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Will eyed the boy that Charlotte had introduced to him as Jem before she’d left them alone together in the training room. It wasn’t surprising that another stray would turn up eventually. Will fought the urge to ask what had led the boy to the London Institute. Considering he wouldn’t tell anyone the real reason for leaving his family, he didn’t deserve to hear the stories of others.
That didn’t mean he wasn’t curious. The boy in front of him looked ghastly. If it wasn’t for the runes standing out starkly against his pale skin, Will would have thought the boy couldn’t survive a Rune Ceremony.
Before he thought better of it, Will blurted out, “What happened to you?”
If Charlotte had still been there, he’d have been scolded. He wasn’t sure what reaction he expected from the boy, but it definitely wasn’t a smirk that did little to hide the darkness in his eyes.
“A demon killed my family.” He spoke carefully, like he was dreading through the details carefully in his own mind as he talked. Will could understand that. “And it poisoned me.”
Will nodded, though he still didn’t understand the details. If that were the case, the boy actually looked like he was doing quite well. Will had heard of demons doing such things, but he’d never seen it for himself. He’d kind of thought that it meant you were a goner right away, not that you could still be walking around and moving to new institutes. That particular thought he managed to keep to himself.
Jem wandered over to the weapon rack on the far wall. For the first time since Charlotte had brought Jem into the room, Will remembered the blade that he held in his own hand, the one he’d forgotten as soon as Charlotte had opened the door and he’d caught sight of who she was with. Jem picked up a blade with the practised moves of a Shadowhunter. Maybe the demon hadn’t instantly killed him because he was stronger than Will had taken him for at first glance.
“Do you want to spar?” Jem asked, brandishing the blade.
Will looked at him, dumbfounded. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to at all. Even though Jem seemed stronger than expected, Will was hesitant. Jem sensed his hesitance and raised a challenging eyebrow that Will couldn’t back down from.
“Fine,” he said.
He got into position, watching Jem carefully as he did the same. If nothing else, Jem was good at the basics.
He came at Will with the blade. Will managed to block, but it was a closer call than he’d been prepared for.
The idea that Jem might have lied about the demon poison did pass through Will’s mind. Maybe he was just naturally pale, but no, as they continued to spar, he noticed the moments when Jem stumbled or his form was incorrect. He was well practised enough to mostly make up for it, but he wasn’t as good as he could have been. Not if he’d been training since early childhood like most Shadowhunters.
Despite his earlier reluctance to spar, Will didn’t hold back. Once he could see Jem fighting back with all of his energy, Will couldn’t bring it in himself to pity him. What Jem lacked in physical strength, he made up for in the fact that he seemed better practised than Will.
It wasn’t enough in the end. Jem stumbled again, and Will took the opening, overpowering Jem. The stumble sent him to the floor where he sat staring up at Will, his chest rising and falling rapidly.
“You’re good,” Will observed from above him.
Jem waited, like he was expecting Will to add “for someone sick” or something like that. When he didn’t, Jem grinned.
“Thanks. I sure hope I am after all the time I put in.”
“Charlotte said you came from Shanghai?”
Jem’s eyes took on a glassy, far away quality as he thought about home. “Yeah, my dad is—was—English though. That’s why I’m here. I needed to get away.”
It was quiet for a moment, with Will still hovering above Jem where he sat on the floor. Jem had gotten lost in thought, hardly noticing his surroundings. Will hesitated, not sure he wanted to interrupt, but eventually, it was too awkward to continue standing there. He cleared his throat, his cheeks a little warm when Jem looked up at him. He held out his hand, offering to help him stand.
It should have been nothing. Will would tug Jem to his feet, they’d let go, and they’d go about their day.
Instead, prickling erupted across Will’s skin the second they touched. At first, he thought Jem must have done something on purpose. After being cursed, Will had tried his hardest to completely forget the concept of soulmates. He’d hoped he didn’t have one until he began to believe that he didn’t.
But the wide-eyed look on Jem’s face as Will tugged him to his feet made it clear that he hadn’t done something nefarious.
The two boys pulled their hands apart. There, scrawled across Will’s palm, was the name James Carstairs in a beautiful cursive. Will tilted his hand back and forth like he might make it disappear, but it was there, stark against his skin.
Across from him, he saw his own name scrawled across Jem’s wrist in the exact spot Will had touched while helping him up. Will swallowed down bile.
This was never supposed to happen. He’d been so sure that it wouldn’t happen. Now that it had, he wasn’t sure what to make of it. Did he come clean? Did he unload onto Jem everything that the demon had told him? Or did he let Jem live in blissful ignorance until he met his doom?
He knew enough to know that Jem had already been through enough, so he kept his mouth shut.
Besides, he wasn’t the only one worried. At first, he took the discomfort in Jem’s eyes as rejection, but after a moment, he realised it was far. A second after that, he knew why. Jem had been poisoned. He was weak. He was possibly even dying. The idea of a soulmate must have been just as terrifying for him as it was for Will.
“That was unexpected,” Will said with a slight laugh, trying to lighten the mood. It was the first time in a long time that he could remember making a joke without a hint of darkness.
“Yes,” Jem said, his voice breathy.
The way he looked at Will had changed drastically in the snap of a finger. It wasn’t anything like the looks of love that Will’s parents gave to each other, but it was…something. Something that could develop into more if the universe allowed it enough time.
Will knew that he should be worried, that he should be making excuses to distance himself, but with Jem’s name etched in his skin, he couldn’t bear to do so.
Tessa’s heart raced in her chest as she tried to keep up with the strange boy who was apparently rescuing her. The time she’d spent locked up by the Dark Sisters should have given her time to process that the world was different than she’d long believed it to be, yet she was no less overwhelmed by the rapidly unfolding situation before her.
The boy slowed long enough to pull some sort of metal stick out of his pocket. He drew it across his skin, drawing some symbol that Tessa didn’t recognize. Tessa stared. The symbol looked like ink against his skin. It was remarkably similar to the soulmate marks that people got except he had drawn it on his own. And it certainly didn’t look like a name.
“Who are you?” she asked.
Following him had seemed like the right thing to do at the time. She didn’t know whether she could trust him, but she knew she couldn’t trust the Dark Sisters. Better to hold onto a tiny glimmer of hope than stay locked up and abused.
“We’ll have time for explanations later,” the boy snapped.
Whenever she read fairy tales of princesses being rescued by princes, it never went like this. Then again, she was far from a princess. She’d spent a lot of time daydreaming about escaping while locked up. For a while, she’d even held onto a hope of her brother rescuing her. But she’d never imagined a prince. It was more likely that she’d fallen prey to some elaborate trap.
There was commotion behind them. They were still being chased. Tessa gasped. Her brain was trying to work too fast for her to know what to do. In a moment of desperation, she reached for the boy like he was the one thing that could help her. She grabbed his forearm, right above the place where he’d drawn the strange symbol.
Electricity shot through the palm of her hand. At first, she thought it must have been some strange effect of whatever he’d done, but when she pulled her hand away, “William Herondale,” was scrawled across her palm.
She didn’t have time to think much of it before the boy—William—grabbed her arm and tugged her down the hallway.
“Come on!” he said, not the slightest bit of warmth in his voice despite what had just happened.
By the time they made it safely to the carriage, Tessa was more confused than ever. Another boy their age had made it safely out before either of them. As they sat in the carriage going who knew where, he watched them both with a deep, questioning frown. William had rolled down his sleeve, covering the mark that Tessa knew was there. He wouldn’t even look her in the eye.
Tessa kept her hands folded in her lap, sensing that it was best to keep her own mark out of sight, though she wasn’t sure why.
Tessa had been at the institute for several days, and William Herondale had been nothing more than a ghost during that time. She would have believed that he’d left entirely if she didn’t keep catching glimpses of him right as he slipped out of rooms that she entered. No matter how hard she tried, he evaded her. Knowing what she did now, she had begun to wonder if Shadowhunters thought of soulmates differently than mundanes didn’t. No one had said much about the concept. She thought that Charlotte and Henry must be soulmates, but it hadn’t been confirmed to her. And she was too worried about the potential answers to ask what they thought of the idea.
She hadn’t told anyone else in the institute about her own mark even though it was becoming a pain to keep it hidden. They all had to know she was either hiding a mark or had a ridiculous love for gloves. They’d known Will longer than they’d known her, so if anyone should tell them about the marks, she figured it should be him. And she was pretty sure he hadn’t said a word. Not to most of them at least.
Jem Carstairs was the only one who kept looking at her like he knew something. Despite how little she’d seen of Will, she’d seen only a little more of Jem. He didn’t run from her, but he was gone almost as often as Will was, and she’d become increasingly aware that it was probably because he was actually with Will, wherever he’d snuck off to.
It was during one of her usual hunts for Will around the institute that she came across Jem instead. For once, they seemed to be spending time apart. It had taken a few minutes for her to realise that she’d wandered into Jem’s room.
The sound of violin music had drawn her down the hallway, and she’d listened to Jem play for several minutes before he’d calmly put down the violin and turned to her. The smile on his face hinted that he’d known she was there the whole time.
Though he hadn’t made any overt attempts to talk with her, she marvelled over how welcoming he’d been considering his best friend’s feelings towards her.
“Hello,” Jem said.
Taking it as an invitation, Tessa stepped a bit further into the bedroom.
“That was beautiful,” she said.
Jem gave her a smile and carefully stored his violin away. “Thank you. I assume you’re looking for Will?”
Tessa’s cheeks burned, but Jem’s smile was still soft and friendly.
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” he said. “You have his name on your skin. Of course you want to speak with him. Unfortunately, Will often makes questionable decisions like running away from his soulmate.”
Something about Jem’s openness made Tessa want to spill everything that she’d been keeping bottled up over the previous few days.
“I don’t understand it,” she said, pacing back and forth across the room while Jem’s amused eyes followed her. “Some people have complicated feelings about what the marks mean, but am I really so horrifying that he won’t even have one conversation with me?”
She’d meant for the question to be rhetorical, but as soon as it was out there, she felt exposed. She turned sharply to look at Jem. There was a pain in his eyes that hadn’t been there before.
“It’s not that,” he said.
“Then what is it? Why would my soulmate possibly not want to talk to me?”
Jem sighed. He sunk back in his chair. Tessa had noticed that Jem looked frail since arriving. She’d been surprised at first that he was a trained Shadowhunter like the others, but she’d also gotten the impression that he was hiding strength underneath it all.
“Normally, it wouldn’t be my place to tell you this,” he said slowly, eyes watching Tessa like he was waiting for some type of reaction. “However, I’ve told Will repeatedly that I’d say something if he didn’t speak with you, and he still hasn’t done it.”
He hesitated a moment before pulling back his sleeve, revealing his wrist and the name scrawled across it. Tessa gasped and tugged off the glove from her hand. She held her palm next to Jem’s wrist, needing to make sure that they were truly identical.
“How could this be?” she said softly.
Embarrassment washed over her. She’d been trying to speak to Will for days, and all along, she’d had no idea that she had come between something. She stumbled away from Jem, suddenly feeling like a villain. Yet he did nothing but smile at her.
“It’s okay,” he promised her, and she was shocked that he seemed to mean it. If he’d been initially shocked, he’d managed to get over it before Will had.
Tessa had heard the odd story of people with more than one soulmate before. Most of them were dismissed as tall tales, but none of them had happy endings.
Tessa struggled to come up with words. She couldn’t take her eyes off Jem’s mark. Without thinking, she reached out to touch it. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe part of her hoped that it would rub off under her fingers.
Instead, electricity surged through her fingertips the second their skin touched. Both she and Jem gasped and jumped apart.
Tessa pulled away. There across her fingers, on the very same hand that held Will’s name, ‘James Carstairs’ was scrawled.
What was on Jem’s skin was even more remarkable. Because she’d touched Will’s name, her name had appeared with his, but instead of looking like a mess of scribbles, the names had linked together like they were always meant to be there with each other.
Suddenly, Tessa felt at peace. Whatever worries she’d had that they were barreling towards disaster were gone. This wasn’t a conundrum. It was just their fate.
She looked back up at Jem’s eyes. He was still smiling at her, and she wondered if he’d had some inkling of this before she or Will had, if perhaps that’s why he had been so unbothered by his soulmate having another.
“I don’t know if this will make Will happier or not,” Jem joked.
Despite herself, Tessa laughed. In many ways, she was still the odd one out. Jem and Will knew each other in a way that Tessa didn’t know either of them. Yet and she didn’t know how Will would react to the news, but Jem knew him, and he didn’t seem particularly bothered. That had to be a good sign.
She tilted her head to the side, watching Jem.
“What do you think?” she asked.
He reached out again, taking her hand in his. The electricity wasn’t exactly the same as the first touch, but the gesture still felt right.
“I think this is the best ending I could have hoped for,” he said.