With an effort of will Tessa forced herself simply to nod, and not to fling herself at Charlotte with a barrage of questions she knew she wouldn’t get answers to.
“And Jem.” Charlotte turned to him. “If I could talk to you for a few moments? Will you walk with me to the library?”
Jem nodded. “Of course.” He smiled at Tessa, inclining his head. “Tomorrow, then,” he said, and followed Charlotte down the corridor.
The moment they vanished around the corner, Tessa tried the door of Nate’s room. It was locked. With a sigh she turned and headed the other way down the corridor. Perhaps Charlotte was right. Perhaps she ought to get some sleep.
Halfway down the corridor she heard a commotion. Sophie, a metal pail in each of her hands, suddenly appeared in the hallway, banging a door shut behind her. She looked livid. “His Highness is in a particularly fine temper this evening,” she announced as Tessa approached. “He threw a pail at my head, he did.”
“Who?” Tessa asked, and then realized. “Oh, you mean Will. Is he all right?”
“Well enough to throw pails,” Sophie said crossly. “And to call me a nasty name. I don’t know what it meant. I think it was in French, and that usually means someone’s calling you a whore.” She tightened her lips. “I’d best run and get Mrs. Branwell. Maybe she can get him to take the cure, if I can’t.”
“The cure?”
“He must drink this.” Sophie thrust a pail toward Tessa; Tessa couldn’t quite see what was in it, but it looked like ordinary water. “He has to. Or I wouldn’t like to say as what’ll happen.”
A mad impulse took hold of Tessa. “I’ll get him to do it. Where is he?”
“Upstairs, in the attic.” Sophie’s eyes were large. “But I wouldn’t if I was you, miss. He’s downright nasty when he’s like this.”
“I don’t care,” Tessa said, reaching for the pail. Sophie handed it to her with a look of relief and apprehension. It was surprisingly heavy, filled to the brim with water and slopping over. “Will Herondale needs to learn to take his medicine like a man,” Tessa added, and pushed open the door to the attic, Sophie looking after her with an expression that clearly said she thought Tessa had gone out of her head.
Beyond the door was a narrow flight of stairs going up. She held the pail in front of her as she went; it slopped water onto the bodice of her dress, raising goose bumps on her skin. By the time she had reached the top of the steps, she was damp and breathless.
There was no door at the head of the stairs; they ended abruptly at the attic, a huge room whose roof was so steeply gabled that it gave the impression of being low-ceilinged. Rafters just above Tessa’s head ran the length of the room, and there were very low square windows set at intervals in the walls, through which Tessa could see the gray dawn light. The floor was bare polished boards. There was no furniture at all, and no light beyond the pale illumination that came from the windows. A set of even narrower stairs led to a closed trapdoor in the ceiling.
In the center of the room lay Will, barefoot, flat on his back on the floor. A number of pails surrounded him—and the floor around him, Tessa saw as she approached, was soaked with water. Water ran in rivulets down the boards and pooled in the uneven hollows of the floor. Some of the water was tinged reddish, as if it had been mixed with blood.
Will had an arm thrown over his face, hiding his eyes. He was not lying still, but moving restlessly, as if he were in some pain. As Tessa neared, he said something in a low voice, something that sounded like a name. Cecily, Tessa thought. Yes, it sounded very much as if he had said the name Cecily.
“Will?” she said. “Who are you talking to?”
“Back, are you, Sophie?” Will replied without raising his head. “I told you if you brought me another one of those infernal pails, I’d—”
“It’s not Sophie,” Tessa said. “It’s me. Tessa.”
For a moment Will was silent—and motionless, save for the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed. He wore only a pair of dark trousers and a white shirt, and like the floor around him, he was soaking wet. The fabric of his clothes clung to him, and his black hair was pasted to his head like wet cloth. He must have been freezing cold.
“They sent you?” he said finally. He sounded incredulous, and something else, too.
“Yes,” answered Tessa, though this was not strictly true.
Will opened his eyes and turned his head toward her. Even in the dimness she could see the intensity of his eye color. “Very well, then. Leave the water and go.”
Tessa glanced down at the pail. For some reason her hands did not seem to want to let go of the metal handle. “What is it, then? I mean to say—what am I bringing you, exactly?”
“They didn’t tell you?” He blinked at her in surprise. “It’s holy water. To burn out what’s in me.”
It was Tessa’s turn to blink. “You mean—”
“I keep forgetting everything you don’t know,” Will said. “Do you recall earlier this evening when I bit de Quincey? Well, I swallowed some of his blood. Not much, but it doesn’t take much to do it.”
“To do what?”
“To turn you into a vampire.”
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.”