Christopher and Thomas, in another surprise for James in a morning full of surprises, seemed pleased to see him.
“Oh, have you decided not to detest Matthew any longer?” Christopher asked. “I’m so glad. You were really hurting his feelings. Though we are not supposed to talk about that to you.” He gazed dreamily at the bread basket, as if it were a wonderful painting. “I forgot that.”
Thomas put his head down on the table. “Why are you the way that you are?”
Matthew reached over and patted Thomas on the back, then rescued Christopher from setting his own sleeves on fire with a candle. He gave James the candle and a smile.
“If you ever see Christopher near an open flame, take him away from it, or take it away from him,” Matthew said. “Fight the good fight with me. I must be eternally watchful.”
“That must be difficult, when surrounded by, um, your adoring public,” said James.
“Well,” said Matthew, and paused, “it’s possible,” he said, and paused again, “I may have been . . . slightly showing off? ‘Look, if you don’t want to be friends with me, everybody else does, and you are making a big mistake.’ I may have been doing that. Possibly.”
“Is that over?” Thomas asked. “Thank the Angel. You know large crowds of people make me nervous! You know I can never think of anything to say to them! I am not witty like you or aloof and above it all like James or living in cloud cuckoo land like Christopher. I came to the Academy to get away from being bossed by my sisters, but my sisters make me much less nervous than battering rams flying through the air and parties all the time. Can we please have some peace and quiet occasionally!”
James stared at Thomas. “Does everybody think I’m aloof?”
“No, mostly people think you’re an unholy abomination upon this earth,” Matthew said cheerfully. “Remember?”
Thomas looked ready to put his head back on the table, but he cheered up when he saw James had not taken offense.
“Why would that be?” Christopher asked politely.
James stared. “Because I can turn from flesh and blood into a ghastly shadow?”
“Oh,” said Christopher. His dreamy lavender eyes focused for a moment. “That’s very interesting,” he told James, his voice clear. “You should let me and Uncle Henry perform many experiments on you. We could do an experiment right now.”
“No, we could not,” said Matthew. “No experiments at breakfast time. Add it to the list, Christopher.”
Christopher sighed.
And just like that, as if it could always have been that easy, James had friends. He liked Thomas and Christopher as much as he’d always known he would.
Of all his new friends, though, he liked Matthew the best. Matthew always wanted to talk about the books James had read, or tell James a story as good as a book. He made obvious efforts to find James when James was not there, and obvious efforts to protect James when he was there. James did not have many nice things to write letters home about: He ended up writing letters that were full of Matthew.
James knew Matthew probably only felt sorry for him. Matthew was always looking after Christopher and Thomas, with the same painstaking care he must have looked after his father. Matthew was kind.
That was all right. James would absolutely have wanted to share a room with Matthew, now it was out of the question.
“Why do people call you Demon Eyes, James?” Christopher asked one day when they were sitting around a table studying Ragnor Fell’s account of the First Accords.
“Because I have golden eyes as if lit by eldritch infernal fires,” James said. He had heard a girl whispering that and thought it sounded rather poetic.
“Ah,” said Christopher. “Do you look at all like your grandfather aside from that? The demonic one, I mean.”
“You cannot simply ask whether people look like their demon grandfather!” Thomas wailed. “Next you will ask Professor Fell if he looks like his demon parent! Please, please do not ask Professor Fell if he looks like his demon parent. He has a cutting tongue. Also, he might cut you with a knife.”
“Fell?” Christopher inquired.
“Our teacher,” said Matthew. “Our green teacher.”
Christopher looked genuinely astonished. “We have a teacher who is green?”
“James looks like his father,” said Matthew unexpectedly, then narrowed his laughing dark eyes in James’s direction in a musing fashion. “Or he will, when he grows into his face and it stops being angles pointing in all different directions.”
James slowly raised his open book to hide his face, but he was secretly pleased.
Matthew’s friendship made other friends creep forward too. Esme cornered James and told him how sorry she was that Mike was being an idiot. She also told him that she hoped James did not take this expression of friendly concern in a romantic way.
“I have rather a tendresse for Matthew Fairchild, actually,” Esme added. “Please put in a good word for me there.”
Life was much, much better now that he had friends, but that did not mean anything was perfect, or even mended. People were still afraid of him, still hissing “Demon Eyes” and muttering about unclean shadows.
“Pulvis et umbra sumus,” said James once, out loud in class, after hearing too many whispers. “My father says that sometimes. We are but dust and shadows. Maybe I’m just—getting a head start on all of you.”
Several people in the classroom were looking alarmed.
“What did he say?” Mike Smith whispered, clearly agitated.
“It’s not a demon language, buffoon,” Matthew snapped. “It’s Latin.”
Despite everything Matthew could do, the whispers rose and rose. James kept expecting a disaster.
And then the demons were let loose in the woods.
“I’ll be partners with Christopher,” said Thomas at their next training exercise, sounding resigned.
“Excellent. I will be partners with James,” said Matthew. “He reminds me of the nobility of the Shadowhunter way of life. He keeps me right. If I am parted from him I will become distracted by truth and beauty. I know I will.”
Their teachers seemed extremely pleased that Matthew was actually participating in training courses now, aside from the courses only for the elites, in which Thomas reported that Matthew was still determined to be hopeless.
James did not know why the teachers were so worried. It was obvious that as soon as anyone was actually in danger, Matthew would leap to their defense.
James was glad to be so sure of that, as they walked through the woods. It was a windy day, and it seemed as if every tree was stooping down to howl in his ear, and he knew that Pyxis boxes had been placed throughout the woods by older students—Pyxis boxes with the smallest and most harmless of demons inside, but still real Pyxis boxes with real demons inside, who they were meant to fight. Pyxis boxes were a little outmoded these days, but they were still sometimes used to transport demons safely. If demons could ever be said to be safe.
James’s aunt Ella, who he had never seen, had been killed by a demon from a Pyxis box when she was younger than James was now.