Clockwork Princess

dying. It may have saved you a hundred times before you were ever born, and it’s saved you since. Think of the times you have been close to death. Think of the way it intervened.”
    Tessa thought back—the way her angel had flown at the automaton choking her, had fended off the blades of the creature that had attacked her near Ravenscar Manor, had kept her from being dashed to pieces on the rocks of the ravine. “But it did not save me from torture, nor injury.”
    “No. For those are part of the human condition.”
    “So is death,” said Tessa. “I am not human, and you let the Dark Sisters torture me. I could never forgive you for that. Even if you convinced me my brother’s death was his fault, that Thomas’s death was justified, that your hatred was reasonable, I could never forgive you for that.”
    Mortmain lifted the box at his feet and upended it. There was a rattling crash as cogs fell from it—cogs and cams and gears, sheared-off bits of metal smeared with black fluid, and lastly, bouncing atop the rest of the rubbish like a child’s red rubber ball, a severed head.
    Mrs. Black’s.
    “I destroyed her,” he said. “For you. I wished to show you I am sincere, Miss Gray.”
    “Sincere in what?” Tessa demanded. “Why did you do all this?
Why did you create me?
”
    His lips twitched slightly; it was not a smile, not really. “For two purposes. The first is so that you could bear children.”
    “But warlocks cannot …”
    “No,” said Mortmain. “But you are no ordinary warlock. In you the blood of demons and the blood of angels has fought its own war in Heaven, and the angels have been victorious. You are not a Shadowhunter, but you are not a warlock, either. You are something new, something entirely other.
Shadowhunters
,” he spat. “All Shadowhunter and demon hybrids die, and the Nephilim are proud of it, glad that their blood will never be filthied, their lineage tainted by magic. But
you
. You can do magic. You can have children like any other woman. Not for some years yet, but when you reach your full maturity. The greatest warlocks alive have assured me of it. Together we will start a new race, with the Shadowhunters’ beauty and with no warlock mark. It will be a race that will break the Shadowhunters’ arrogance by replacing them on this earth.”
    Tessa’s legs gave out. She slumped to the floor, her dressing gown pooling around her like black water. “You—you want to use me to
breed your children
?”
    Now he did grin. “I am not a man without honor,” he said. “I offer you marriage. I always planned that.” He gestured at the pitiful pile of ragged metal and flesh that had been Mrs. Black. “If I can have your willing participation, I would prefer it. And I can promise I shall deal thus with all your enemies.”
    My enemies
. She thought of Nate, his hand closing on hers as he died, bloody, in her lap. She thought of Jem again, the way he never railed against his fate but faced it down bravely; she thought of Charlotte, who wept over Jessamine’s death, though Jessie had betrayed her; and she thought of Will, who had laid down his heart for her and Jem to walk upon because he loved them more than he loved himself.
    There was human goodness in the world, she thought—all caught up with desires and dreams, regrets and bitterness, resentments and powers, but it was there, and Mortmain would never see it.
    “You will never understand,” she said. “You say that you build, that you invent, but I know an inventor—Henry Branwell—and you are nothing like him. He brings things to life; you just destroy. And now you bring me another dead demon, as if it were flowers rather than more death. You have no feelings, Mr. Mortmain, no empathy for anyone. If I had not known it before, it would have been made abundantly clear when you tried to use James Carstairs’s illness to force me to come here. Though he is dying because of you, he wouldn’t allow me to come—wouldn’t take your
yin fen
. That’s how
good
people behave.”
    She saw the look on his face. Disappointment. It was only there for a moment, though, before it was wiped away with a shrewd look. “Wouldn’t allow you to come?” he said. “So I did not misjudge you; you would have done it. Would have come to me, here, out of love.”
    “Not love for you.”
    “No,” he said thoughtfully, “not for me,” and he drew from his pocket an object that Tessa recognized immediately.
    She stared at the