Clockwork Princess

building collapsing, and the automatons began to fall, one by one, crumpling to the ground, lifeless without their Magister to animate them. A garden of metal flowers, withering and dying one by one, and the Shadowhunters stood in the center of them, looking about themselves in wonder.
    And then Tessa realized that she did still have a heart, for it leaped in joy to see them alive and safe. Yet even as she reached for them with her golden hands—one stained with scarlet now, Mortmain’s blood mixing with Ithuriel’s golden ichor—they shrank back from the blaze of light around her.
No, no
, she wanted to say,
I would never hurt you
, but the words would not come. She could not speak; the burning was too great. She struggled to find her way back to herself, to Change into Tessa again, but she was lost in the blaze of the fire, as if she had fallen into the heart of the sun. An agony of flames exploded through her, and she felt herself begin to fall, the clockwork angel a red-hot lariat about her throat.
Please
, she thought, but everything was fire and burning, and she fell, senseless, into the light.

22
T HUNDER IN THE T RUMPET
    For till the thunder in the trumpet be,
Soul may divide from body, but not we
One from another
    —Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Laus Veneris”
    Clockwork creatures clawed at Tessa out of black mists. Fire ran through her veins, and when she looked down, her skin was cracked and blistering, golden ichor running in sheets down her arms. She saw the endless fields of Heaven, saw a sky constantly on fire with a blaze that would have blinded any human. She saw silver clouds with edges like razors, and felt the icy emptiness that hollowed the hearts of angels.
    “Tessa.”
It was Will; she would have known his speech anywhere.
“Tessa, wake up, wake up. Tessa, please.”
    She could hear the pain in his voice and wanted to reach out for him, but as she lifted her arms, the flames rose and charred her fingers. Her hands turned to ash and blew away on the hot wind.
    Tessa tossed on her bed in a delirium of fever and nightmares. The sheets, twisted around her, were soaked with sweat, her hair plastered to her temples. Her skin, always pale, was near-translucent, showing the mapping of veins beneath her skin, the shape of her bones. Her clockwork angel was at her throat; every once in a while she would catch at it, and then cry out in a lost voice, as if the touch pained her.
    “She’s in so much agony.” Charlotte dipped a cloth in cool water and pressed it to Tessa’s burning forehead. The girl made a soft protesting sound at the touch but didn’t move to bat Charlotte’s hand away. Charlotte would have liked to think it was because the cool cloths were helping, but she knew that it was more likely that Tessa was simply becoming too exhausted. “Isn’t there anything more we can do?”
    The angel’s fire is leaving her body
. Brother Enoch, standing at Charlotte’s side, spoke in his eerie omnidirectional whisper.
It will take the time it takes. She will be free of pain when it is gone
.
    “But she will live?”
    She has survived thus far
. The Silent Brother sounded grim.
The fire should have killed her. It would have killed any normal human. But she is part Shadowhunter and part demon, and she was protected by the angel whose fire she drew on. It shielded her even in those last moments as it blazed up and burned away its own corporeal form
.
    Charlotte could not help but remember the circular room under Cadair Idris, Tessa stepping forward and transforming from girl into flame, blazing up like a column of fire, her hair turning to tendrils of sparks, the light of it blinding and terrifying. Crouched on the floor by Henry’s body, Charlotte had wondered how even angels could burn like that and live.
    When the angel had left Tessa, she had collapsed, her clothes hanging in tatters and her skin covered in marks as if she had been scorched. Several Shadowhunters had rushed to her side between the crumpling automatons, though it had been something of a blur to Charlotte—scenes viewed through the wavering lens of her terror over Henry: Will lifting Tessa in his arms; the Magister’s stronghold beginning to close itself up behind them, doors slamming closed as they raced through the corridors, Magnus’s blue fire lighting them a path to escape. The creation of a second Portal. More Silent Brothers waiting for them at the Institute, scarred hands and scarred faces, shutting out