Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy Read online

  Simon didn’t know what to say. I’m sorry felt so inadequate. But Julie seemed to have run out of words.

  “Why are you telling me this?” he asked gently.

  “Because I want someone to understand that it is a big deal, what they’re sending us out to do. Even if it’s just one vampire against all of us. I don’t care what Jon says. Things happen. People—” She nodded sharply, like she was dismissing not just him but everything that had passed between them. “Also, I wanted to thank you for what you did, Simon Lewis. And for your sacrifice.”

  “I really don’t remember doing anything,” Simon said. “You shouldn’t thank me. I know what happened that day, but it’s like it all happened to someone else.”

  “Maybe that’s how it seems,” Julie said. “But if you’re going to be a Shadowhunter, you have to learn to see things how they are.”

  She turned away then, and started to head for her room. He was dismissed.

  “Julie?” he called softly after her. “Is that why Jon and Beatriz are at the Academy too? Because of the people they lost in the war?”

  “You’ll have to ask them,” she said, without turning back. “We all have our own story of the Dark War. All of us lost something. Some of us lost everything.”

  The next day, their history lecturer, the warlock Catarina Loss, announced that she was handing the class over to a special guest.

  Simon’s heart stopped. The last guest lecturer to honor the students with her presence had been Isabelle Lightwood. And the “lecture” had consisted of a stern and humiliating warning that every female in a ten-mile radius should keep her grubby little hands off Simon’s hot bod.

  Fortunately, the tall, dark-haired man who strode to the front of the classroom looked unlikely to have any interest in Simon or his bod.

  “Lazlo Balogh,” he said, his tone implying that he should have needed no introduction—but that perhaps Catarina should have done him the honor of supplying one.

  “Head of the Budapest Institute,” George whispered in Simon’s ear. In spite of his self-proclaimed laziness, George had memorized the name of every Institute head—not to mention every famous Shadowhunter in history—before arriving at the Academy.

  “I have come to tell you a story,” Balogh said, eyebrows angling into a sharp, angry V. Between the pale skin, dark widow’s peak, and faint Hungarian accent, Balogh looked more like Dracula than anyone Simon had ever met.

  He suspected Balogh wouldn’t have appreciated the comparison.

  “Several of you in this classroom will soon face your first battle. I have come to inform you what is at stake.”

  “We’re not the ones who need to be worrying about stakes,” Jon said, and snickered from the back row.

  Balogh lasered a furious glare at him. “Jonathan Cartwright,” he said, his accent giving the syllables a sinister shadow. “Were I the son of your parents, I would hold my tongue in the presence of my betters.”

  Jon went sheet white. Simon could feel the hatred radiating from him, and thought that it was likely Balogh had just made an enemy for life. Possibly everyone in the classroom had, too, because Jon wasn’t the type to appreciate an audience to his humiliation.

  He opened his mouth, then shut it again in a thin, firm line. Balogh nodded, as if agreeing that, yes, it was right that he should shut up and burn with silent shame.

  Balogh cleared his throat. “My question for you, children, is this. What is the worst thing a Shadowhunter can do?”

  Marisol raised her hand. “Kill an innocent?”

  Balogh looked like he’d smelled something bad. (Which—given that the classroom had a bit of a stinkbug infestation—wasn’t entirely unlikely.) “You’re a mundane,” he said.

  She nodded fiercely. It was Simon’s favorite thing about the tough thirteen-year-old: She never once apologized for who or what she was. To the contrary, she seemed proud of it.

  “There was a time when no mundane would have been allowed in Idris,” Balogh said. He glanced at Catarina, who was hovering at the edge of the classroom. “And no Downworlders, for that matter.”

  “Things change,” Marisol said.

  “Indeed.” He scanned the classroom, which was filled with mundanes and Shadowhunters alike. “Would any of the . . . more informed students like to hazard a guess?”

  Beatriz’s hand rose slowly. “My mother always said the worst thing a Shadowhunter could do was forget her duty, that she was here to serve and protect mankind.”

  Simon caught Catarina’s lips quirking up into a half smile.

  Balogh’s turned noticeably in the other direction. Then, apparently deciding that the Socratic method wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, he answered his own question. “The worst thing any Shadowhunter can do is betray his fellows in the heat of battle,” he intoned. “The worst thing any Shadowhunter can be is a coward.”

  Simon couldn’t help but feel like Balogh was speaking directly to him—that Balogh had peered inside his head and knew exactly how reluctant Simon was to wield his weapon in battle conditions, against an actual living thing.

  Well, not exactly living, he reminded himself. He’d fought demons before, he knew that, and he didn’t think he’d lost sleep over it. But demons were just monsters. Vampires were still people; vampires had souls. Vampires, unlike the creatures in his video games, could hurt and bleed and die—and they could also fight back. In English class the year before, Simon had read The Red Badge of Courage, a tedious novel about a Civil War soldier who’d gone AWOL in the heat of battle. The book, which at the time had seemed even more irrelevant than calculus, had put him to sleep, but one line had burrowed itself into his brain: “He was a craven loon.” Eric was in the class too, and for a few weeks they’d decided to call their band the Craven Loons, before forgetting all about it. But lately Simon couldn’t drive the phrase out of his head. “Loon” as in: nuts for ever thinking he could be a warrior or a hero. “Craven” as in: Spineless. Frightened. Timid. A big fat coward.

  “The year was 1828,” Balogh declaimed. “This was before the Accords, mind you, before the Downworlders were brought into line and taught to be civilized.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Simon saw their history lecturer stiffen. It didn’t seem wise to offend a warlock, even one as seemingly unflappable as Catarina Loss, but Balogh continued unheeded.

  “Europe was in chaos. Unruly revolutionaries were fomenting discord across the continent. And in the German states, a small cabal of warlocks took advantage of the political situation to visit the most unseemly miseries upon the local population. Some of you mundanes may be familiar with this time of tragedy and havoc from the tales told by the Brothers Grimm.” At the surprised look on several students’ faces, Balogh smiled for the first time. “Yes, Wilhelm and Jacob were in the thick of it. Remember, children, all the stories are true.”

  As Simon tried to wrap his head around the idea that, somewhere in Germany, someone’s dear old grandmother might actually be a wolf in a hat, Balogh continued his story. He told the class of the small band of Shadowhunters that had been dispensed to “deal with” the warlocks. Of their journey into a dense German forest, its trees alive with dark magic, its birds and beasts enchanted to defend their territory against the forces of justice. In the dark heart of the forest, the warlocks had summoned a Greater Demon, planning to unleash its might on the people of Bavaria.

  “Why?” one of the students asked.

  “Warlocks don’t need a reason,” Balogh said, with another look at Catarina. “The summons of dark magic is always heeded by the weak and easily tempted.”

  Catarina murmured something. Simon found himself hoping it was a curse.

  “There were five Shadowhunters,” Balogh continued, “which was more than enough might to take on three warlocks. But the Greater Demon came as a surprise. Even then, right would have triumphed, were it not for the cowardice of the youngest of their party, a Shadowhunter named Tobias Herondale.”

  A murmur ri
ppled across the classroom. Every student, Shadowhunter and mundane alike, knew the name Herondale. It was Jace’s last name. It was the name of heroes.

  “Yes, yes, you’ve all heard of the Herondales,” Balogh said impatiently. “And perhaps you’ve heard good things—of William Herondale, for instance, or his son James, or Jonathan Lightwood Herondale today. But even the strongest tree can have a weak branch. Tobias’s brother and sister-in-law died noble deaths in battle before the decade was out. For some, that was enough to wipe away the stain on the name Herondale. But no amount of Herondale glory or sacrifice will make us forget what Tobias did—nor should it. Tobias was inexperienced and distracted, on the mission under duress. He had a pregnant wife at home, and labored under the delusion that this should excuse him from his duties. And when the demon launched its attack, Tobias Herondale, may his name be blackened for the rest of time, turned on his heel and ran away.” Then Balogh repeated that last, cracking his hand against the desk with each word. “Ran. Away.”

  He went on to describe, in gruesome, painful detail, what happened next: How three of the remaining Shadowhunters were slaughtered by the demon—one disemboweled, one burned alive, one doused with acidic blood that dissolved him into dust. How the fourth survived only by the intercession of the warlocks, who returned him—disfigured by demonic burns that would never fade—to his people as a warning to stay away.

  “Of course, we returned in even greater force, and repaid the warlocks tenfold for what they’d done to the villagers. But the far greater crime, that of Tobias Herondale, still called for vengeance.”

  “The greater crime? Greater than slaughtering a bunch of Shadowhunters?” Simon said before he could stop himself.

  “Demons and warlocks can’t help what they are,” Balogh said darkly. “Shadowhunters are held to a higher standard. The deaths of those three men sit squarely on the shoulders of Tobias Herondale. And he would have been punished in kind, had he ever been foolish enough to show his face again. He never did, but debts need repaying. A trial was held in absentia. He was judged guilty, and punishment was carried out.”

  “But I thought you said he never came back?” Julie said.

  “Indeed. So the punishment was carried out on his wife, in his stead.”

  “His pregnant wife?” Marisol said, looking like she was about to be sick.

  “Sed lex, dura lex,” Balogh said. The Latin phrase had been hammered into them from the first day at the Academy, and Simon was coming to hate the sound of it—so often was it used as an excuse for acting like monsters. Balogh steepled his fingers and contemplated the classroom, watching in satisfaction as his message came clear. This was how the Clave treated cowardice on the battlefield; this was justice under the Covenant. “The Law is hard,” Balogh translated for the hushed students. “But it is the Law.”

  “Choose wisely,” Scarsbury warned, watching the students sift through the many pointy options the weapons room had to offer.

  “How are we supposed to choose wisely when you won’t even tell us what we’re going up against?” Jon complained.

  “You know it’s a vampire,” Scarsbury said. “You’ll learn more when you arrive on site.”

  Simon slung a bow over his shoulders and selected a dagger for melee fighting; it seemed the weapon he was least likely to accidentally stab himself with. As the Shadowhunter students Marked themselves with runes of strength and agility and tucked witchlights into their pockets, Simon hooked a slim flashlight to one side of his belt and a portable flamethrower to the other. He touched the Star of David hanging on the same chain as Jordan’s pendant around his neck—it wouldn’t help much unless this vampire happened to be Jewish, but it made him feel just a little better. Like someone was looking out for him.

  There was an electric charge of anticipation in the air that reminded Simon of being a little kid, preparing to go on a field trip. Of course, a visit to the Bronx Zoo or the sewage treatment center carried with it less chance of disembowelment, and instead of lining up to board a school bus, the students assembled themselves in front of a magical Portal that would transdimensionally carry them thousands of miles in the blink of an eye.

  “You ready for this?” George asked him, grinning. Decked out in full gear with a longsword slung over his shoulder, Simon’s roommate looked every inch the warrior.

  For a brief moment, Simon imagined himself saying no. Raising his hand, asking to be excused. Admitting that he didn’t know what he was doing here, that every fighting tactic he’d been taught had evaporated from his mind, that he would like to pack up his suitcase, Portal home, and pretend none of this had ever happened.

  “As I’ll ever be,” he said—and stepped through the Portal.

  From what Simon remembered, traveling by school bus was a filthy, undignified experience, rife with foul smells, spitballs, and the occasional embarrassing bout of motion sickness.

  Traveling by Portal was significantly worse.

  Once he’d regained his balance and his breath, Simon looked around—and gasped. No one had mentioned where they were Portaling to, but Simon recognized the block immediately. He was back in New York City—and not just New York but Brooklyn. Gowanus, to be specific, a thin stretch of industrial parks and warehouses lining a toxic canal that was less than a ten-minute walk from his mother’s apartment.

  He was home.

  It was exactly as he’d remembered it—and yet, wholly different. Or maybe it was just that he was wholly different, that after only two months in Idris, he’d forgotten the sounds and smells of modernity: the low, steady hum of electricity and the thick haze of car exhaust, the honking trucks and pigeon crap and piles of garbage that had for sixteen years formed the fabric of his daily life.

  On the other hand, maybe it was because now that he could see through glamours, he could see the mermaids swimming in the Gowanus.

  It was home and not home all at the same time, and Simon felt the same disorientation he had after his summer in the mountains at Camp Ramah, when he’d found himself unable to fall asleep without the sound of cicadas and Jake Grossberg’s snoring in the upper bunk. Maybe, he thought, you couldn’t know how much going away had changed you until you tried to go home.

  “Listen up, men!” Scarsbury shouted, as the final student came through the Portal. They were assembled in front of an abandoned factory, its walls streaked with graffiti and its windows boarded up tight.

  Marisol cleared her throat, loudly, and Scarsbury sighed. “Listen up, men and women. Inside this building is a vampire who’s broken the Covenant and killed several mundanes. Your mission is to track her down, and execute her. And I suggest you do so before sunset.”

  “Shouldn’t the vampires be allowed to deal with this themselves?” Simon asked. The Codex had made it pretty clear that Downworlders were trusted to police themselves. Simon wondered whether that involved giving alleged rogue vampires a trial before they were executed.

  How did I get here? he wondered—he didn’t even believe in the death penalty.

  “Not that it’s any of your concern,” Scarsbury said, “but her clan has handed her over to us, so that you children can get a little blood on your hands. Think of it as a gift, from the vampires to you.”

  Except “it” wasn’t an it at all, Simon thought.

  “Sed lex, dura lex,” George murmured beside him, with an uneasy look, as if he was trying to convince himself.

  “There’s twenty of you and one of her,” Scarsbury said, “and in case even those odds are too much for you, experienced Shadowhunters will be watching, ready to step in when you screw up. You won’t see them, but they’ll see you, and ensure that you come to no harm. Probably. And if any of you are tempted to turn tail and run, remember what you’ve learned. Cowardice has its price.”

  When they were standing on the curb in the bright sunlight, the mission had sounded more than a little unsporting. Twenty Shadowhunters in training, all of them armed to the gills; one captured vampire, trapped in the
building by steel walls and sunshine.

  But inside the old factory, in the dark, imagining the flicker of motion and the glimmer of fangs behind every shadow, was a different story. The game no longer felt rigged in their favor—it no longer felt like much of a game at all.

  The students split up into pairs, prowling through the darkness. Simon volunteered to guard one of the exits, hoping very much that this would prove similar to those gym class soccer games, where he’d spent hours guarding the goal and only a handful of times had to fend off a well-aimed kick.

  Of course, each of those times, the ball had sailed over his head and into the net, losing the game for his team. But he tried not to think about that.

  Jon Cartwright was stationed at the door beside him, a witchlight stone glowing in his hand. Time passed; they did their best to ignore each other.

  “Too bad you can’t use one of these,” Jon said finally, holding up the stone. “Or one of these.” He tapped the seraph blade hanging from his belt. The students hadn’t been taught how to fight with them yet, but several of the Shadowhunter kids had brought their own weapons from home. “Don’t worry, hero. If the vamp shows up, I’m here to protect you.”

  “Great, I can hide behind your massive ego.”

  Jon wheeled on him. “You want to watch yourself, mundane. If you’re not careful, you’ll . . .” Jon’s voice trailed off. He backed up until he was pressed against the wall.

  “I’ll what?” Simon prompted him.

  Jon made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a whimper. His hand floundered at his belt, fingers stretching for the seraph blade but coming nowhere near it. His eyes were riveted on a spot just over Simon’s shoulder. “Do something!” he squeaked. “She’s going to get us!”