Matthew’s whole body jerked with shock. He swung to face James, and stared. “What?”
“You might have noticed life is less than ideal for me at this time,” James said between his teeth. “So give up making a tragic spectacle of yourself over nothing, and—”
Matthew was not leaning against the wall any longer, and James was not sitting on the step. They were both standing up, and this was not a practice on the training grounds. James thought they were really going to fight; he thought they might really hurt each other.
“Oh, I’m terribly sorry, James Herondale,” Matthew sneered. “I forgot nobody could do a single thing like speak or breathe in this place without incurring your extremely judgmental judgment. I must be making a spectacle over nothing, if you say so. By the Angel, I’d trade places with you in a second.”
“You’d trade places with me?” James shouted. “That’s rubbish, that’s absolute swill, you would never. Why would you do that? Why would you even say it?”
“Maybe it’s the fact you have everything I want,” Matthew snarled. “And you don’t even seem to want it.”
“What?” James asked blankly. He was living in opposites land, in which the sky was the earth and the name of every day started with Y. It was the only explanation. “What? What do I have that you could possibly want?”
“They will send you home any time you like,” Matthew said. “They’re trying to drive you away. And no matter what I do, they won’t chuck me out. Not the Consul’s son.”
James blinked. Rain slithered down his cheeks and down the neck of his shirt, but he hardly felt it. “You want . . . to be chucked out?”
“I want to go home, all right?” Matthew snapped. “I want to be with my father!”
“What?” James said blankly, one more time.
Matthew might insult the Nephilim, but no matter what he said he always seemed to be having a marvelous time. James had believed he was enjoying himself at the Academy, as James himself could not. James had never thought he might really be unhappy. He’d never even considered Uncle Henry.
Matthew’s face twisted as if he was going to cry. He stared off determinedly into the distance, and when he spoke his voice was hard.
“You think Christopher’s bad, but my father is so much worse,” Matthew said. “A hundred times as bad as Christopher. A thousand. He’s been practicing being terrible for much longer than Christopher. He’s so absentminded, and he can’t—he can’t walk. He could be working on some new device, or writing a letter to his warlock friend in America about a new device, or working out why some old device literally exploded, and he would not notice if his own hair was on fire. I’m not exaggerating, I’m not making a joke—I have put out fires on my own father’s head. My mother is always busy, and Charles Buford is always running after her and acting superior. I’m the one who takes care of my father. I’m the one who listens to him. I didn’t want to go away to school and leave him, and I’ve been doing all I can to get chucked out and go back.”
I don’t take care of my father. My father takes care of me, James wanted to say, but he feared it might be cruel to say that, when Matthew had never had that unquestioning security.
It occurred to James that one day there might be a time when his father did not seem all-knowing, able to solve everything and be anything. The thought made him uncomfortable.
“You’ve been trying to get expelled?” James asked. He spoke slowly. He felt slow.
Matthew made an impatient gesture, as if chopping invisible carrots with an invisible knife. “That is what I’ve been trying to tell you, yes. But they won’t. I have been doing the best impression of the worst Shadowhunter in the world, and yet they won’t. What is wrong with the dean, I ask you? Does she want blood?”
“The best impression of the worst Shadowhunter,” James repeated. “So you don’t—believe in all that stuff about violence being repulsive, and truth and beauty and Oscar Wilde?”
“No, I do,” Matthew said hastily. “I really like Oscar Wilde. And beauty and truth. I do think it’s nonsense that because we are born what we are, we cannot be painters or poets or create anything—that all we do is kill. My father and Christopher are geniuses, do you know that? Real geniuses. Like Leonardo da Vinci. He was a mundane who—”
“I know who Leonardo da Vinci is.”
Matthew glanced at him and smiled: it was The Smile, gradual and illuminating as sunrise, and James had the sinking feeling that he might not be immune after all.