Angels Twice Descending Read online

  *

  They went back to Magnus and Alec's apartment. The couple had taken their new baby on vacation to Bali, which meant Simon and Isabelle could have the place to themselves.

  "You sure it's okay for us to be here?" Simon asked, looking nervously around the apartment. The last time he'd seen it, the decorating ethos had been part-Studio 54, part-bordello: lots of disco balls, velvet curtains, and some appallingly placed mirrors. Now the living room looked like something puked up by a Babies"R"Us--blankets and diapers and mobiles and stuffed bunnies everywhere you looked.

  He still couldn't believe Magnus Bane was someone's dad.

  "I'm sure," Isabelle said, stripping off her dress in one smooth motion to reveal the unending stretches of smooth, pale skin that lay beneath. "But if you want to leave . . ."

  "No," Simon said, struggling for enough breath to speak. "Definitely. No. Here's good. Very good."

  "Well, then." Isabelle swept a family of stuffed kittens off the couch, then stretched across like a very satisfied and very dangerous cat. She looked pointedly at Simon's shirt, which was still on his body.

  "Well. Then." Simon stood above her, unsure what to do next.

  "Simon."

  "Yes?"

  "I'm looking pointedly at your shirt."

  "Uh-huh."

  "Which is still on your body."

  "Oh. Right." He took care of that. Dropped down beside her on the couch.

  "Simon."

  "Yes? Oh. Right." Simon leaned toward her and pulled her close for a kiss, which she indulged for about thirty seconds before extricating herself.

  "What's wrong?" he asked.

  "You tell me," she said. "I, your incredibly sexy girlfriend that you never get to see, am prostrating myself before you half-naked, and you seem like you'd rather be watching a baseball game."

  "I hate baseball."

  "Exactly." Isabelle sat up--though, mercifully, she didn't put any clothes back on. Not yet. "You know you can talk to me about anything, right?"

  Simon nodded.

  "So if, hypothetically, you were feeling a little nervous about this whole Ascension thing tomorrow, and wondering whether you still wanted to go through with it, you could talk to me about that."

  "Hypothetically," Simon said.

  "Just picking a topic at random," Isabelle said. "We could also talk about Avatar: The Last Airplane, if you want."

  "It's the Airbender," Simon said, suppressing a grin, "and I love you even if you are nerd-clueless."

  "And I love you, even if you are a mundane," she said. "Even if you stay a mundane. You know that, right?"

  "I . . ." It was easy for her to say, and he thought she probably even meant it. But that didn't make it true. "You think you would? Really?"

  Isabelle let out her breath in an irritated puff. "Simon Lewis, are you forgetting that you were a mundane when I started dating you? A rather scrawny mundane with terrible fashion sense, I should point out. And then you were a vampire, and I still dated you. Then you were a mundane again, but this time with freaking amnesia. And still, inexplicably, I fell in love with you all over again. What could possibly make you think I have any standards left when it comes to you?"

  "Uh, thank you, I think?"

  "`Thank you' is the correct response. And also 'I love you, too, Isabelle, and I would love you even if you lost your memory or grew a mustache or something.'"

  "Well, obviously." Simon tugged at her chin. "Though I'd draw the line at a beard."

  "Goes without saying." Then she looked serious again. "You do believe me, right? You can't be doing this for me."

  "I'm not doing it for you," Simon said, and that was true. He may have gone to the Academy, in part, because of Isabelle--but he'd stayed for himself. When he Ascended, it wouldn't be because he needed to prove something to her. "But . . . if I did back out, which I would never do, but if I did, wouldn't that make me a coward? You'd date a mundane, maybe. But I know you, Izzy. You couldn't date a coward."

  "And you, Simon Lewis, couldn't be a coward. Not if you tried. It's not cowardly to make a choice about what you want your life to be. Choosing what's right for you, maybe that's the bravest thing you can do. If you choose to be a Shadowhunter, I will love you for it. But if you choose to stay a mundane, I'll love you for that, too."

  "What if I just choose not to drink from the Mortal Cup because I'm afraid it will kill me?" Simon asked. It was a relief to finally say it out loud. "What if it had nothing to do with how I want to spend the rest of my life? What if it's just being scared?"

  "Well, then, you're an idiot. Because the Mortal Cup could never hurt you. It will know what I do, which is that you'd make an amazing Shadowhunter. The blood of the Angel could never hurt you," she said, intensity blazing in her eyes. "It's not possible."

  "You really believe that?"

  "I really do."

  "So the fact that we're here, and you're, you know--"

  "Partially disrobed and wondering why we're still making small talk?"

  "--has nothing to do with the fact that you think this might be our last night together?"

  This earned him another exasperated sigh. "Simon, do you know how many times I've been almost certain one of us wouldn't survive the next twenty-four hours?"

  "Um, several?"

  "Several," she confirmed. "And on not one of those occasions have we ever had any sort of desperate, angsty farewell sex."

  "Wait--we haven't?"

  Over the last several months, Simon and Isabelle had gotten very close. Closer, he thought, than they'd ever been before, not that he could quite remember. At least conversationally. As for the other kind of close--talking on the phone and writing each other letters wasn't exactly conducive to losing your virginity.

  Then there was the excruciating fact that Simon wasn't certain he still had a virginity to lose.

  All this time he'd been too embarrassed to ask.

  "Are you kidding me?" Isabelle asked.

  Simon could feel his cheeks burning.

  "You're not kidding me!"

  "Please don't be mad," Simon said.

  Isabelle laughed. "I'm not mad. If we'd had sex, and you'd forgotten--which, by the way, I assure you would not be possible, demon amnesia or no demon amnesia--maybe I'd be mad."

  "So we really never . . . ?"

  "We really never," Isabelle confirmed. "I know you don't remember, but things were a little hectic around here, what with the war and all the people trying to kill us and such. And like I said, I don't believe in 'farewell sex.'"

  Simon felt like the whole night--possibly the most important night of his young and sorrowfully inexperienced life--was hanging in the balance, and he was very afraid of saying the wrong thing. "So, uh, what kind of sex do you believe in?"

  "I think it should be a beginning of something," Isabelle said. "Like, say, hypothetically, if your entire life were going to change tomorrow, if it were going to be the first day of the rest of your life, I'd want to be a part of that."

  "The rest of my life."

  "Yep."

  "Hypothetically."

  "Hypothetically." She took off his glasses then and kissed him hard on the lips, then very softly on the neck. Exactly where a vampire would sink its fangs in, some part of him thought. Most of him, though, was thinking, This is actually going to happen.

  This is going to happen tonight.

  "Also, most of all, I believe in doing it because I want to do it," Isabelle said plainly. "Just like anything else. And I want to. Assuming you do."

  "You have no idea how much," Simon said honestly, and thanked God that Shadowhunting blood didn't bestow telepathy. "I should just warn you, I don't, I mean, I haven't, I mean, this would be the first time I, so--"

  "You'll be a natural." She kissed his neck again, then his throat. Then his chest. "I promise."

  Simon thought about all the opportunities here for humiliation, how he had absolutely no idea what he was doing, and how usually when he had no i
dea what he was doing, he screwed things up. Riding a horse, wielding a sword, leaping from a tree--all these things people kept saying would come naturally to him usually came with bumps, bruises, and, more than once, a face full of manure.

  But he had tried none of those things with Isabelle by his side. Or in his arms.

  As it turned out, that made all the difference.

  *

  "Good morning!" Simon sang, stepping out of the Portal and into his bedroom at the Academy--just in time to catch Julie slipping out the door.

  "Er, good morning," George mumbled, tucked beneath the covers. "Wasn't sure you'd be back."

  "Did I just see--?"

  "A gentleman doesn't kiss and tell." George grinned. "Speaking of which, should I ask where you've been all night?"

  "You should not," Simon said firmly. As he crossed the room to his closet to find something clean to wear, he tried his best to keep a silly, moony, heartsick smile off his face.

  "You're skipping," George said accusingly.

  "Am not."

  "And you were humming," George added.

  "I most definitely was not."

  "Would this be a good time to tell you that Jon Cartwright the Thirty-Fifth seems to have done his business in your T-shirt drawer?"

  But this morning nothing could dampen Simon's mood. Not when he could still feel the ghost of Isabelle's touch. His skin buzzed with it. His lips felt swollen. His heart felt swollen. "I can always get new T-shirts," Simon said cheerfully. He thought that from this point forward, he might say everything cheerfully.

  "I think this place has officially driven you round the bend." George sighed then, sounding a bit heartsick himself. "You know, I'm really going to miss it here."

  "You're not going to cry again, are you? I think there may be another sentient slime mold growing in the back of my sock drawer, if you want to get really choked up."

  "Does one wear socks to get transformed into a half-angel superhuman fighting machine?" George mused.

  "Not with sandals," Simon said promptly. He hadn't dated Isabelle all these months without learning something about proper footwear. "Never with sandals."

  They got dressed for the ceremony--choosing, after some deliberation, their most Simon-like and George-like outfits. Which meant, for George, jeans and a rugby shirt; for Simon, a faded tee that he'd had made back when the band was called Guinea Pig Death Posse. (This, fortunately, had been lying on the floor for a week, so was rat crap free.) Then, without much talking, they started packing up their belongings. The Academy wasn't much for big celebrations--probably a good thing, Simon mused, since at the last all-school party, one of the first-years had misfired his flaming crossbow and accidentally set the roof on fire. There would be no graduation ceremony, no mugging for cameras with proud parents, no yearbook signings or tossing of mortarboard caps. Just the Ascension ritual, whatever that meant, and that would be it. The end of the Academy; the beginning of the rest of their lives.

  "It's not like we'll never see each other again," George said suddenly, in a tone that suggested he'd been worrying about exactly that.

  Simon was going back to New York, and George was going to the London Institute, where, they said, a Lovelace was always welcome. But what was an ocean of distance when you could Portal? Or at least e-mail?

  "Of course not," Simon said.

  "But it won't be the same," George pointed out.

  "No, I guess it won't."

  George busied himself with neatly tucking his socks into a suitcase compartment, which Simon found alarming, since it was the first time in two years George had done anything neatly. "You're my best friend, you know," George said without looking up. Then, quickly, as if to forestall argument, "Don't worry, I know I'm not your best friend, Si. You've got Clary. And Isabelle. And your bandmate mate. I get it. I just thought you should know."

  On some level, Simon had already known this. He'd never bothered to think much about it--he didn't think much about George, period, because that was the beauty of George. Simon never had to think about him, to puzzle out what he would do or how he would react. He was just steady, dependable George, always there, always full of cheer and eager to spread it around. Now Simon did think about him, about how well George knew him, and vice versa--not just in the big ways: their dead-of-night fears about washing out of the Academy, Simon's hapless pining for Isabelle, George's even more hapless, if more halfhearted, pining for most girls who crossed his path. They knew each other in the little ways--that George was allergic to cashews, that Simon was allergic to Latin homework, that George had a paralyzing fear of large birds--and somehow, that seemed to matter even more. Over the past two years, they'd developed a roommate shorthand, almost a silent language. Not exactly like a parabatai, Simon thought, and not exactly like a best friend. But not something less than. Not something he ever wanted to leave behind for good.

  "You're right, George. I do have more than enough best friends."

  George's face fell, so slightly that only someone who knew him as well as Simon would have noticed.

  "But there's something else I've never had," Simon added. "At least until now."

  "What's that?"

  "A brother." The word felt right. Not someone you chose--someone the fates assigned you, someone who, under any other circumstances, might never have given you a second look, nor you him. Someone you would die for and kill for without a second thought, because he was family. Judging from George's radiant smile, the word sounded right to him, too.

  "Are we going to have to hug now or something?" George said.

  "I think that may be inescapable."

  *

  The Council Hall was intimidatingly beautiful, morning light streaming in through a window in its high domed ceiling. It reminded Simon of pictures he'd seen of the Pantheon, but this place felt more ancient than even ancient Rome. This felt timeless.

  The Academy students huddled together in small clumps, all of them looking too nervous and distracted to do much more than comment blandly on the weather. (Which, as always in Idris, was perfect.) Marisol gave Simon a bright smile and a sharp nod when she saw him enter the chamber, as if to say, I never doubted you . . . almost.

  Simon and George were the last to arrive, and shortly after they did, everyone took their places for the ceremony. The seven mundanes were arranged in alphabetical order in the front of the chamber. There were meant to be ten of them, but apparently Sunil wasn't the only one who'd reconsidered at the last moment. Leilana Jay, a very tall, very pale girl from Memphis, and Boris Kashkoff, an Eastern European with ropy muscles and ruddy cheeks, had both slipped away sometime in the night. No one spoke of them, not the teachers, not the students. It was like they never existed, Simon thought--and then imagined Sunil, Leilana, and Boris out there in the world somewhere, living alone with their knowledge of the Shadow World, aware of evil but without the will or ability to fight it.

  There's more than one way to fight evil in this world, Simon thought, and it was Clary's voice in his head, and it was Isabelle's, and his mother's, and his own. Don't do this because you think you have to. Do it because you want to.

  Only if you want to.

  The Academy's Shadowhunter students--Simon never thought of them as the "elites" anymore, just as he no longer thought of himself and the other mundanes as the "dregs"--sat in the first two rows of the audience. The students weren't two tiers anymore; they were one body. One unit. Even Jon Cartwright looked proud of, and a little nervous for, the mundanes at the front of the chamber--and when Simon caught him locking eyes with Marisol and pressing two fingers to his lips and then his chest, it seemed almost right. (Or, at least, not a total crime against nature, which was a start.) There were no family members in the audience--those mundanes with living relatives (and there were depressingly few of them) had, of course, already severed ties. George's parents, who were Shadowhunters by blood if not by choice, could have attended, but he'd asked them not to. "Just in case I explode, mate," he'd
confided to Simon. "Don't get me wrong, the Lovelaces are hardy folk, but I don't think they'd enjoy a faceful of liquefied George."

  Nonetheless, the room was almost full. This was the first class of Academy mundanes to Ascend in decades, and more than a few Shadowhunters had wanted to see it for themselves. Most of them were strangers to Simon, but not all. Crowded in behind the rows of students were Clary, Jace, and Isabelle, and Magnus and Alec--who had made a surprise return from Bali for the occasion--tag-teaming their squirming blue baby. All of them--even the baby--were intensely fixed on Simon, as if they could get him through the Ascension with sheer force of will.

  This, Simon realized, was what Ascending meant. This was what being a Shadowhunter meant. Not just risking his life, not just carving runes and fighting demons and occasionally saving the world. Not just joining the Clave and agreeing to follow its draconian rules. It meant joining his friends. It meant being a part of something bigger than himself, something as wonderful as it was terrifying. Yes, his life was much less safe than it had been two years ago--but it was also much more full. Like the Council Hall, it was crowded with all the people he loved, people who loved him.

  You might almost call them a family.

  *

  And then it began.

  One by one the mundanes were summoned to the dais, where their professors stood in a somber line, waiting to shake their hands and wish them luck.

  One by one the mundanes approached the double circles traced on the dais and knelt in their center, surrounded by runes. Two Silent Brothers stood by just in case something went wrong. Each time a mundane took position, they bent over the runes and scratched in a new one to symbolize that student's name. Then they returned to the edges of the dais again, statue-still in parchment robes, watching. Waiting.

  Simon waited too as one by one his friends brought their lips to the Mortal Cup. As a blinding flare of blue light encompassed them, then faded away.

  One by one.

  Gen Almodovar. Thomas Daltrey. Marisol Garza.

  Each student drank.

  Each student survived.

  The wait was interminable.

  Except that when the Consul called his name, it felt much too soon.

  Simon's feet were cement blocks. He forced himself toward the dais, one step at a time, his heartbeat pulsing like a subwoofer, making his whole body tremble. The professors shook his hand, even Delaney Scarsbury, who murmured, "Always knew you had it in you, Lewis." A blatant lie. Catarina Loss gripped his hand tightly and pulled him close, her brilliant white hair sweeping his shoulder as her lips brushed his ear. "Finish what you started, Daylighter. You have the power to change these people for the better. Don't waste it."