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.
Now, finally, he was whole again.
He was more than whole, he realized, as the Consul said proudly, “You are Nephilim now. I name you Simon Shadowhunter, of the blood of Jonathan Shadowhunter, child of the Nephilim.” It was a placeholder name, until he chose a new one for himself. Moments before, that had seemed unthinkable, but now it simply felt true. He was the same person he’d always been . . . and yet. He wasn’t Simon Lewis anymore. He was someone new.
“Arise.”
He felt . . . he didn’t know how he felt, except stunned. Filled with joy and confusion and what felt like a flickering light, growing brighter by the second.
He felt strong.
He felt ready.
He felt like his abs were still pretty much only a two-pack, but he supposed even a magic cup could get you only so far.
The Consul cleared her throat. “Arise,” she said again. Then she lowered her voice to a whisper. “That means you stand up and give someone else a turn.”
Simon was still trying to shake off his joyous daze as he made his way back to the others. George was next, and as they passed each other, he gave Simon a surreptitious high five.
Simon wondered what George would see inside the light, if it would be as wondrous. He wondered whether, after the ceremony was over, they would compare notes—or if this was the kind of thing you were supposed to keep to yourself. He supposed there was probably some kind of Shadowhunter protocol to follow—the Shadowhunters had a protocol for everything.
We, he corrected himself wryly. We have a protocol for everything.
This would take some getting used to.
George was on his knees inside the circles, the Mortal Cup in his hands. It was strange, being a Shadowhunter while George was still a mundane, as if there was now an invisible divide between them. This is the farthest apart we’ll ever be, Simon thought, and silently urged his roommate to hurry up and drink.
The Consul said the traditional words. George swore his oath of loyalty to the Shadowhunters without hesitation, drew in a deep breath, then jauntily raised the Mortal Cup as if giving a toast. “Slàinte!” he shouted, and as his friends broke into indulgent laughter, he took a slug.
Simon was still laughing when the screaming began.
The room fell dead silent, but inside Simon’s mind, there was a siren of pain. An inhuman, unearthly scream.
George’s scream.
On the dais, George and the Consul were engulfed in an impossible flash of blinding darkness. When it faded away, the Consul was on her feet, the Silent Brothers already by her side, all of them peering down at something horrible, something with the shape of a person, but not its face and not its skin. Something with black veins bulging through cracking flesh, something with the Mortal Cup still clenched in its rigid fist, some withered, writhing, crumbling creature with George’s hair and George’s sneakers, but in place of George’s smile, a tortured, toothless rictus leaking something too black to be blood. Not George, Simon thought furiously as the thing stopped jerking and trembling and fell still. And somehow, in Simon’s head, George screamed and screamed.
The chamber was a storm of motion—responsible adults hustling students out of the room, gasps and cries and shrieks—but Simon barely registered any of it. He was moving forward, toward the thing that couldn’t be George, pressing toward the dais with Shadowhunter strength and Shadowhunter speed. Simon was going to save his roommate, because he was a Shadowhunter now, and that’s what Shadowhunters do.
He didn’t notice Catarina Loss come up behind him, not until her hands were on his shoulders, her grip light enough that he should have been able to break free—but he couldn’t move.
“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!”