Wil held up his hands. “No tricks, old one. Surely you must have heard the rumors running about in Downworld. The Clave has other things on its mind than tracking down ghosts who traffic in demon powders and faerie blood.” He leaned forward. “I’l give you a good price.” He drew a cambric bag from his pocket and dangled it in the air. It clinked like coins rattling together. “They al fit your description, Mol.”
An eager look came over her dead face, and she solidified enough to take the bag from him. She plunged one hand into it and brought her palm out ful of rings—gold wedding rings, each tied in a lovers’ knot at the top. Old Mol, like many ghosts, was always looking for that talisman, that lost piece of her past that would final y al ow her to die, the anchor that kept her trapped in the world. In her case it was her wedding ring. It was common belief, Magnus had told Wil , that the ring was long gone, buried under the silty bed of the Thames, but in the meantime she’d take any bag of found rings in the hope one would turn out to be hers.
She dropped the rings back into the bag, which vanished somewhere on her undead person, and handed him a folded sachet of powder in return. He slipped it into his jacket pocket just as the ghost began to shimmer and fade. “Hold up, there, Mol. That isn’t al I have come for tonight.”
The spirit flickered while greed warred with impatience and the effort of remaining visible. Final y she grunted. “Very wel . What else d’you want?”
Wil hesitated. This was not something Magnus had sent him for; it was something he wanted to know for himself. “Love potions—”
Old Mol screeched with laughter. “Love potions? For Wil ’erondale? ’Tain’t my way to turn down payment, but any man who looks like you ’as got no need of love potions, and that’s a fact.”
“No,” Wil said, a little desperation in his voice. “I was looking for the opposite, real y—something that might put an end to being in love.”
“An ’atred potion?” Mol stil sounded amused.
“I was hoping for something more akin to indifference? Tolerance?”
She made a snorting noise, astonishingly human for a ghost. “I ’ardly like to tel you this, Nephilim, but if you want a girl to ’ate you, there’s easy enough ways of making it ’appen. You don’t need my help with the poor thing.”
And with that she vanished, spinning away into the mists among the graves. Wil , looking after her, sighed. “Not for her,” he said under his breath, though there was no one to hear him, “for me . . .” And he leaned his head against the cold iron gate.
THE COUNCIL CHAMBER
A bove, the fair hall-ceiling stately set
Many an arch high up did lift,
A nd angels rising and descending met
With interchange of gift.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Palace of Art”
“Oh, yes. It real y does look just as I imagined,” Tessa said, and turned to smile at the boy who stood beside her. He had just helped her over a puddle, and his hand stil rested politely on her arm, just above the crook of her elbow.
James Carstairs smiled back at her, elegant in his dark suit, his silver-fair hair whipped by the wind. His other hand rested on a jade-topped cane, and if any of the great crowd of people mil ing around them thought that it was odd that someone so young should need a walking stick, or found anything unusual about his coloring or the cast of his features, they didn’t pause to stare.
“I shal count that as a blessing,” said Jem. “I was beginning to worry, you know, that everything you encountered in London was going to be a disappointment.”
A disappointment. Tessa’s brother, Nate, had once promised her everything in London—a new beginning, a wonderful place to live, a city of soaring buildings and gorgeous parks. What Tessa had found instead was horror and betrayal, and danger beyond anything she could have imagined. And yet . . .
“Not everything has been.” She smiled up at Jem.
“I am glad to hear it.” His tone was serious, not teasing. She looked away from him up at the grand edifice that rose before them. Westminster Abbey, with its great Gothic spires nearly touching the sky. The sun had done its best to struggle out from behind the haze-tipped clouds, and the abbey was bathed in weak sunlight.
“This is real y where it is?” she asked as Jem drew her forward, toward the abbey entrance. “It seems so . . .”
“Mundane?”
“I had meant to say crowded.” The Abbey was open to tourists today, and groups of them swarmed busily in and out the enormous doors, most clutching Baedeker guidebooks in their hands. A group of American tourists—middle-aged women in unfashionable clothes, murmuring in accents that made Tessa briefly homesick—passed them as they went up the stairs, hurrying after a lecturer who was offering a guided tour of the Abbey.
Jem and Tessa melted in effortlessly behind them.
The inside of the abbey smel ed of cold stone and metal. Tessa looked up and around, marveling at the size of the place. It made the Institute look like a vil age church.