Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy Read online

  George raised his hand. “Uh, sir, some of us here are still”—he swallowed, and, not for the first time, Simon wondered whether he regretted admitting the truth about himself; the Academy was a much easier place to be when you were on the elite Shadowhunter track, and not just because the elites didn’t have to sleep in the dungeon—“mundanes.”

  “I noticed that myself, Lovelace,” Scarsbury said dryly. “Imagine my surprise when I discovered some of you dregs are worth something after all.”

  “No, I mean . . .” George hesitated, substantially more easily intimidated than any six-foot-five Scottish sex god (Beatriz Velez Mendoza’s description, according to her bigmouthed best friend) had a right to be. Finally, he squared his shoulders and plowed forward. “I mean we’re mundanes. We can’t be Marked, we can’t use seraph blades or witchlight or anything, we don’t have, like, superspeed and angelic reflexes. Going after a Downworlder when we’ve only had a couple months of training . . . isn’t that dangerous?”

  A vein in Scarsbury’s neck began to throb alarmingly, and his good eye bulged so far out of his head Simon feared it might pop. (Which, he thought, could finally explain the mysterious eye patch.) “Dangerous? Dangerous?” he boomed. “Anyone else here afraid of a little danger?”

  If they were, they were even more afraid of Scarsbury, and so kept their mouths shut. He let the silence hang, thick and angry, for an agonizing minute. Then he scowled at George. “If you’re afraid of dangerous situations, boy, you’re in the wrong place. And as for the rest of you dregs, best you find out now whether you’ve got what it takes. If you don’t, then drinking from the Mortal Cup will kill you, and trust me, mundies, getting bled dry by a bloodsucker would be a much kinder way to go.” He’d fixed his gaze on Simon, maybe because Simon had once been a bloodsucker, or maybe because he now seemed the most likely to get drained by one.

  It occurred to Simon that Scarsbury could be hoping for that outcome—that he’d selected Simon for this mission in hopes of getting rid of his biggest problem student. Though surely no Shadowhunter, even a Shadowhunting gym teacher, would stoop so low?

  Something in Simon, some ghost of a memory, warned him not to be so sure.

  “Is that understood?” Scarsbury said. “Is there anyone here who wants to go running to mommy and daddy crying ‘please save me from the big, bad vampire’?”

  Dead silence.

  “Excellent,” Scarsbury said. “You have two days to train. Then just keep reminding yourself how impressed all your little friends will be when you come back.” He chuckled. “If you come back.”

  The student lounge was dark and musty, lit by flickering candlelight and watched over by the glowering visages of Shadowhunters past, Herondales and Lightwoods and even the occasional Morgenstern peering down from heavy gilt frames, their bloody triumphs preserved in fading oil paint. But it had several obvious advantages over Simon’s bedroom: It wasn’t in the dungeon, it wasn’t splattered with black slime, it didn’t carry the faint whiff of what might have been moldy socks but might have been the bodies of former students decaying under the floorboards, it didn’t have what sounded like a large and boisterous family of rats scrabbling behind the walls. But the one notable advantage of his room, Simon was reminded that night, while camped out in a corner playing cards with George, was the guarantee that Jon Cartwright and his Shadowhunter-track groupies would never, ever deign to cross the threshold.

  “No sevens,” George said, as Jon, Beatriz, and Julie swept into the lounge. “Go fish.”

  As Jon and the two girls approached, Simon suddenly got very interested in the card game. Or, at least, he did his best. At a normal boarding school, there’d be a TV in the lounge, instead of a gigantic portrait of Jonathan Shadowhunter, his eyes blazing as bright as his sword. There’d be music leaking out of the dorm rooms and mingling in the corridor, some of it good, some of it Phish; there’d be e-mail and texting and Internet porn. At the Academy, after-hours options were more limited: There was studying the Codex, and there was sleep. Playing cards was about as close as he could get to gaming, and when he went too long without gaming, Simon got a little itchy. It turned out that when you spent all day training to defeat actual, real-world monsters, Dungeons & Dragons questing lost a bit of its luster—or at least, so claimed George and every other student Simon had tried to recruit for a campaign—which left him with old half-forgotten summer camp standards: Hearts, Egyptian Ratscrew, and, of course, Go Fish. Simon stifled a yawn.

  Jon, Beatriz, and Julie stood beside them, waiting to be acknowledged. Simon hoped if he waited long enough, they’d just go away. Beatriz wasn’t so bad, at least not on her own. But Julie could have been carved out of ice. She had suspiciously few physical flaws—the silky blond hair of a Barbie doll, the porcelain skin of a cosmetics model, better curves than any of the bikini-girl posters papering Eric’s garage—and wore the hawkish expression of someone on a search-and-destroy mission for any weakness whatsoever. All that, and she carried a sword.

  Jon, of course, was Jon.

  Shadowhunters didn’t practice magic—that was a fundamental tenet of their beliefs—so it was unlikely that the Academy would teach Simon a way to make Jon Cartwright vanish into another dimension. But a guy could dream.

  They didn’t go away. Finally, George, congenitally incapable of being rude, set down his cards.

  “Can we help you?” George asked, a sliver of ice cooling his Scottish brogue. Jon’s and Julie’s friendliness had melted away once they learned the truth about George’s mundane blood, and though George never said anything about it, he clearly had neither forgiven nor forgotten.

  “Actually, yes,” Julie said. She nodded at Simon. “Well, you can.”

  Finding out about the imminent vampire-killing mission hadn’t exactly tied a bright yellow ribbon around Simon’s day; he wasn’t in the mood. “What do you want?”

  Julie looked awkwardly at Beatriz, who stared down at her feet. “You ask,” Beatriz murmured.

  “Better if you do,” Julie shot back.

  Jon rolled his eyes. “Oh, by the Angel! I’ll do it.” He pulled himself up to his full, impressive height, rested his hands on his hips, and peered down his regal nose at Simon. It had the look of a pose practiced in the mirror. “We want you to tell us about vampires.”

  Simon grinned. “What do you want to know? Scariest is Eli in Let the Right One In, cheesiest is late-era Lestat, most underrated is David Bowie in The Hunger. Sexiest is definitely Drusilla, though if you ask a girl, she’ll probably say Damon Salvatore or Edward Cullen. But . . .” He shrugged. “You know girls.”

  Julie’s and Beatriz’s eyes were wide. “I didn’t think you’d know so many!” Beatriz exclaimed. “Are they . . . are they your friends?”

  “Oh, sure, Count Dracula and I are like this,” Simon said, crossing his fingers to demonstrate. “Also Count Chocula. Oh, and my BFF Count Blintzula. He’s a real charmer. . . .” He trailed off as he realized no one else was laughing. In fact, no one seemed to realize he was joking. “They’re from TV,” he prompted them. “Or, uh, cereal.”

  “What’s he talking about?” Julie asked Jon, perfect nose wrinkling up in confusion.

  “Who cares?” Jon said. “I told you this was a waste of time. Like he cares about anyone but himself?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Simon asked, starting to get irritated.

  George cleared his throat, visibly uncomfortable. “Come on, if he doesn’t want to talk about it, that’s his business.”

  “Not when it’s our lives at stake.” Julie was blinking hard, like she had something in her eye or—Simon caught his breath. Was she blinking back tears?

  “What’s going on?” he asked, feeling more clueless than usual, which was saying a lot.

  Beatriz sighed and gave Simon a shy smile. “We’re not asking you for anything personal or, you know, painful. We just want you to tell us what you know about vampires from, um . . .”

  “From bein
g a bloodsucker,” Jon filled in for her. “Which, as you may recall, you were.”

  “But I don’t recall,” Simon pointed out. “Or have you not been paying attention?”

  “That’s what you say,” Beatriz argued, “but . . .”

  “But you think I’m lying?” Simon asked, incredulous. The black hole at the center of his memories was such a central fact of his existence, it had never even occurred to him someone might question it. What would be the point of lying about that—and what kind of person would do so? “You all think that? Really?”

  One by one, they began to nod . . . even George, though at least he had the grace to look sheepish.

  “Why would I pretend not to remember?” Simon asked.

  “Why would they let someone like you in here, if you really didn’t have a clue?” Jon retorted. “It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  “Well, I guess it’s a mad, mad, mad world,” Simon snapped. “Because what you see is what you get.”

  “A whole lot of nothing, then,” Jon said.

  Julie elbowed him, sounding uncharacteristically angry—usually she was happy to go along with whatever Jon said. “You said you’d be nice.”

  “What’s the point? Either he doesn’t know anything or he doesn’t want to tell us. And who cares, anyway? It’s just one Downworlder. What’s the worst that could happen?”

  “You really don’t know, do you?” Julie said. “Have you ever even been in battle? Have you ever seen anyone get hurt? Die?”

  “I’m a Shadowhunter, aren’t I?” Jon said, though Simon noticed that wasn’t much of an answer.

  “You weren’t in Alicante for the war,” Julie said darkly. “You don’t know how it was. You didn’t lose anything.”

  Jon reared on her. “Don’t you tell me what I’ve lost. I don’t know about you, but I’m here to learn how to fight, so that next time—”

  “Don’t say that, Jon,” Beatriz pleaded. “There won’t be a next time. There can’t be.”

  Jon shrugged. “There’s always a next time.” He sounded almost hopeful about it, and Simon understood that Julie was probably right. Jon talked like someone who’d been kept very far away from death of any kind.

  “I’ve seen dead sheep,” George said brightly, clearly trying to lighten the mood. “That’s about it.”

  Beatriz frowned. “I don’t really want to have to fight a vampire. Maybe if it were a faerie . . .”

  “You don’t know anything about faeries,” Julie snapped.

  “I know I wouldn’t mind killing a couple of them,” Beatriz said.

  Julie deflated abruptly as if someone had pricked her and let all the air out. “Me neither. If it were that easy . . .”

  Simon didn’t know much about Shadowhunter-Downworlder relations, but he’d figured out pretty quickly that faeries were public enemy number one in Shadowhunterland these days. The actual enemy number one, Sebastian Morgenstern, who’d started the Dark War and Turned a bunch of Shadowhunters into evil Sebastian-worshipping zombies, was long dead. Which left his secret allies, the Fair Folk, to bear his consequences. Even Shadowhunters like Beatriz, who seemed to honestly believe that werewolves were like anyone else, if a little hairier, and had a bit of a fangirl crush on the infamous warlock Magnus Bane, talked about the faeries like they were a roach infestation and the Cold Peace like it was merely a pit stop to extermination.

  “You were right this morning, George,” Julie said. “They shouldn’t be sending us out like this, not any of us. We’re not ready.”

  Jon snorted. “Speak for yourself.”

  As they bickered among themselves about exactly how hard it would be to kill one vampire, Simon stood up. Bad enough that they all thought he was a liar—even worse that, in a way, he sort of was. He couldn’t remember anything about being a vampire—nothing useful, at least—but he remembered enough to be extremely uncomfortable with the idea of killing one.

  Or maybe it was just the idea of killing anything. Simon was a vegetarian, and the only violence he’d ever committed was on-screen, blowing up pixelated dragons and sea slugs.

  That’s not true, a voice in his head reminded him. There’s plenty of blood on your hands. Simon shrugged it off. Not remembering something might not mean it never happened, but sometimes pretending that made things easier.

  George grabbed his arm before he could leave. “I’m sorry about—you know,” he told Simon. “I should have believed you.”

  “Yeah. You should have.” Simon sighed, then assured his roommate there were no hard feelings, which was mostly true. He was halfway down the shadowed corridor when he heard footsteps chasing after him.

  “Simon!” Julie cried. “Wait a second.”

  In the last few months, Simon had discovered the existence of magic and demons, he’d learned that his memories of the past were as flimsy and fake as his sister’s old paper dolls, and he’d given up everything he’d ever known to move to a magically invisible country and study demon-hunting. And still, nothing surprised him quite as much as the ever-increasing list of hot girls who urgently wanted something from him. It wasn’t nearly as much fun as it should have been.

  Simon stopped to let Julie catch up. She was a few inches taller and had the kind of gold-flecked hazel eyes that changed in every light. Here in the dim corridor, they flashed amber in the candelabra’s glow. She moved with an easy grace, like a ballet dancer, if ballet dancers habitually sliced people to ribbons with a silver runed dagger. In other words, she moved like a Shadowhunter, and from what Simon had seen of her on the training field, she was going to be a very good one.

  And like any good Shadowhunter, she had no inclination to bond with mundanes, much less mundanes who used to be Downworlders—even mundanes who, in a life they could no longer remember, had saved the world. But ever since Isabelle Lightwood had descended on the Academy to stake her claim on Simon, Julie had looked at him with special fascination. Less like someone she wanted to throw into bed and more like someone she wanted to examine under a microscope as she plucked off his limbs, excavated his interior, and sought some glimmer of what might possibly attract a girl like Isabelle Lightwood.

  Simon didn’t mind letting her look. He liked the sharp curiosity in her gaze, the lack of expectation. Isabelle, Clary, Maia, all those girls back in New York, they claimed to know and love him, and he believed them—but he also knew they didn’t love him, they loved some bizarro-world version of him, some Simon-shaped doppelgänger, and when they looked at Simon, all they saw, all they wanted to see, was that other guy. Julie may have hated him—okay, clearly hated him—but she also saw him.

  “It’s really true?” she asked him now. “You don’t remember any of it? Being a vampire? The demon dimension? The Dark War? None of it?”

  Simon sighed. “I’m tired, Julie. Can we just pretend that you asked me that a million more times and I gave you the same answer, and call it a day?”

  She brushed at her eye, and Simon wondered again whether it was possible that Julie Beauvale had actual human feelings and, for whatever reason, was blinking back actual human tears. It was too dark in the corridor to see anything but the smooth lines of her face, the glint of gold where her necklace disappeared into her cleavage.

  Simon pressed a hand to his collarbone, suddenly remembering the weight of a stone, the flash of a ruby, the steady pulse so like a heartbeat, the look on her face when she’d given it to him for safekeeping, said good-bye, shards of confused memory impossible to piece together, but even as he asked himself whose face, whose frightened farewell, his mind offered up the answer.

  Isabelle.

  It was always Isabelle.

  “I believe you,” Julie said. “I don’t get it, but I believe you. I guess I was just hoping . . .”

  “What?” There was an unfamiliar note in her voice, something gentle and uncertain, and she looked almost as surprised as he did to hear it.

  “I thought you, of all people, might understand,” Julie said. “Wha
t it’s like, to fight for your life. To fight Downworlders. To think you’re going to die. To”—her voice didn’t waver and her expression didn’t change, but Simon could almost feel her blood turn to ice as she forced the words out—“see other people fall.”

  “I’m sorry,” Simon said. “I mean, I know about what happened, but . . .”

  “But it’s not the same as being there,” Julie said.

  Simon nodded, thinking about the hours he’d spent sitting beside his father’s bed, long after the heart monitor had flatlined, knowing he’d never wake up. He’d thought: Okay, I know how this goes. He’d seen plenty of movies where the hero’s father dies; he’d pictured the look on Luke Skywalker’s face, returning to find his aunt’s and uncle’s bodies smoldering in the Tatooine ruins, and thought he understood grief. “There are some things you can’t understand unless you’ve been through them yourself.”

  “Did you ever wonder why I was here?” Julie asked him. “Training at the Academy, rather than in Alicante or some Institute somewhere?”

  “Actually . . . no,” Simon admitted, but maybe he should have. The Academy had been shut down for decades, and he knew in that time, Shadowhunter families had gotten used to training their children themselves. He also knew that most of them, in the wake of the Dark War, were still doing so, not wanting to let their loved ones too far out of their sight.

  She looked away from him then, and her fingers knit together, needing something to hold on to. “I’m going to tell you something now, Simon, and you won’t repeat it.”

  It wasn’t a question.

  “My mother was one of the first Shadowhunters to be Turned,” she said, her voice deadened. “So she’s gone now. After, we evacuated to Alicante, just like everyone else. And when they attacked Alicante . . . they locked all the children up in the Accords Hall. They thought we’d be safe there. But there wasn’t anywhere safe that day. The faeries got in, and the Endarkened—they would have killed us all, Simon, if it weren’t for you and your friends. My sister, Elizabeth. She was one of the last to die. I saw him, this faerie with silver hair, and he was so beautiful, Simon, like liquid mercury, that’s what I was thinking when he brought down his sword. That he was beautiful.” She shook herself all over. “Anyway. My father’s useless now. So that’s why I’m here. To learn to fight. So next time . . .”