The Evil We Love (Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy Book 5) (3 page)

They couldn’t bring his father back, but if they could help him avenge the loss, surely they owed him that much.

Robert, at least, owed him everything.

“Of course we’ll come with you,” Robert said firmly. “Whatever you need.”

“Agreed,” Michael said. Where Robert went, he would always follow.

Valentine nodded. “Stephen? Lucian?”

Robert caught Amatis rolling her eyes. Valentine never treated the women with anything less than respect, but when it came to battle, he preferred to fight with men by his side.

Stephen nodded. Lucian, who was Valentine’s
parabatai
and the one he relied on most, shifted uncomfortably. “I promised Céline I would tutor her tonight,” he admitted. “I could cancel it, of course, but—”

Valentine waved him off, laughing, and the others followed suit.

“Tutoring? Is that what they’re calling it these days?” Stephen teased. “Seems like she’s already aced her O levels in wrapping you around her little finger.”

Lucian blushed. “Nothing’s happening there, trust me,” he said, and it was presumably the truth. Céline, three years younger, with the fragile, delicately pretty features of a porcelain doll, had been trailing their group like a lost puppy. It was obvious to anyone with eyes that she’d fallen hard for Stephen, but he was a lost cause, pledged to Amatis for life. She’d picked Lucian as her consolation prize, but it was just as obvious that Lucian had no romantic interest in anyone but Jocelyn Fairchild. Obvious, that is, to everyone except Jocelyn.

“We don’t need you for this one,” Valentine told Lucian. “Stay and
enjoy
yourself.”

“I should be with you,” Lucian said, the merriment faded from his voice. He sounded pained at the thought of Valentine venturing into dangerous territory without him, and Robert understood.
Parabatai
didn’t always fight side by side—but knowing your
parabatai
was in danger, without you there to support and protect him? It caused an almost physical pain. And Lucian and Valentine’s
parabatai
bond was even more intense than most. Robert could almost feel the current of power flowing between them, the strength and love they passed back and forth with every glance. “Where you go, I go.”

“It’s already decided, my friend,” Valentine said, and that simply, it was. Lucian would stay on campus with the others. Valentine, Stephen, Michael, and Robert would slip away from campus after dark and venture into Brocelind Forest in pursuit of a werewolf encampment that, supposedly, could lead them to Valentine’s father’s killer. They’d make up the rest as they went along.

As the others hurried off to the dining hall for lunch, Maryse grabbed Robert’s hand and pulled him close.

“You’ll be careful out there, yes?” she said sternly. Maryse said everything sternly—it was one of the things he liked best about her.

She pressed her lithe body against his, kissed his neck, and he felt, in that moment, a passing sense of supreme confidence, that this was where he belonged . . . at least, until she whispered, “Come home to me in one piece.”

Come home to me
. As if he belonged to her. As if, in her mind, they were already married, with a house and children and a lifetime of togetherness, as if the future was already decided.

It was the appeal of Maryse, as it was the appeal of Valentine, the ease with which they could be so sure of what should be, and what was to come. Robert continued hoping that one day it would rub off on him. In the meantime, the less certain he was, the more certain he acted—there was no need for anyone to know the truth.

*   *   *

Robert Lightwood wasn’t much of a teacher. He gave them a neatly sanitized account of the early days of the Circle, laying out Valentine’s revolutionary principles as if they were a list of ingredients for baking a particularly bland cake. Simon, fruitlessly devoting most of his energy to telepathic communication with Isabelle, was barely listening. He found himself cursing the fact that Shadowhunters were so haughty about the whole we-don’t-do-magic thing. If he were a warlock, he’d probably be able command Isabelle’s attention with the flick of a finger. Or, if he were still a vampire, he could have used his vampy powers to enthrall her—but that was something Simon preferred not to think about, because it raised some unsettling questions about how he’d managed to enthrall her in the first place.

What he did hear of Robert’s tale didn’t much interest him. Simon had never liked history much, at least as it was relayed to him in school. It sounded too much like a brochure, everything neatly laid out and painfully obvious in retrospect. Every war had its bullet-pointed causes; every megalomaniac dictator was so cartoonishly evil you wondered how stupid the people of the past had to be, not to notice. Simon didn’t remember much of his own history-making experiences, but he remembered enough to know it wasn’t so clear when it was happening. History, the way teachers liked it, was a racetrack, a straight shot from start to finish line; life itself was more of a maze.

Maybe the telepathy worked after all. Because when the speech ended and the students were given permission to disperse, Isabelle hopped off the stage and strolled right up to Simon. She gave him a sharp nod hello.

“Isabelle, I, uh, maybe we could—”

She flashed him a brilliant smile that, for just a moment, made him think all his worrying had been for nothing. Then she said, “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friends? Especially the handsome ones?”

Simon turned to see half the class crowding in behind him, eager for a brush with the famous Isabelle Lightwood. At the front of the pack were George and Jon, the latter practically drooling.

Jon elbowed past Simon and thrust out a hand. “Jon Cartwright, at your service,” he said in a voice that oozed charm like a blister oozed pus.

Isabelle took his hand—and instead of jujitsuing him to the ground with a humiliating thump or slicing his hand off at the wrist with her electrum whip, she let him turn her hand over and bring it to his lips. Then she
curtsied
. She
winked
. Worst of all, she
giggled.

Simon thought he might puke.

Unendurable minutes of torment passed: George blushing and making goofy attempts at jokes, Julie struck speechless, Marisol pretending to be above it all, Beatriz engaging in wan but polite small talk about mutual acquaintances, Sunil bouncing in the back of the crowd, trying to make himself seen, and through it all, Jon smirking and Isabelle beaming and batting her eyes in a display that could only be meant to make Simon’s stomach churn.

At least, he desperately hoped it was meant for that. Because the other option—the possibility that Isabelle was smiling at Jon simply because she wanted to, and that she accepted his invitation to squeeze his rock-hard biceps because she wanted to feel his muscles contract beneath her delicate grip—was unthinkable.

“So what do you people do around here for fun?” she asked finally, then narrowed her eyes flirtatiously at Jon. “And don’t say ‘me.’”

Am I already dead?
Simon thought hopelessly.
Is this hell?

“Neither the circumstances nor the population here have proven themselves conducive to fun,” Jon said pompously, as if the bluster in his voice could disguise the fire in his cheeks.

“That all changes tonight,” Isabelle said, then turned on her spiky heel and strode away.

George shook his head, letting out an appreciative whistle. “Simon, your girlfriend—”

“
Ex
-girlfriend,” Jon put in.

“She’s magnificent,” Julie breathed, and from the looks on the others’ faces, she was speaking for the group.

Simon rolled his eyes and hurried after Isabelle—reaching out to grab her shoulder, then thinking better of it at the last moment. Grabbing Isabelle Lightwood from behind was probably an invitation to amputation.

“Isabelle,” he said sharply. She sped up. So did he, wondering where she was headed. “Isabelle,” he said again. They burrowed deeper into the school, the air thick with damp and mold, the stone floor increasingly slick beneath their feet. They hit a fork, corridors branching off to the left and right, and she paused before choosing the one on the left.

“We don’t go down this one, generally,” Simon said.

Nothing.

“Mostly because of the elephant-size slug that lives at the end of it.” This was not an exaggeration. Rumor had it that some disgruntled faculty member—a warlock who’d been fired when the tide turned against Downworlders—had left it behind as a parting gift.

Isabelle kept walking, slower now, picking her way carefully over seeping puddles of slime. Something skittered loudly overhead. She didn’t flinch—but she did look up, and Simon caught her fingers playing across the coiled whip.

“Also because of the rats,” he added. He and George had gone on an expedition down this corridor in search of the supposed slug . . . they gave up after the third rat dropped from the ceiling and somehow found its way down George’s pants.

Isabelle breathed a heavy sigh.

“Come on, Izzy, hold up.”

Somehow, he’d stumbled on the magic words. She spun around to face him. “Don’t call me that,” she hissed.

“What?”

“My friends call me Izzy,” she said. “You lost that right.”

“Izzy—Isabelle, I mean. If you’d read my letter—”

“No. You don’t call me Izzy, you don’t send me letters, you don’t follow me into dark corridors and try to save me from rats.”

“Trust me, we see a rat, it’s every man for himself.”

Isabelle looked like she wanted to feed him to the giant slug. “My point, Simon Lewis, is that you and I are strangers now, just like you wanted it.”

“If that’s true, then what are you doing here?”

Isabelle looked incredulous. “It’s one thing for Jace to believe the world revolves around him, but come on. I know you love fantasy, Simon, but the suspension of disbelief can only go so far.”

“This is my school, Isabelle,” Simon said. “And you’re my—”

She just stared at him, as if defying him to come up with a noun that would justify the possessive.

This wasn’t going the way he’d planned.

“Okay, then, why are you here? And why are you being so nice to all my, uh, friends?”

“Because my father’s
forcing
me to be here,” she said. “Because I guess he thinks some delightful father-daughter bonding time in a slime-covered pit will make me forget that he’s a deadbeat adulterer who ditched his family. And I’m being nice to your friends because I’m a nice person.”

Now it was Simon who looked incredulous.

“Okay, I’m not,” she admitted. “But I’ve never actually been to school, you know. I figured if I have to be here, I might as well make the best of it. See what I’m missing. Is that enough information for you?”

“I get that you’re mad at me, but—”

She shook her head. “You
don’t
get it. I’m not mad at you. I’m not anything at you, Simon. You asked me to accept that you were a different person now, someone who I don’t know. So I’ve accepted that. I loved someone—he’s gone now. You’re nobody I know, and, as far as I can tell, nobody I need to know. I’ll only be here a few days, and then we never need to see each other again. How about we don’t make it harder than it has to be?”

He couldn’t quite catch his breath.

I loved someone
, she’d said, and it was the closest she—or any girl—had ever come to saying
I love you
to Simon.

Except that it wasn’t close at all, was it?

It was a world away.

“Okay.” It was the only word he could force out, but she was already walking on down the corridor. She didn’t need his permission to be a stranger; she didn’t need anything from him. “You’re going the wrong way!” he called after her. He didn’t know where she wanted to go, but there seemed little chance she wanted to go slug-ward.

“They’re all wrong,” she called back, without turning around.

He tried to sense some subtext in her words, a glimmer of pain. Something that would give the lie to her claim, betray the feelings she still harbored for him—prove this was as hard and confusing for her as it was for him.

But the suspension of disbelief could only go so far.

*   *   *

Isabelle had said she wanted to make the best of her time at the Academy, and she’d proposed they not make it any harder than it needed to be. Unfortunately, Simon soon discovered, these two things were mutually exclusive. Because Isabelle’s version of making the best of things involved Isabelle stretched out like a cat on one of the student lounge’s musty leather couches, surrounded by sycophants, Isabelle partaking in George’s illicit supply of scotch and inviting the others to do so as well, so that soon all of Simon’s friends and enemies were drunk and giddy and in much too good a mood for his liking. Making the best of things apparently meant encouraging Julie to flirt with George and teaching Marisol how to smash statuary with a whip and, worst of all, agreeing to “maybe” be Jon Cartwright’s date for the end-of-year party later in the week.

Simon wasn’t sure whether any of this was harder than it needed to be—who knew what qualified as
needed to be?
—but it was excruciating.

“So, when does the real fun start?” Isabelle finally said.

Jon waggled his eyebrows. “Just say the word.”

Isabelle laughed and touched his shoulder.

Simon wondered whether the Academy would expel him for murdering Jon Cartwright in his sleep.

“Not that kind of fun. I mean, when do we sneak off campus? Go party in Alicante? Go swimming in Lake Lyn? Go . . .” She trailed off, finally noticing that the others were gaping at her like she was speaking in tongues. “Are you telling me you don’t do
any
of that?”

“We’re not here to have fun,” Beatriz said, somewhat stiffly. “We’re here to learn to be Shadowhunters. There are rules for a reason.”

Isabelle rolled her eyes. “Haven’t you ever heard that rules are meant to be broken? Students are
supposed
to get into a little trouble at the Academy—at least the best students are. Why do you think the rules are so strict? So that only the best can get around them. Think of it like extra credit.”