Born to Endless Night (5 page)

Simon brightened. “So cool.”

“Nerds,” said Julie.

Simon took that as praise. He did feel that George had really come along under his tutelage. He had even voluntarily bought graphic novels when he was in Scotland over Christmas. Maybe someday the student would become the master.

“This is hard luck for you, Simon,” said George. “I know you wanted to talk to Alec.”

Simon’s brief moment of cheer faded, and he collapsed with his face on the table. “Forget about talking to Alec. When I went to tell them about the baby, I walked in on Alec and Magnus. If Alec didn’t like me before, he
definitely
hates me now.”

Another old memory flashed in Simon’s mind, absolutely unwelcome: Alec’s pale, furious face as he looked down at Clary. Maybe Alec hated Clary, too. Maybe once someone crossed him, he never forgot and never forgave, and would always hate them both.

His hideous imaginings were interrupted by a sensation around their dinner table.

“What? Where? When? How? Did Magnus seem like an athletic yet tender lover?” Julie demanded.

“Julie!” said Beatriz.

“Thank you, Beatriz,” said Simon.

“Don’t say a word, Simon,” said Beatriz. “Not until I have acquired a pen and paper so I can write down everything you say. I’m sorry, Simon, but they are famous, and celebrities have to bear with this interest in their love lives. They’re like Brangelina.”

Beatriz rummaged through her bag until she found a notebook, and then opened it and gazed at Simon with an expectant air.

Julie, Idris born and bred, made a face. “What is Brangelina? It sounds like a demon.”

“It does not!” George protested. “I believe in their love.”

“They are not like Brangelina,” Simon said. “What would you even call them? Algnus? That sounds like a foot disease.”

“Obviously you would call them Malec,” said Beatriz. “Are you stupid, Simon?”

“I will not be distracted!” said Julie. “Does Magnus have piercings? Of course he does; when would he miss an opportunity to shine?”

“I didn’t notice, and even if I had noticed, I wouldn’t discuss it,” said Simon.

“Oh, because people in the mundane world never obsess about celebrities and their love lives,” Beatriz said. “See also, Brangelina. And that boy band George is obsessed with. He has all kinds of theories about their romances.”

“What . . . boy band . . . George is obsessed with?” Simon asked slowly.

George looked shifty. “I don’t want to talk about it. The band’s going through some hard times lately, and it makes me too sad.”

Far too many disturbing and upsetting things had happened to Simon today. He decided to stop thinking about George and the boy band.

“I’m the one who grew up a subway ride from Broadway, I know people get too interested in celebrities,” he said. “But it’s weird for me when you girls obsess over Jace or Magnus. It’s weird when Jon trails after Isabelle with his tongue hanging out.”

“Is George’s crush on Clary weird too?” asked Beatriz.

“Is this Betray George Day, Beatriz?” George demanded. “Si, I may have had certain thoughts about certain pocket-size vixens, but I would never tell you about them! I don’t want to make it weird!”

“Pocket-size vixens?” Simon stared. “Congratulations, you made it weird.”

George hung his head in shame.

“It’s weird for me because everybody acts as if they know famous people, but I really do know these people. They’re not images, like posters to hang on the wall. They’re not anything like you think they are. They have a right to privacy. It’s weird because I see everyone acting like they know who my friends are, when they only know a tiny bit of them, and it’s weird to see anyone acting as if they have some sort of claim on my friends and their lives.”

Beatriz hesitated, then put her pen down. “Okay,” she said. “I can see it’s weird for you, but—it does come from everyone admiring what they’ve done. People act like they know them because they want to know them. And being admired means they have a lot of influence over other people. They can do a lot of good with that. Alec Lightwood is Sunil’s inspiration to be a Shadowhunter. And you, Simon. A lot of people follow you because they admire you. There might be some weirdness mixed in with being admired like that, but I think there’s more good.”

“Oh, it’s not the same for me,” Simon mumbled. “I mean, I don’t even remember. I meant my friends. Including Alec, who is . . . my friend who doesn’t like me. They’re the special ones.”

He couldn’t be cool and assured like Magnus or Jace. He didn’t know what Beatriz was talking about. Also he felt suddenly paranoid over whether people were wondering if he had piercings.

Simon had no piercings. He used to be a musician in Brooklyn. He probably should have piercings.

Beatriz hesitated another instant, then tore off the page she’d written on and rolled it into a ball. “You’re special too, Simon,” she said, and blushed. “Everybody knows that.”

Simon looked at her red face and remembered George mentioning someone had a crush on him. He’d thought for a moment it might be Julie, and though it would be both bizarre and bizarrely flattering to have changed the heart of a Shadowhunter ice princess with his manly charms, he supposed Beatriz made more sense. He and Beatriz were really good friends. Beatriz had the best smile in the Academy. Simon would’ve been thrilled to have an attractive girl he was friends with get a crush on him, back in Brooklyn.

He felt mainly awkward now. He wondered if he was supposed to let Beatriz down easily.

Julie cleared her throat. “And just so you know . . . ,” she said, “there have been invasive questions asked about you. Also there was an incident where someone tried to steal one of your used socks and keep it as a trophy.”

“Who was the sock person?” Simon demanded. “That’s just nasty.”

“We never tell them anything,” Julie said. “And they may ask once, but they never ask again.” Her lip curled back from her teeth. She looked like a snarling blond tiger. “Because you’re a real person to us, Simon. And you’re our friend.”

She reached across the table and touched Simon’s hand, then drew it back as if she had been burned. Beatriz snatched Julie’s hand as soon as she’d drawn it back and pulled her out of her chair and toward the corner of the room where the food was laid out.

Neither of them needed more food. They had barely touched their stew. Simon watched as they went, and then stood talking to each other in fraught whispers.

“Well, they both seem strangely upset.”

George rolled his eyes. “Come on, Si, don’t be dense.”

“You can’t mean . . . ,” began Simon. “They can’t both—like me?”

There was a long silence.

“Neither of them like you?” Simon said. “You work out. And! You have a Scottish accent.”

“Don’t rub it in. Maybe girls fear me, because my keen eyes see too deeply into their souls,” George said. “Or maybe they’re intimidated by my good looks. Or maybe . . . Please don’t make me talk about what a lonely bugger I am anymore.”

He looked after Julie and Beatriz a little wistfully. Simon could not tell if George was wistful about Julie or Beatriz, or simply wistful about love in general. He’d had no idea his friends were involved in such an emotional tangle.

He was surprised. He felt awkward. And he didn’t feel anything else.

He liked Beatriz a lot. Julie was terrible, but Simon thought of Julie telling him about her sister, and he had to admit: Julie was terrible, but he liked her, too. Both of them were beautiful and badass and did not come with a burden of lost memories and tangled emotions.

He wasn’t even pleased they liked him. He wasn’t even slightly tempted.

He wished, with single-minded intensity, that Isabelle was here—not a letter, not a voice on the phone, but here.

He looked at George’s sad face and offered: “Want to talk about when Magnus and Alec go, and we steal their suite and make our own meals in our own little kitchen?”

George sighed. “Could we really, Simon, or is that too beautiful a dream? Every day would be a song. All I want is to make a sandwich, Simon. Just a humble sandwich, with ham, cheese, maybe a little dab of . . . oh my God.”

Simon wondered what a dab of “oh my God” would taste like. George had frozen, spoon to his lips, eyes fixed on a point over Simon’s shoulder.

Simon turned around in his seat and saw Isabelle framed in the doorway of the Academy dining hall. She was wearing a long dress the color of irises and her arms were spread wide, bracelets gleaming. Time seemed to slow, like a movie, like magic, like she was a genie who could appear in a puff of glittering smoke to grant wishes, and every wish would be her.

“Surprise,” said Isabelle. “Miss me?”

Simon jumped to his feet. He might have knocked his bowl clear across the table and into George’s lap. He was sorry, but he would make it up to him later.

“Isabelle,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“Congratulations, Simon, that’s a very romantic question,” Isabelle told him. “Am I meant to take it as ‘No, I didn’t miss you, and I’m seeing other girls’? If so, don’t worry about it. Why worry, when life is short? Specifically, your life, because I am going to cut off your head.”

“I’m confused by what you’re saying,” Simon told her.

Isabelle raised her eyebrows and opened her lips, but before she could speak Simon caught her by the waist and drew her in against him, kissing her surprised mouth. Isabelle’s mouth relaxed, curving under his. She flung her arms around his neck and kissed him back, sultry and exuberant at once, a femme fatale
and a warrior princess, all the dream girls of all his nerdy fantasies in one. Simon pulled back for a moment to look into Isabelle’s night-dark eyes.

“I wasn’t aware,” said Simon, “that there are any other girls in the world but you.”

He was embarrassed as soon as he said it. It was in no way a smooth line. It was pathetically honest, trying to tell Isabelle what he had only just realized himself. But he saw Isabelle’s eyes shine like new stars waking in the night, felt her arm around his neck pulling him down for another kiss, and he thought to himself that the line might be a little smooth. After all, it had gotten him a girl,
the
girl. The only girl Simon wanted.

*    *    *

It was midnight before Magnus got all of the Lightwoods out of their suite. Isabelle had left to see Simon some time before, and Clary and Jace could usually be persuaded to go off together, but for a while he thought he was actually going to have to use magic on Maryse and Robert. He shoved them out of the door while they were still giving him helpful baby tips.

As soon as they were gone, Alec stumbled over to the bed and lay flat on his face, instantly asleep. Magnus was left with the baby.

It was possible the baby was stunned by the Lightwoods too. He lay in his crib staring up at the world with wide eyes. The crib was under a window, and he was in a small pool of light, moonshine shimmering on his crumpled blanket and his little fat legs. Magnus crouched down by the crib and watched him, waiting for the next eruption of screaming that meant he needed to be changed and fed. Instead he fell asleep too, his mouth open, a tiny blue rosebud.

Who could ever love it?
the baby’s mother had written, but the baby did not know that yet. He slept, innocent and serene as any child secure of love. Magnus’s mother might have thought the same despairing words.

Alec thought they were keeping him.

Keeping him had not even occurred to Magnus. He had thought he lived life believing a thousand possibilities were open to him, but he had not thought of this possibility as being open to him: family life like mundanes and Nephilim had, love so secure that it could be shared with someone brand-new to the world and helpless.

He tried out the thought now.

Keeping him. Keeping the baby. Having a baby, with Alec.

Hours passed. Magnus hardly noticed, time went by so quietly, as if someone had laid out the carpet of the night to muffle time’s footsteps. He did not register anything but that small face, until he felt a soft touch on his shoulder.

Magnus did not get up, but he turned to see Alec looking down at him. The moonlight turned Alec’s skin silver and his eyes a darker, deeper blue, infinitely tender.

“If you thought I was asking you to keep the baby,” Magnus said, “I wasn’t.”

Alec’s eyes widened. He absorbed this in silence.

“You’re . . . still really young,” Magnus said. “I’m sorry if sometimes it seems as if I do not remember that. It’s strange to me—being immortal means both being young and being old are strange to me. I know I must seem strange to you sometimes.”

Alec nodded, thoughtful and not hurt. “You do,” he said, and leaned down with one hand gripping the side of the crib, touched Magnus’s hair, and gave him a moonlight-soft kiss. “And I never want anything but this. I never want a less strange love.”

“But you don’t have to be scared I would ever leave you,” said Magnus. “You don’t have to be scared of what will happen to the baby or that I will be hurt because the baby—is a warlock, and was not wanted. You do not have to feel trapped. You do not have to be scared, and you do not have to do this.”

Alec knelt down in the shadows and on the bare, dusty boards of the attic, next to the crib and facing Magnus.

“What if I want to?” he asked. “I’m a Shadowhunter. We marry young, and we have children young, because we might die young, because we want to do our duty to the world and have all the love in the world we can. I used to . . . I used to think I could never do that, never have that. I used to feel trapped. I don’t feel trapped now. I could never ask you to live in an Institute, and I don’t want to. I want to stay in New York, with you, and with Lily and Maia. I want to keep doing what we’re doing. I want Jace to run the Institute after my mother, and I want to work with him. I want to be part of the connection between the Institute and Downworlders. For so long I thought I could never have any of the things I wanted, except that I could maybe keep Jace and Isabelle safe. I thought I could have their backs in a fight. Now I have more and more people I care about, and . . . I want everyone I care about—I want people I don’t even know, I want all of us—to know we have each other’s backs so we do not have to fight alone. I am not trapped. I’m happy. I am exactly where I want to be. I know what I want, and I have the life I want. I’m not scared of any of the things you said.”