Angels Twice Descending (Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy, #10)

Simon thought about all the opportunities here for humiliation, how he had absolutely no idea what he was doing, and how usually when he had no idea what he was doing, he screwed things up. Riding a horse, wielding a sword, leaping from a tree—all these things people kept saying would come naturally to him usually came with bumps, bruises, and, more than once, a face full of manure.

But he had tried none of those things with Isabelle by his side. Or in his arms.

As it turned out, that made all the difference.

*

“Good morning!” Simon sang, stepping out of the Portal and into his bedroom at the Academy—just in time to catch Julie slipping out the door.

“Er, good morning,” George mumbled, tucked beneath the covers. “Wasn’t sure you’d be back.”

“Did I just see—?”

“A gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell.” George grinned. “Speaking of which, should I ask where you’ve been all night?”

“You should not,” Simon said firmly. As he crossed the room to his closet to find something clean to wear, he tried his best to keep a silly, moony, heartsick smile off his face.

“You’re skipping,” George said accusingly.

“Am not.”

“And you were humming,” George added.

“I most definitely was not.”

“Would this be a good time to tell you that Jon Cartwright the Thirty-Fifth seems to have done his business in your T-shirt drawer?”

But this morning nothing could dampen Simon’s mood. Not when he could still feel the ghost of Isabelle’s touch. His skin buzzed with it. His lips felt swollen. His heart felt swollen. “I can always get new T-shirts,” Simon said cheerfully. He thought that from this point forward, he might say everything cheerfully.

“I think this place has officially driven you round the bend.” George sighed then, sounding a bit heartsick himself. “You know, I’m really going to miss it here.”

“You’re not going to cry again, are you? I think there may be another sentient slime mold growing in the back of my sock drawer, if you want to get really choked up.”

“Does one wear socks to get transformed into a half-angel superhuman fighting machine?” George mused.

“Not with sandals,” Simon said promptly. He hadn’t dated Isabelle all these months without learning something about proper footwear. “Never with sandals.”

They got dressed for the ceremony—choosing, after some deliberation, their most Simon-like and George-like outfits. Which meant, for George, jeans and a rugby shirt; for Simon, a faded tee that he’d had made back when the band was called Guinea Pig Death Posse. (This, fortunately, had been lying on the floor for a week, so was rat crap free.) Then, without much talking, they started packing up their belongings. The Academy wasn’t much for big celebrations—probably a good thing, Simon mused, since at the last all-school party, one of the first-years had misfired his flaming crossbow and accidentally set the roof on fire. There would be no graduation ceremony, no mugging for cameras with proud parents, no yearbook signings or tossing of mortarboard caps. Just the Ascension ritual, whatever that meant, and that would be it. The end of the Academy; the beginning of the rest of their lives.

“It’s not like we’ll never see each other again,” George said suddenly, in a tone that suggested he’d been worrying about exactly that.

Simon was going back to New York, and George was going to the London Institute, where, they said, a Lovelace was always welcome. But what was an ocean of distance when you could Portal? Or at least e-mail?

“Of course not,” Simon said.

“But it won’t be the same,” George pointed out.

“No, I guess it won’t.”