He curled his fingers around hers. Despite her thoughts of snow and gray skies, his hand was surprisingly warm. "That's all right," he said in a low voice. "I like the way it looks on you."

She felt her cheeks warm. Before she could answer, the train whistle sounded. Voices cried out that they were in London, Kings Cross Station.

The train began to slow as the platform came into view. The hubbub of the station rose to assault Tessa's ears, along with the sound of the train braking. Jem said something, but his words were lost in the noise; it sounded like a warning, but Will was already on his feet, his hand reaching for the compartment door latch. He swung it open and leaped out and down.

If he were not a Shadowhunter, Tessa thought, he would have fal en, and badly, but as it was, he simply landed lightly on his feet and began to run, pushing his way among the crowding porters, the commuters, the gentility traveling north for the weekend with their massive trunks and hunting hounds on leashes, the newspaper boys and pickpockets and costermongers and all the other human traffic of the grand station.

Jem was on his feet, hand reaching for the door-but he turned back and looked at Tessa, and she saw an expression cross his face, an expression that said that he realized that if he fled after Will, she could not fol ow. With another long look at her, he latched the door shut and sank into the seat opposite her as the train came to a stop.

"But Will -," she began.

"He Will be all right," said Jem with conviction. "You know how he is.

Sometimes he just wants to be alone. And I doubt he wishes to take part in recounting today's experiences to Charlotte and the others." When she didn't move her eyes from his, he repeated, gently, "Wil can take care of himself, Tessa."

She thought of the bleak look in Will 's eyes when he had spoken to her, starker than the Yorkshire moors they had just left behind them. She hoped Jem was right.

Chapter 7: The Curse

A n orphan's curse would drag to hell

A spirit from on high;

But oh! more horrible than that

Is the curse in a dead man's eye!

Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse,

And yet I could not die.

-Samuel Taylor Coleridge,

"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

Magnus heard the sound of the front door opening and the following clatter of raised voices, and thought immediately, Will. And then was amused that he had thought it. The Shadow-hunter boy was becoming like an annoying relative, he thought as he folded down a page of the book he was reading- Lucian's Dialogues of the Gods; Camil e would be furious he had dog-eared her volume-someone whose habits you knew well but could not change.

Someone whose presence you could recognize by the sound of their boots in the hal way. Someone who felt free to argue with the footman when he'd been given orders to tell everyone that you were not at home.

The parlor door flew open, and Will stood on the threshold, looking half- triumphant and half-wretched-quite a feat. "I knew you were here," he announced as Magnus sat up straight on the sofa, swinging his boots to the floor. "Now, Will you tell this-this overgrown bat to stop hovering over my shoulder?" He indicated Archer, Camil e's subjugate and Magnus's temporary footman, who was indeed lurking at Will 's side. His face was set in a look of disapproval, but then it was always set in a look of disapproval.

"Tel him you want to see me."

Magnus set his book down on the table beside him. "But maybe I don't want to see you," he said reasonably. "I told Archer to let no one in, not to let no one in but you."

"He threatened me," Archer said in his hissing not-quite-human voice. "I shal tell my mistress."

"You do that," said Will, but his eyes were on Magnus, blue and anxious.

"Please. I have to talk to you."

Drat the boy, Magnus thought. After an exhausting day spent clearing a memory-blocking spel for a member of the Penhal ow family, he had wanted only to rest. He had stopped listening for Camil e's step in the hall, or waiting for her message, but he still preferred this room to others-this room, where her personal touch seemed to cling to the thorned roses on the wal paper, the faint perfume that rose from the draperies. He had looked forward to an evening spent by the fire here-a glass of wine, a book, and being left strictly alone.

But now here was Will Herondale, his expression a study in pain and desperation, wanting Magnus's help. He was really going to have to do something about this annoying softhearted impulse to assist the desperate, Magnus thought. That, and his weakness for blue eyes.

"Very well," he said with a martyred sigh. "You may stay and talk to me. But I warn you, I'm not raising a demon. Not before I've had my supper. Unless you have turned up some sort of hard proof . . ."

"No." Will came eagerly into the room, shutting the door in Archer's face.

He reached around and locked it, for good measure, and then strode over to the fire. It was chil y out. The visible bit of window not blocked by drapes showed the square outside darkening to a blackish twilight, leaves blown rattling across the pavement by a brisk-looking wind. Will drew off his gloves, laid them on the mantel, and stretched his hands out to the flames. "I don't want you to raise a demon."

"Huh." Magnus put his booted feet up on the smal rosewood table before the sofa, another gesture that would have infuriated Camil e, had she been there. "That's good news, I suppose-"

"I want you to send me through. To the demon realms."

Magnus choked. "You want me to do what?"

Will 's profile was black against the flickering fire. "Create a portal to the demon worlds and send me through. You can do that, can't you?"

"That's black magic," said Magnus. "Not quite necromancy, but-"

"No one need know."

"Real y." Magnus's tone was acid. "These things have a way of getting out.

And if the Clave found out I'd sent one of their own, their most promising, to be rent apart by demons in another dimension-"

"The Clave does not consider me promising." Will 's voice was cold. "I am not promising. I am not anything, nor Will I ever be. Not without your help."

"I am beginning to wonder if you've been sent to test me, Will Herondale."

Will gave a harsh little bark of laughter. "By God?"

"By the Clave. Who might as well be God. Perhaps they simply seek to find out whether I am Will ing to break the Law."

Will swung around and stared at him. "I am deadly earnest," he said. "This is not some sort of test. I cannot go on like this, summoning up demons at random, never having them be the correct one, endless hope, endless disappointment. Every day dawns blacker and blacker, and I Will lose her forever if you-"

"Lose her?" Magnus's mind fastened on the word; he sat up straight, narrowing his eyes. "This is about Tessa. I knew it was."

Will flushed, a wash of color across the pal or of his face. "Not just her."

"But you love her."

Will stared at him. "Of course I do," he said final y. "I had come to think I would never love anyone, but I love her."

"Is this curse supposed to be some business about taking away your ability to love? Because that's nonsense if I've ever heard it. Jem's your parabatai. I've seen you with him. You love him, don't you?"

"Jem is my great sin," said Will. "Don't talk to me about Jem."

"Don't talk to you about Jem, don't talk to you about Tessa. You want me to open a portal to the demon worlds for you, and you won't talk to me or tell me why? I won't do it, Will." Magnus crossed his arms over his chest.

Will rested a hand on the mantel. He was very still, the flames showing the outlines of him, the clear beautiful profile, the grace of his long slender hands.

"I saw my family today," he said, and then amended that quickly. "My sister. I saw my younger sister. Cecily. I knew they lived, but I never thought I would see them again. They cannot be near me."

"Why?" Magnus made his voice soft; he felt he was on the verge of something, some sort of breakthrough with this odd, infuriating, damaged, shattered boy. "What did they do that was so terrible?"

"What did they do?" Will 's voice rose. "What did they do? Nothing. It is me. I am poison. Poison to them. Poison to anyone who loves me."

"Wil -"

"I lied to you," Will said, turning suddenly away from the fire.

"Shocking," Magnus murmured, but Will was gone, gone into his memories, which was perhaps for the best. He had begun to pace, scuffing his boots along Camil e's lovely Persian carpet.

"You know what I've told you. I was in the library of my parents' house in Wales. It was a rainy day; I was bored, going through my father's old things.

He kept a few things from his old life as a Shadowhunter, things he had not wanted, for sentiment I suppose, to give up. An old stele, though I did not know what it was at the time, and a small, engraved box, in a false drawer of his desk. I suppose he assumed that would be enough to keep us out, but nothing is enough to keep out curious children. Of course the first thing I did upon finding the box was open it. A mist poured out of it in a blast, forming almost instantly into a living demon. The moment I saw the creature, I began to scream. I was only twelve. I'd never seen anything like it. Enormous, deadly, all jagged teeth and barbed tail-and I had nothing. No weapons.

When it roared, I fell to the carpet. The thing was hovering over me, hissing.

Then my sister burst in."

"Cecily?"

"El a. My elder sister. She had something blazing in her hand. I know what it was now-a seraph blade. I had no idea then. I screamed for her to get out, but she put herself between the creature and me. She had absolutely no fear, my sister. She never had. She was not afraid to climb the tal est tree, to ride the wildest horse-and she had no fear there, in the library. She told the thing to get out. It was hovering there like a great, ugly insect. She said, 'I banish you.' Then it laughed."

It would. Magnus felt a strange stirring of both pity and liking for the girl, brought up to know nothing about demons, their summoning or their banishment, yet standing her ground regardless.

"It laughed, and it swung out with its tail, knocking her to the ground. Then it fixed its eyes on me. They were all red, no whites at all. It said, 'It is your father I would destroy, but as he is not here, you Will have to do.' I was so shocked, all I could do was stare. El a was crawling over the carpet, grabbing for the fal en seraph blade. 'I curse you,' it said. 'Al who love you Will die.

Their love Will be their destruction. It may take moments, it may take years, but any who look upon you with love Will die of it, unless you remove yourself from them forever. And I shall begin it with her.' It snarled in El a's direction, and vanished."

Magnus was fascinated despite himself. "And did she fal dead?"

"No." Will was still pacing. He took off his jacket, slung it over a chair. His longish dark hair had begun to curl with the heat coming off his body, mixing with the heat of the fire; it stuck to the back of his neck. "She was unharmed.

She took me in her arms. She comforted me. She told me the demon's words meant nothing. She admitted she had read some of the forbidden books in the library, and that was how she knew what a seraph blade was, and how to use it, and that the thing I had opened was called a Pyxis, though she could not imagine why my father would have kept one. She made me promise not to touch anything of my parents' again unless she was there, and then she led me up to bed, and sat reading while I fell asleep. I was exhausted with the shock of it all, I think. I remember hearing her murmur to my mother, something about how I had been taken il while they had been out, some childish fever. By that point I was enjoying the fuss that was being made over me, and the demon was beginning to seem a rather exciting memory. I recal planning how to tell Cecily about it-without admitting, of course, that El a had saved me while I had screamed like a child-"

"You were a child," Magnus noted.

"I was old enough," said Will. "Old enough to know what it meant when I was woken up the next morning by my mother howling with grief. She was in El a's room, and El a was dead in her bed. They did their best to keep me out, but I saw what I needed to see. She was swel ed up, greenish-black like something had rotted her from inside. She didn't look like my sister anymore.

She didn't look human anymore.

"I knew what had happened, even if they didn't. 'A ll who love you will die.

And I shall begin it with her. ' It was my curse at work. I knew then that I had to get away from them-from all my family-before I brought the same horror down on them. I left that night, following the roads to London."

Magnus opened his mouth, then closed it again. For once he didn't know what to say.

"So, you see," said Will, "my curse can hardly be called nonsense. I have seen it at work. And since that day I have striven to be sure that what happened to El a Will happen to no one else in my life. Can you imagine it? Can you?" He raked his hands through his black hair, letting the tangled strands fal back into his eyes. "Never letting anyone near you. Making everyone who might otherwise love you, hate you. I left my family to distance myself from them, and that they might forget me. Each day I must show cruelty to those I have chosen to make my home with, lest they let themselves feel too much affection for me."

"Tessa . . ." Magnus's mind was suddenly full of the serious-faced gray- eyed girl who had looked at Will as if he were a new sun dawning on the horizon. "You think she does not love you?"

"I do not think so. I have been foul enough to her." Will 's voice was wretchedness and misery and self-loathing all combined. "I think there was a time when she almost-I thought she was dead, you see, and I showed her- I let her see what I felt. I think she might have returned my feelings after that.

But I crushed her, as brutal y as I could. I imagine she simply hates me now."

"And Jem," said Magnus, dreading the answer, knowing it.

"Jem is dying anyway," Will said in a choked voice. "Jem is what I have all owed myself. I tell myself, if he dies, it is not my fault. He is dying anyway, and in pain. El a's death at least was swift. Perhaps through me he can be given a good death." He looked up miserably, met Magnus's accusing eyes.

"No one can live with nothing," he whispered. "Jem is all I have."