Welcome to Shadowhunter Academy (Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy #1)(13)

Simon did not love the way Jon said “Downworlder,” as if the words “Downworlder” and “disgusting” were more or less the same thing. But maybe it was natural for Jon to be disturbed. Simon could remember being disturbed about it himself. Simon hadn’t wanted to make his friends into his prey, either.

Today had gone pretty well. Simon didn’t want to ruin it. He decided he was in a good enough mood to let it go.

Simon felt better about the Academy until that night, when he woke from a doze to a deluge of memory.

The memories hit like that sometimes, not in sharp tiny jabs but in an insistent and terrible cascade. He had thought of his former roommate before. He’d known he’d had a friend, a roommate, named Jordan, and that Jordan had been killed. But he hadn’t recalled the feelings of it—the way Jordan had taken him in when his mother had barred her door, talking about Maia with Jordan, hearing Clary laugh that Jordan was cute, talking to Jordan, patient and kind and always seeing Simon as more than a job, more than a vampire. He remembered seeing Jordan and Jace snarl at each other and then play video games like idiots, and Jordan finding him sleeping in a garage, and Jordan looking at Maia with such regret.

And he remembered holding Jordan’s Praetor Lupus pendant in his hands, in Idris, after Jordan was dead. Simon had held that pendant again since then, once he had regained some of his memories, feeling the weight of it and wondering what the Latin motto meant.

He had known Jordan was his roommate, and known he was one of the many casualties of the war.

He had never truly felt the weight of it, until now.

The sheer weight of memory made him feel as if stones were being piled on his chest, crushing him. Simon couldn’t breathe. He erupted from his sheets, swinging his legs over the side of the bed, his feet hitting the stone floor with a shock of cold.

“Wuzz—wuzzit?” mumbled George. “Did the possum come back?”

“Jordan’s dead,” Simon said bleakly, and put his face in his hands.

There was a silence.

George did not ask him who Jordan had been, or why he suddenly cared. Simon would not have known how to explain the tangle of grief and guilt in his chest: how he hated himself for forgetting Jordan, even though he could not have helped it, how this was like finding out Jordan was dead for the first time and like having a scarred-over wound reopened, both at once. There was a bitter taste in Simon’s mouth, like old, old blood.

George reached out and put a hand on Simon’s shoulder. He kept it there, grip firm, hand warm and steady, something to anchor Simon in the cold, dark night of memory.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. Simon was sorry too.

*

At dinner the next day, it was soup again. It had been soup for every meal for many days now. Simon did not remember a life before soup, and he despaired of ever achieving a life after soup. Simon wondered if the Shadowhunters had runes to protect against scurvy.

Their usual group was clustered around their usual table, chatting, when Jon said: “I wish we were being taught about demons by someone with less of an agenda, if you know what I mean.”

“Uh,” said Simon, who mostly sat through their classes on demons through the ages in deep relief that he was not being asked to move. “Don’t we all have the same . . . demon-hunting . . . agenda?”

“You know what I mean,” Jon said. “We’ve got to be taught about the past crimes of warlocks as well. We have to fight the Downworlders, too. It’s naive to pretend they’re all tame.”

“The Downworlders,” Simon repeated. The soup turned to ashes in his mouth, which was actually an improvement. “Like vampires?”

“No!” said Julie hastily. “Vampires are great. They have, you know, class. Compared to the other Downworlders. But if you’re talking about creatures like werewolves, Simon, you must see they’re not exactly our kind of people. If you can call them people at all.”

She said “werewolves” and Simon could not help but think of Jordan, flinching as if he’d been struck and unable to keep his mouth shut a moment longer.

Simon pushed his bowl of soup away and shoved his chair back.

“Don’t tell me about what I must, Julie,” he said coldly. “I must inform you there are werewolves worth a hundred of your and Jon’s Shadowhunter asses. I must say that I am sick to the teeth of you insulting mundanes and telling me I’m your special pet exception, as if I want to be the pet of people who bully kids younger and weaker than they are. And I must tell you, you’d better hope this Academy works out and mundanes like me Ascend, because from all I can see of you, the next generation of Shadowhunters is going to be nothing without us.”

He looked toward George, the way he looked to George to share jokes in class and over meals, to see if George agreed with him at all.

George was staring at his plate.

“Come on, man,” he muttered. “Don’t—don’t do this. They’ll make you move rooms. Just sit down, and everybody can apologize, and we can go on as we were.”

Simon took a deep breath, absorbed the disappointment, and said: “I don’t want things to go on as they were. I want things to change.”

He turned away from the table, from all of them, marched over to where the dean and Scarsbury were sitting, and announced at the top of his voice: “Dean Penhallow, I want to be placed in the stream for mundanes.”