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The tapping came again. Over the last week, he'd heard it three times. Nothing more audible than tapping and footsteps and the footsteps were faint enough that Jem was starting to think it was a hallucination. He wasn't being intentionally starved anymore but he was hungry all the time.
He was also so lonely he had taken to lying on his back and talking to people who weren't there. If he stopped talking, could he forget how? He lay with his feet outside the bars and stared at the stone ceiling and told his mother about his fears.
He formed each word carefully and repeated things until he'd said them exactly the way he wanted to. English, Chinese, Latin. Fragments of French though he was terrible at that language. He played translation games. Challenges he and Will had set for one another when they were young. How many languages can you translate a word into? How fast can you do it?
The tapping interrupted him as he worked through the translations for "curious." He sat up and turned to the door, sitting with his feet crossed as he studied the heavy slab of metal. Then the door moved. He tensed. It didn't swing open as it did when the automatons brought him dinner. Instead it creaked open just a crack, moving slow as though it took a lot of effort. Nothing came through.
He took a deep breath and the smell assaulted him. Something alive. Someone alive. Someone familiar.
"By the Angel, no, not again," he murmured in Latin because it had been the last language he had used and it was readily available in his mind.
Nothing came through the door immediately and he stood frozen, thinking that maybe he was wrong. The scent on the air told him that she was there but the room was silent, the hall was silent and nothing moved.
"Hello?" Jem called out softly and a soft noise, swirling skirts perhaps was audible.
She appeared in the gap a moment later. Her hair had been twisted back in a simple style and she wore a green dress. She didn't look terrified. Nervous perhaps but none of the terror he had seen on her before. She met his eyes and her expression changed. It wasn't a smile but it was just a little bit closer to one.
She glanced back the way she had come and the hope he was nurturing started to crumble away but then she stepped into the room. Her eyes bounced from the glass on the floor to him as she stepped around it to walk down the edge of the room, carefully picking her way past stray pieces. Where the feet of his metal waiter had stomped the glass to dust in the middle, it lay like snow. She was well away from that, close to the edge of the wall.
"I'm sorry for the mess, I didn't know to expect visitors," he said. She didn't smile. She frowned a little as though surprised that he might make a joke. He let himself smile.
The smell of her drove him to distraction but he tightened his hands on the cross beam of the cage’s wall and tried to look friendly.
"Thank you for visiting," he said and it came out not as another joke but genuine. He was so grateful to see another person. He was so grateful that she had recovered. So much of the past weeks had been spent worrying that she had died. She nodded in recognition of his words. Her eyes hadn't left him since she'd stepped through the doorway. Somehow she managed to be simultaneously average and beautiful. A person you wouldn't look twice at. A person you couldn't look away from.
A person he wanted to pull close and either devour or defend. His emotions were tied up wrong to his new vampire impulses. His hand reached towards her even as he told himself all the reasons that it shouldn't. She should have run for the hills after what he'd done to her the last time but instead she stepped in close enough to reach. There was a knife's edge moment wherein he thought he was going to grab hold and pull her into his teeth. It passed when she took his hand and held it between both of hers.
The warmth drove out the hunger in a rush of relief. It was like discovering that he had been missing something his entire life and it had suddenly been given back to him. He couldn't form words so he wrapped his other hand around hers.
"Are you hurt?" he asked.
She shook her head but it wasn't very decided.
"My name is James Carstairs," he said and he adjusted their hands so he could shake her's. A corner of her lips twitched. She started to speak twice before taking his hand in hers and turning it so that it was palm up. She ran her index finger over his palm in a pattern. She looked up at him and he realized it was supposed to mean something.
"Could you do that again?" he asked. The smell was torturous but she wouldn't hold his hand like that if he bit her so he forced the urge down as hard as he could. He wanted her to keep touching him. He wasn't sure if it was loneliness or desperation or something else. The back of his hand rested on the palm of hers and she used her other finger to trace the pattern again.
"I am alarmingly stupid," he said when he realized how simple it was, "T."
A small nod and then another letter, "E."
She had to pause a long time between each letters. The spell that interfered with her ability to speak also made it nearly impossible for her to write. Even single letter seemed to be difficult for her.
"S. Tess?" he said and she nodded and then added, "A."
"Hello, Tessa," he said and she shook his hand again.
"You can escape your cage," he said and she shrugged and nodded.
She looked away from him, at the door and he could see her throat. His fingers found the spot where he had bitten her and her attention snapped back to him but she did not flinch away. There was no scarring he could see. Her eyes were a little larger than they had been a moment ago and he was suddenly aware of her breathing, it was hard to say if it were faster or slower but it was all he could think about.
He pulled his hands back and folded them together.
Those blue gray eyes were curious and not nearly as wary as he thought they should be. She took in the details of the room and the cage and him. He wasn’t sure he’d ever been laid quite so bare by another person. He wore the clothing he’d been wearing to breakfast the day of the attack. Black trousers and jacket, a white shirt with blood that had dried to a dark brown stain and left the fabric perpetually stiff. It had been one of the very very rare good days that he had left and he’d dressed for the meal before his failing body could put him back to bed. He’d been strangely glad to die dressed and standing.
It hadn’t occurred to him to be self conscious of the wreck he was in until she frowned at it and looked up at him with a question in her eyes.
“I haven’t had a chance to change,” he said looking down at the mess.
She ran her finger over the scar of the voyance rune on his hand and then pulled her hand back as though she’d done something embarrassing or rude. He held out his hand to her as he would if he were asking her to dance. She put her hand in it again. He traced the same mark on her hand with his finger while she watched him. He wanted to explain it but his teeth were out now and he wasn’t sure he could talk around them.
The teeth sliced his own lip as he started to speak and the taste of his own blood was enough to push him off the ledge of his self control.
He caught her in the shoulder and shoved her hard. He was stronger than he knew and she cried out and slammed back into the stone wall behind the cage.
His lip curled and the fangs actually ached. That vampiric hiss that made them sound so utterly inhuman kept getting cut off by his clattering jaw. She slid down the wall and drew her knees up to sit tight to the stone. It made her look more childlike than he’d imagined her to be. The fear on her face hurt more than his shredded lip or protesting stomach. He wrapped his hands over his mouth and back pedaled until he was sitting in an almost identical position as far in the cage from her as he could get.
He squeezed his eyes shut and didn’t breathe. The only sound was her hammering heart beat. It was pushing against him like there was someone knocking on his temples with a mallet. A piece of a symphony came to him and fit itself to her heart rate. As she calmed so did the music in his head. The hunger wouldn’t abate. That edge of control wouldn’t come back.
“You should leave before I try and hurt you again,” he said softly without opening his eyes.
Her soft exclamation of “No,” was more sad than anything else. He chanced a look at her. Her expression was all concern, the fear had fled but she stayed back from the bars. To answer her, he’d have to take in more air and that would be disaster. Their eyes met and he held her gaze like it was a lifeline.
Sometimes Will needed him to be stronger than he was. Sometimes he pretended healthiness or at least the absence of pain because the truth would shatter what was left of Will’s composure. Jem held her eyes and found that well of strength. That ability to pretend to be more than he was and used it again.
He breathed in air that wasn’t just full of the smell of her but also her fear. The scent of fear pawed at some vampire hunting instinct but that was easier to shove down. That he scared her was repulsive to everything in him, even that hunting instinct. It was impossible that his expression even approached friendly but she didn’t look away and he didn’t lunge for her.
He held her gaze and breathed in again and then again. He crossed his legs and sat up and breathed again. Her fear retreated as he relaxed. She sat up and inched closer. Her expression was tentative when she held out her hand again. He waited until he was sure that he wanted to touch her more than he wanted to eat her. Cold stone, cold metal, warm fingers. He brushed his fingers over her knuckles and the last of her fear was gone from both the smell in the air and her expression.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. She shook her head and touched his cheek with the hand that wasn’t on his.
There was a wariness to her but that had been there since he had met her. It took him a moment to figure out what it was about that that bothered him so much. He was wary as well. It was sane to be wary in a place like this. Her eyes followed him when he moved a little closer. She didn’t recoil but something in her body language made it clear.
She expected everyone to hurt her.
If he hurt her it would not be a surprise to her. She would forgive him for scaring her. She had forgiven him for nearly killing her. Pain was expected. Apologies weren’t.
He was searching for promises he could make that weren’t lies when he heard the sound. He wanted to swear that he would never hurt her but he didn’t trust himself enough to believe that promise. He wanted to tell her that there was an end to all this but he couldn’t see it.
The sound of metal feet were distant but distinct.
“You need to go,” he told her and she started to argue but he held up a hand and shook his head, “There’s someone coming. I can hear them. I have stronger hearing than you do. You need to go before they get here.”
He hadn’t understood how much her face had softened and opened up as they spoke until he said that and she crumbled back behind a mask of blankness. She squeezed his hand and held his gaze for a long moment before she turned and ran for the door. She looked back one time before she ducked out of it and was gone.
She didn’t latch it behind her.
She didn’t come back that night.
Tessa had broken the lock on her own door one day while it was open. The latch no longer turned when the key did. It would be found eventually but as her door was usually opened by automatons without the capacity for thought, the modification hadn’t been discovered yet.
Her automaton maid had left and she fixed her improperly buttoned dress. Mortmain claimed he would be selling the automaton maids to the general public in the next year. He was very proud of the idea. Tessa thought they needed a little more work before they went to the market but then she also found the very idea repulsive so perhaps she wasn’t the best judge.
She waited a long hour after it was gone, listening carefully and wishing her hearing was as sharp as Jem’s so she could know exactly when she could safely leave. With nothing to do she sat on her chair and told herself stories. Most of them were ones that she had read. She could never call up the phrasing exactly as it was in the novels but she knew the stories and she walked herself through them slowly, trying to pull up as many details as possible.
She could have done the same with memories of her life but she rarely did. Calling up the happy times with Aunt Harriet and Nate did little to make her feel better because it invariably brought with it the memories of Aunt as she lay dying and Nate’s pleading insistence that she make the match and marry Mortmain.
He’d been so very, very wrong that that was the best choice. She needed to believe that. She needed to believe that there was a world better than this out there.
Once she was sure there was no sound, she left the remembered story of Lucie Manette in her head and stepped back out into the corridor. It was familiar but no less foreboding. She could see the crack of light from one of the doors and her heart jumped no matter how many times she told it to stop.
Out in the hallway she could see light coming from under one of the doorways and her heart climbed up her throat then slammed down into the pit of her stomach. She stopped in a moment of unreasonable terror.
It wasn’t Jem’s door.
She could hear the man inside. He was the one who had nearly torn her arm off. There was a cage door between them but some childish superstition told her not to risk so much as crossing the light that came from the door. She skirted around the shaft of light and stopped in front of the door she actually wanted but it was locked solidly.
Her disappointment made her mentally chastize herself again. He was a vampire. He had nearly killed her. He was a Shadowhunter. Those should have been enough reasons to never open that door again. But he was the only person in nearly a year who had untied her or bothered to look her in the eye when asking how she was. Those should have been little things when stacked up against how fast he had moved when the hunger took him the last time she had seen him.
They should have been little things but they weren’t.
He looked at her not around her. Three other people looked at her and all three of them she hated with the kind of passion that made her worry she would ever be capable of being a good person again. The only people she saw were Mortmain, the Dark Sisters and a few human maids on special occasions. The maids never looked right at her. Ever. They rarely spoke.
Jem, she tried to push his name out because dwelling on it was madness but it wouldn’t go. Jem with his skeletal features and strange silver hair and beautiful eyes. She stopped that line of thought again only to have it change form. She found herself wondering what his face had been like when he’d been well. She wanted to know why his hair was that colour.
He answered her questions even when she couldn’t ask them though he hadn’t said much about himself. He would tell her what was true if she could just figure out how to get the questions out. Could the Shadowhunters really steal souls? Would they really destroy her just for existing? Could they truly climb into your mind and divine your thoughts and memories from within? Had they really waged war against Mortmain’s family for a thousand years?
She sank down to the floor in front of Jem’s locked door and leaned her head against it.
You don’t need to make friends with violent monsters, she thought to herself and tried to silently form the words with her mouth but even that caused the spell to push harder against her self control. It had been three months since she’d been able to speak and each day was just a little harder. The magic wanted to push the right words out of her mouth and sometimes it took everything she had to keep them in.
It left her without the energy to fight or the ability to argue. She scrambled to her feet and slammed her fist against the heavy metal of Jem’s locked door and then sunk back to the floor.
A moment later she heard a bang.
She fought the feeling of relief that she wasn’t alone in this place for only a moment before she let herself have that little echo of comfort.
Not alone.
She tapped out a pattern and he answered it.
Not alone.
When she pushed through the door, the only thing Jem saw was the bruise across her cheek bone. Her movements were slow and careful as though everything hurt. The blood scent was stronger than it usually was, she had unhealed wounds beyond the bruising he could see. It didn’t catch his hunger though. She was in pain and that was all he worried about.
“Tessa,” he said because he couldn’t find other words.
She stepped right up to the cage door and wrapped her hands around the bars and one of her fingers was swollen enough that he thought it might be broken. He touched her hands with just his finger tips, as gentle as he could. She leaned against the cage and in a fit of madness he kissed her forehead where it was pressed between the bars.
She started to cry then. It was just as silent as everything else about her but the tears were real. He’d never seen her cry. She hadn’t cried when she’d been tied to his cage and left to die but she cried now.
“I’ll kill him for you, I will,” he whispered as he reached out and stroked her hair and brushed tears off her face.
She sank to the ground and he followed her. He wanted to pull her close and hold her safe from everything that had ever hurt her but the cage stood between them. He wrapped an arm around her shoulders but couldn’t reach any farther than that. They were alone but he leaned his head in close to hers and whispered. He could just see his silver hair against her brown out the corner of his eye.
“I’m going to tell you a story,” he told her and she nodded. Her hand found his and he laced his fingers through hers. They were as close as they could be with iron bars between them.
In his entire life, he had never had cause to comfort someone like this. No one turned to him like this. No one came to him for advice or comforting words but Will. Will who never quite accepted kindness and definitely never curled into his arms.
Without quite meaning to, he was telling her the story of how his father had come to Shanghai from London as a young man on his year abroad and how much he had hated it there. He told his father’s story about being unable to learn the language and how much the Shadowhunter girl who got saddled with the task interpreting for him hated him. He learned insults first because she kept calling him stupid and slow. He would find out later she’d been given the task as a punishment for some risky behaviour the head of the Institute hadn’t liked.
He told her of how his mother had warmed to the man who would become her husband as he put in the effort to learn the language and how they had bonded over a shared love of music and desserts. Tessa drew little question marks on the back of his hand when she wanted to know more and nodded along to show him that she understood him. She made him explain the comment about desserts.
“My father didn’t like the food in China,” he said, “But he did like this one dessert the cook would make so they used to sneak it out of the kitchen and climb up to the training room where they would sit and eat it and talk about music and their homes. My mother, she wasn’t from Shanghai, she was from a village to the north and she missed it. They were both homesick. It was one of the things that they shared even then.”
She sighed a little and nodded. Her shoulder was warm beneath his arm and she smelled like every good thing he’d ever had. He couldn’t tell if he was being comforting or not but she seemed more relaxed and she kept pressing for more information and he even got an echo of a smile for the story of the time his mother had hit his father across the head with a broom just after they’d been married. She claimed he deserved it, he claimed it was an unprovoked attack. Jem could remember them arguing about with smiles on their faces years later.
He left out the part of the story that ended with his arrival in London with nothing but a trunk of clothing and his father’s violin. He wanted it to be a happy story about people falling in love and building a life. He wanted to forget that it ended with a tragedy.
He kissed her hair very gently and cursed everything that he had found her here where they could never be anything but the tragedy.
Tessa found the door open and for the first time didn’t hesitate before she pushed it all the way open and slipped inside. It had been months since she’d seen him. She wanted to see his face, wanted to hear his voice, wanted to find someway to tell him how grateful she was to him.
When he looked up at her it was with wide eyes in a sunken face. He looked worse than he had in a long time and she faltered. He looked the way he had when he’d licked blood off her skin and then collapsed into hysterical laughter the first time she had met him. He was miserable and hungry and it hurt something in her chest to see him like this.
“Jem?” she forced out the single syllable and he blinked very slowly. He was silent when he shook his head at her to tell her to stay away. She hesitated. You don’t need to make friends with violent monsters. Then she crossed the rest of the space and sat down near him. It was far too late for warnings like that.
In what had to be a fit of madness, she sat right at the edge of the cage and held out her hand to him, palm up, wrist exposed.
“Do not be ridiculous,” he said and his voice was tight, almost angry.
She gestured and he came over to her. When he was close enough, she took his face in her hands. She touched the circles under his eyes and the sharpness of his cheekbones beneath his skin. He felt so fragile and she tried to imagine him well. He must have been beautiful. Even like this there was beauty in him. He was on the brink of tears and she could feel the tension in him.
It wasn’t until she touched his lip with her thumb that she realized how much she truly trusted him. Of all the people she had ever seen in the damned cave, he was the least likely to hurt her. She could feel his teeth behind his lips, long and sharp.
His eyes were shut as she traced the lines of his face. He was not relaxed but he did not move away and he did not ask her to stop. When her fingers found his mouth again he opened his mouth to speak and she cut her thumb on one of those teeth.
The world stopped turning.
He did not move, still as a statue as blood dripped onto his barely parted lips. The panic that had threatened dropped away from Tessa as he held still. He was not going to lunge at her. He was not going to rip her apart. He was not a violent monster, he couldn’t be. She believed that.
He licked the blood off his lip first and then closed his mouth over the little cut in her skin. It was shallow and closed quickly. He held her wrist in his hand even after the blood had stopped flowing. Then he pulled away and shook his head hard. She offered him her hand again with more confidence. The bite would hurt but she could manage that.
The last person she’d put any trust in had been Nate and that had ended terribly but she trusted this strange boy. She reached out and smoothed his hair with her other hand as he had done for her the day that she had come to him after getting caught somewhere she shouldn’t have been. She wanted to be able to tell him stories in a soft voice and promise him that it would be alright but she couldn’t so she tried to put all that feeling into a smile.
“Do you mean that?” he asked as though she had actually said something aloud and she wondered what exactly he had seen in her face. She nodded, hoping that he had seen the trust and the care and not something else.
His cool hands were wrapped around hers now. The gentle fingers on her wrist and his palm against hers were far more intimate than she expected. She felt nervous and exposed and she reached out for his face so he would look at her again. The silver of his eyes calmed her. He was a vampire, a shadowhunter, a prisoner of a war she didn’t quite understand but he was not a violent monster.
She smiled again and this time he responded by smiling back. He held her with his eyes and put his mouth to her wrist in a motion that was more kiss than anything else. Then he pulled back without breaking the skin.
“It’ll come too fast. I don’t want to risk hurting you,” he said with his finger on her racing pulse. She nodded.
His lips were feather light against her palm and he bit her just below her thumb. A surprised noise escaped her but the pain vanished a moment later. She had forgotten this part. In the mess of fear and horror and powerlessness that had been her first experience with him, she had forgotten the bliss of this. Without being conscious of it, her fingers curved around his cheek and his jaw to hold onto the sensation and the nearness of him.
He didn’t suck as she expected, the sensation was more like nursing. His lips and tongue moved slowly and gently over the broken skin. Gentle, far gentler than she had ever imagined being bitten by a vampire could be. Even when he worried the wound open again when it started to heal it was gentle.
She tried to keep her eyes open but when she came back to herself, she was leaning against the bars of the cage while he repeated her name and gently tried to wake her up. He sounded so worried and her name was different in his voice than she had ever heard it before.
She found his face and smiled again. How long had it been since she had smiled this many times? She felt heavy and sleepy and wonderful. She reached for him so that she could pull him in close and there were cage bars in the way. The lethargy cleared a little faster as she remembered where she was.
“Better?” she dragged the two syllables out without flinching though it hurt a lot. The pain burned through what was left of that drifting soft edged world that was made up entirely of Jem.
“You needn’t do that,” he said. She cupped his face with the hand he had just bitten and tried to find a way to tell him what she felt. That she couldn’t put it into words even in her own head didn’t help.
They stayed close together for a long time until the reality of the cave came back to them and she had to leave to return to her room before the automatons started bringing around food. She stopped at his door and attempted to wedge some bits of rock into the lock so that it wouldn’t latch as often.
Back in her room she found two little scars, nearly invisible unless she tilted her skin just right in the fire light. She thought perhaps she should have been horrified but instead she rubbed her thumb over them and smiled again before curling into a tight ball in her bed to sleep off the dizziness of the blood loss.
She brought him a tiny notebook when he asked for paper. There were scribbled out lines and broken phrases written in the first few pages and then it was blank. She grimaced in frustration at it as he paged through. She had even made attempts at drawing but she had absolutely no aptitude for it which made him smile.
She was someone with talents and failures and likes and dislikes. He had known that but the horrible sketch of what was probably the cave made her seem more real and less of a dream he had invented for himself in the dark. Realizing that made her silence infuriating because it stood between him and knowing those things. What was she good at? Did she like music? Did she care for poetry?
The project he’d intended with the little book fell apart quickly. Nothing he wanted to ask and nothing she wanted to say could be isolated down to repeatable phrases that he could write out for her to point out or hold up. She asked questions more elegantly with her eyebrows than a piece of paper ever could.
Instead he found himself writing things down just for the sake of making her smile. The more she smiled, the bolder she got. She stopped shying away and touched him in little ways. It was deeply distracting even though he wasn’t hungry. She was familiar but in the way that a sister might be. There was nothing about the way she took his hand that would have been acceptable in polite society but it was hardly a seduction.
She traced the Voyance rune on the back of his hand with her finger tip and looked a question at him. He explained runes and steles to her and she was able to trace out the shapes in her little book. Symbols she could manage even if words were nearly impossible for her. Her curiosity about the runes was infectious.
A born Shadowhunter, Jem took runes seriously but had never been amazed by them. They simply were as the sky simply was. Beautiful, impressive perhaps but not something that warranted much daily thought. She pressed him for more information.
Her face creased in sadness and concern when he let slip that they were meant to be black not white and gray as they were on his pale skin. He didn’t need to tell her why his had faded. He rolled up his sleeve to show her the difference between the faded white scars of old runes and the grayed reminders of the runes that had been on his skin at the moment of his death including one for strength on his forearm that she traced with a finger tip.
“They were my heritage. They reminded me that even if I were ill I was one of Angel’s warriors. I wouldn’t have chosen this,” he said waving at himself. He was dead. He was immortal. He was no longer a part of his family’s line. Instead, he was just another dead end on the Carstairs family tree. She took his hand and gave him a sad, kind smile. She understood what it meant to him to lost them without the explanation.
“You are,” she said and he could see the flicker of pain that came with speaking. She breathed in a shaky gasp and then added, “Still.”
“I’m not. I am not still one of them,” he said, “I could not so much as return to the home I had lived in because it stands on consecrated ground, if it still stands at all.”
She shook her head and her look told him how much she wanted to argue but she didn’t fight for more words. Instead she put one hand on the strength rune on his arm and the other in the middle of his chest where his heart no longer beat.
“I don’t think the Clave would agree with you,” he said but he smiled as he did. She made a rude gesture and he laughed a little. He looked at her with her hair in an elegant knot at the back of her head and her wide gray eyes lit with humour and imagined her making that same gesture at a Council meeting.
It was that image that made he want to introduce this girl to Will.
He rarely wanted to introduce people he liked or respected to Will. Will was invariably awful to them and they could never see the good in him. No one saw in Will what he did. Most of them started to doubt that Jem had any sanity of his own. Few people could do more than tolerate Will and none of those were outside the little collection of them at the Institute.
Jem understood why people hated Will. He understood that Will brought it upon himself. He did not understand why Will did the things he did or told the lies he told. He wanted Tessa to be the exception. He wanted Will to like her and her laughing eyes and quiet strength.
Jem let himself imagine a mad future that would never happen where he would have the opportunity to introduce them. Will would say something horrible and Tessa would meet it with the challenging smile she was giving him now. He wanted to know if she would be able to see the boy beneath the monster in Will as easily as seemed to be able to see it in him.
“I’d like to take you there, even if I can’t go inside, I wish I could introduce you to my friends,” he said.
She shrugged and looked around the room.
“Someday though, someday we will not be here,” he said.
She didn’t believe him but he was a little shocked to realize that he believed it. He hadn’t realized he had hope left.