Clockwork Princess

ground, his eyes gone yellow and his teeth bared and as sharp as daggers, ready to bite.
    “Stop it. Stop it!” Tessa, by the fire, had seized up a poker; Will choked and put his hand against Woolsey’s face, pushing him away. Woolsey yelled, and suddenly the weight was off Will’s chest; Magnus had lifted the werewolf and shoved him away. Then Magnus’s hands were fisted in the back of Will’s jacket, and Will found himself being dragged from the room, Woolsey staring after him, one hand to his face where Will’s silver ring had burned his cheekbone.
    “Let me go. Let me go!” Will struggled, but Magnus’s grip was like iron. He marched Will down the corridor and into a half-lit library. Will pulled free just as Magnus let go of him, resulting in an inelegant stumble that fetched him up against the back of a red velvet sofa. “I cannot leave Tessa alone with Woolsey—”
    “Her virtue is hardly in danger from him,” Magnus said dryly. “Woolsey will behave himself, which is more than I can say for you.”
    Will turned around slowly, wiping blood from his face. “You’re glaring at me,” he said to Magnus. “You look like Church before he bites someone.”
    “Picking a fight with the head of the Praetor Lupus,” Magnus said bitterly. “You know what his pack would do to you if they had an excuse. You
want
to die, don’t you?”
    “I don’t,” Will said, surprising even himself a little.
    “I don’t know why I ever helped you.”
    “You like broken things.”
    Magnus took two strides across the room and seized Will’s face in his long fingers, forcing his chin up. “You are
not
Sydney Carton,” he said. “What good will it do you to die for James Carstairs, when he is dying anyway?”
    “Because if I save him, then it is worth it—”
    “God!” Magnus’s eyes narrowed. “
What
is worth it? What could possibly be worth it?”
    “Everything I have lost!” Will shouted.
“Tessa!”
    Magnus dropped his hand from Will’s face. He took several paces backward and breathed in and out slowly, as if mentally counting to ten. “I’m sorry,” he said finally. “About what Woolsey said.”
    “If Jem dies, I cannot be with Tessa,” said Will. “Because it will be as if I were waiting for him to die, or took some joy in his death, if it let me have her. And I will not be that person. I will not profit from his death. So he must live.” He lowered his arm, his sleeve bloody. “It is the only way any of this can ever mean anything. Otherwise it is only—”
    “Pointless, needless suffering and pain? I don’t suppose it would help if I told you that is the way life is. The good suffer, the evil flourish, and all that is mortal passes away.”
    “I want more than that,” said Will. “You made me want more than that. You showed me I was only ever cursed because I had chosen to believe myself so. You told me there was possibility, meaning. And now you would turn your back on what you created.”
    Magnus laughed shortly. “You are incorrigible.”
    “I’ve heard that.” Will pulled himself away from the sofa, wincing. “You’ll help me, then?”
    “I’ll help you.” Magnus reached down his shirtfront and drew out something that dangled on a chain, something that glowed with a soft red light. A square red stone. “Take this.”
    He folded it into Will’s hand.
    Will looked at him in confusion. “This was Camille’s.”
    “I gave it to her as a gift,” said Magnus, a bitter quirk to the side of his mouth. “She returned all my gifts to me last month. You might as well take it. It warns when demons are close. It might work on those clockwork creations of Mortmain’s.”
    “‘True love cannot die,’” Will said, translating the inscription on the back in the light from the corridor. “I can’t wear this, Magnus. It’s too pretty for a man.”
    “So are you. Go home and clean yourself up. I will call upon you as soon as I have information.” He looked at Will keenly. “In the meantime do your best to be worthy of my assistance.”
    “If you come near me, I shall bash in your head with this poker,” Tessa said, brandishing the fireplace instrument between herself and Woolsey Scott as if it were a sword.
    “I’ve no doubt you would too,” he said, looking at her with a grudging sort of respect as he mopped the blood from his chin with a monogrammed handkerchief. Will had been bloody too, his own blood and Woolsey’s; he was doubtless in another room with