"What's wrong with you?" Simon demanded. "Saying 'don't panic' is guaranteed to make everyone panic! Be specific about the problem."
"Okay, I get what you're saying and you make a fair point," continued the new boy. He had an accent, his voice light yet rumbling over certain syllables. Simon was fairly sure he was Scottish. "It's just that I think there's a demon possum in the wardrobe."
"By the Angel!" said Julie.
Simon said: "That's ridiculous."
There was a sound from within the wardrobe. A dragging, grunting, hissing sound that raised the hairs on the back of Simon's neck.
Quick as a flash and with Shadowhunter grace, Julie leaped onto the bed that did not have an open suitcase on it. Simon supposed that was his bed. The fact that he'd been here only two minutes and already had a girl hurling herself onto his bed would have been thrilling, except that of course she was fleeing infernal rodents.
"Do something, Simon!"
"Yes, Simon--are you Simon? Hi, Simon--please do something about the demonic possum," said the guy on the stool.
"I'm sure it's not a demonic possum."
The sound of scuffling within the wardrobe was very loud, and Simon did not feel entirely sure. It did sound like there was something enormous lurking in there.
"I was born in the City of Glass," said Julie. "I am a Shadowhunter and I can handle the demonic. But I was also raised in a nice house that was not infested with filthy wildlife!"
"Well, I'm from Brooklyn," said Simon, "and not to bad-mouth my beloved city or call it a verminous garbage heap with good music or anything, but I know rodents. Also, I believe I was a rodent, but that was only for a little while--I don't remember it clearly and I don't want to discuss it. I think I can handle a possum . . . which again, I'm sure is not demonic."
"I saw it and you guys didn't!" exclaimed the guy on the stool. "I'm telling you, it was suspiciously large! Fiendishly large."
There was another rustle, and some menacing snuffling. Simon sidled over to the open suitcase on the other bed. There were a lot more rugby shirts in there, but on top of them was something else.
"Is that a weapon?" Julie asked.
"Uh, no," said Simon. "It's a tennis racket."
The Shadowhunters needed more extracurricular activities.
He suspected the racket was going to be a truly terrible weapon, but it was what he had. He edged back toward the wardrobe, and threw the door open. There, in the splintered, gnawed-on recesses of the wardrobe, was a possum. Its red eyes shone and its small mouth opened, hissing at Simon.
"How disgusting," said Julie. "Kill it, Simon!"
"Simon, you're our only hope!" said the boy on the stool.
The possum made a movement, as if to dart forward. Simon brought the racket down with a thwack against the stone. The possum hissed again and moved in a different direction. Simon had the wild idea that it was feinting, just before it actually ran between his legs. Simon let out a sound that was too close to a squawk, stumbled back, and hit wildly in several directions, striking flagstones every time. The other two screamed. Simon spun to try to locate the possum, seeing a flash of fur out of the corner of his eye and spinning again. The boy on the stool--either looking for reassurance or in a misguided effort to be helpful--grabbed at Simon's shoulders and tried to turn him, using a handful of his shirt for leverage.
"There!" he yelled in Simon's ear, and Simon whirled of his own accord, was turned against his will, and walked backward into the stool.
He felt the stool tip and tilt against his legs, and the boy on it snatched at Simon's shoulders again. Simon, already dizzy, lurched and then saw the possum's furry little body creeping over his own sneaker and made a fatal mistake. He hit his own foot with the racket. Very hard.
Simon, the stool, the boy on the stool, and the racket all went tumbling onto the stone floor.
The possum streaked out of the doorway. Simon thought it cast him a red-eyed look of triumph as it went.
Simon was in no condition to give chase, since he was in a jumble of chair legs and human legs, and had knocked his head against the bedpost.
He was trying to sit up, rubbing his head and feeling a little dizzy, when Julie jumped off the bed. The bedpost swayed with the force of her movement, and knocked against the back of Simon's head once more.
"Well, I'll leave you guys before the creature returns to his nest!" Julie announced. "Er . . . I mean, I'll leave you guys . . . to it." She paused in the doorway, staring in the direction the possum had gone. "Bye now," she added, and bolted in the opposite direction.
"Ow," Simon said, giving up on sitting up straight and leaning back on his hands. He grimaced. "Very ow. Well . . . that was . . ."
He gestured to the stool, the open doorway, the disgusting wardrobe, and his supine self.
"That was . . . ," he continued, and found himself shaking his head and laughing. "Just such an impressive display from three future awesome demon hunters."
The boy no longer on the stool looked startled, no doubt because he thought his new roommate was deranged and giggled over possums. Simon could not help it. He could not stop laughing.
Any of the Shadowhunters he knew back in New York would have dealt with the situation without blinking an eye. He was sure Isabelle would have cut off the possum's head with a sword. But now he was surrounded by people who panicked and screamed and stood on stools, flailing disasters of human beings who could not cope with a single rodent, and Simon was one of them. They were all just normal kids.
It was such a relief, Simon felt dizzy with it. Or maybe that was because he'd hit his head.
He kept laughing, and when he looked over at his roommate again, the other boy met his eyes.
"What a shame our teachers didn't see that awesome performance," Simon's new roommate said seriously. Then he burst out laughing too, hand against his mouth, laugh lines fanning out from the corners of his eyes, as if he laughed all the time and his face had just grown used to it. "We are gonna slay."
After the slight burst of possum-related hysterics, Simon and his new roommate got up off the flo
or and got to unpacking and introducing themselves.
"Sorry about all that. I'm not great with scuttling little things. I'm hoping to fight demons a bit higher off the ground. I'm George Lovelace, by the way," said the boy, sitting on the bed beside his open suitcase.
Simon stared at his own bag, full of its many hilarious T-shirts, and then suspiciously at the wardrobe. He didn't know if he trusted the possum wardrobe with his T-shirts.
"So you're a Shadowhunter, then?"
He'd worked out how Shadowhunter names were constructed by now, and he'd already figured George for a Shadowhunter at first sight. Only that had been before Simon thought George might be cool. Now he was disappointed. He knew what Shadowhunters thought of mundanes. It would have been nice to have someone new to all this to go through school with.
It would be nice to have a cool roommate again, Simon thought. Like Jordan. He could not remember Jordan, his roommate when he was a vampire, all that well, but what he remembered was good.
"Well, I'm a Lovelace," said George. "My family quit Shadowhunting due to laziness in the 1700s, then went and settled outside Glasgow to become the best sheep thieves in the land. The only other branch of the Lovelaces gave up Shadowhunting in the 1800s--I think they had a daughter who came back, but she died, so we were all that was left. Shadowhunters used to come knocking to past generations, and my brave ancestors were all like, 'Nope, think we'll stick with the sheep,' until finally the Clave stopped coming around because they were tired of our layabout ways. What can I tell you? The Lovelaces are quitters."
George shrugged and made a what can you do? gesture with his tennis racket. The strings were broken. It was still their only weapon in case the possum returned.
Simon checked his phone. Idris had no reception, big surprise, and he tossed it in the suitcase among his T-shirts. "That's a noble legacy."
"Can you believe, I didn't know anything about it until a few weeks ago? The Shadowhunters came to find us again, telling us they needed new, uh, demon hunters in the fight against evil because a bunch of them had died in a war. Can I just say, the Shadowhunters, man, they really know how to win over hearts and minds."