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

Simon took the Cup into his hands. It was even heavier than it looked and curiously warm to the touch. Whatever was inside it didn’t look much like blood, fortunately, but it didn’t look like anything else he recognized either. If he didn’t know better, Simon would have said the Cup was full of light. As he peered down at it, the strange liquid almost seemed to pulse with a soft glow, as if to say, Go ahead, drink me.

He couldn’t remember the first time he’d seen the Mortal Cup—that was one of the memories still lost to him—but he knew the role it had played in his life, knew that if it weren’t for the Cup, he and Clary might never have discovered the existence of Shadowhunters in the first place. It had all begun with the Mortal Cup; it seemed fitting that it should all end here too.

Not end, Simon thought quickly. Hopefully not end.

It was said that the younger you were, the less likely drinking from the Cup was to kill you. Simon was, subjectively, nineteen, but he’d recently learned that by Shadowhunter rules, he was only eighteen. The months he’d spent as a vampire apparently didn’t count. He could only hope the Cup understood that.

“Drink,” the Consul repeated quietly, a note of humanity creeping into her voice.

Simon raised the Cup to his lips.

He drank.

*

He is tangled in Isabelle’s arms, he is curtained by Isabelle’s hair, he is touching Isabelle’s body, he is lost in Isabelle, in her smell and her taste and the silk of her skin.

He is onstage, the music pounding, the floor shaking, the audience cheering, his heart beating beating beating in time with the drumbeat.

He is laughing with Clary, dancing with Clary, eating with Clary, running through the streets of Brooklyn with Clary, they are children together, they are one half of a whole, they hold hands and squeeze tight and pledge never to let go.

He is going cold, stiff, the life draining out of him, he is below, in the dark, clawing his way to the light, fingernails scraping dirt, mouth filled with dirt, eyes clogged with dirt, he is straining, reaching, dragging himself up toward the sky, and when he reaches it, he opens his mouth wide but does not breathe, for he no longer needs to breathe, only to feed. And he is so very hungry.

He is sinking his teeth into the neck of an angel’s child, he is drinking the light.

He is bearing a Mark, and it burns.

He is raising his face to meet the gaze of an angel, he is flayed by the fury of angel fire, and yet still, impudent and bloodless, he lives.

He is in a cage.

He is in hell.

He is bent over the broken body of a beautiful girl, he is praying to whatever god that will listen, please let her live, anything to let her live.

He is giving away that which is most precious to him, and he is doing so willingly, so that his friends will survive.

He is, again, with Isabelle, always with Isabelle, the holy flame of their love encompassing them both, and there is pain, and there is exquisite joy, and his veins burn with angel fire and he is the Simon he once was and the Simon he then became and the Simon he now will be, he endures and he is reborn, he is blood and flesh and a spark of the divine.

He is Nephilim.

*

Simon didn’t see the flash of light he’d expected—he saw only the flood of memories, a tidal wave that threatened to drown him in the past. It wasn’t simply a lifetime that passed before his eyes; it was an eternity, all the versions of himself that ever could have been, that ever would be. And then it was over. His mind stilled. His soul quieted. And his memories—the parts of himself he’d feared were lost forever—had come home.

He’d spent two years trying to convince himself that it was okay if he never remembered, that he could live with piecing together the fragments of his past, relying on others to tell him about the person he’d once been. But it had never felt right. The empty hole in his memory was like a missing limb; he’d learned to compensate, but he’d never stopped feeling the absence or its pain.