Pale Kings and Princes Page 4

  "I was there," Simon said quietly. "Remember?"

  "Of course I do. But you don't. So it's not the same. You're not . . ."

  "The same," he finished for her.

  "That's not what I meant, I just--"

  "Trust me, Izzy. I get it. I'm not him. I'll never be him."

  Isabelle made a noise halfway between a hiss and a yowl. "Would you drop it already with this old Simon/new Simon inferiority complex? It's getting old. Why don't you get a little creative and find a new excuse?"

  "New excuse for what?" he asked, genuinely confused.

  "For you not to be with me!" she yelled. "Because you're obviously looking for one. Try harder."

  She stomped out of the store, slamming the door shut behind her. It dinged as it closed and not-Diana emerged from the back. "Oh, it's still just you," he said, sounding distinctly disappointed. "Have you decided?"

  Simon could give up right now; he could stop trying, stop fighting, just let her go. That would be the easiest of decisions. All he'd have to do would be to let it happen.

  "I decided a long time ago," Simon said, and ran out of the shop.

  He needed to find Isabelle.

  It wasn't much of a challenge. She was sitting on a small bench across the street, head in her hands.

  Simon sat down beside her. "I'm sorry," he said quietly.

  She shook her head without lifting it from her hands. "I can't believe I was dumb enough to think this would work."

  "It still can," he said with an embarrassing tinge of desperation. "I still want it to, if you--"

  "No, not you and me, idiot." She finally looked up at him. Mercifully, her eyes were dry. In fact, she didn't look sad at all--she looked furious. "This stupid weapons-shopping idea. Last time I take dating advice from Jace."

  "You let Jace plan our date?" Simon said, incredulous.

  "Well, it's not like either of us was doing a very good job of it. He took Clary here to buy a sword, and it was this whole disgustingly sexy thing, and I just thought, maybe . . ."

  Simon laughed in relief. "I hate to break it to you, but you're not dating Jace."

  "Um, yeah. Disgusting."

  "No, I mean, you're not dating a guy who's anything like Jace."

  "I wasn't aware I was dating anyone at all," she said, frost in her voice. His heart caught in his throat like it was snagged on barbed wire. But then, ever so slightly, she melted. "Kidding. Mostly."

  "Relieved," he said. "Mostly."

  Isabelle sighed. "I'm sorry this was such a disaster."

  "It's not all your fault."

  "Well, obviously it's not all my fault," she said. "Not even mostly my fault."

  "Uh . . . I thought we'd moved into the apologies portion of the day."

  "Right. Sorry."

  He grinned. "See, now you're talking."

  "So, what now? Back to the Academy?"

  "Are you kidding?" Simon stood up and extended a hand to her. Miracle of miracles, she took it. "We're not giving up until we get this right. But we're not going to get there pretending to be Jace and Clary. That's our whole problem, isn't it? Trying to be people we're not? I can't be some kind of cool, hipster nightclub hopper."

  "I don't think there's any such thing as a 'nightclub hopper,'" Isabelle said wryly.

  "This proves my point. And you're never going to be some kind of gamer who wants to stay up all night debating Naruto plot points and battling D&D orcs."

  "Now you're just making up words."

  "And neither of us is ever going to be Jace and Clary--"

  "Thank God," they said, in sync, then exchanged a grin.

  "So what are you suggesting?" Izzy asked.

  "Something new," Simon said, mind racing to come up with an actual concrete, useful idea. He knew he was onto something, he just wasn't sure what. "Not your world, not my world. A new world, for just the two of us."

  "Please tell me you don't want us to Portal to some other dimension. Because that didn't work out so well the last time."

  Simon grinned, an idea dawning. "Maybe we can find a spot slightly closer to home. . . ."

  *

  As the sun dipped beneath the horizon, the clouds overhead blushed cotton-candy pink. Their reflections gleamed on the crystalline waters of Lake Lyn. The horses whinnied, the birds chirped, and Simon and Isabelle crunched their peanut brittle and popcorn. This, Simon thought, was the sound of happiness.

  "You still haven't told me how you found this place," Isabelle said. "It's perfect."

  Simon didn't want to admit that it was Jon Cartwright who'd told him about the isolated inlet on the edge of Lake Lyn, its hanging willows and rainbow of wildflowers making it the perfect spot for a romantic picnic. (Even when the picnic consisted of peanut brittle, popcorn, and the handful of other random teeth-decaying, artery-clogging snacks they'd grabbed on their way out of Alicante.) Simon, who had long ago grown tired of hearing about Jon's romantic exploits, had done his best to tune the jerk out. But apparently a few details had lodged in his subconscious. Enough, at least, to find the place.

  Jon Cartwright was a blowhard and a buffoon--Simon would maintain this to his dying day.

  But it turned out the guy had good taste in romantic date spots.

  "Just stumbled on it," Simon mumbled. "Good luck, I guess."

  Isabelle gazed out at the impossibly smooth water. "This place reminds me of Luke's farm," she said softly.

  "Me too," he said. In that other life, the one he barely remembered, he and Clary had spent many long, happy days at Luke's summer house upstate, splashing in the lake, lying in the grass, naming the clouds.

  Isabelle turned to him. Simon's jacket was spread out between them as an improvised picnic blanket. It was a small jacket--not very much distance for him to cross, if he wanted to reach her.

  He'd never wanted anything more.

  "I think about it a lot," Izzy said. "The farm, the lake."

  "Why?"

  Her voice softened. "Because that was where I almost lost you--where I was sure I would lose you. But I got you back."

  Simon didn't know what to say.

  "It doesn't even matter," she said, harder now. "Not like you even know what I'm talking about."

  "I know what happened there." Namely, Simon had summoned the Angel Raziel--and the Angel had actually shown up.

  He wished he could remember it; he would like to know how that felt, talking to an angel.

  "Clary told you," she said flatly.

  "Yeah." Isabelle was a little sensitive on the subject of Clary. She definitely didn't need to hear about all the time he'd had with Clary this summer, the long hours spent lying in Central Park, side by side, swapping stories of their past--Simon telling her what he remembered; Clary telling him what actually happened.

  "But she wasn't even there," Isabelle said.

  "She knows the important stuff."

  Isabelle shook her head. She reached across the picnic blanket and rested a hand on Simon's knee. He worked very hard to hear her over the sudden buzzing in his ears. "If she wasn't there, she can't know how brave you were," Isabelle said. "She can't know how scared I was for you. That's the important stuff."

  There was silence between them, then. But finally, it wasn't the awkward kind. It was the good kind, the kind where Simon could hear what Isabelle was saying without her having to say it, and where he could answer her in kind.

  "What's it like?" she asked him. "Not remembering. Being a blank slate."

  Her hand was still warm on his knee.

  She'd never asked him that before. "It's not quite a blank slate," he explained, or tried to. "It's more like . . . double vision. Like I'm remembering two different things at the same time. Sometimes one seems more real, sometimes the other does. Sometimes everything is blurry. That's when I usually take some Advil, and a nap."

  "But you're starting to remember things."

  "Some things," he allowed. "Jordan. I remember a lot about Jordan. Caring about him. Losing--" Simon
swallowed hard. "Losing him. I remember my mom freaking out about me being a vampire. And some stuff before Clary's mom got kidnapped. The two of us being friends, before all of this started. Normal Brooklyn stuff." He stopped talking as he realized her face was clouding over.

  "Of course you remember Clary."

  "It's not like that," he said.

  "Like what?"

  Simon didn't think about it. He just did it.

  He took her hand.

  She let him.

  He wasn't sure how to explain this--it was still all jumbled in his head--but he had to try. "It's not like the things I remember are more important than the things I can't remember. Sometimes it seems like it's random. But sometimes . . . I don't know, sometimes it feels like the most important things are going to be the hardest to get back. Picture all these memories buried, like dinosaur bones, and me trying to dig them up. Some of them are just lying right beneath the surface, but the important ones, those are miles down."

  "And you're saying that's where I am? Miles beneath the surface?"

  He held on to her tightly. "You're basically down there at the molten center of the earth."

  "You are so weird."

  "I try my best."

  She threaded her fingers through his. "I'm jealous, you know. Sometimes. That you can forget."

  "Are you kidding?" Simon couldn't even begin to understand that one. "Everything you have, all the people in your life--no one would want that taken away."

  Isabelle looked back out at the lake, blinking hard. "Sometimes people get taken away from you whether you want it or not. And sometimes that hurts so much, it might be easier to forget."

  She didn't have to say his name. Simon said it for her. "Max."

  "You remember him?"

  Simon had never realized what a sad sound it was, hope.

  He shook his head. "I wish I did, though."

  "Clary told you about him," she said. Not a question. "And what happened to him."

  He nodded, but her gaze was still fixed on the water.

  "He died in Idris, you know. I like being here sometimes. I feel closer to him here. Other times I wish this place would evaporate. That no one could ever come here again."

  "I'm sorry," Simon said, thinking they had to be the lamest, most useless words in the English language. "I wish I could say something that would help."

  She faced him; she whispered, "You did."

  "What?"

  "After Max. You . . . said something. You helped."

  "Izzy . . ."

  "Yes?"

  This was it, this was The Moment--the moment talking gave way to gazing, which would inevitably give way to kissing. All he had to do was lean slightly forward and give himself over to it.

  He leaned back. "Maybe we should start heading back to campus."

  She made that angry cat noise again, then lobbed a chunk of peanut brittle at him. "What is wrong with you?" she exclaimed. "Because I know there's nothing wrong with me. You would be insane not to want to kiss me, and if this is some stupid playing-hard-to-get thing, you're wasting your time, because trust me, I know when a guy wants to kiss me. And you, Simon Lewis, want to kiss me. So what is happening here?"

  "I don't know," he admitted, and ridiculous as this was, it was also wholly true.

  "Is it the stupid memory thing? Are you seriously still afraid that you can't live up to some amazing forgotten version of yourself? Do you want me to tell you all the ways you weren't amazing? For one, you snored."

  "Did not."

  "Like a Drevak demon."

  "This is slander," Simon said, outraged.

  She snorted. "My point, Simon, is that you're supposed to be past all of this. I thought you figured out that no one is expecting you to be anyone other than who you are. That I just need you to be you. I only want you. This Simon. Isn't that why we're here? Because you finally got that through your thick head?"

  "I guess."

  "So what are you afraid of? It's obviously something."

  "How do you know?" he asked, curious how she could be so certain, when he still had no clue himself.

  She smiled, and it was the kind of smile you give to someone who can make you want to throttle them and kiss them all at the same time. "Because I know you."

  He thought about gathering her up in his arms, about how it would feel--and that's when he realized what he was afraid of.

  It was that feeling, the hugeness of it, like staring into the sun. Like falling into the sun.

  "Losing myself," he said.

  "What?"

  "That's what I'm afraid of. Losing myself, in this. In you. I've spent this whole year trying to find myself, to figure out who I am, and now there's you, there's us, there's this all-consuming, terrifying black hole of a feeling, and if I give into it . . . I feel like I'm standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon, you know? Like, here's something bigger, deeper than the human mind is built to fathom. And I'm just supposed to . . . jump in?"

  He waited nervously for her reaction, suspecting that girls probably didn't like it much when you admitted you were afraid of them. Girls like Izzy probably didn't like it when you admitted you were afraid of anything. Nothing scared her; she deserved someone just as brave.

  "Is that all?" Her face lit up. "Simon, don't you think I'm scared of that too? You're not the only one on that ledge. If we jump, we jump together. We fall together."

  Simon had spent so long trying to gather together the pieces of himself, to fit the puzzle back together. But the final piece, the most important piece, had been right in front of him the whole time. Losing himself to Izzy--could it be that this was the only way to really find himself?

  Could it be that this, here, was home?

  Enough bad metaphors, he told himself. Enough delaying.

  Enough being afraid.

  He stopped thinking about the person he used to be or the relationship they used to have; he stopped thinking about whether he was screwing things up or why he wanted to; he stopped thinking about demon amnesia and Shadowhunter Ascension and the Fair Folk and the Dark War and politics and homework and the unregulated traffic of deadly sharp objects.

  He stopped thinking about what could happen, and what could go wrong.

  He took her in his arms and kissed her--kissed her the way he'd been longing to kiss her since he first laid eyes on her, kissed her not like a romance novel hero or a Shadowhunter warrior or some imaginary character from the past, but like Simon Lewis kissing the girl he loved more than anything in the world. It was like falling into the sun, falling together, hearts blazing with pale fire, and Simon knew he would never stop falling, knew that now that he'd grabbed hold of her again, he would never let go.

  *

  The marriage of true minds admits no impediments--but the make-out sessions of teenagers all too often do. Especially when one of the teenagers was a student at Shadowhunter Academy, with both homework and a curfew. And when the other was a demon-fighting warrior with a stakeout in the morning.

  If Simon had had his way, he would have spent the next week, or possibly the next eternity, entangled with Izzy on the grass, listening to the lake lap against the shore, losing himself in the touch of her fingers and the taste of her lips. Instead, he spent a memorable two hours doing so, then galloped at breakneck speed back to Shadowhunter Academy and spent another hour kissing her good-bye, before letting her leap into the Portal with a promise to return as soon as she could.

  He had to wait until the next day to thank Helen Blackthorn for her help. He caught her just as she was packing up to leave.

  "I see the date went well," she said as soon as she opened the door.

  "How could you tell?"

  Helen smiled. "You're practically radioactive."

  Simon thanked her for relaying Izzy's message and handed her a small bag of cookies he'd cadged from the dining hall. They were the only thing at the Academy that actually tasted good. "Consider this a small down payment on what I owe you," he said.
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  "You don't owe me anything. But if you really want to pay me back, come to the wedding--you can be Izzy's plus one."

  "I wouldn't miss it," Simon promised. "So when's the big day?"

  "First of December," she said, but there was a quavering note in her voice. "Probably."

  "Maybe sooner?"

  "Maybe not at all," she admitted.

  "What? You and Aline aren't breaking up!" Simon caught himself, remembering that he was talking to someone he barely knew. He couldn't exactly command her to have a happy ending just because he'd suddenly fallen in love with love. "I'm sorry, it's none of my business, but . . . why would you come all this way and take all their crap if you didn't want to marry her?"

  "Oh, I want to marry her. More than anything. It's just, being back here has made me wonder if I'm being selfish."

  "How could marrying Aline be selfish?" Simon asked.

  "Look at my life!" Helen exploded, the day's--or maybe the year's--worth of pent-up fury blasting out of her. "They look at me like I'm some kind of freak show--and those are the kind ones, the ones who don't look at me like I'm the enemy. Aline is already stuck on that godforsaken island because of me. Is she supposed to suffer like that for the rest of her life? Just because she made the mistake of falling in love with me? What kind of person does that make me?"

  "You can't possibly think any of this is your fault." He didn't know her very well, but none of this sounded right to him. Not like something she would say or believe.

  "Professor Mayhew told me that if I really loved her, I would leave her," Helen admitted. "Instead of dragging her into this nightmare with me. That holding on to her is just proof I'm more faerie than I think."

  "Professor Mayhew is a troll," Simon said, and wondered what it would take to get Catarina Loss to turn him into one for real. Or maybe a toad or a lizard. Something that would more befit the reptilian nature of his soul. "If you really loved Aline, you would do everything you can to hold on to her. Which is exactly what you're doing. Besides, you're assuming that if you tried to break up with her for her own good, she'd let you. From what I've heard about Aline, that's not likely."

  "No," Helen said fondly. "She'd fight me tooth and nail."

  "Then why not fast-forward to the inevitable? Accept that you're stuck with her. The love of your life. Poor you."