He waited nervously for her reaction, suspecting that girls probably didn’t like it much when you admitted you were afraid of them. Girls like Izzy probably didn’t like it when you admitted you were afraid of anything. Nothing scared her; she deserved someone just as brave.
“Is that all?” Her face lit up. “Simon, don’t you think I’m scared of that too? You’re not the only one on that ledge. If we jump, we jump together. We fall together.”
Simon had spent so long trying to gather together the pieces of himself, to fit the puzzle back together. But the final piece, the most important piece, had been right in front of him the whole time. Losing himself to Izzy—could it be that this was the only way to really find himself?
Could it be that this, here, was home?
Enough bad metaphors, he told himself. Enough delaying.
Enough being afraid.
He stopped thinking about the person he used to be or the relationship they used to have; he stopped thinking about whether he was screwing things up or why he wanted to; he stopped thinking about demon amnesia and Shadowhunter Ascension and the Fair Folk and the Dark War and politics and homework and the unregulated traffic of deadly sharp objects.
He stopped thinking about what could happen, and what could go wrong.
He took her in his arms and kissed her—kissed her the way he’d been longing to kiss her since he first laid eyes on her, kissed her not like a romance novel hero or a Shadowhunter warrior or some imaginary character from the past, but like Simon Lewis kissing the girl he loved more than anything in the world. It was like falling into the sun, falling together, hearts blazing with pale fire, and Simon knew he would never stop falling, knew that now that he’d grabbed hold of her again, he would never let go.
The marriage of true minds admits no impediments—but the make-out sessions of teenagers all too often do. Especially when one of the teenagers was a student at Shadowhunter Academy, with both homework and a curfew. And when the other was a demon-fighting warrior with a stakeout in the morning.
If Simon had had his way, he would have spent the next week, or possibly the next eternity, entangled with Izzy on the grass, listening to the lake lap against the shore, losing himself in the touch of her fingers and the taste of her lips. Instead, he spent a memorable two hours doing so, then galloped at breakneck speed back to Shadowhunter Academy and spent another hour kissing her good-bye, before letting her leap into the Portal with a promise to return as soon as she could.
He had to wait until the next day to thank Helen Blackthorn for her help. He caught her just as she was packing up to leave.
“I see the date went well,” she said as soon as she opened the door.
“How could you tell?”
Helen smiled. “You’re practically radioactive.”
Simon thanked her for relaying Izzy’s message and handed her a small bag of cookies he’d cadged from the dining hall. They were the only thing at the Academy that actually tasted good. “Consider this a small down payment on what I owe you,” he said.
“You don’t owe me anything. But if you really want to pay me back, come to the wedding—you can be Izzy’s plus one.”
“I wouldn’t miss it,” Simon promised. “So when’s the big day?”
“First of October,” she said, but there was a quavering note in her voice. “Probably.”
“Maybe sooner?”
“Maybe not at all,” she admitted.
“What? You and Aline aren’t breaking up!” Simon caught himself, remembering that he was talking to someone he barely knew. He couldn’t exactly command her to have a happy ending just because he’d suddenly fallen in love with love. “I’m sorry, it’s none of my business, but . . . why would you come all this way and take all their crap if you didn’t want to marry her?”
“Oh, I want to marry her. More than anything. It’s just, being back here has made me wonder if I’m being selfish.”
“How could marrying Aline be selfish?” Simon asked.
“Look at my life!” Helen exploded, the day’s—or maybe the year’s—worth of pent-up fury blasting out of her. “They look at me like I’m some kind of freak show—and those are the kind ones, the ones who don’t look at me like I’m the enemy. Aline is already stuck on that godforsaken island because of me. Is she supposed to suffer like that for the rest of her life? Just because she made the mistake of falling in love with me? What kind of person does that make me?”
“You can’t possibly think any of this is your fault.” He didn’t know her very well, but none of this sounded right to him. Not like something she would say or believe.
“Professor Mayhew told me that if I really loved her, I would leave her,” Helen admitted. “Instead of dragging her into this nightmare with me. That holding on to her is just proof I’m more faerie than I think.”
“Professor Mayhew is a troll,” Simon said, and wondered what it would take to get Catarina Loss to turn him into one for real. Or maybe a toad or a lizard. Something that would more befit the reptilian nature of his soul. “If you really loved Aline, you would do everything you can to hold on to her. Which is exactly what you’re doing. Besides, you’re assuming that if you tried to break up with her for her own good, she’d let you. From what I’ve heard about Aline, that’s not likely.”
“No,” Helen said fondly. “She’d fight me tooth and nail.”
“Then why not fast-forward to the inevitable? Accept that you’re stuck with her. The love of your life. Poor you.”
Helen sighed. “Isabelle told me what you said about the fey, Simon. About how you think it’s wrong to discriminate against them. That faeries can be good, just as much as anyone else.”
He didn’t understand where she was going with this, but he wasn’t sorry to have the chance to confirm it. “She was right, I do think that.”
“Isabelle believes that too, you know,” Helen said. “She’s been doing her best to convince me.”
“What do you mean?” Simon asked, confused. “Why would you need convincing.”
Helen kneaded her fingers together. “You know, I didn’t want to come here to tell a bunch of kids the story of my mother and father—I didn’t do that voluntarily. But I also didn’t make it up. That’s what happened. That’s who my mother was, and that’s what half of me is.”
“No, Helen, that’s not—”
“Do you know the poem ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’?”
Simon shook his head. The only poetry he knew was by Dr. Seuss or Bob Dylan.
“It’s Keats,” she said, and recited a few stanzas for him by memory.
She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept, and sigh’d fill sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.
And there she lullèd me asleep,
And there I dream’d—Ah! woe betide!
The latest dream I ever dream’d
On the cold hill’s side.
I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—“La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!”
“Keats wrote about faeries?” Simon asked. If they’d covered this in English class, he might have paid closer attention.