She smiled, opening her mouth to lie—she was on an errand for Charles, he’d left something in his old room—when Christopher turned and blinked at her.
“Oh! It’s you,” Christopher said with his usual sunny smile. “I thought it might be rats again. Hullo, Grace.”
“It’s awfully late,” she said conversationally, as if she ran into young men in cellars every day. “Do the Fairchilds know you’re here?”
“Oh, I’m here all the time,” he said, holding the peculiar object up to the light. It looked like a strange stele. “Henry’s got loads of equipment, and he doesn’t mind if I use it.”
“But—aren’t you going to ask me what I’m doing here?” Grace asked, approaching the worktable.
“Why would I do that?” Christopher seemed genuinely puzzled. “You’re affianced to Charles—surely you have a right to be here.”
She cleared her throat. “It’s a surprise for Charles. Could I convince you to take pity on me and help me find a particular ingredient?”
Christopher slid off the stool. “You’re working on a scientific surprise for Charles? I never thought he had much interest in science.” He set his odd stele down on the workbench. “Would you like a quick tour of the laboratory? I daresay it’s the best-equipped scientific workshop in London.”
Grace was nonplussed. She hadn’t compelled him to offer her the tour; he’d come up with that on his own. She could have reduced him to a babbling lump, she thought, saying things like I would die in order to help you with anything you could possibly desire, his eyes crossed with longing. But as Christopher seemed honestly chuffed at the chance to show off his beakers and tubes and vials, she found herself holding back.
She didn’t like using the power, really, she thought, as he led her to a series of shelves containing tiny jars full of colorful substances and started telling her about a table of chemical elements invented by a scientist in Russia a number of years earlier. Using it made her feel tied to her mother. To the darkness her mother served.
As she studied the contents of the little jars, Christopher told her about the way magic and science could be combined to create something entirely new. She didn’t quite follow, but she surprised herself by wanting to know more as he talked about the purpose of various objects and instruments, the experiments he and Henry conducted, the things they discovered.
Grace was reminded of the time he had given her a ride home from a picnic last summer during the demon attacks. He’d told her then about his love of science without being the least bit condescending, as her male admirers often were, or self-important in the way Charles always was. Christopher treated her as an equal whose enthusiasm for science was not only similar to his own but unsurprising.
“What were you working on when I came in?” she asked, truly curious, as he concluded the tour of the shelves and bins crammed with neatly labeled specimens and ingredients.
Christopher led her back to the stele and handed her a magnifying lens so that she could view the designs more closely. They were very odd—not quite the runes she was used to seeing on the skin of Shadowhunters, but not entirely unlike them either.
“It’s not a real stele at all,” he said. “I’ve been calling it a pithos, because it turns into a sort of box, too. I could try to melt down the material, see if it’s really adamas, but the problem is that once you melt something down, you can’t put it back the way it was.”
“I suppose not,” she said. “May I handle it?”
He passed it to her. Grace felt its weight in her hands, not quite sure what she was looking for. If she were an ordinary Shadowhunter, she would have handled plenty of steles, but Tatiana had always disapproved of her studying or training.
Christopher blinked his unusual violet eyes. “Just because it looks like a stele doesn’t mean anything—especially if its purpose was meant to be disguised for some reason.”
“Hold out your arm,” Grace said impulsively.
Christopher pushed up his shirtsleeve, revealing a Mark on his inside left forearm. Craft, maybe? Or Technique? “Go ahead if you like,” he said. “Draw something.”
She touched the tip of the pithos to his skin and hesitated, suddenly unsure of herself. She momentarily wished she had used her powers on him; she was sorely in need of the confidence they would bring her. Slowly and awkwardly, she drew the enkeli rune, the rune most Shadowhunters learned to draw first. Angelic power.