“I don’t know what to do,” Will said. “Mortmain has taken Tessa, and I believe now I know where she might be. There is a part of me that wants nothing more than to go after her. But I cannot leave Jem. I swore an oath. And what if he wakes in the night and finds I am not here?” He looked as lost as a child. “He will think I left him willingly, not caring that he was dying. He will not know. And yet if he could speak, would he not tell me to go after Tessa? Is that not what he would want?” Will dropped his face into his hands. “I cannot say, and it is tearing me in half.”

“But he would understand,” he said dazedly. “If we explained it to him. If we told him…he would understand.”She made her voice as cold as she could. As calm. “Told him what?”Will only looked at her. There had been light in his eyes on the stairs… And it was going now, fading like the last breath of someone dying. She felt as if she were watching the life bleed out of Will Herondale. “Jem would forgive me,” Will said, but there was hopelessness in his face, his voice, already. He had given up, Tessa thought. “He would,” she said, “He would never stay angry at you, Will; he loves you too well for that. I do not even think he would hold anger toward me. But this morning he told me he thought he would die without ever loving anyone as his father loved his mother, without ever being loved like that in return. Do you want me to go down the hallway and knock on his door and take that away from him? And would you love me still, if I did?”“Then…please, Tessa, don’t tell him what I just told you…”“I will tell no one,” she said. “I swear it…”

“He dropped his voice, so low that Tessa wasn’t sure if what he said next was real or part of the dream darkness rising to claim her, though shefought against it.“I’ve never minded it,” he went on. “Being lost, that is. I had always thought one could not be truly lost if one knew one’s own heart. But I fear I maybe lost without knowing yours.” He closed his eyes as if he were bone-weary, and she saw how thin his eyelids were, like parchment paper, andhow tired he looked. “Wo ai ni, Tessa,” he whispered. “Wo bu xiang shi qu ni.”She knew, without knowing how she knew, what the words meant.I love you.And I don’t want to lose you.”

“He clung to her more tightly, knotting his hands in her hair, trying to tell her, with the press of his mouth on hers, all the things he could never say out loud: I love you; I love you and I don’t care that you’re my sister; don’t be with him, don’t want him, don’t go with him. Be with me. Want me. Stay with me.I don’t know how to be without you.”

“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 was the way life is. The good suffer, the evil flourish, and all that is mortal passes away,” Magnus said.“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.”

“I told you before, Jem, that you would not leave me," Will said, his bloody hand on the hilt of the dagger. " And you are still with me. When I breath, I will think of you, for without you I would have been dead years ago. When I wake up and when I sleep, when I lift up my hands to defend myself or when I lie down to die, you will be with me. You say we are born again. I say there is a river that divides the dead and the living. What I do know is that if we are born again, I will meet you in another life, if there is a river, you will wait on the shores for me to come to you, so we can cross together." Will took a deep breath and let go of the knife. He drew his hand back. The cut on his palm was already healing- the result of the half dozen iratzes on his skin. " You hear that, James Carstairs? We are bound, you and I, over the divide of death, down through whatever generations may come. Forever." He rose to his feet and looked down at the knife. The knife was Jem's, the blood was his. This spot of ground, whether he could ever find it again, whether he lived to try, would be theirs.He turned around to walk to Balios, towards Wales and Tessa. He did not look back.”

“Your place is with me,” Jem said. “It always will be.”“What do you mean?”He flushed, the color dark against his pale skin. “I mean,” he said, “Tessa Gray, will you do me the honor of becoming my wife?”Tessa sat bolt upright. “Jem!”They stared at each other for a moment. At last he said, trying for lightness, though his voice cracked, “That was not a no, I suppose, thoughneither was it a yes.”“You can’t mean it.”“I do mean it.”“You can’t—I’m not a Shadowhunter. They’ll expel you from the Clave—”He took a step closer to her, his eyes eager. “You may not be precisely a Shadowhunter. But you are not a mundane either, nor provably aDownworlder. Your situation is unique, so I do not know what the Clave will do. But they cannot forbid something that is not forbidden by the Law.They will have to take your—our—individual case into consideration, and that could take months. In the meantime they cannot prevent ourengagement.”“You are serious.” Her mouth was dry. “Jem, such a kindness on your part is indeed incredible. It does you credit. But I cannot let you sacrificeyourself in that way for me.”“Sacrifice? Tessa, I love you. I want to marry you.”