Isabelle gaped at him. “You’re not seriously mad at me? For saving your ass?”
It wasn’t until she asked that he realized he was. Angry at her for killing the vampire girl, angry at her for assuming he needed his ass saved and being pretty much right, angry at her for hiding in the dark, waiting to save him, even though he’d made it painfully clear that there couldn’t be anything between them anymore. Angry that she was a supernaturally sexy, raven-haired warrior goddess and apparently against all odds still in love with him—and he was apparently going to have to break up with her, again.
“She didn’t want to hurt me. She just wanted to go.”
“And what? I should have let her? Is that what you were planning to do? There are more people in the world than you, Simon. She killed children. She ripped out their throats.”
He couldn’t answer. He didn’t know what to feel or think. The vampire girl had been a murderer. A cold-blooded murderer, in every sense of the word. But he’d felt a kinship with her as she’d embraced him, a sort of whispering in the back of his mind that said we are lost children together.
He wasn’t sure there was a place in Isabelle’s life for someone lost.
“Simon?” Isabelle was like a tightly coiled spring. He could see how much effort it was taking her just to keep her voice steady, her face free of emotion.
How can I know that? Simon wondered. Looking at her was like seeing double: one Isabelle a stranger he barely knew, one Isabelle the girl that other, better Simon loved so much he would have sacrificed everything for her. There was a part of him—a part beneath memories, beyond rationality—desperate to close the space between them, to take her in his arms, smooth back her hair, lose himself in her bottomless eyes, her lips, her fierce, protective, overwhelming love.
“You can’t keep doing this!” he shouted, unsure whether he was yelling at her or himself. “It’s not your job to choose for me anymore, to decide what I should do or how I should live. Who I should be. How many times do I have to tell you before you hear me? I’m not him. I will never be him, Isabelle. He belonged to you, I get that. But I don’t. I know you Shadowhunters are used to having everything your way—you set the rules, you know what’s best for the rest of us. But not this time, okay? Not with me.”
With deliberate calm, Isabelle coiled her whip around her wrist. “Simon, I think you’ve mistaken me for someone who cares.”
It wasn’t the emotion in her voice that cracked his heart, but the lack of it. Behind the words was nothing: no pain, no suppressed anger, only a void. Hollow and cold.
“Isabelle—”
“I didn’t come here for you, Simon. This is my job. I thought you wanted it to be your job too. If you still feel that way, I’d suggest you reconsider some things. Like how you speak to your superiors.”
“My . . . superiors?”
“And for the record, since you brought it up? You’re right, Simon. I don’t know this version of you at all. And I’m pretty sure I don’t want to.” She stepped past Simon, her shoulder brushing against his for the briefest of moments, then slipped out of the building.
Simon stared after her, wondering if he should follow, but he couldn’t seem to make his feet move. At the sound of the door slamming shut, Jon Cartwright blinked his eyes open and woozily eased himself upright. “We got her?” he asked Simon, catching sight of the small pile of dust where the vampire girl had been.
“Yeah,” he said wearily. “You could say that.”
“Oh yeah, that’s right, bloodsucker!” Jon pumped his fist in the air, then made devil fingers. “You mess with a Cartwright bull—you get the horns.”
“I’m not saying she didn’t break the Law,” Simon explained, for what seemed like the hundredth time. “I’m just saying, even if she did, why did we have to kill her? I mean—what about, I don’t know, jail?”
By the time they’d Portaled back to the Academy, dinner was long over. But as a reward for their labors, Dean Penhallow had opened up the dining hall and the kitchen for the twenty returning students. They huddled around a couple of the long tables, gnawing hungrily at stale egg rolls and mercifully flavorless shawarma. The Academy had returned to its traditional policy of serving international food—but unfortunately, all of these foods were prepared by a single chef, who Simon suspected was a warlock, because nearly everything they ate seemed enchanted to taste like dog food.
“Because that’s what we do,” Jon said. “A vampire—any Downworlder—violates the Covenant, someone has to kill it. Have you not been paying attention?”
“So why isn’t there a Downworlder jail?” Simon said. “Why aren’t there Downworlder trials?”
“That’s not how it works, Simon,” Julie said. He’d thought she might be friendlier after their conversation in the corridor the other night, but if anything, her edges had gotten sharper, more liable to draw blood. “This isn’t your stupid mundane law. This is the Law. Handed down from the Angel. Higher than everything else.”
Jon nodded proudly. “Sed lex, dura lex.”
“Even if it’s wrong?” Simon asked.
“How could it be wrong, if it’s the Law? That’s an oxymoron.”
Takes one to know one, he thought childishly, but stopped himself before saying it out loud. Anyway, Jon was more of your garden-variety moron.
“You realize you all sound like you’re in some kind of cult,” Simon complained. He touched the star that was still hanging at his neck. His family had never been particularly religious, but his father had always loved helping him try to figure out the Jewish perspective on questions of right and wrong. “There’s always a little wiggle room,” he’d told Simon, “a little space to figure these things out yourself.” He’d taught Simon to ask questions, to challenge authority, to understand and believe in rules before he followed them. There was a noble Jewish heritage of arguing, his father liked to say, even when it came to arguing with God.
Simon wondered now what his father would think of him, at this school for fundamentalists, swearing fealty to a higher Law. What did it even mean to be Jewish in a universe where angels and demons walked the earth, practiced miracles, carried swords? Was thinking for yourself an activity better suited to a world without any evidence of the divine?
“The Law is hard, but it’s the Law,” Simon added in disgust. “So freaking what? If the Law is wrong, why not change it? Do you know what the world would look like if we were all still following the laws made up back in the Dark Ages?”
“You know who else used to talk like that?” Jon asked ominously.
“Let me guess: Valentine.” Simon scowled. “Because apparently in all of Shadowhunter history only one guy has bothered to ask any questions. Yeah, that’s me, charismatic, evil supervillain about to lead a revolution. Better report me.”