Welcome to Shadowhunter Academy

“You’re right, our morals are sound even though our walls are infested. And we’ll still have some interesting classes, Si,” George said. “Plus, don’t worry, we still get sent on missions to fight demons and rogue Downworlders.”

Simon choked on his soup. “I was not worrying about that. Are any of our teachers at all worried that sending out people with no superpowers to fight demons might prove just a teeny bit, not to put too fine a point on it, fatal?”

“They have to face trials of courage before they must face Ascension,” said Beatriz. “Better for them to drop out because they are scared, or even because a demon ate their leg, than to have them try to Ascend without being suitable, and die in the attempt.”

“That’s a cool, cheerful, and normal thing to say,” Simon said. “Shadowhunters are great at saying normal things.”

“Well, I’m looking forward to the missions,” said George. “And tomorrow a Shadowhunter is coming in to give a guest lecture on the lesser utilized weapons. I hope there’ll be a practical demonstration.”

“Not in a classroom,” said Beatriz. “Think of what one heavy-duty crossbow could do to the walls.”

That was all the warning Simon got before he clattered happily into class the next day, George on his heels, and found Dean Penhallow already there, talking with nervous good cheer. The classroom was very full—both the regular stream and the mundane stream were in attendance.

“—despite her tender years, a Shadowhunter of some renown and noted expertise with less used weapons such as the whip. May I welcome to Shadowhunter Academy our first guest lecturer: Isabelle Lightwood!”

Isabelle turned, sleek black hair flaring around her shoulders and black skirt flaring around her pale legs. She was wearing glittery plum lipstick, so dark it looked almost black. Her eyes did look black, but another small knife of memory pierced Simon, of course at the worst time possible: he remembered the colors of her eyes from close up, very dark brown, like brown velvet, so close to black as to make no difference, but with paler rings of color . . .

He stumbled over to his desk, and folded into his chair with a thump.

*    *    *

When the dean left, Isabelle turned and regarded her class with absolute contempt.

“I am not actually here to instruct any of you idiots,” she told them, walking up and down the rows of desks. “If you want to use a whip, train with one, and if you lose an ear, don’t be a big whiny baby.”

Several of the boys nodded, as if hypnotized. Almost all the boys were watching Isabelle as if they were a nest of snakes intent on being charmed. Some of the girls were watching her that way too.

“I am here,” Isabelle a

Simon goggled. She couldn’t be talking about him. Could she?

“Do you see that man?” Isabelle asked, pointing at Simon. Apparently she was talking about him. “That’s Simon Lewis, and he is my boyfriend. So if any of you think about trying to hurt him because he’s a mundie or—may the Angel have mercy on your soul—pursuing him romantically, I will come after you, I will hunt you down, and I will crush you to powder.”

“We’re just bros,” said George hastily.

Beatriz edged her desk away from Simon’s.

Isabelle lowered her hand. The flush of excitement was receding from her face as well, as though she had come to say what she had said, and now that she was out of adrenaline she was actually processing what had come out of her mouth.

“I am going to go now,” Isabelle a

She turned and walked out of the room.

“I have to—” Simon began, rising from his desk on legs that felt a little unsteady. “I have to go.”

“Yeah, you do,” George said.

Simon went out the door, and ran down the stone corridors of the Academy. He knew Isabelle was fast, so he ran, faster than he’d ever run on the training grounds, and he caught up to her in the hall. She stopped in the dim light of the stained-glass window as he called her name.

“Isabelle!”

She stood waiting for him. Her lips parted and gleamed, like plums under a winter frost, ready to be tasted. Simon could see himself ru

Simon felt a hot pang of grief through his whole body, not just through his chest, as if he had been struck by lightning. But he had to say it.

“I’m not your boyfriend, Isabelle,” he called out.

She went white. Simon was horrified by how badly his words had come out.

“I mean, I can’t be your boyfriend, Isabelle,” he said. “I’m not him—that guy who was your boyfriend. That guy you want.”

He almost said: I wish I could be. He had wished he could be. That was why he had come to the Academy, to learn how to be that guy they all wanted back. He’d wanted to be that way, be an awesome hero like in a game or a movie. He’d been so sure, at first, that was what he wanted.

Except wishing he could be that guy was like wishing to obliterate the guy he was now: the normal, happy guy in a band, who could still love his mother, who did not wake up in the coldest, darkest hour of the night weeping for dead friends.

And he did not know if he could be that guy she wanted, whether he wished it or not.

“You remember everything, and I—I don’t remember enough,” Simon went on. “I hurt you when I don’t mean to, and I thought I could come to the Academy and come back better, but it’s not looking good. The whole game has changed. My skill level has decreased and the difficulty level has been jacked up to impossible—”

“Simon,” Isabelle interrupted, “you’re talking like a nerd.”

She said it almost fondly, but it freaked Simon out more. “And I don’t know how to be smooth, sexy vampire Simon for you, either!”

Isabelle’s perfect mouth curved, like a dark half-moon in her pale face. “You were never that smooth, Simon.”

“Oh,” said Simon. “Oh, thank God. I know you’ve had a lot of boyfriends. I remember there was a faerie, and”—another flash of memory, this time most unwelcome—“a . . . Lord Montgomery? You dated a member of the nobility? How am I ever going to compete with that?”

Isabelle still looked fond, but it was diluted with a good deal of impatience. “You’re Lord Montgomery, Simon!”

“I don’t understand,” said Simon. “When you’re made a vampire, are you also given a title?”

Maybe that made sense. Vampires were aristocratic.

Isabelle put her fingers up to touch her brow. It was a gesture that seemed like disdainful weariness, like Isabelle was tired of all this, but Simon saw the way her eyes closed, as if she could not look at him when she spoke. “It was just a joke between you and me, Simon.”

Simon was tired of all this: of knowing pieces of her so well and others not at all, of knowing he was not what she wanted.

“No,” he said. “It was a joke between you and him.”

“You are him, Simon!”

“I’m not,” Simon told her. “I don’t—I don’t know how to be, that’s what I’ve been realizing all this time. I thought I could learn to be him, but since I got to the Academy I learned that I can’t. I can’t experience everything we did over again. I’m never going to be the guy who did all that. I’m going to do different things. I’m going to be a different guy.”

“Once you Ascend, you’ll get all your memories back!” Isabelle shouted at him.

“If I Ascend, it will be in two years. I’m not going to be the same guy in two years, even if I do get all the memories back, because there will be so many other memories. You’re not going to be the same girl. I know you believed in me, Isabelle, I know you believed because you—you cared about him. That means more than I can tell you. But, Isabelle, Isabelle, it isn’t fair of me to take advantage of your belief. It isn’t fair to keep you waiting for him, when he isn’t ever coming back.”