It would not have been so bad, James believed, if it had been anywhere but the Academy. These were hallowed halls: This was where children were molded to Ascend or grew up learning to serve the Angel.
And this was a school, and this was how schools worked. James had read books about schools before, had read about someone being sent to Coventry, so nobody talked to them at all. He knew how hate could run like wildfire through a group, and that was only among mundanes facing mundane strangeness.
James was stranger than any mundane could ever dream, stranger than any Shadowhunter had believed possible.
He moved out of Matthew’s room, and down into the dark. He was given his own room, because even the mundanes were too scared to sleep in the same room as him. Even Dean Ashdown seemed afraid of him. Everybody was.
They acted as if they wanted to cross themselves when they saw him, but they knew he was worse than a vampire and it would do no good. They shuddered when his eyes rested on them, as if his yellow demon’s eyes would burn a hole clear through their souls.
Demon’s eyes. James heard it whispered again and again. He had never thought he would long to be called Goatface.
He never spoke to anyone, sat at the back of class, ate as quickly as he could, and then ran away so people did not have to look at him while they ate their meals. He crept around the Academy like a loathed and loathsome shadow.
Uncle Jem had been changed into a Silent Brother because he would have died otherwise. Uncle Jem had a place in the world, had friends and a home, and the horror was that he could not be in the place where he belonged. Sometimes after his visits James would find his mother standing at the window, looking out at the street Uncle Jem had long disappeared from, and he would find his father in the music room staring at the violin nobody but Uncle Jem was allowed to touch.
That was the tragedy of Uncle Jem’s life; it was the tragedy of his parents’ lives.
But how would it be if there was nowhere in the world that you belonged? If you could get nobody to love you? What if you could not be a Shadowhunter or a warlock or anything else?
Maybe then you were worse than a tragedy. Maybe you were nothing at all.
James was not sleeping very well. He kept slipping into sleep and then startling awake, worried he was slipping into that other world, a world of shadows, where he was nothing but an evil shade among shades. He did not know how he had done it before. He was terrified it was going to happen again.
Maybe everyone else was hoping it would, though. Maybe they were all praying he would become a shadow, and simply slip away.
*
James woke one morning and could not bear the darkness and the feeling of stone above his head, pressing down all around him, for a moment longer. He staggered up the stairs and out onto the grounds.
He was expecting it to still be night, but the sky was bleached by morning, the stars turned invisible against the near-white of the sky. The only color to be found in the sky was the dark gray of clouds, curling like ghosts around the fading moon. It was raining a little, cold pinpricks against James’s skin. He sat down on the stone step of the Academy’s back door, lifted a palm to the sky, and watched the silvery rain dash down into the hollow of his hand.
He wished the rain would wash him away, before he had to face yet another morning.
He was watching his hand as he wished that, and he saw it happen then. He felt the change creeping over him and saw his hand grow darkly transparent. He saw the raindrops pass through the shadow of his palm as if it was not there.
He wondered what Grace would think, if she could see him now.
Then he heard the crunch of feet running, pounding against the earth, and his father’s training made James’s head jerk up to see if anyone was being chased, if anyone was in danger.
James saw Matthew Fairchild running as if he was being chased.
Astonishingly, he was wearing gear that he had not, as far as James knew, been threatened into. Even more astonishingly, he was participating in degrading physical exercise. He was running faster than James had seen anyone run in training—maybe faster than James had ever seen anyone run ever—and he was running grimly, face set, in the rain.
James watched him run, frowning, until Matthew glanced up at the sky, stopped, and then began trudging back to the Academy. James thought he would be discovered for a moment, thought of jumping up and racing around to another side of the building, but Matthew did not make for the door.
Instead Matthew went and stood against the stone wall of the Academy, strange and solemn in his black gear, blond hair wild with wind and wet with rain. He tipped his face up to the sky, and he looked as unhappy as James felt.
It made no sense. Matthew had everything, had always had everything, while James now had less than nothing. It made James furious.
“What’s wrong with you?” James demanded.