“I think we should have a funeral,” George Lovelace said, voice trembling on the last word. “A proper one.”
Simon Lewis paused in his labors and peered up at his roommate. George was the kind of guy Simon had once loathed on sight, assuming anyone with that bronze glow, those six-pack abs, that maddeningly sexy (at least, according to every girl and more than a few of the guys Simon had checked with) Scottish brogue, must have a brain the size of a rat turd and a personality about as appealing. But George turned Simon’s assumptions on their head on a daily basis. As he was doing right at this moment, wiping away something that looked suspiciously like a tear.
“Are you . . . crying?” Simon asked, incredulous.
“Of course not.” George gave his eyes another furious wipe. “Well, in my defense,” he added, sounding only slightly abashed, “death is a terrible thing.”
“It’s a dead rat,” Simon pointed out. “A dead rat in your shoe, I might add.” Simon and George had discovered that the key to a happy roommate relationship was clear division of labor. So George was in charge of disposing of all creatures—rats, lizards, cockroaches, the occasional odd-shaped mishmash of the three whose ancestor had, presumably, once insulted a warlock—found in the closets or beneath the beds. Simon handled all those that had crawled inside items of clothing and—he shuddered to remember the moment they realized this labor needed assigning—under pillows. “Also, for the record, only one of us has actually been a rat—and you’ll note he’s not the one crying.”
“It could be the last dead rat we ever find!” George sniffled. “Think about it, Si. This could be the last shared dead rat of our entire lives.”
Simon sighed. As Ascension Day approached, the day they would officially stop being students and start being Shadowhunters, George had been mournfully noting every last time they did anything. Now, as the moon rose over their last night at the Academy, he’d apparently lost his mind. A little nostalgia made sense to Simon: That morning, at their last-ever calisthenics session, Delaney Scarsbury had called him a spaghetti-armed, four-eyed, bow-legged demon-snack-in-waiting for the last time, and Simon had almost said thank you. And that night’s final bowl of “meat-flavored” custard had admittedly gotten them all a little choked up.
But losing it over a rat with stiffening limbs and athlete’s foot? That was taking things too far.
Using the torn-off cover from his old demonology textbook, Simon managed to scoop the rat out of the shoe without touching it. He dropped it into one of the plastic bags he’d had Isabelle bring him specifically for this purpose, tied the bag tightly, then—humming taps—dropped it into the trash.
“RIP, Jon Cartwright the Thirty-Fourth,” George said solemnly.
They named all their rats Jon Cartwright—a fact that drove the original Jon Cartwright nuts. Simon smiled at the thought of it, their gallingly cocky classmate’s forehead flush with anger, that vein in his disgustingly muscled neck starting to throb. Maybe George was right.
Maybe, someday, they would even miss the rats.
Simon had never put much effort into imagining his graduation day, much less the night before. Like prom and homecoming, these seemed like rituals meant for a very different kind of teenager—the school-spirited, letter-jacketed jocks and cheerleaders he knew mostly from bad movies. No keg parties for him, no weepy farewells or ill-advised hookups fueled by nostalgia and cheap beer. Two years ago, if he’d bothered to think about it at all, Simon would have assumed he’d spend that night like he’d spent most of his nights in Brooklyn, hanging with Eric and the guys in Java Jones, guzzling coffee and brainstorming names for the band. (Dead Sneaker Rat, Simon mused out of habit. Or maybe Rodent Funeral.)
Of course, that was back when he’d assumed high school would lead to college, which would lead to rock stardom . . . or at least a moderately cool job at a moderately cool record label. Before he knew there was such a thing as demons, before he knew there was a race of superpowered, angel-blooded warriors eternally pledged to battle them—and definitely before he’d volunteered himself up to be one of them.
So instead of Java Jones, he was in the Academy’s student lounge, squinting through candlelight, sneezing from two centuries’ worth of dust, and dodging the intimidating glares of noble Shadowhunters past whose portraits lined the room, their expressions seeming to say, How could you possibly imagine you could be one of us? Instead of Eric, Matt, and Kirk, who he’d known since kindergarten, he was with friends he’d met only a couple of years before, one of whom nurtured an intense affection for rats and another who shared his name with them. Instead of speculating about their futures in rock and roll, they were readying themselves for a life battling multidimensional evils. Assuming, that is, they survived graduation.
Which wasn’t exactly a safe assumption to make.
“What do you think it will be like?” Marisol Garza asked now, nestled beneath Jon Cartwright’s beefy arm and looking like she was almost happy to be there. “The ceremony, I mean. What do you think we’ll have to do?”
Jon, like Julie Beauvale and Beatriz Mendoza, descended from a long line of Shadowhunters. For them, tomorrow was just another day, their official farewell to student life. Time to stop training and start battling.
But for George, Marisol, Simon, Sunil Sadasivan, and a handful of other mundane students, tomorrow loomed as the day they Ascended.
No one was quite sure what it meant: Ascension. Much less what it entailed. They’d been told very little: That they would drink from the Mortal Cup. That they would, like the first of the warrior race, Jonathan Shadowhunter, sip the blood of an angel. That they would, if they were lucky, be transformed on the spot into real, full-blooded Shadowhunters. That they would say good-bye to their mundane lives forever and pledge themselves to a fearless life of service to humanity.
Or if they were very unlucky, they would die an immediate and presumably gruesome death.
It didn’t exactly make for a festive evening.
“I’m just wondering what’s in the Cup,” Simon said. “You don’t think it’s actual blood, do you?”
“Isn’t that your specialty, Lewis?” Jon sneered.
George sighed wistfully. “The last time Jon makes a stupid vampire joke.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Simon muttered.
Marisol whacked Jon’s shoulder. “Shut up, idiot,” she said. But she said it rather too lovingly for Simon’s taste.
“I bet it’s water,” Beatriz said, always the peacemaker. “Water that you’re supposed to pretend is blood, or that the Cup turns into blood, or something like that.”