Clockwork Princess (The Infernal Devices, #3)(131)

“The same,” Sophie said, rising gracefully to her feet and ceding him the chair beside the bed. “She has been calling out again.”

“For anyone particular?” Will asked, and then was immediately sorry he had asked. Surely his motives would be ridiculously transparent.

Sophie’s dark hazel eyes darted away from his. “For her brother,” she said. “If you wish a few moments alone with Miss Tessa …”

“Yes, please, Sophie.”

She paused at the door. “Master William,” she said.

Having just settled himself in the armchair beside the bed, Will glanced over at her.

“I am sorry I have thought and spoken so ill of you for all these years,” Sophie said. “I understand now that you were only doing what we all try to do. Our best.”

Will reached out and placed his hand over Tessa’s left one, where it plucked feverishly at the coverlet. “Thank you,” he said, unable to look at Sophie directly; a moment later he heard the door softly close behind her.

He looked at Tessa. She was momentarily quiet, her lashes fluttering as she breathed. The circles beneath her eyes were dark blue, her veins a delicate filigree at her temples and the insides of her wrists. When he remembered her blazing up in glory, it was impossible to believe her fragile, yet here she was. Her hand felt hot in his, and when he brushed his knuckles against her cheek, her skin was burning.

“Tess,” he whispered. “Hell is cold. Do you remember when you told me that? We were in the cellars of the Dark House. Anyone else would have been panicking, but you were as calm as a governess, telling me Hell was covered in ice. If it is the fire of Heaven that takes you from me, what a cruel irony that would be.”

She breathed in sharply, and for a moment his heart leaped—had she heard him? But her eyes remained firmly shut.

His hand tightened on hers.

“Come back,” he said. “Come back to me, Tessa. Henry said that perhaps, since you had touched the soul of an angel, that you dream of Heaven now, of fields of angels and flowers of fire. Perhaps you are happy in those dreams. But I ask this out of pure selfishness. Come back to me. For I cannot bear to lose all my heart.”

Her head turned slowly toward him, her lips parting as if she were about to speak. He leaned forward, heart leaping.

“Jem?” she said.

He froze, unmoving, his hand still wrapped about hers. Her eyes fluttered open—as gray as the sky before rain, as gray as the slate hills of Wales. The color of tears. She looked at him, through him, not seeing him at all.

“Jem,” she said again. “Jem, I am so sorry. It is all my fault.”

Will leaned forward again. He could not help himself. She was speaking, and comprehensibly, for the first time in days. Even if not to him.

“It’s not your fault,” he said.

She returned the pressure of his hand hotly; each of her individual fingers seemed to burn through his skin. “But it is,” she said. “It is because of me that Mortmain deprived you of your yin fen. It is because of me that all of you were in danger. I was meant to love you, and all I did was shorten your life.”

Will took a ragged breath. The splinter of ice was back in his heart, and he felt as if he were breathing around it. And yet it was not jealousy, but a sorrow more profound and deeper than any he thought he had known before. He thought of Sydney Carton. Think now and then that there is a man who would give his life, to keep a life you love beside you. Yes, he would have done that for Tessa—died to keep the ones she needed beside her—and so would Jem have done that for him or for Tessa, and so would Tessa, he thought, do that for both of them. It was a near incomprehensible tangle, the three of them, but there was one certainty, and that was that there was no lack of love between them.

I am strong enough for this, he told himself, lifting her hand gently. “Life is not just surviving,” he said. “There is also happiness. You know your James, Tessa. You know he would choose love over the span of his years.”

But Tessa’s head only tossed fretfully on the pillow. “Where are you, James? I search for you in the darkness, but I cannot find you. You are my intended; we should be bound by ties that cannot sever. And yet when you were dying, I was not there. I have never said good-bye.”

“What darkness? Tessa, where are you?” Will gripped her hand. “Give me a way to find you.”

Tessa arched back on the bed suddenly, her hand clamping down on his. “I’m sorry!” she gasped. “Jem—I am so sorry—I have wronged you, wronged you horribly—”

“Tessa!” Will bolted to his feet, but Tessa had already collapsed bonelessly onto the mattress, breathing hard.

He could not help it. He cried out for Charlotte like a child who had woken from a nightmare, as he had never permitted himself to cry out when he truly was a child, waking in the then unfamiliar Institute and longing for comfort but knowing he must not take it.

Charlotte came running through the Institute, as he had always known she would come running for him if he called. She arrived, breathless and frightened; she took one look at Tessa on the bed, and Will clasping her hand, and he saw the terror leave her face, replaced by a look of wordless sorrow. “Will …”

Will gently detached his hand from Tessa’s, turning toward the door. “Charlotte,” he said. “I have never asked you to use your position as head of the Institute to help me before—”