Welcome to Shadowhunter Academy Read Free

like her pretense of indifference, that sounded like a promise of the complete opposite. Simon looked at her for a long moment. She was so overwhelmingly beautiful and impressive, he found it too much to handle. He could barely believe any of his new memories, but the idea that Isabelle Lightwood had been his girlfriend seemed more unbelievable than the fact that vampires were real and Simon had been one. He didn’t have the faintest idea how he had made her feel that way about him once, and so he didn’t have the faintest idea how to make her feel that way about him again. It was like asking him to fly. He’d asked her to dance once, to have coffee with him twice in the months since she and Magnus had come to him and given back as much of his memory as they could, but not enough. Each time Isabelle had watched him carefully, expectantly, waiting for some miracle he knew he could not perform. It meant he was tongue-tied around her all the time, so sure he was going to say the wrong thing and shatter everything that he could scarcely say anything.
    “Okay,” he said. “Well, I’ll miss you.”
    Isabelle’s hand shot out, grasping his arm. She still wasn’t looking at him.
    “If you need me, I’ll come,” she said, and released him as abruptly as she had grabbed him.
    “Okay,” Simon said again, and retreated to Catarina Loss’s side as she made the Portal to go through to Idris, the country of the Shadowhunters. This parting was so painful and awkward and welcome that he could not quite appreciate how awesome it was to have magic done right in front of him.
    He waved good-bye to all these people he barely knew and somehow loved anyway, and he hoped they could not tell how relieved he was to be going.
    *    *    *
    Simon had remembered snatches about Idris, towers and a prison and stern faces and blood in the streets, but all of it was from the city of Alicante.
    This time, he found himself outside the city. He was standing in the lush countryside, on one side a valley and on the other meadows. There was nothing to be seen for miles but different shades of green. There were the jade-green stretches of meadows upon meadows right down to the crystalline dazzle on the horizon that was the City of Glass, its towers blazing in the sunlight. On the other side, there were the emerald depths of a forest, dark green abundance cloaked in shadows. The tops of the trees ruffled in the wind like viridescent feathers.
    Catarina looked around, then took one step, so she was standing right on the lip of the valley. Simon followed her, and in that one step the shadows of the forest lifted, as if shadows could become a veil.
    Suddenly there were what Simon recognized as training grounds, stretches of clear ground cut into the earth with fences around them, markings indicating where Shadowhunters would run or throw etched so deep in the earth Simon could see them from where he stood. At the center of the grounds and in the very heart of the forest, the jewel to which all the rest was background setting, was a tall gray building with towers and spires. Simon was suddenly searching for architectural words like “buttress” to describe how stone could carry the shape of a swallow’s wings and support a roof. The Academy had a stained-glass window set in its very center. In the window, darkened with age and years, an angel wielding a sword could still be seen, celestial and fierce.
    “Welcome to Shadowhunter Academy,” said Catarina Loss, her voice gentle.
    They began their descent together. At one point Simon’s sneakers slid in the soft, crumbling earth of the steep slope, and Catarina had to grab hold of his jacket to steady him.
    “I hope you brought some hiking boots, city boy.”
    “I did not bring hiking boots even slightly,” said Simon. He’d known he was packing wrong. His instincts had not led him astray. Nor had they been at all helpful.
    Catarina, probably disappointed by Simon’s demonstrable lack of