Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy Read online

  Simon had seen enough horror movies to get the picture. And the picture was enough to make him want to bolt for the door, slip through it into the daylight, and keep running until he was back home, doors locked, safely under the bed, where he’d once hidden from imaginary monsters.

  Instead, slowly, he turned around.

  The girl who melted out of the shadows looked to be about his age. Her brown hair was pulled back into a high ponytail, her glasses were dark pink and horn-rimmed vintage, and her T-shirt featured a bloody, crimson-shirted Star Trek officer and read, LIVE FAST, DIE RED. She was, in other words, exactly Simon’s type—except for the fangs glinting in his flashlight beam and the inhuman speed with which she streaked across the room and kicked Jon Cartwright in the head. He crumpled to the ground.

  “And then there were two,” the girl said, and smirked.

  It had never occurred to Simon that the vampire would be his age, or at least look it.

  “You want to be careful with that thing, Daylighter,” she said. “I hear you’re alive again. Presumably you want to keep it that way.”

  Simon looked down to realize he had taken the dagger into his hand.

  “You going to let me out of here, or what?” she asked.

  “You can’t go out there.”

  “No?”

  “Sunshine, remember? Makes vampires go poof?” Simon couldn’t believe his voice wasn’t shaking. Honestly, he couldn’t believe he hadn’t peed his pants. He was alone with a vampire. A cute, girl vampire . . . that he was supposed to kill. Somehow.

  “Check your watch, Daylighter.”

  “I don’t wear a watch,” Simon said. “And I’m not a Daylighter anymore.”

  She stepped closer to him, close enough to stroke his face. Her finger was cold, her skin as smooth as marble. “Is it true you don’t remember?” she said, peering curiously at him. “You don’t even remember me?”

  “Did I . . . do I know you?”

  She brushed her fingertips across her lips. “The question is, how well did you know me, Daylighter? I’ll never tell.”

  Clary and the others had said nothing about Simon having vampire friends, or . . . more-than-friends. Maybe they’d wanted to spare him the details of that part of his life, the part where he’d thirsted for blood and walked in the shadows. Maybe he’d been so embarrassed that he’d never told them.

  Or maybe she was lying.

  Simon hated this, the not knowing. It made him feel like he was walking on quicksand, every unanswered question, every new discovery about his past sucking him farther down into the muck.

  “Let me go, Daylighter,” she whispered. “You would never have hurt one of your own.”

  He’d read in the Codex that vampires had the ability to mesmerize; he knew he should be guarding himself against it. But her gaze was magnetic. He couldn’t look away.

  “I can’t do that,” he said. “You broke the Law. You killed someone. Many someones.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because . . .” He stopped, realizing how feeble it would sound: because someone told me so.

  She guessed at the answer anyway. “You always do what you’re told, Daylighter? You never think for yourself?”

  Simon’s hand tightened on the dagger. He’d been so worried about discovering he was a coward, too frightened to fight. But now that he was here, facing the supposed monster, he wasn’t afraid—he was reluctant.

  Sed lex, dura lex.

  Except maybe it wasn’t so simple; maybe she’d just made a mistake, or someone else had, maybe he’d gotten the wrong information. Maybe she was a cold-blooded killer—but even so, who was he to punish her?

  She angled past him toward the door. Without thinking, Simon moved to block her. His dagger swung up, slicing a dangerous arc through the air and whistling past her ear. She danced backward, laughing as she lunged for him, fingers curled like claws. Simon felt it then, for the first time, the adrenaline surge he’d been promised, the clarity of battle. He stopped thinking in terms of techniques and moves, stopped thinking at all, and simply acted, blocking and ducking her attack, aiming a kick at her ankles to sweep her legs out from under her, slashing the dagger across pale skin, drawing blood, and as his mind kicked into gear again, a step behind his body, he thought, I’m doing it. I’m fighting. I’m winning.

  Until she wrapped a hand around his wrist in an iron grip, flipped him over onto his back as if he were a small child, and straddled him. She’d been playing with him, he realized. Pretending to fight, until she got bored.

  She lowered her face toward his, close enough that he would have felt her breath—if she’d been breathing.

  He remembered, suddenly, how cold he had been, when he was dead. He remembered the stillness in his chest, where his heart no longer beat.

  “I could give it all back to you, Daylighter,” she whispered. “Eternal life.”

  He remembered the hunger, and the taste of blood.

  “That wasn’t life,” he said.

  “It wasn’t death, either.” Her lips were cold on his neck. Everything about her was cold. “I could kill you now, Daylighter. But I’m not going to. I’m not a monster. No matter what they told you.”

  “I told you, I’m not a Daylighter anymore.” Simon didn’t know why he was arguing with her, especially now, but it seemed important to say it out loud, that he was alive, that he was human, that his heart beat again. Especially now.

  “You were a Downworlder once,” she said, rising over him. “That will always be a part of you. Even if you forget, they never will.”

  Simon was about to argue, again, when a shining whip lashed out of the shadows and wrapped around the girl’s neck. It yanked her off her feet and she landed hard, head cracking against the cement floor.

  “Isabelle?” Simon said in confusion, as Isabelle Lightwood charged at the vampire, blade gleaming.

  He’d never before realized what a horrible crime against nature it was that he had lost his memories of Isabelle in action. It was clear that it was her natural state. Isabelle standing still was beautiful; Isabelle leaping through the air, carving death into cold flesh, was unworldly, burning as brightly as her golden whip. She was like a goddess, Simon thought, and then silently corrected himself—she was like an avenging angel, her vengeance swift and deadly. Before he could lever himself off the ground, the vampire girl’s throat was split wide open, her undead eyes rolling back in her head, and like that, it was over. She was dust; she was gone.

  “You’re welcome.” Isabelle extended her hand.

  Simon ignored it, rising to his feet without her help. “Why did you do that?”

  “Um, because she was about to kill you?”

  “No, she wasn’t,” he said coldly.

  Isabelle gaped at him. “You’re not seriously mad at me? For saving your ass?”

  It wasn’t until she asked that he realized he was. Angry at her for killing the vampire girl, angry at her for assuming he needed his ass saved and being pretty much right, angry at her for hiding in the dark, waiting to save him, even though he’d made it painfully clear that there couldn’t be anything between them anymore. Angry that she was a supernaturally sexy, raven-haired warrior goddess and apparently against all odds still in love with him—and he was apparently going to have to break up with her, again.

  “She didn’t want to hurt me. She just wanted to go.”

  “And what? I should have let her? Is that what you were planning to do? There are more people in the world than you, Simon. She killed children. She ripped out their throats.”

  He couldn’t answer. He didn’t know what to feel or think. The vampire girl had been a murderer. A cold-blooded murderer, in every sense of the word. But he’d felt a kinship with her as she’d embraced him, a sort of whispering in the back of his mind that said we are lost children together.

  He wasn’t sure there was a place in Isabelle’s life for someone lost.

  “Simon?” Isabelle was like a tightly
coiled spring. He could see how much effort it was taking her just to keep her voice steady, her face free of emotion.

  How can I know that? Simon wondered. Looking at her was like seeing double: one Isabelle a stranger he barely knew, one Isabelle the girl that other, better Simon loved so much he would have sacrificed everything for her. There was a part of him—a part beneath memories, beyond rationality—desperate to close the space between them, to take her in his arms, smooth back her hair, lose himself in her bottomless eyes, her lips, her fierce, protective, overwhelming love.

  “You can’t keep doing this!” he shouted, unsure whether he was yelling at her or himself. “It’s not your job to choose for me anymore, to decide what I should do or how I should live. Who I should be. How many times do I have to tell you before you hear me? I’m not him. I will never be him, Isabelle. He belonged to you, I get that. But I don’t. I know you Shadowhunters are used to having everything your way—you set the rules, you know what’s best for the rest of us. But not this time, okay? Not with me.”

  With deliberate calm, Isabelle coiled her whip around her wrist. “Simon, I think you’ve mistaken me for someone who cares.”

  It wasn’t the emotion in her voice that cracked his heart, but the lack of it. Behind the words was nothing: no pain, no suppressed anger, only a void. Hollow and cold.

  “Isabelle—”

  “I didn’t come here for you, Simon. This is my job. I thought you wanted it to be your job too. If you still feel that way, I’d suggest you reconsider some things. Like how you speak to your superiors.”

  “My . . . superiors?”

  “And for the record, since you brought it up? You’re right, Simon. I don’t know this version of you at all. And I’m pretty sure I don’t want to.” She stepped past Simon, her shoulder brushing against his for the briefest of moments, then slipped out of the building.

  Simon stared after her, wondering if he should follow, but he couldn’t seem to make his feet move. At the sound of the door slamming shut, Jon Cartwright blinked his eyes open and woozily eased himself upright. “We got her?” he asked Simon, catching sight of the small pile of dust where the vampire girl had been.

  “Yeah,” he said wearily. “You could say that.”

  “Oh yeah, that’s right, bloodsucker!” Jon pumped his fist in the air, then made devil fingers. “You mess with a Cartwright bull—you get the horns.”

  “I’m not saying she didn’t break the Law,” Simon explained, for what seemed like the hundredth time. “I’m just saying, even if she did, why did we have to kill her? I mean—what about, I don’t know, jail?”

  By the time they’d Portaled back to the Academy, dinner was long over. But as a reward for their labors, Dean Penhallow had opened up the dining hall and the kitchen for the twenty returning students. They huddled around a couple of the long tables, gnawing hungrily at stale egg rolls and mercifully flavorless shawarma. The Academy had returned to its traditional policy of serving international food—but unfortunately, all of these foods were prepared by a single chef, who Simon suspected was a warlock, because nearly everything they ate seemed enchanted to taste like dog food.

  “Because that’s what we do,” Jon said. “A vampire—any Downworlder—violates the Covenant, someone has to kill it. Have you not been paying attention?”

  “So why isn’t there a Downworlder jail?” Simon said. “Why aren’t there Downworlder trials?”

  “That’s not how it works, Simon,” Julie said. He’d thought she might be friendlier after their conversation in the corridor the other night, but if anything, her edges had gotten sharper, more liable to draw blood. “This isn’t your stupid mundane law. This is the Law. Handed down from the Angel. Higher than everything else.”

  Jon nodded proudly. “Sed lex, dura lex.”

  “Even if it’s wrong?” Simon asked.

  “How could it be wrong, if it’s the Law? That’s an oxymoron.”

  Takes one to know one, he thought childishly, but stopped himself before saying it out loud. Anyway, Jon was more of your garden-variety moron.

  “You realize you all sound like you’re in some kind of cult,” Simon complained. He touched the star that was still hanging at his neck. His family had never been particularly religious, but his father had always loved helping him try to figure out the Jewish perspective on questions of right and wrong. “There’s always a little wiggle room,” he’d told Simon, “a little space to figure these things out yourself.” He’d taught Simon to ask questions, to challenge authority, to understand and believe in rules before he followed them. There was a noble Jewish heritage of arguing, his father liked to say, even when it came to arguing with God.

  Simon wondered now what his father would think of him, at this school for fundamentalists, swearing fealty to a higher Law. What did it even mean to be Jewish in a universe where angels and demons walked the earth, practiced miracles, carried swords? Was thinking for yourself an activity better suited to a world without any evidence of the divine?

  “The Law is hard, but it’s the Law,” Simon added in disgust. “So freaking what? If the Law is wrong, why not change it? Do you know what the world would look like if we were all still following the laws made up back in the Dark Ages?”

  “You know who else used to talk like that?” Jon asked ominously.

  “Let me guess: Valentine.” Simon scowled. “Because apparently in all of Shadowhunter history only one guy has bothered to ask any questions. Yeah, that’s me, charismatic, evil supervillain about to lead a revolution. Better report me.”

  George shook his head warningly. “Simon, I don’t think—”

  “If you hate it so much, why are you even here?” Beatriz cut in, an uncharacteristically hostile note in her voice. “You get to pick the life you want to live.” She stopped abruptly, leaving something unspoken hanging in the silence. Something, Simon suspected, like: Unlike the rest of us.

  “Good question.” Simon set down his fork and pushed his chair back.

  “Come on, you didn’t even finish your . . .” George waved toward the plate, as if he couldn’t bring himself to actually describe it as food.

  “I just lost my appetite.”

  Simon was halfway to the dungeons when Catarina Loss stopped him in the hallway.

  “Simon Lewis,” she said. “We need to talk.”

  “Can we do it in the morning, Ms. Loss?” he asked. “It’s been a long day, and—”

  She shook her head. “I know about your day, Simon Lewis. We talk now.”

  The sky was bright with stars. Catarina’s blue skin glowed in the moonlight, and her hair burned silver. The warlock had insisted that they both needed some fresh air, and Simon had to admit she was right. He felt better already, just breathing in the grass and trees and sky. Idris had seasons, but so far, at least, they weren’t like the seasons he was used to. Or rather, they were like the best possible versions of themselves: each fall day crisp and bright, the air rich with the promise of bonfires and apple orchards, the approach of winter marked by only a startlingly clear sky and a new sharp bite to the air that was almost pleasurable in its icy pain.

  “I heard what you said at dinner, Simon,” Catarina said as they strolled across the grounds.

  He looked at his teacher with surprise and a bit of alarm. “How could you?”

  “I’m a warlock,” she reminded him. “I can a lot of things.”

  Right. Magic school, he thought in despair, wondering if he’d ever have any privacy again.

  “I want to tell you a story, Simon,” she said. “It’s something I’ve told a very few, trusted people, and I hope that you’ll choose to keep it to yourself.”

  It seemed like a strange thing for her to risk on a student she barely knew—but then, she was a warlock. Simon had no idea what they were capable of, but he was getting better at imagining. If he broke her confidence, she’d probably know it.

  And act accordingly.

  “You were listening in class to
the story of Tobias Herondale?”

  “I always listen in class,” Simon said, and she laughed.

  “You’re very good at evasive answers, Daylighter. You’d make a good faerie.”

  “I’m guessing that’s not a compliment.”

  Catarina offered him a mysterious smile. “I’m no Shadowhunter,” she reminded him. “My opinions on faeries are my own.”

  “Why do you still call me Daylighter?” Simon asked. “You know that’s not what I am anymore.”

  “We are all what our pasts have made us,” Catarina said. “The accumulation of thousands of daily choices. We can change ourselves, but never erase what we’ve been.” She held up a finger to silence him, as if she knew he was about to argue. “Forgetting those choices doesn’t unmake them, Daylighter. You’d do well to remember that.”

  “Is that what you wanted to tell me?” he asked, his irritation more visible than he’d intended. Why did everyone in his life feel the need to tell him who he was, or who he should be?

  “You’re impatient with me,” Catarina observed. “Fortunately, I don’t care. I’m going to tell you another story of Tobias Herondale now. Listen or not—that’s your decision.”

  He listened.

  “I knew Tobias, knew his mother before he was born, watched him as a child struggling to fit into his family, find his place. The Herondales are a rather infamous line, as you probably know. Many of them heroes, some of them traitors, so many of them brash, wild creatures consumed by their passions, whether it be love or hate. Tobias was . . . different. He was mild, sweet, the kind of boy who did as he was told. His older brother, William—now, there was a Shadowhunter fit to be a Herondale, just as brave and twice as headstrong as the grandson who later bore his name. But not Tobias. He had no special talent for Shadowhunting, and not much love for it either. His father was a hard man, his mother a bit of a hysteric, though few could blame her with a husband like that. A bolder boy might have turned from his family and its traditions, decided he was unfit for the Shadowhunter life and struck out on his own. But for Tobias? That was unthinkable. His parents taught him the Law, and he knew only to follow it. Not so unusual among humans, even when their blood is mixed with the Angel’s. Unusual for a Herondale, maybe, but if anyone thought that, Tobias’s father made sure they kept their mouths shut. And so he grew up. He married, a match that surprised everyone, for Eva Blackthorn was the opposite of mild. A raven-haired spitfire, somewhat like your Isabelle.”