Clockwork Angel (The Infernal Devices #1)

At that, Tessa nearly did drop the pail. “You’re turning into a vampire?”

Will grinned at that, propping himself up on one elbow. “Don’t alarm yourself unduly. It requires days for the transformation to occur, and even then, I would have to die before it took hold. What the blood would do is make me irresistibly drawn to vampires—drawn to them in the hopes that they’d make me one of them. Like their human subjugates.”

“And the holy water . . .”

“Counteracts the effects of the blood. I must keep drinking it. It makes me sick, of course—makes me cough up the blood and everything else in me.”

“Good Lord.” Tessa thrust the pail toward him with a grimace. “I suppose I had better give it to you, then.”

“I suppose you had.” Will sat up, and put his hands out to take the pail from her. He scowled down at the contents, then held it up and tipped it toward his mouth. After swallowing a few mouthfuls, he grimaced and dumped the rest unceremoniously over his head. Finished, he tossed the bucket aside.

“Does that help?” Tessa asked with honest curiosity. “Pouring it over your head like that?”

Will made a strangled noise that was only somewhat of a laugh. “The questions you ask . . .” He shook his head, flinging droplets of water from his hair onto Tessa’s clothes. Water soaked the collar and front of his white shirt, turning it transparent. The way it clung to him, showing the lines of him underneath—the ridges of hard muscle, the sharp line of collarbone, the Marks burning through like black fire—it made Tessa think of the way one might lay thin paper down over a brass engraving, brushing charcoal over it to bring the shape through. She swallowed, hard. “The blood makes me feverish, makes my skin burn,” Will said. “I can’t get cool. But, yes, the water helps.”

Tessa just stared at him. When he had come into her room at the Dark House, she had thought he was the most beautiful boy she’d ever seen, but just now, looking at him—she had never looked at a boy like that, not in this way that brought blood hot to her face, and tightened her chest. More than anything else she wanted to touch him, to touch his wet hair, to see if his arms, corded with muscle, were as hard as they looked, or if his callused palms were rough. To put her cheek against his, and feel his eyelashes brush her skin. Such long lashes . . .

“Will,” she said, and her voice sounded thin to her own ears. “Will, I want to ask you . . .”

He looked up at her. The water made his lashes cling to one another, so that they formed starlike sharp points. “What?”

“You act like you don’t care about anything,” she said on an exhale of breath. She felt as if she had been running, and had crested a hill and was racing down the other side, and there was no stopping now. Gravity was taking her where she had to go. “But—everyone cares about something. Don’t they?”

“Do they?” Will said softly. When she didn’t answer, he leaned back on his hands. “Tess,” he said. “Come over here and sit by me.”

She did. It was cold and damp on the floor, but she sat, gathering her skirts up around her so only the tips of her boots showed. She looked at Will; they were very close together, facing each other. His profile in the gray light was cold and clean; only his mouth had any softness.

“You never laugh,” she said. “You behave as if everything is funny to you, but you never laugh. Sometimes you smile when you think no one is paying attention.”

For a moment he was silent. Then, “You,” he said, half-reluctantly. “You make me laugh. From the moment you hit me with that bottle.”

“It was a jug,” she said automatically.

His lips quirked up at the corners. “Not to mention the way that you always correct me. With that funny look on your face when you do it. And the way you shouted at Gabriel Lightwood. And even the way you talked back to de Quincey. You make me . . .” He broke off, looking at her, and she wondered if she looked the way she felt—stunned and breathless. “Let me see your hands,” he said suddenly. “Tessa?”

She gave them to him, palms up, hardly looking at them herself. She could not look away from his face.

“There’s still blood,” he told her. “On your gloves.” And, looking down, she saw it was true. She had not taken off Camille’s white leather gloves, and they were streaked with blood and dirt, shredded near the fingertips where she had pried at Nate’s manacles.

“Oh,” she said, and began to draw her hands back, meaning to take the gloves off, but Will let go of only her left hand. He continued to hold the right one, lightly, by the wrist. There was a heavy silver ring on his right index finger, she saw, carved with a delicate design of birds in flight. His head was bent, his damp black hair falling forward; she couldn’t see his face. He brushed his fingers lightly over the surface of the glove. There were four pearl buttons fastening it closed at the wrist, and as he ran his fingertips over them, they sprang open and the pad of his thumb brushed against the bare skin of her inner wrist, where the blue veins pulsed.

She nearly jumped out of her skin. “Will.”

“Tessa,” he said. “What do you want from me?”

He was still stroking the inside of her wrist, his touch doing odd delicious things to her skin and nerves. Her voice shook when she spoke. “I—I want to understand you.”

He looked up at her, through his lashes. “Is that really necessary?”

“I don’t know,” Tessa said. “I’m not sure anyone does understand you, except possibly Jem.”

“Jem doesn’t understand me,” Will said. “He cares for me—like a brother might. It’s not the same thing.”

“Don’t you want him to understand you?”

“Dear God, no,” he said. “Why should he need to know my reasons for living my life as I do?”

“Maybe,” Tessa said, “he simply wants to know that there is a reason.”

“Does it matter?” Will asked softly, and with a swift motion he slipped her glove entirely off her hand. The chilly air of the room struck the bare skin of her fingers with a shock, and a shiver passed over Tessa’s entire body, as if she had found herself suddenly naked in the cold. “Do reasons matter when there’s nothing that can be done to change things?”

Tessa reached for an answer, and found none. She was shivering, almost too hard to speak.

“Are you cold?” Lacing his fingers with hers, Will took her hand and pressed it to his cheek. She was startled by the feverish heat of his skin. “Tess,” he said, his voice thick and soft with desire, and she leaned toward him, swaying like a tree whose branches were weighted by snow. Her whole body ached; she ached, as if there were a terrible hollow emptiness inside her. She was more conscious of Will than she had ever been of anything or anyone else in her life, of the faint shine of blue beneath his half-closed lids, of the shadow of light stubble across his jaw where he hadn’t shaved, of faint white scars that dotted the skin of his shoulders and throat—and more than anything else of his mouth, the crescent shape of it, the slight dent in the center of his bottom lip. When he leaned toward her and brushed his lips across hers, she reached for him as if she would otherwise drown.