Classes may have been over for the year, but the Academy faculty was still finding new ways to torture them.
“What do you think it is this time?” Julie Beauvale asked as they settled onto the uncomfortable wooden benches in the main hall. The entire student body, Shadowhunters and mundanes alike, had been summoned first thing Monday morning for an all-school meeting.
“Maybe they finally decided to kick out all the dregs,” Jon Cartwright said. “Better late than never.”
Simon was too tired and too uncaffeinated to think up a clever retort. So he simply said, “Suck it, Cartwright.”
George snorted.
Over the last several months of classes, training, and demon-hunting disasters, their class had grown pretty close—especially the handful of students who were around Simon’s age. George was George, of course; Beatriz Mendoza was surprisingly sweet for a Shadowhunter; and even Julie had turned out to be slightly less snotty than she pretended to be. Jon Cartwright, on the other hand . . . The moment they met, Simon had decided that if looks matched personalities, Jon Cartwright would look like a horse’s ass. Unfortunately, there was no justice in the world, and he looked instead like a walking Ken doll. Sometimes first impressions were misleading; sometimes they peered straight through to a person’s inner soul. Simon was as sure now as he’d ever been: Jon’s inner soul was a horse’s ass.
Jon gave Simon a patronizing pat on the shoulder. “I’m going to miss your witty repartee this summer, Lewis.”
“I’m going to hope you get eaten by a spider demon this summer, Cartwright.”
George slipped an arm around both of them, grinning maniacally and humming “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?”
George had, perhaps, embraced the spirit of celebration a little too enthusiastically of late.
Up at the front of the hall, Dean Penhallow cleared her throat loudly, looking pointedly in their direction. “If we could have some silence, please?”
The room continued chattering, Dean Penhallow continued clearing her throat and asking nervously for order, and things could have gone on like that all morning had Delaney Scarsbury, their training master, not climbed up on a chair. “We’ll have silence, or we’ll have one hundred push-ups,” he boomed. The room hushed immediately.
“I suppose you’ve all been wondering how you would keep busy now that exams are past?” Dean Penhallow said, her voice rising at the end of her sentence. The dean had a way of turning almost everything into a question. “I think you’ll all recognize this week’s guest speaker?”
An intimidating barrel-chested man in gray robes strode onto the makeshift stage. The room gasped.
Simon gasped too, but it wasn’t the appearance of the Inquisitor that had blown his mind. It was the girl trailing after him, glaring fiercely at his robes like she hoped to set them on fire with her mind. A girl with a curtain of silky black hair and bottomless brown eyes: the Inquisitor’s daughter. Known to friends, family, and humiliatingly rejected ex-boyfriends as Isabelle Lightwood.
George elbowed him. “You seeing what I’m seeing?” he whispered. “You want a tissue?”
Simon couldn’t help remembering the last time Izzy had shown up at the Academy, for the express purpose of warning every girl in school away from him. He’d been horrified. Right about now, he couldn’t imagine anything better.
But Isabelle didn’t look inclined to say anything to the class. She simply sat beside her father, arms crossed, glowering.
“She’s even prettier when she’s angry,” Jon whispered.
In a miraculous triumph of restraint, Simon didn’t spear him in the eye with a pen.
“You’ve nearly completed your first year at the Academy,” Robert Lightwood told the assembled students, somehow making it sound less like a congratulations than it did like a threat. “My daughter tells me that one of the mundanes’ great heroes has a saying, ‘With great power comes substantial responsibility.’??”
Simon gaped. There was only one way Isabelle Lightwood, as far from a comics nerd as a person could get, would know a line—even a mangled one—from Spider-Man. She’d been quoting Simon.
That had to mean something . . . right?
He tried to catch her eye.
He failed.
“You’ve learned a lot about power this year,” Robert Lightwood continued. “This week I’m going to talk to you about responsibility. And what happens when power runs unchecked, or is freely given to the wrong person. I’m going to talk to you about the Circle.”
At those words, a hush fell across the room. The Academy faculty, like most Shadowhunters, were very careful to avoid the subject of the Circle—the group of rogue Shadowhunters that Valentine Morgenstern had led in the Uprising. The students knew about Valentine—everyone knew about Valentine—but they learned quickly not to ask too many questions about him. Over the last year, Simon had come to understand that the Shadowhunters preferred to believe their choices were perfect, their laws infallible. They didn’t like to think about the time they’d been nearly destroyed by a group of their own.
It explained, at least, why the dean was hosting this session, rather than their history teacher, Catarina Loss. The warlock seemed to tolerate most Shadowhunters—barely. Simon suspected that when it came to former members of the Circle, “barely” was too much to hope for.
Robert cleared his throat. “I’d like all of you to ask yourselves what you would have done, were you a student here in Valentine Morgenstern’s day. Would you have joined the Circle? Would you have stood by Valentine’s side at the Uprising? Raise your hand, if you think it’s possible.”
Simon was unsurprised to see not a single hand in the air. He’d played this game back in mundane school, every time his history class covered World War II. Simon knew no one ever thought they would be a Nazi.
Simon also knew that, statistically, most of them were wrong.
“Now I’d like you to raise your hand if you think you’re an exemplary Shadowhunter, one who would do anything to serve the Clave,” Robert said.
Unsurprisingly, many more hands shot up this time, Jon Cartwright’s the highest.
Robert smiled mirthlessly. “It was the most eager and loyal of us who were first to join Valentine’s ranks,” he told them. “It was those of us most dedicated to the Shadowhunter cause who found ourselves the easiest prey.”
There was a rustling in the crowd.
“Yes,” Robert said. “I say us, because I was among Valentine’s disciples. I was in the Circle.”
The rustling burst into a storm. Some of the students looked unsurprised, but many of them looked as if a nuclear bomb had just gone off inside their brains. Clary had told Simon that Robert Lightwood used to be a member of the Circle, but it was obviously hard for some people to reconcile that with the position of the Inquisitor, which this tall, fearsome man now held.
“The Inquisitor?” Julie breathed, eyes wide. “How could they let him . . . ?”