Jem shook his head. “I don’t. I only got a sense—a fleeting image of the street—from the tracking spel . I wil 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 wel if you wish to become someone’s parabatai. First you must ask them, of course. It’s no smal commitment—”
“You asked Wil ,” Tessa guessed.
Jem shook his head, stil 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 al 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 wal . 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 smel the sweet scent of the drug on him, and the tang of his skin underneath. “It means something else as wel .”
Tessa swal owed. “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 intel igible 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 fal ing melodical y: “Ni hen piao liang.”
“What did you say?”