Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy

by Cassandra Clare

  Matthew smiled. Behind them, the Academy exploded. The carriage jolted slightly with the force of the impact.

  “We don’t . . . have to be parabatai,” Matthew said, his voice quiet under the sound of the blast. “I said it to make your father take me with you, so I could execute my new plan, but we don’t . . . have to. I mean, unless you . . . maybe want to be.”

  James had thought he wanted a friend like himself, a parabatai who was shy and quiet and would enter in on James’s feelings about the terror of parties. Instead here was Matthew, who was the life and soul of every party, who made dreadful hairbrush decisions, who was unexpectedly and terribly kind. Who had tried to be his friend and kept trying, even though James did not know what trying to be a friend looked like. Who could see James, even when he was a shadow.

  “Yes,” James said simply.

  “What?” said Matthew, who always knew what to say.

  “I’d like that,” said James. He curled his hands, one around his father’s coat sleeve, and one around Matthew’s. He held on to them, all the way home.

  Shadowhunter Academy, 2008

  “So James found a parabatai and everything worked out great,” Simon said. “That’s awesome.”

  James was Tessa Gray’s son, Simon had realized, a long way into the story. It was strange to think of that: It seemed to bring that lost boy very close, he and his friend. Simon liked the sound of James. He’d liked Tessa, too.

  And though he was starting to get the feeling, even without his memories, that he hadn’t always liked Jace Herondale—he liked him now.

  Catarina rolled her eyes so hard Simon thought he could hear them roll, like tiny, exasperated bowling balls.

  “No, Simon. The Academy drove James Herondale out for being different, and all the people who loved him could do was follow him out. The people who drove them out did have to rebuild part of their precious Academy, mind you.”

  “Uh,” said Simon. “Sorry, is the message I’m meant to be learning ‘get out, get out as fast as you can’?”

  “Maybe,” Catarina said. “Maybe the message is to trust your friends. Maybe the message is not that people in the past did badly but that now we must all strive to do better. Maybe the message is you have to work these things out for yourself. You think all lessons have easy conclusions? Don’t be a child, Daylighter. You’re not immortal anymore. You don’t have much time to waste.”

  Simon took that as the dismissal it was, scooping up his books. “Thanks for the story, Ms. Loss.”

  He ran down the stairs and out of the Academy, but he was too late, as he’d known he would be.

  He was barely out of the door when he saw the dregs, filthy and tired, arm in arm, lurching up from the training grounds. Marisol was in front, her arm looped with George’s. It looked as if someone had tried to pull out all her hair.

  “Where were you, Lewis?” she called. “We could have used you cheering for us as we won!”

  Some way behind them were the elites. Jon was looking very unhappy, which filled Simon with a deep sense of peace.

  Trust your friends, Catarina had said.

  Simon might speak up for mundies in class, but it mattered more that George and Marisol and Sunil spoke up too. Simon didn’t want to change things by being the special one, the exceptional mundane, the former Daylighter and former hero. They had all chosen to come try to be heroes. His fellow dregs could win without him.

  There was one more motive Catarina might have had that she had not announced, Simon thought.

  She had heard this story from her dead friend Ragnor Fell.

  Catarina had listened to her friend’s stories, the way James Herondale had listened to his father’s stories. Being able to tell the stories over again, having someone to listen and learn, meant her friend was not lost.

  Maybe he could write to Clary, Simon thought, as well as Isabelle. Maybe he could trust her to love him despite how often he might fail her. Maybe he was ready to be told stories about himself and about her. He didn’t want to lose his friend.

  Simon was writing his letter to Clary when George came in, toweling his hair. He had taken his life in his hands and risked the showers in one of the dregs’ bathroom.

  “Hey,” Simon said.

  “Hey, where were you while the game was happening?” George asked. “I thought you were never coming back and I’d have to be pals with Jon Cartwright. Then I thought about being pals with Jon, was overwhelmed with despair, and decided to find one of the frogs I know are living in here, give it little frog glasses, and call it Simon 2.0.”

  Simon shrugged, not sure how much he was supposed to tell. “Catarina kept me after class.”

  “Careful, or someone might start rumors about you two,” said George. “Not that I would judge. She’s obviously . . . ceruleanly charming.”

  “She was telling me a long story about Shadowhunters being jerks and about parabatai. What do you think about the whole parabatai thing, anyway? The parabatai rune is like a friendship bracelet you can never take back.”

  “I think it sounds nice,” said George. “I’d like that, to have someone who would always watch my back. Someone who I could count on at the times when this scary world gets the scariest.”

  “Makes it sound like there’s someone you’d ask.”

  “I’d ask you, Si,” said George, with an awkward little smile. “But I know you wouldn’t ask me. I know who you would ask. And that’s okay. I’ve still got Frog Simon,” he added thoughtfully. “Though I’m not sure he’s exactly Shadowhunter material.”

  Simon laughed at the joke, as George had meant him to, smoothing over the awkward moment.

  “How were the showers?”

  “I have one word for you, Si,” said George. “A sad, sad word. Gritty. I had to shower, though. I was gross. Our victory was amazing but hard-won. Why are Shadowhunters so bendy, Simon? Why?”

  George kept complaining about Jon Cartwright’s enthusiastic if unskilled attempts at playing baseball, but Simon was not listening.

  I know who you would ask.

  A flash of memory came to Simon, as it did sometimes, cutting like a knife. I love you, he’d told Clary. He’d said it believing he was going to die. He’d wanted those to be his last words before he died, the truest words he could speak.

  He’d been thinking all this time about his two possible lives, but he didn’t have two possible lives. He had a real life, with real memories and a real best friend. He had his childhood as it had actually been, holding hands with Clary as they crossed the street, and the last year as it had actually been, with Jace saving his life and with him saving Isabelle’s and with Clary there, Clary, always Clary.

  The other life, the so-called normal life without his best friend, was a fake. It was like a giant woven tapestry portraying his life, scenes shown in threads that were all the colors of the rainbow, except it had one color—one of the brightest colors—ripped out.

  Simon liked George, he liked all his friends at the Academy, but he was not James Herondale. He had already had friends before he came here.

  Friends to live and die for, to have entangled with every memory. The other Shadowhunters, especially Clary, were a part of him. She was the color that had been ripped out, the bright thread woven through his first memories to his last. Something was missing from the pattern of Simon’s life, without Clary, and it would never be right again, unless she was restored.

  My best friend, Simon thought. Another thing worth living in this world for, worth being a Shadowhunter for. Maybe she wouldn’t want to be his parabatai. God knew Simon was no prize. But if he got through this school, if he managed to become a Shadowhunter, he would have all the memories of his best friend back.

  He could try for the bond between Jace and Alec, between James Herondale and Matthew Fairchild. He could ask if she would perform the ritual and speak the words that told the world what was between you, and that it was unbreakable.

  He could at least ask Clary.

/>   The Evil We Love

  By Cassandra Clare and Robin Wasserman

  It seemed suddenly very important to have space between him and Michael. As much space as possible.

  “You’re what?”

  He hadn’t meant to shout.

  —The Evil We Love

  There were, Simon Lewis thought, so many ways to destroy a letter. You could shred it into confetti. You could light it on fire. You could feed it to a dog—or a Hydra demon. You could, with the help of your friendly neighborhood warlock, Portal it to Hawaii and drop it into the mouth of a volcano. And given all the letter-destroying options available, Simon thought, maybe the fact that Isabelle Lightwood had returned his letter intact was of significance. Maybe it was actually a good sign.

  Or at least a not-entirely-terrible sign.

  That, at least, was what Simon had been telling himself for the last few months.

  But even he had to admit that when the letter in question was a sort-of-maybe love letter, a letter that included heartfelt, humiliating phrases like “you’re amazing” and “I know I am that guy you loved”—and when said letter was returned unopened, “RETURN TO SENDER” scrawled across it in red lipstick—“not-entirely-terrible” might be overly optimistic.

  At least she had referred to him as “sender.” Simon was pretty sure that Isabelle had devised some other choice names for him, none quite so friendly. A demon had sucked out all of his memories, but his observational faculties were intact—and he’d observed that Isabelle Lightwood wasn’t the kind of girl who liked to be rejected. Simon, in defiance of all laws of nature and common sense, had rejected her twice.

  He’d tried to explain himself in the letter, apologize for pushing her away. He’d confessed how much he wanted to fight his way back to the person he once was. Her Simon. Or at least, a Simon worthy of her.

  Izzy—I don’t know why you would wait for me, but if you do, I promise to make myself worth that wait, he’d written. Or I’ll try. I can promise I am going to try.

  One month to the day after he sent it, the letter came back unread.

  As the dorm room door creaked open, Simon hastily shoved the letter back into his desk drawer, careful to avoid the cobwebs and pockets of mold that coated every piece of furniture no matter how diligently he cleaned. He didn’t move hastily enough.

  “Not the letter again?” Simon’s roommate at the Academy, George Lovelace, groaned. He flung himself down on his bed, sweeping an arm melodramatically across his forehead. “Oh, Isabelle, my darling, if I stare at this letter long enough, maybe I’ll telepathically woo you back to my weeping bosom.”

  “I don’t have a bosom,” Simon said, with as much dignity as he could muster. “And I’m pretty sure if I did, it wouldn’t be weeping.”

  “Heaving, then? That’s what bosoms do, isn’t it?”

  “I haven’t spent much time around them,” Simon admitted. Not much that he could remember, at least. There had been that aborted attempt at groping Sophie Hillyer back in the ninth grade, but her mother busted him before he could even find the clasp on her bra, much less master it. There had, presumably, been Isabelle. But Simon tried very hard these days not to think about that. The clasp on Isabelle’s bra; his hands on Isabelle’s body; the taste of—

  Simon shook his head violently, almost hard enough to clear it. “Can we stop talking about bosoms? Like, forever?”

  “Didn’t mean to interrupt your very important moping-about-Izzy time.”

  “I’m not moping,” Simon lied.

  “Excellent.” George grinned triumphantly, and Simon realized he’d fallen into some kind of trap. “So then you’ll come out to the training field with me, help break in the new daggers. We’re sparring, mundies versus elites—losers have to eat extra helpings of soup for a week.”

  “Oh yeah, Shadowhunters really know how to party.” His heart wasn’t in the sarcasm. The truth was, his fellow students did know how to party, even if their idea of fun usually involved pointy weapons. With exams behind them and only one more week before the end-of-year party and summer vacation, Shadowhunter Academy felt more like camp than school. Simon couldn’t believe he’d been here the whole school year; he couldn’t believe he’d survived the year. He’d learned Latin, runic writing, and a smattering of Chthonian; he’d fought tiny demons in the woods, endured a full moon night with a newborn werewolf, ridden (and nearly been trampled by) a horse, eaten his weight in soup, and in all that time, he’d been neither expelled nor exsanguinated. He’d even bulked up enough to trade in his ladies’-size gear for a men’s size, albeit the smallest one available. Against all odds, the Academy had come to feel like home. A slimy, moldy, dungeonlike home without working toilets, maybe, but home nonetheless. He and George had even named the rats that lived behind their walls. Every night, they left Jon Cartwright Jr., III, and IV a piece of stale bread to nibble, in hopes they’d prefer the crumbs to human feet.

  This last week was a time for celebration, late-night carousing, and petty wagering over dagger fights. But Simon couldn’t quite find the will for fun. Maybe it was the looming shadow of summer vacation—the prospect of going home to a place that didn’t feel much like home anymore.

  Or maybe it was, as it always was, Isabelle.

  “Definitely you’ll have much more fun here, sulking,” George said as he changed into his gear. “Silly of me to suggest otherwise.”

  Simon sighed. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  George had a movie-star face, a Scottish accent, a sun-kissed tan, and the kind of muscles that made girls—even the Shadowhunter Academy girls, who until they met Simon had apparently never encountered a human male without a six-pack—giggle and swoon. Girl trouble, particularly the brand involving humiliation and rejection, was beyond his comprehension.

  “Just to be clear,” George said, in the rich brogue that even Simon couldn’t help but find charming, “you don’t remember anything about dating this girl? You don’t remember being in love with her, you don’t remember what it was like when the two of you—”

  “That’s right,” Simon cut him off.

  “Or even if the two of you—”

  “Again, correct,” Simon said quickly. He hated to admit it, but this was one of the things about demon amnesia that bothered him the most. What kind of seventeen-year-old guy doesn’t know whether or not he’s a virgin?

  “Because you’re apparently running low on brain cells, you tell this gorgeous creature that you’ve forgotten all about her, reject her publicly, and yet when you pledge your love to her in some goopy romantic letter, you’re surprised when she’s not having it. Then you spend the next two months mooning over her. Is that about right?”

  Simon dropped his head into his hands. “Okay, so when you put it that way, it makes no sense.”

  “Oh, I’ve seen Isabelle Lightwood—it makes all the sense in the world.” George grinned. “I just wanted to get my facts straight.”

  He bounded out the door before Simon could clarify that it wasn’t about how Isabelle looked—although it was true that she looked, to Simon, like the most beautiful girl in the world. But it wasn’t about her curtain of silky black hair or the bottomless dark brown of her eyes or the deadly liquid grace with which she swung her electrum whip. He couldn’t have explained what it was about, since George was right, he didn’t remember anything about her or what the two of them had been like as a couple. He still had some trouble believing they ever were a couple.

  He just knew, on a level beneath reason and memory, that some part of him belonged with Isabelle. Maybe even belonged to Isabelle. Whether he could remember why, or not.

  He’d written Clary a letter too, telling her how much he wanted to remember their friendship—asking for her help. Unlike Isabelle, she’d written back, telling him the story of how they first met. It was the first of many letters, all of them adding episodes to the epic, lifelong story of Clary and Simon’s Excellent Adventure. The more Simon read, the more he remembered, and
sometimes he even wrote back with stories of his own. It felt safe, somehow, corresponding by letter; there was no chance that Clary could expect anything of him, and no chance that he would fail her, see the pain in her eyes when she realized all over again that her Simon was gone. Letter by letter, Simon’s memories of Clary were beginning to knit themselves together.

  Isabelle was different. It felt like his memories of Isabelle were buried inside a black hole—something dangerous and ravenous, threatening to consume him if he got too close.

  Simon had come to the Academy, in part, to escape his painful and confusing double vision of the past, the cognitive dissonance between the life he remembered and the one he’d actually lived. It was like that cheesy old joke his father had loved. “Doctor, my arm hurts when I move like this,” Simon would say, setting him up. His father would answer in an atrocious German accent, his version of “doctor voice”: “Then . . . don’t move like that.”

  As long as Simon didn’t think about the past, the past couldn’t hurt him. But, increasingly, he couldn’t help himself. There was too much pleasure in the pain.

  Classes may have been over for the year, but the Academy faculty was still finding new ways to torture them.

  “What do you think it is this time?” Julie Beauvale asked as they settled onto the uncomfortable wooden benches in the main hall. The entire student body, Shadowhunters and mundanes alike, had been summoned first thing Monday morning for an all-school meeting.

  “Maybe they finally decided to kick out all the dregs,” Jon Cartwright said. “Better late than never.”

  Simon was too tired and too uncaffeinated to think up a clever retort. So he simply said, “Suck it, Cartwright.”

  George snorted.

  Over the last several months of classes, training, and demon-hunting disasters, their class had grown pretty close—especially the handful of students who were around Simon’s age. George was George, of course; Beatriz Mendoza was surprisingly sweet for a Shadowhunter; and even Julie had turned out to be slightly less snotty than she pretended to be. Jon Cartwright, on the other hand . . . The moment they met, Simon had decided that if looks matched personalities, Jon Cartwright would look like a horse’s ass. Unfortunately, there was no justice in the world, and he looked instead like a walking Ken doll. Sometimes first impressions were misleading; sometimes they peered straight through to a person’s inner soul. Simon was as sure now as he’d ever been: Jon’s inner soul was a horse’s ass.