Clockwork Princess (The Infernal Devices, #3)(91)

“Mortmain’s father.”

“Warlocks cannot have children,” snarled Starkweather. “Some human boy they found and trained up. Shade taught him his unholy tinkering ways. Won his trust.”

“It’s unlikely the Shades stole Mortmain from his parents,” said Charlotte. “He was probably a boy who would have died in a workhouse otherwise.”

“It was unnatural. Warlocks should not have human children to raise.” Aloysius stared deep within the red embers of the fire. “That is why we raided Shade’s house. We killed him and his wife. The boy escaped. Shade’s clockwork prince.” He snorted. “We took several of his items back with us to the Institute, but none of us could make head or tail of them. That was all there was to it—a routine raid. Everything according to plan. That is, until my granddaughter was born. Adele.”

“I know that she died at her first rune ceremony,” said Charlotte, her hand unconsciously going to her own belly. “I am sorry. It is a great sorrow to have a sickly child—”

“She was not born sickly!” he barked. “She was a healthy infant. Beautiful, with my son’s eyes. Everyone doted on her, until one morning my daughter-in-law woke us with a scream. She insisted that the child in her cradle was not her daughter, though they looked exactly alike. She swore she knew her own child and this was not it. We thought she had gone mad. Even when the baby’s eyes changed from blue to gray—well, that happens often with infants. It wasn’t until we tried to apply her first Marks that I began to realize my daughter-in-law had been right. Adele—the pain was excruciating for her. She screamed and screamed and writhed. Her skin burned where the stele touched her. The Silent Brothers did all they could, but by the next morning she was dead.”

Aloysius paused and was silent for a long time, gazing, as if fascinated, into the fire.

“My daughter-in-law nearly went mad. She could not bear to remain in the Institute. I stayed. I knew she had been correct—Adele was not my granddaughter. I heard rumors of faeries and other Downworlders who boasted that they had had their revenge on the Starkweathers, had taken one of their children from them and replaced her with a sickly human. None of my investigations yielded anything concrete, but I was determined to find out where my granddaughter had gone.” He leaned on the mantel. “I had nearly given up when Tessa Gray came to my Institute in the company of your two Shadowhunters. She could have been the ghost of my daughter-in-law, so similar did they look. But she did not appear to have any Shadowhunter blood. It was a mystery, but one I pursued.

“The faerie I interrogated today gave me the last bits of the puzzle. In her infancy my granddaughter was replaced with a kidnapped human child, a sickly creature who died when the Marks were applied, because she was not Nephilim.” There was a hard crack in his voice now, a fissure in the flint. “My granddaughter was left with a mundane family to raise her, their sickly Elizabeth—chosen because of her superficial resemblance to Adele—replaced with our healthy girl. That was the Court’s revenge on me. They believed I had killed their own, so they would kill mine.” His eyes were cold as they rested on Charlotte. “Adele—Elizabeth—grew to womanhood in that mundane family, never knowing what she was. And then she married. A mundane man. His name was Richard. Richard Gray.”

“Your granddaughter,” Charlotte said slowly, “was Tessa’s mother? Elizabeth Gray? Tessa’s mother was a Shadowhunter?”

“Yes.”

“These are crimes, Aloysius. You should go to the Council with this—”

“They do not care about Tessa Gray,” said Starkweather roughly. “But you do. You will listen to my story because of it, and you may help me because of it.”

“I may,” said Charlotte, “if it is the right thing to do. I do not yet understand how Mortmain comes into this story.”

Aloysius moved restlessly. “Mortmain learned of what had happened and determined that he would make use of Elizabeth Gray, a Shadowhunter who did not know she was a Shadowhunter. I believe that Mortmain courted Richard Gray as an employee in order to grant himself access to Elizabeth. I believe that he loosed an Eidolon demon upon her—my granddaughter—in the shape of her husband, and that he did it in order to get Tessa on her. Tessa was always the goal. The child of a Shadowhunter and a demon.”

“But the offspring of demons and Shadowhunters are stillborn,” Charlotte said automatically.

“Even if the Shadowhunter does not know they are a Shadowhunter?” said Starkweather. “Even if they carry no runes?”

“I …” Charlotte closed her mouth. She had no idea what the answer was; as far as she knew, the situation had never occurred. Shadowhunters were marked when children, male and female, all of them.

But Elizabeth Gray had not been.

“I know the girl is a shape-shifter,” said Starkweather. “But I do not believe that is why he wants her. There is something else he wants her to do. Something only she can do. She is the key.”

“The key to what?”

“It was the last words the faerie spoke to me this afternoon.” Starkweather glanced at the blood on his sleeve. “He said, ‘She is to be our vengeance for all your wasteful death. She will bring ruin to the Nephilim, and London will burn, and when the Magister rules over all, you will be no more to him than cattle in a pen.’ Even if the Consul does not wish to go after Tessa for her own sake, they ought to go after her to prevent that.”