If they were, they were even more afraid of Scarsbury, and so kept their mouths shut. He let the silence hang, thick and angry, for an agonizing minute. Then he scowled at George. “If you’re afraid of dangerous situations, boy, you’re in the wrong place. And as for the rest of you dregs, best you find out now whether you’ve got what it takes. If you don’t, then drinking from the Mortal Cup will kill you, and trust me, mundies, getting bled dry by a bloodsucker would be a much kinder way to go.” He’d fixed his gaze on Simon, maybe because Simon had once been a bloodsucker, or maybe because he now seemed the most likely to get drained by one.
It occurred to Simon that Scarsbury could be hoping for that outcome—that he’d selected Simon for this mission in hopes of getting rid of his biggest problem student. Though surely no Shadowhunter, even a Shadowhunting gym teacher, would stoop so low?
Something in Simon, some ghost of a memory, warned him not to be so sure.
“Is that understood?” Scarsbury said. “Is there anyone here who wants to go running to mommy and daddy crying ‘please save me from the big, bad vampire’?”
Dead silence.
“Excellent,” Scarsbury said. “You have two days to train. Then just keep reminding yourself how impressed all your little friends will be when you come back.” He chuckled. “If you come back.”
The student lounge was dark and musty, lit by flickering candlelight and watched over by the glowering visages of Shadowhunters past, Herondales and Lightwoods and even the occasional Morgenstern peering down from heavy gilt frames, their bloody triumphs preserved in fading oil paint. But it had several obvious advantages over Simon’s bedroom: It wasn’t in the dungeon, it wasn’t splattered with black slime, it didn’t carry the faint whiff of what might have been moldy socks but might have been the bodies of former students decaying under the floorboards, it didn’t have what sounded like a large and boisterous family of rats scrabbling behind the walls. But the one notable advantage of his room, Simon was reminded that night, while camped out in a corner playing cards with George, was the guarantee that Jon Cartwright and his Shadowhunter-track groupies would never, ever deign to cross the threshold.
“No sevens,” George said, as Jon, Beatriz, and Julie swept into the lounge. “Go fish.”
As Jon and the two girls approached, Simon suddenly got very interested in the card game. Or, at least, he did his best. At a normal boarding school, there’d be a TV in the lounge, instead of a gigantic portrait of Jonathan Shadowhunter, his eyes blazing as bright as his sword. There’d be music leaking out of the dorm rooms and mingling in the corridor, some of it good, some of it Phish; there’d be e-mail and texting and Internet porn. At the Academy, after-hours options were more limited: There was studying the Codex, and there was sleep. Playing cards was about as close as he could get to gaming, and when he went too long without gaming, Simon got a little itchy. It turned out that when you spent all day training to defeat actual, real-world monsters, Dungeons & Dragons questing lost a bit of its luster—or at least, so claimed George and every other student Simon had tried to recruit for a campaign—which left him with old half-forgotten summer camp standards: Hearts, Egyptian Ratscrew, and, of course, Go Fish. Simon stifled a yawn.
Jon, Beatriz, and Julie stood beside them, waiting to be acknowledged. Simon hoped if he waited long enough, they’d just go away. Beatriz wasn’t so bad, at least not on her own. But Julie could have been carved out of ice. She had suspiciously few physical flaws—the silky blond hair of a Barbie doll, the porcelain skin of a cosmetics model, better curves than any of the bikini-girl posters papering Eric’s garage—and wore the hawkish expression of someone on a search-and-destroy mission for any weakness whatsoever. All that, and she carried a sword.
Jon, of course, was Jon.
Shadowhunters didn’t practice magic—that was a fundamental tenet of their beliefs—so it was unlikely that the Academy would teach Simon a way to make Jon Cartwright vanish into another dimension. But a guy could dream.
They didn’t go away. Finally, George, congenitally incapable of being rude, set down his cards.
“Can we help you?” George asked, a sliver of ice cooling his Scottish brogue. Jon’s and Julie’s friendliness had melted away once they learned the truth about George’s mundane blood, and though George never said anything about it, he clearly had neither forgiven nor forgotten.
“Actually, yes,” Julie said. She nodded at Simon. “Well, you can.”
Finding out about the imminent vampire-killing mission hadn’t exactly tied a bright yellow ribbon around Simon’s day; he wasn’t in the mood. “What do you want?”
Julie looked awkwardly at Beatriz, who stared down at her feet. “You ask,” Beatriz murmured.
“Better if you do,” Julie shot back.
Jon rolled his eyes. “Oh, by the Angel! I’ll do it.” He pulled himself up to his full, impressive height, rested his hands on his hips, and peered down his regal nose at Simon. It had the look of a pose practiced in the mirror. “We want you to tell us about vampires.”
Simon grinned. “What do you want to know? Scariest is Eli in Let the Right One In, cheesiest is late-era Lestat, most underrated is David Bowie in The Hunger. Sexiest is definitely Drusilla, though if you ask a girl, she’ll probably say Damon Salvatore or Edward Cullen. But . . .” He shrugged. “You know girls.”
Julie’s and Beatriz’s eyes were wide. “I didn’t think you’d know so many!” Beatriz exclaimed. “Are they . . . are they your friends?”
“Oh, sure, Count Dracula and I are like this,” Simon said, crossing his fingers to demonstrate. “Also Count Chocula. Oh, and my BFF Count Blintzula. He’s a real charmer. . . .” He trailed off as he realized no one else was laughing. In fact, no one seemed to realize he was joking. “They’re from TV,” he prompted them. “Or, uh, cereal.”
“What’s he talking about?” Julie asked Jon, perfect nose wrinkling up in confusion.
“Who cares?” Jon said. “I told you this was a waste of time. Like he cares about anyone but himself?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Simon asked, starting to get irritated.
George cleared his throat, visibly uncomfortable. “Come on, if he doesn’t want to talk about it, that’s his business.”
“Not when it’s our lives at stake.” Julie was blinking hard, like she had something in her eye or—Simon caught his breath. Was she blinking back tears?
“What’s going on?” he asked, feeling more clueless than usual, which was saying a lot.
Beatriz sighed and gave Simon a shy smile. “We’re not asking you for anything personal or, you know, painful. We just want you to tell us what you know about vampires from, um . . .”
“From being a bloodsucker,” Jon filled in for her. “Which, as you may recall, you were.”
“But I don’t recall,” Simon pointed out. “Or have you not been paying attention?”
“That’s what you say,” Beatriz argued, “but . . .”
“But you think I’m lying?” Simon asked, incredulous. The black hole at the center of his memories was such a central fact of his existence, it had never even occurred to him someone might question it. What would be the point of lying about that—and what kind of person would do so? “You all think that? Really?”
One by one, they began to nod . . . even George, though at least he had the grace to look sheepish.