The witchlight torches were burning low on the wal s. 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’l 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 col arbones. 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 appal ed. He never spoke like this about his il ness, 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 wil 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 kil ing me.”
“But, Jem, I don’t think that’s what Wil meant to do at al .” 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 al black now. “I tel 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 Wil . 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 fal ing 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 Wil , 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 il 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 al 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.