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

“Let go of me!” Simon raged. The Silent Brothers were kneeling by the thing now, the body, but they weren’t doing anything for it. They weren’t helping. They were just staring fixedly at the spiderweb of inky veins spreading across flesh. “I have to help him!”


“No.” Catarina’s hand feathered across his forehead and the screaming in his mind fell silent. She was still holding on; he still couldn’t move. He was a Shadowhunter, but she was a warlock. He was helpless. “It’s too late.”

Simon couldn’t watch the black veins eat up skin or the hollow eyes melt into the skull. He focused on the sneakers. George’s sneakers. One was untied, as it often was. Just that morning George had tripped over the laces, and Simon had caught him from falling. “The last time you’ll save me,” George had said with another of his wistful sighs, and Simon had shot back, “Not likely.”

The veins were popping, with a sound like Rice Krispies in milk. The body was starting to ooze.

Now Simon was holding on to Catarina too. He held tight.

“What’s the point?” he said in despair, because what was the point of dying like this, not in battle, not for a good cause, not to save a fellow warrior or the world, but for nothing? And what was the point of living as a Shadowhunter, what was the point of skill and bravery and superhuman powers, when you couldn’t do anything but stand by and watch?

“Sometimes there is no point,” Catarina said gently. “There only is what is.”

What is, Simon thought, the wave of rage and frustration and horror nearly consuming him. He would not let himself be consumed; he would not waste this moment, if this was all he had. He’d spent two years making himself strong—he would be strong for George, now, in the only way left to him. He would bear witness.

Simon summoned his will. What is.

He forced himself not to look away.

What is: George. Brave and kind and good. George, dead. George, gone.

And though he didn’t know what the Law had to say about dying by the Mortal Cup, whether the Clave would consider George one of their own and give him Shadowhunter burial rights, he didn’t care. He knew what George was, what he was meant to be, and what he deserved.

“Ave atque vale, George Lovelace, child of Nephilim,” he whispered. “Forever and ever, my brother, hail and farewell.”

*

Simon grazed a finger over the small stone plaque, tracing the engraved letters: GEORGE LOVELACE.

“It’s pretty, isn’t it?” Isabelle said from behind him.

“Simple,” Clary added. “He would have liked that, don’t you think?”

Simon thought that George would have preferred to be interred in the City of Bones, like the Shadowhunter he was. (More to the point, he would have preferred not to be dead at all.) The Clave had refused him. He died in the act of Ascension, which in their eyes marked him as unworthy. Simon was trying very hard not to be angry about this.

He spent a lot of time these days trying not to be angry.

“It was nice of the London Institute to offer a place for him, don’t you think?” Isabelle said. Simon could hear in her voice how hard she was trying, how worried she was for him.

They told me a Lovelace is always welcome at the London Institute, George had said when he heard about his placement.

After his death the Institute made good on their word.