Excerpt:7.poglavlje,The Clockwork Angel

http://www.theinfernaldevices.com/infernalseries/ID1chapter1.html

Tessa glanced out over the room. It was still dark with smoke. In
among with swirls of blackness, she could see the bright flash of
weapons, the Shadowhunters brandishing their angel knives, and the
occasional spray of vampire blood, bright as a scatter of rubies. She
realized — with a sort of shock of surprise, for the vampires, at
first, had terrified her — that the vampires were clearly overmatched
here; though they were vicious and fast, the Shadowhunters were nearly
as fast, and had weapons and training on their side. Vampire after
vampire went down below the onslaught of their seraph blades. Blood ran
in sheets across the floor, soaking the edges of the Persian rugs.

The smoke cleared in a spot, and Tessa saw Charlotte in the middle of
dispatching a burly vampire in a gray morning jacket; she slashed the
blade of her knife across his throat, and blood sprayed across the wall
behind them in a scarlet fan. He sank snarling to his knees, and
Charlotte finished him with a thrust of her blade to his chest. Her
expression as she did so was studious, calm and concentrated; the same
look she wore when, at the breakfast table, she had read of the Devil’s
Acre murders in the newspaper.
A blur of motion exploded
behind her; it was Will, followed by a wild-eyed vampire — who, Tessa
saw with some surprise, was brandishing a silver pistol. He pointed it
at Will: aimed, and fired, Will dived out of the way, skidding across
the bloody floor. He rolled to his feet, and bounded up onto a
velvet-seated chair. Ducking another shot, he leaped again, and Tessa
watched with amazement as he ran along the backs of a row of
chairs, leaping down from the last of them; he whirled to face the
vampire, now a distance from him across the room; somehow a
short-bladed knife gleamed in his hand, though Tessa had not seen him
draw it. He threw it — the vampire ducked aside, but was not quite fast
enough; the knife sank into his shoulder. He roared in pain and was
reaching for the knife when a slim, dark shadow reared up out of
nowhere — there was a flash of silver — and the vampire blew apart in a
shower of blood and dust. As the mess cleared, Tessa saw Jem, his
dragon-headed cane still raised in his fist. He was grinning, but not
at her; he kicked the silver pistol — now lying abandoned among the
vampire’s remains — hard, and it skidded across the floor, fetching up
at Will’s feet. Will nodded toward Jem with a return of his grin, swept
the pistol off the floor with a graceful gesture and shoved it through
his belt.
“Will!” Tessa called to him, though she wasn’t sure if he could hear her over the din. “Will —”

Something seized her by the back of her dress and hauled her up and
backwards; it was like being caught in the talons of an enormous bird.
Tessa screamed once, and found herself flung forward, skidding across
the boards of the stage. She hit the stack of chairs; they crashed to
the floor in a deafening mass and Tessa, sprawled among the mess,
looked up with a gasp of pain.
The Russian vampire, Alexei,
stood over her. His black eyes were wild, rimmed with red; his white
hair straggled over his face in matted clumps, and his shirt was
slashed open across the front, the edges of the tear soaked with blood.
He must have been cut, though not deep enough to kill him, and had
healed: the skin under the torn shirt looked unmarked now. “Bitch,” he hissed at Tessa. “Lying, traitorous bitch. You brought that boy in here. That Nephilim.”
Tessa scrambled backward; her back hit a wall of fallen chairs. “Alexei — stop —”

“De Quincey welcomed you back, even after your disgusting little —
interlude — with the lycanthrope. And this is how you repay him. Repay us.” He held his hands out to her; they were streaked with black ash. “You see this,” he said. “The dust of our dead people. Dead vampires. And you betrayed them for Nephilim.” He spat the word as if it were poison.

“Alexei —” Tessa’s hands, behind her, scrabbled among the smashed
chairs — surely there must be something, some broken-off piece, that
she could use as a weapon. “Please don’t do this.”
“And now
what?” Alexei went on, as if she hadn’t spoken. He gestured wildly
toward Nathaniel. “Now you are trying to save a human — a common
criminal — one who has betrayed the Night’s Children.” He advanced on
her, his hands out, reaching. “I should have killed you in Livadia —”

Tessa’s fingers closed around the leg of a chair; without even thinking
about it, she swung the chair up and over and brought it crashing down
on Alexei’s back. Her heart soared as he yelled and staggered back. She
scrambled to her feet as Alexei straightened up, and swung the chair at
him again. This time a jagged bit of broken chair arm caught him across
the face, opening up a long red cut. He snarled something at her in
Russian — she couldn’t understand it, but from the tone of his voice,
it clearly wasn’t a compliment.
“Now,” she said. “That’s not a very nice thing to say.”
His lips curled back from his teeth in a silent snarl, and he sprang —
there was no other word for it; it was like the silent spring of a cat.
He struck Tessa to the ground, landing on top of her, knocking the
chair from her hand. He lunged at her throat, teeth bared, and she
raked her clawed hand across his face, hitting and kicking at him. His
blood, where it dripped on her, seemed to burn, like acid. She screamed
and struck out at him harder, but he only laughed; his pupils had
disappeared into the black of his eyes and he looked entirely unhuman,
like some sort of monstrous, predatory serpent. He caught her wrists in
his grasp and forced them down on either side of her, hard against the
floor. “Camille,” he said, leaning down over her, his voice thick, “be
still, my little Camille — it will be over in moments —”
He
threw his head back like a striking cobra, and the light of the blazing
candelabras sparked off his needle teeth — terrified, Tessa struggled
to free her trapped legs, meaning to kick him in the stomach or the
groin, kick him as hard as she could —
Alexei yelled. Yelled
and writhed, and Tessa saw that there was a hand caught in his hair,
yanking his head up and back, dragging him to his feet. A hand inked
all over with swirling black Marks.
Will’s hand.

Alexei was hauled screaming to his feet, his hands clamped to his head.
Tessa struggled upright, staring, as Will flung the howling vampire
contemptuously away from him. Will wasn’t smiling any more, but his
eyes were glittering, and Tessa could see why Magnus had described
their color as the color of the sky in Hell.
“Nephilim.” Alexei staggered, righted himself, and spat at Will’s feet. “Murdering dog.”

“I rather like dogs,” said Will. “They’re loyal. That’s more than I can
say for your kind.” He drew the pistol from his belt and aimed it at
Alexei. “One of the Devil’s own abominations, aren’t you? You don’t
even deserve to live in this world with the rest of us, and yet when we
let you live out of pity, you throw our gift back in our faces.”

“As if we need your pity,” Alexei snarled. “As if we could ever be less
than you — you Nephilim, thinking you are —” He stopped, abruptly.
“Are what?” Will cocked the pistol; the click was loud even above the noise of the battle. “Say it.”
The vampire raised his head. “Say what?”
“God,”
said Will. “You were going to tell me that we Nephilim play at God,
weren’t you? Except you can’t even say the word.” His finger was white
on the trigger of the gun. “Say it. Say it, and I’ll let you live.”
Alexei bared his teeth. “You cannot kill me with that — that stupid human toy —”
“If the bullet passes through your heart,” Will said, his aim unwavering, “you’ll die.”

Alexei raised his head. He opened his mouth. A sound came out — a sort
of gasp, as he tried to speak, tried to shape a word his mind would not
let him say. He gasped again, choked, and put a hand to his throat.
Will began to laugh —
And the vampire sprung. His face
twisted in a rictus mask of rage and pain, he leaped at Will with a
howl. There was a blur of movement — the gun went off and there was a
spray of blood. Will hit the floor, the pistol skidding from his grip,
the vampire on top of him. Tessa scrambled to retrieve the pistol,
caught it up, and turned to see that Alexei had seized Will from the
back, his forearm jammed against Will’s throat, clearly meaning to
strangle the life out of him.
She raised the pistol, her
hand shaking — but she had never used a pistol before, never shot
anything, and how to shoot the vampire without injuring Will? Will was
clearly choking, his face suffused with blood. Alexei snarled
something, and tightened his grip —
And Will, ducking his
head, sank his teeth into the vampire’s forearm. Alexei yelled and
jerked his arm away; Will flung himself to the side, choking, and
rolled to his knees to spit blood onto the stage. When he looked up,
glittering red blood was smeared across the lower half of his face. His
teeth shone red, too, when he — Tessa couldn’t believe it — grinned, actually grinned, and looking at Alexei, said:
“How do you like it, vampire? You were going to bite me, earlier. Now you know what’s it’s like, don’t you?”

Alexei, on his knees, stared from Will to the ugly red hole in his own
arm, which was already beginning to close up, though dark blood still
trickled from it thinly. “For that,” he said, “you will die, Nephilim.”

Will spread his arms wide. On his knees, grinning like a demon, blood
dripping from his mouth, he barely looked human himself. “Come and get
me.”
Alexei gathered himself to spring — and Tessa pulled
the trigger. The gun kicked back, hard, into her hand, and Alexei fell
sideways, blood streaming from his shoulder. She had missed the heart. Damn it.

Alexei began to pull himself to his feet, his eyes fixed on Tessa now.
She pulled the trigger on the pistol again — nothing. A soft click let
her know the gun was empty.
She fell back, throwing the gun to the side.
“Tessa,” Will
shouted, and she wasn’t sure if he sounded angry, or something else. He
was on his feet, reaching for the gleaming weapons at his belt. His
hand closed around the hilt of a seraph blade, just as Alexei reached
her. He staggered, lunged for her, hands out —
And dissolved
in a shower of dust and blood. With a single thin scream, he dissolved
— his flesh melted away from his face and hands, and Tessa caught sight
for a moment of the blackened skeleton beneath before it, too, crumbled
to dust, leaving an empty pile of clothes behind. Clothes, and a
gleaming silver blade.
She looked up. Jem stood a few feet
away, looking very pale. He held another blade in his left hand; his
right was empty. There was a long cut along one of his cheeks, but he
seemed otherwise uninjured. His hair and eyes gleamed, a brutal silver
in the candlelight. “I think,” he said, “that that was the last of
them.”
Surprised, Tessa glanced out over the room: the chaos
had subsided. Shadowhunters moved here and there in the wreckage — some
were seated on chairs, being attended to by stele-wielding healers —
but she could not see a single vampire. The smoke of the burning had
subsided as well, though white ash from the torched curtains still
floated down over the room like unexpected snow.
Will, blood still dripping from his chin, looked at Jem with his eyebrows raised. “Nice throw,” he said.
Jem shook his head. “You bit a vampire,” he said. “I saw you. You bit a vampire.”
“I had no choice,” said Will. “He was choking me.”
“I know,” Jem said. “But really, Will — again?”