The Infernal Devices 01 - Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare Page A

“What do you mean, you don’t know? Everyone’s something. This girl can’t be nothing at all… .”
    Tessa woke with a cry, her eyes flying open, and found herself staring at shadows. Darkness clustered about her thickly. She could barely hear the murmur of voices through her panic, and struggled into a sitting position, kicking away blankets and pillows. Dimly, she recognized that the blanket was thick and heavy, not the thin, braided one that belonged to the Dark House.
    She was in a bed, just as she had dreamed, in a great stone room, and there was hardly any light. She heard the rasp of her own breath as she turned, and a scream forced its way out of her throat. The face from her nightmare hovered in the darkness before her—a great white moon of a face, its head shaved bald, smooth as marble. Where the eyes should have been there were only indentations in the flesh—not as if the eyes had been ripped out, but as if they had never grown there at all. The lips were banded with black stitches, the face scrawled with black marks like the ones on Will’s skin, though these looked as if they had been cut there with knives.
    She screamed again and scrabbled backward, half-falling off the bed. She hit the cold stone floor, and the fabric of the white nightdress she was wearing—someone must have put it on her while she was unconscious—ripped at the hem as she scrambled to her feet.
    “Miss Gray.” Someone was calling her name, but in her panic, she knew only that the voice was unfamiliar. Thespeaker was
not
the monster who stood staring at her from the bedside, its scarred face impassive; it had not moved when she did, and though it showed no signs of pursuing her, she began to back away, carefully, feeling behind herself for a door. The room was so dim, she could see only that it was roughly oval, the walls and floor all of stone. The ceiling was high enough to be in black shadow, and there were long windows across the opposite wall, the sort of arched windows that might have belonged in a church. Very little light filtered through them; it looked as if the sky outside was dark. “Theresa Gray—”
    She found the door, the metal handle; turning, she seized on it thankfully, and pulled. Nothing happened. A sob rose up in her throat.
    “Miss Gray!” the voice said again, and suddenly the room was flooded with light—a sharp, white-silver light that she recognized. “Miss Gray, I am sorry. It was not our intention to frighten you.” The voice was a woman’s: still unfamiliar, but youthful and concerned. “Miss Gray, please.”
    Tessa turned slowly and put her back against the door. She could see clearly now. She was in a stone room whose central focus was a large, four-poster bed, its velvet coverlet now rucked and hanging sideways where she had dragged it off the mattress. Tapestry curtains were pulled back, and there was an elegant tapestry rug on the otherwise bare floor. In fact, the room itself was fairly bare. There were no pictures or photographs hanging on the wall, no ornaments cluttering the surfaces of the dark wood furniture. Two chairs stood facing each other near the bed, with a small tea table between them. A Chinese screen in one corner of the room hid what were probably a bathtub and washstand.
    Beside the bed stood a tall man who wore robes like a monk’s, of a long, coarse, parchment-colored material. Red-brown runes circled the cuffs and hem. He carried a silver staff, its head carved in the shape of an angel and runes decorating its length. The hood of his robe was down, leaving bare his scarred, white, blinded face.
    Beside him stood a very small woman, almost child-size, with thick brown hair knotted at the nape of her neck, and a neat, clever little face with bright, dark eyes like a bird’s. She wasn’t pretty exactly, but there was a calm, kindly look on her face that made the ache of panic in Tessa’s stomach ease slightly, though she couldn’t have said exactly why. In her