"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 being 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 doppelganger, 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 bli
nking 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. "What 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, holding his hand, watching him waste away. When his parents had sat him and Rebecca down, forced out all those unthinkable words, "metastasized" and "palliative" and "terminal," 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 . . ."
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 there might, somewhere in Germany, be a large bean stalk with an angry giant at the top, 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.