Howling, de Quincey began to pull himself to his feet. Tessa raised her arm, pulled the trigger on the pistol again—nothing. A soft click let her know the gun was empty.
De Quincey laughed. He was still clutching his shoulder, though the blood flow had already slowed to a trickle. “Camille,” he spat at Tessa. “I will be back for you. I will make you sorry you were ever reborn.”
Tessa felt a chill at the pit of her stomach—not just her fear. Camille’s. De Quincey bared his teeth one last time and whirled with incredible speed. He raced across the room and flung himself into a high glass window. It shattered outward in an explosion of glass, carrying him forward as if his body were being carried on a wave, vanishing into the night.
Will swore. “We can’t lose him—,” he began, and started forward. Then he spun as Tessa screamed. A ragged-looking male vampire had risen up behind her like a ghost appearing out of the air, and had snatched her by the shoulders. She tried to pull free, but his grip was too strong. She could hear him murmuring in her ear, horrible words about how she was a traitor to the Night Children, and how he would tear her open with his teeth.
“Tessa,” Will shouted, and she wasn’t sure if he sounded angry, or something else. He reached for the gleaming weapons at his belt. His hand closed around the hilt of a seraph blade, just as the vampire spun Tessa around. She caught sight of his leering white face, the blood-tipped fangs out, ready to tear. The vampire lunged forward—
And exploded in a shower of dust and blood. He dissolved, the flesh melting away from his face and hands, and Tessa caught sight for a moment of the blackened skeleton beneath before it, too, crumbled, leaving an empty pile of clothes behind. Clothes, and a gleaming silver blade.
She looked up. Jem stood a few feet away, looking very pale. He held the blade in his left hand; his right was empty. There was a long cut along one of his cheeks, but he seemed otherwise uninjured. His hair and eyes gleamed a brutal silver in the light of the dying flames. “I think,” he said, “that that was the last of them.”
Surprised, Tessa glanced around the room. The chaos had subsided. Shadowhunters moved here and there in the wreckage—some were seated on chairs, being attended to by stele-wielding healers—but she could not see a single vampire. The smoke of the burning had subsided as well, though white ash from the torched curtains still floated down over the room like unexpected snow.
Will, blood still dripping from his chin, looked at Jem with his eyebrows raised. “Nice throw,” he said.
Jem shook his head. “You bit de Quincey,” he said. “You fool. He’s a vampire. You know what it means to bite a vampire.”
“I had no choice,” said Will. “He was choking me.”
“I know,” Jem said. “But really, Will. Again?”
It was Henry, in the end, who freed Nathaniel from the torture chair by the simple expedient of smashing it apart with the flat side of a sword until the manacles came free. Nathaniel slid to the floor, where he lay moaning, Tessa cradling him. Charlotte fussed a bit, bringing wet cloths to clean Nate’s face, and a ragged bit of curtain to throw over him, before she raced off to engage Benedict Lightwood in an energetic conversation—during which she alternated between pointing back at Tessa and Nathaniel and waving her hands in a dramatic manner. Tessa, utterly dazed and exhausted, wondered what on earth Charlotte could be doing.
It hardly mattered, really. Everything seemed to be going on in a dream. She sat on the floor with Nathaniel as the Shadowhunters moved around her, drawing on one another with their steles. It was incredible to watch their injuries vanishing as the healing Marks went onto their skin. They all seemed equally able to draw the Marks. She watched as Jem, wincing, unbuttoned his shirt to show a long cut along one pale shoulder; he looked away, his mouth tight, as Will drew a careful Mark below the injury.
It wasn’t until Will, having finished with Jem, came sauntering over to her that she realized why she was so tired.
“Back to yourself, I see,” he said. He had a damp towel in one hand but hadn’t yet bothered to clean the blood off his face and neck.
Tessa glanced down at herself. It was true. At some point she had lost Camille and become herself again. She must have been dazed indeed, she thought, not to have noticed the return of her own heartbeat. It pulsed inside her chest like a drum.
“I didn’t know you knew how to use a pistol,” Will added.
“I don’t,” Tessa said. “I think Camille must have. It was—instinctive.” She bit her lip. “Not that it matters, since it didn’t work.”
“We rarely use them. Etching runes into the metal of a gun or bullet prevents the gunpowder from igniting; no one knows why. Henry has tried to address the problem, of course, but not with any success. Since you can’t kill a demon without a runed weapon or a seraph blade, guns aren’t much use to us. Vampires die if you shoot them through the heart, admittedly, and werewolves can be injured if you have a silver bullet, but if you miss the vitals, they’ll just come at you angrier than ever. Runed blades simply work better for our purposes. Get a vampire with a runed blade and it’s much harder for them to recover and heal.”
Tessa looked at him, her gaze steady. “Isn’t it hard?”
Will tossed the damp cloth aside. It was scarlet with blood. “Isn’t what hard?”
“Killing vampires,” she said. “They may not be people, but they look like people. They feel as people do. They scream and bleed. Isn’t it hard to slaughter them?”
Will’s jaw tightened. “No,” he said. “And if you really knew anything about them—”
“Camille feels,” she said. “She loves and hates.”
“And she is still alive. Everyone has choices, Tessa. Those vampires would not have been here tonight if they hadn’t made theirs.” He glanced down at Nathaniel, limp in Tessa’s lap. “Nor, I imagine, would your brother have been.”
“I don’t know why de Quincey wanted him dead,” Tessa said softly. “I don’t know what he could have done to incur the wrath of vampires.”
“Tessa!” It was Charlotte, darting up to Tessa and Will like a hummingbird. She still seemed so tiny, and so harmless, Tessa thought—despite the fighting gear she wore and the black Marks that laced her skin like curling snakes. “We’ve been given permission to bring your brother back to the Institute with us,” she announced, gesturing at Nathaniel with a small hand. “The vampires may well have drugged him. He’s certainly been bitten, and who knows what else? He could turn darkling—or worse, if we don’t prevent it. In any case, I doubt they’ll be able to help him in a mundane hospital. With us, at least the Silent Brothers can see to him, poor thing.”
“Poor thing?” echoed Will rather rudely. “He rather got himself into this, didn’t he? No one told him to run off and get himself involved with a bunch of Downworlders.”
“Really, Will.” Charlotte eyed him coldly. “Can’t you have a little empathy?”
“Dear God,” said Will, looking from Charlotte to Nate and back again. “Is there anything that makes women sillier than the sight of a wounded young man?”
Tessa slitted her eyes at him. “You might want to clean the rest of the blood off your face before you continue arguing in that vein.”
Will threw his arms up into the air and stalked off. Charlotte looked at Tessa, a half smile curving the side of her mouth. “I must say, I rather like the way you manage Will.”
Tessa shook her head. “No one manages Will.”
Clockwork Angel (The Infernal Devices #1)
Cassandra Clare's books
- City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments #1)
- Clockwork Prince (The Infernal Devices, #2)
- Clockwork Princess (The Infernal Devices, #3 )
- The Midnight Heir (The Bane Chronicles, #4)
- The Rise of the Hotel Dumort (The Bane Chronicles, #5)
- The Runaway Queen (The Bane Chronicles #2)
- Vampires, Scones, and Edmund Herondale
- What Really Happened in Peru (The Bane Chronicles, #1)
- City of Heavenly Fire
- The City of Fallen Angels (Mortal Instruments 4)
- SHADOWHUNTERS AND DOWNWORLDERS
- City of Lost Souls