"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.