Clockwork Princess (The Infernal Devices, #3)(59)

There was a world of questions in that one word.

“She’s gone,” Jem said in a flat, uninflected voice. “I ran after the carriage—but it was gaining speed and I could not run fast enough. I lost them near Temple Bar.” His eyes flicked toward Jessamine, but he did not even seem to see her body, or Will holding her, or anything at all. “If I could have run faster—,” he said, and then he doubled up as if he had been struck, a cough ripping through him. He hit the ground on his knees and elbows, blood spattering the ground at his feet. His fingers clawed at the stone. Then he rolled onto his back and was still.





10

LIKE WATER UPON SAND


For I wondered that others, subject to death, did live, since he whom I loved, as if he should never die, was dead; and I wondered yet more that myself, who was to him a second self, could live, he being dead. Well said one of his friends, “Thou half of my soul”; for I felt that my soul and his soul were “one soul in two bodies”: and therefore was my life a horror to me, because I would not live halved. And therefore perchance I feared to die, lest he whom I had much loved should die wholly.

—Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book IV



Cecily pushed open the door of Jem’s bedroom with the tips of her fingers, and stared inside.

The room was quiet but aflutter with movement. Two Silent Brothers stood by the side of Jem’s bed, with Charlotte between them. Her face was grave and tearstained. Will knelt by the side of the bed, still in his bloodstained clothes from the courtyard fight. His head was down on his crossed arms, and he looked as if he was praying. He seemed young and vulnerable and despairing, and despite her conflicted feelings, some part of Cecily longed to go into the room and comfort him.

The rest of her saw the still, white figure lying in the bed, and quailed. She had been here such a short time; she could feel nothing but that she was intruding on the inhabitants of the Institute—their grief, their sorrow.

But she must talk to Will. She had to. She moved forward—

And felt a hand on her shoulder, pulling her away. Her back hit the wall of the corridor, and Gabriel Lightwood immediately released her.

She looked up at him in surprise. He looked exhausted, his green eyes shadowed, flecks of blood in his hair and on the cuffs of his shirt. His collar was damp. He had clearly come from his brother’s room. Gideon had been wounded badly in the leg by an automaton’s blade, and though the iratzes had helped, it seemed there was a limit to what they could cure. Both Sophie and Gabriel had assisted him to his room, though he had protested the whole way that all available attention should go to Jem.

“Do not go in there,” Gabriel said in a low voice. “They are trying to save Jem. Your brother needs to be there for him.”

“Be there for him? What can he do? Will is not a doctor.”

“Even unconscious, James will draw strength from his parabatai.”

“I need to talk to Will for only a moment.”

Gabriel ran his hands through his mop of tousled hair. “You have not been with the Shadowhunters very long,” he said. “You may not understand. To lose your parabatai—it is no small thing. We take it as seriously as losing a husband or wife, or a brother or sister. It is as if it were you lying in that bed.”

“Will would not care so much if I were lying in that bed.”

Gabriel snorted. “Your brother would not have taken so much trouble to warn me off you if he did not care about you, Miss Herondale.”

“No, he does not like you much. Why is that? And why are you giving me advice about him now? You do not like him, either.”

“No,” Gabriel said. “It is not quite like that. I do not like Will Herondale. We have disliked each other for years. In fact, he broke my arm once.”

“Did he?” Cecily’s eyebrows shot up despite herself.

“And yet I am beginning to come to see that many things that I had always thought were certain, are not certain. And Will is one of those things. I was certain he was a scoundrel, but Gideon has told me more about him, and I begin to understand he has a very peculiar sense of honor.”

“And you respect that.”

“I wish to respect it. I wish to understand it. And James Carstairs is one of the best of us; even if I hated Will, I would want him spared now, for Jem’s sake.”

“The thing I must tell my brother,” Cecily said. “Jem would want me to tell him. It is important enough. And it will take but a moment.”

Gabriel rubbed the skin at his temples. He was so very tall—he seemed to tower above Cecily, for all that he was very slender. He had a sharply planed face, not quite pretty, but elegant, his lower lip shaped nearly exactly like a bow. “All right,” he said. “I will go in and send him out.”

“Why you? And not me?”

“If he is angry, if he is grief-stricken, it is better I see it, and that he be furious with me than with you,” Gabriel said matter-of-factly. “I am trusting you, Miss Herondale, that this is important. I hope you won’t disappoint me.”

Cecily said nothing, just watched as Gabriel pushed the door of the sickroom open and went in. She leaned against a wall, her heart pounding, as a murmur of voices came from within. She could hear Charlotte say something about blood replacement runes, which were apparently dangerous—and then the door opened and Gabriel came out.