The Evil We Love (Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy, #5)

“No. You don’t call me Izzy, you don’t send me letters, you don’t follow me into dark corridors and try to save me from rats.”


“Trust me, we see a rat, it’s every man for himself.”

Isabelle looked like she wanted to feed him to the giant slug. “My point, Simon Lewis, is that you and I are strangers now, just like you wanted it.”

“If that’s true, then what are you doing here?”

Isabelle looked incredulous. “It’s one thing for Jace to believe the world revolves around him, but come on. I know you love fantasy, Simon, but the suspension of disbelief can only go so far.”

“This is my school, Isabelle,” Simon said. “And you’re my—”

She just stared at him, as if defying him to come up with a noun that would justify the possessive.

This wasn’t going the way he’d planned.

“Okay, then, why are you here? And why are you being so nice to all my, uh, friends?”

“Because my father’s forcing me to be here,” she said. “Because I guess he thinks some delightful father-daughter bonding time in a slime-covered pit will make me forget that he’s a deadbeat adulterer who ditched his family. And I’m being nice to your friends because I’m a nice person.”

Now it was Simon who looked incredulous.

“Okay, I’m not,” she admitted. “But I’ve never actually been to school, you know. I figured if I have to be here, I might as well make the best of it. See what I’m missing. Is that enough information for you?”

“I get that you’re mad at me, but—”

She shook her head. “You don’t get it. I’m not mad at you. I’m not anything at you, Simon. You asked me to accept that you were a different person now, someone who I don’t know. So I’ve accepted that. I loved someone—he’s gone now. You’re nobody I know, and, as far as I can tell, nobody I need to know. I’ll only be here a few days, and then we never need to see each other again. How about we don’t make it harder than it has to be?”

He couldn’t quite catch his breath.

I loved someone, she’d said, and it was the closest she—or any girl—had ever come to saying I love you to Simon.

Except that it wasn’t close at all, was it?

It was a world away.

“Okay.” It was the only word he could force out, but she was already walking on down the corridor. She didn’t need his permission to be a stranger; she didn’t need anything from him. “You’re going the wrong way!” he called after her. He didn’t know where she wanted to go, but there seemed little chance she wanted to go slug-ward.

“They’re all wrong,” she called back, without turning around.

He tried to sense some subtext in her words, a glimmer of pain. Something that would give the lie to her claim, betray the feelings she still harbored for him—prove this was as hard and confusing for her as it was for him.

But the suspension of disbelief could only go so far.

*

Isabelle had said she wanted to make the best of her time at the Academy, and she’d proposed they not make it any harder than it needed to be. Unfortunately, Simon soon discovered, these two things were mutually exclusive. Because Isabelle’s version of making the best of things involved Isabelle stretched out like a cat on one of the student lounge’s musty leather couches, surrounded by sycophants, Isabelle partaking in George’s illicit supply of scotch and inviting the others to do so as well, so that soon all of Simon’s friends and enemies were drunk and giddy and in much too good a mood for his liking. Making the best of things apparently meant encouraging Julie to flirt with George and teaching Marisol how to smash statuary with a whip and, worst of all, agreeing to “maybe” be Jon Cartwright’s date for the end-of-year party later in the week.

Simon wasn’t sure whether any of this was harder than it needed to be—who knew what qualified as needed to be?—but it was excruciating.

“So, when does the real fun start?” Isabelle finally said.

Jon waggled his eyebrows. “Just say the word.”