cologne. She smiled and thanked him as he shut the door.
Will was slumped in the corner of the carriage, his arms around himself, his eyes half-open. Blood had trickled down his chin. She leaned over and pressed the handkerchief to his mouth; he reached up and put his hand over hers, holding it there. “I’ve made a mess of things,” he said. “Haven’t I?”
“Dreadfully, I’m afraid,” said Tessa, trying not to notice the warmth of his hand over hers. Even in the darkness of the carriage, his eyes were luminously blue. What was it Jem had said, though, about beauty? Beauty is harsh. Would people forgive Will the things he did if he were ugly? And did it help him, in the end, to be forgiven? Though, she could not help but feel he did the things he did not because he loved himself too much but because he hated himself. And she did not know why.
He closed his eyes. “I’m so tired, Tess,” he said. “I only wanted pleasant dreams for once.”
“That is not the way to get them, Will,” she said softly. “You cannot buy or drug or dream your way out of pain.”
His hand tightened over hers.
The carriage door opened. Tessa drew back from Will hastily. It was Jem, his face like thunder; he spared a cursory glance at Will, threw himself into a seat, and reached up to rap on the roof. “Cyril, drive home,” he called, and after a moment the carriage lurched forward into the night. Jem reached out and drew the curtains across the windows. In the dimness Tessa slipped the handkerchief into her sleeve. It was still damp with Will’s blood.
Jem said nothing all the way back from Whitechapel, merely stared stonily ahead of him with his arms folded while Will slept, a faint smile on his face, in the corner of the carriage. Tessa, across from them both, could think of nothing to say to break Jem’s silence. This was so utterly unlike him—Jem, who was always sweet, always kind, always optimistic. His expression now was worse than blank, his nails digging into the fabric of his gear, his shoulders stiff and angular with rage.
The moment they drew up in front of the Institute, he threw the door open and leaped out. She heard him shout something to Cyril about helping Will to his room, and then he stalked away, up the steps, without another word to her. Tessa was so shocked, she could only stare after him for a moment. She moved to the carriage door; Cyril was already there, his hand up to help her down. Barely had Tessa’s shoes hit the cobblestones than she was hurrying after Jem, calling his name, but he was already inside the Institute. He had left the door open for her, and she dashed in after him, after only a brief glance to confirm that Will was being helped by Cyril. She hurried up the stairs, dropping her voice as she realized that, of course, the Institute was asleep, the witchlight torches dimmed to their lowest glow.
She went to Jem’s room first and knocked; when there was no answer, she sought a few of his most commonly visited haunts—the music room, the library—but, finding nothing, she returned, disconsolate, to her own room to ready herself for bed. In her nightgown, her dress brushed and hung up, she crawled between the sheets of her bed and stared at the ceiling. She even picked up Will’s copy of Vathek from her floor, but for the first time the poem in the front failed to make her smile, and she could not concentrate on the story.
She was startled at her own distress. Jem was angry at Will, not at her. Still, she thought, it was perhaps the first time he had lost his temper in front of her. The first time he had been curt with her, or not attended with kindness to her words, had not seemed to think of her first before himself. . . .
She had taken him for granted, she thought with surprise and shame, watching the flickering candlelight. She had assumed his kindness was so natural and so innate, she had never asked herself whether it cost him any effort. Any effort to stand between Will and the world, protecting each of them from the other. Any effort to accept the loss of his family with equanimity. Any effort to remain cheerful and calm in the face of his own dying.
A rending noise, the sound of something being wrenched apart, tore through the room. Tessa sat bolt upright. What was that? It seemed to be coming from outside her door—across the hall—
Jem?
She leaped to her feet and caught her dressing gown down from its peg. Hurriedly slipping into it, she darted out the door and into the corridor.
She had been correct—the noise was coming from Jem’s room. She remembered the first night she had met him, the lovely violin music that had poured like water through the doorway. This noise sounded nothing like Jem’s music. She could hear the saw of bow against string, yet it sounded like screaming, like a person screaming in awful pain. She both longed to go in and felt terrified to do so; finally she took hold of the knob of the door and swung it open, and then ducked inside and pulled the door closed fast after her.
“Jem,” she whispered.
The witchlight torches were burning low on the walls. Jem sat on the trunk at the foot of his bed in just his shirtsleeves and trousers, his silver hair tousled, the violin propped against his shoulder. He was sawing at it viciously with the bow, wringing awful sounds out of it, making it scream. As Tessa watched, one of the violin strings snapped with a shriek.
“Jem!” she cried again, and when he did not look up, she strode across the room and wrenched the bow out of his hand. “Jem, stop! Your violin—your lovely violin—you’ll ruin it.”
He looked up at her. His pupils were enormous, the silver of his eyes only a thin ring around the black. He was breathing hard, his shirt open at the neck, sweat standing out on his collarbones. His cheeks were flushed. “What does it matter?” he said in a voice so low it was almost a hiss. “What does any of it matter? I’m dying. I won’t outlast the decade. What does it matter if the violin goes before I do?”
Tessa was appalled. He never spoke like this about his illness, never.
He stood up and turned away from her, toward the window. Only a little moonlight found its way into the room through the fog; there seemed to be shapes visible in the white mist pressed against the window—ghosts, shades, mocking faces. “You know it is true.”
“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, looking 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.