"Will. Will!" Jem glared down at his parabatai and snatched the book from his hands. Will jumped and looked up at him.
"What was that for? You could have just said my name or something."
"That's what I've been doing for the last five minutes," Jem said, dropping the book in Will's lap. "Now get up. Charlotte needs to talk to us."
Will stood up and followed Jem into the study, where Charlotte was sitting at her desk with a single sheet of paper in front of her. When she heard the door shut, she stood up with the paper in her hands.
"There's been a demon sighting near Temple Bar. Two sightings, actually. A drevak and a behemoth. Find them, take care of them, and be back within an hour and forty five minutes. Any longer and you will be in serious trouble." She narrowed her eyes as she spoke and Jem remembered when he and Will had gone to Devil's Tavern for dinner and Charlotte's search party had found them arm wrestling with faeries at two in the morning.
As they left to go to the weapons room, Charlotte shouted, "And be careful!"
"We always are!" Will shouted back, but they all knew it was a lie. Will would never watch his back and had come back injured so many times that Charlotte had felt the need to remind him to do something he never did anyway, even with the reminder.
In the weapons room, Will picked up a dagger marked with runes of precision. "I'll take the drevak. I suppose we'll have to split up and find a place to meet."
"Maybe I wanted the drevak," Jem muttered as he filled his pocket with seraph blades.
"What was that?"
"Oh, nothing. If we're going to be by Temple Bar, maybe we should just meet outside after an hour."
Will nodded and pulled on a jacket. "And we could go inside and have a drink."
"Or," Jem said, rolling his eyes, "we could meet up and go straight home so Charlotte doesn't get angry with us."
"Boring," Will sighed. "So very boring."
"And then she threw a book at me!"
Jem rolled his eyes and looked over at Will. "Explain again why Tessa decided to throw a book at you."
"All I did was jump out from behind a shelf!" Will shouted. "There was no reason for her to attack me with Little Women!"
"She's very resourceful, then. More than you are. The last time something jumped out at you, you screamed and ran away."
Will glared at him. "That's because it was a duck, and those are bloodthirsty little beasts that cannot be trusted. You should know that! Anyway, enough about my close call with death. This is Temple Bar here. Let's split up and meet here in an hour."
"Don't be late," Jem said, thinking of all the times Will had gone looking for more demons and forgotten to meet Jem.
Jem tracked the behemoth for about half an hour, then killed it and was back just before the nearby church bells rang four o'clock. Will was nowhere in sight and Jem waited in the cold for fifteen minutes before going inside and buying a drink. If Will had forgotten to meet him again and they both got in trouble, Jem was blaming it on Will.
He spent the next hour and a half talking to the bartender, and then realized how much time had passed when someone came in and he caught a glimpse of the dark sky. He quickly paid for his drink and ran outside. There was no sign of Will and Jem realized with a defeated sigh that he would have to go searching again. Charlotte must have been frantic at that point, seeing as she had asked then to be home almost two hours ago.
Jem checked every alley that he passed, asked at every bar he came across, and asked anyone he saw if they had seen Will. Nobody knew where he was and there was nothing to even hint that he had been anywhere Jem had looked. He was ready to give up, go home, and let Will get punished in the morning.
He went down one last alley and sighed in defeat. Nothing. Then, as he started to turn around and head home, his foot his something hard that skittered across the ground with a high pitched ring. He knelt down and picked up a dagger. It was carved with precision runes and he realized with a jolt that he had seen it before, in Will's hand, just before they left. On the ground next to it were three brown spots that smelled and looked a lot like blood.
Jem pulled his stele out and scrawled a tracking rune on the dagger. It flared brightly and disappeared. The only time a tracking rune would do that was when someone was in a demon realm, or dead. He scrabbled at his shirt in panic, finally managing to get it open, and saw with great relief that the parabatai rune on his chest was still black and whole.
Will was alive, but he was gone. Someone or something had taken him, without leaving any clues as to where he had been taken. It couldn't have been the drevak. They weren't intelligent enough, unless there was another demon there that could have hurt Will and then dragged him away, although there wasn't nearly enough blood.
"I will find you, Will," he whispered. "I will search all of London, even all of England, if I have to."
Jem threw open the doors of the Institute, shouting Charlotte's name at the top of his lungs. She came running as he was sprinting towards the study to find her.
"What is it?" she asked frantically. "Where's Will? Is he hurt?"
Jem took a moment to catch his breath before speaking. "Will- Will's gone."
Charlotte put her hand to her mouth. "Oh, Jem, I'm so sorry. Was it the demon? I didn't-"
"No, you don't understand. I mean that Will's gone. Someone's taken him and there was no clues as to who or where. All I found was a couple of spots of blood and a dagger I saw him pick up this morning."
"I… Oh. Oh my," Charlotte mumbled. "I'll go call the Silent Brothers. Maybe they can help."