Clockwork Princess (The Infernal Devices, #3)(32)

Magnus dropped his hand from Will’s face. He took several paces backward and breathed in and out slowly, as if mentally counting to ten. “I’m sorry,” he said finally. “About what Woolsey said.”

“If Jem dies, I cannot be with Tessa,” said Will. “Because it will be as if I were waiting for him to die, or took some joy in his death, if it let me have her. And I will not be that person. I will not profit from his death. So he must live.” He lowered his arm, his sleeve bloody. “It is the only way any of this can ever mean anything. Otherwise it is only—”

“Pointless, needless suffering and pain? I don’t suppose it would help if I told you that is the way life is. The good suffer, the evil flourish, and all that is mortal passes away.”

“I want more than that,” said Will. “You made me want more than that. You showed me I was only ever cursed because I had chosen to believe myself so. You told me there was possibility, meaning. And now you would turn your back on what you created.”

Magnus laughed shortly. “You are incorrigible.”

“I’ve heard that.” Will pulled himself away from the sofa, wincing. “You’ll help me, then?”

“I’ll help you.” Magnus reached down his shirtfront and drew out something that dangled on a chain, something that glowed with a soft red light. A square red stone. “Take this.”

He folded it into Will’s hand.

Will looked at him in confusion. “This was Camille’s.”

“I gave it to her as a gift,” said Magnus, a bitter quirk to the side of his mouth. “She returned all my gifts to me last month. You might as well take it. It warns when demons are close. It might work on those clockwork creations of Mortmain’s.”

“‘True love cannot die,’” Will said, translating the inscription on the back in the light from the corridor. “I can’t wear this, Magnus. It’s too pretty for a man.”

“So are you. Go home and clean yourself up. I will call upon you as soon as I have information.” He looked at Will keenly. “In the meantime do your best to be worthy of my assistance.”

“If you come near me, I shall bash in your head with this poker,” Tessa said, brandishing the fireplace instrument between herself and Woolsey Scott as if it were a sword.

“I’ve no doubt you would too,” he said, looking at her with a grudging sort of respect as he mopped the blood from his chin with a monogrammed handkerchief. Will had been bloody too, his own blood and Woolsey’s; he was doubtless in another room with Magnus now, getting more blood smeared everywhere. Will was never overconcerned with neatness, and even less so when he was emotional. “I see you’ve begun to be like them, the Shadowhunters you seem to adore so much. Whatever possessed you to engage yourself to one of them? And a dying one at that.”

Rage flared up in Tessa, and she considered smacking Woolsey with the poker whether he came near her or not. He had moved awfully quickly while fighting Will, though, and she didn’t fancy her chances. “You don’t know James Carstairs. Don’t speak about him.”

“Love him, do you?” Woolsey managed to make it sound unpleasant. “But you love Will, too.”

Tessa froze inside. She had known that Magnus knew of Will’s affection for her, but the idea that what she felt for him in return was written across her face was too terrifying to contemplate. “That’s not true.”

“Liar,” said Woolsey. “Really, what is the difference if one of them dies? You always have a fine secondary option.”

Tessa thought of Jem, of the shape of his face, his eyes shut in concentration as he played the violin, the curve of his mouth when he smiled, his fingers careful in hers—every line of him inexpressibly dear to her. “If you had two children,” she said, “would you say that it was all right if one of them died, because then you’d still have another?”

“One can love two children. But your heart can be given in romantic love to only a single other,” said Woolsey. “That is the nature of Eros, is it not? So novels would tell us, though I have no experience of it myself.”

“I have come to understand something about novels,” Tessa said.

“And what is that?”

“That they are not true.”

Woolsey quirked an eyebrow. “You are a funny thing,” he said. “I would say I could see what those boys see in you, but …” He shrugged. His yellow dressing gown had a long, bloody tear in it now. “Women are not something I have ever understood.”

“What about them do you find mysterious, sir?”

“The point of them, mainly.”

“Well, you must have had a mother,” said Tessa.

“Someone whelped me, yes,” said Woolsey without much enthusiasm. “I remember her little.”

“Perhaps, but you would not exist without a woman, would you? However little use you may find us, we are cleverer and more determined and more patient than men. Men may be stronger, but it is women who endure.”

“Is that what you are doing? Enduring? Surely an engaged woman should be happier.” His light eyes raked her. “A heart divided against itself cannot stand, as they say. You love them both, and it tears you apart.”

“House,” said Tessa.