Also, he still wanted some of those soup dumplings.
Simon wandered down Flatbush, soaking in the familiar noises of New York at night, sirens and construction drills and road-rage honking, along with the slightly less familiar sounds of glamoured faerie hounds barking at the pigeons. He crossed the Manhattan Bridge, metal rattling beneath his feet as the subway roared past, the lights of the Financial District glittering through the fog. Even before he’d known anything about demons and Downworlders, Simon thought, he had always known New York was full of magic. Maybe that was why it had been so easy for him to accept the truth about the Shadow World: In his city, anything was possible.
Conveniently, the bridge dumped him off in the heart of Chinatown. As he popped into his favorite hole-in-the-wall and scarfed a to-go order of dumplings, Simon’s mind strayed to Isabelle, wondering if she was close by, slashing evildoers with her electrum whip. It boggled his mind—if you thought about it, he was basically dating a superhero.
Of course, the thing about dating a superhero was that you couldn’t exactly ask them to take a break from saving the world just because you were in the mood for a last-minute date. So Simon kept walking, soaking in the rhythm of the midnight city, letting his mind wander as aimlessly as his feet. At least, he thought he was wandering aimlessly, until he found himself on a familiar block of Avenue D, passing a bodega where the milk was always sour but the guy behind the counter would give you free coffee with your morning doughnut, if you knew enough to ask.
Wait, how did I know that? Simon thought. The answer came to him on the heels of the question. He knew that because, in some other forgotten life, he had lived here. He and Jordan Kyle had shared an apartment in the crumbling redbrick building on the corner. A vampire and a werewolf living together—it sounded like the beginning of a bad joke, but the only bad joke was that Simon had practically forgotten it ever happened.
And Jordan was dead.
It hit him now almost as hard as it had when he first heard: Jordan was dead. And not just Jordan. Raphael was dead. Isabelle’s brother Max, dead. Clary’s brother Sebastian, dead. Julie’s sister. Beatriz’s grandfather and father and brother, Julian Blackthorn’s father, Emma Carstairs’s parents—all of them dead, and those were only the ones Simon had been told about. How many other people he had cared about, or people the people he loved had cared about, had been lost to one Shadowhunter war or another? He was still a teenager—he wasn’t supposed to know this many people who had died.
And me, he thought suddenly. Don’t forget that one.
Because it was true, wasn’t it? Before life as a vampire, there’d been death. Cold and bloodless and underground.
Then, later, there’d been the forgetting, and that was a kind of death too.
Simon wasn’t even a Shadowhunter yet, and already, this life had taken so much from him.
“Simon. I thought you’d be here.”
Simon turned around and was reminded that for all the losses, there’d also been some very significant gains. “Isabelle,” he breathed, and then, for quite a while, his lips were too occupied to speak.
They went back to Magnus and Alec’s apartment. The couple had taken their new baby on vacation to Bali, which meant Simon and Isabelle could have the place to themselves.
“You sure it’s okay for us to be here?” Simon asked, looking nervously around the apartment. The last time he’d seen it, the decorating ethos had been part–Studio 54, part-bordello: lots of disco balls, velvet curtains, and some appallingly placed mirrors. Now the living room looked like something puked up by a Babies“R”Us—blankets and diapers and mobiles and stuffed bunnies everywhere you looked.
He still couldn’t believe Magnus Bane was someone’s dad.
“I’m sure,” Isabelle said, stripping off her dress in one smooth motion to reveal the unending stretches of smooth, pale skin that lay beneath. “But if you want to leave . . .”
“No,” Simon said, struggling for enough breath to speak. “Definitely. No. Here’s good. Very good.”
“Well, then.” Isabelle swept a family of stuffed kittens off the couch, then stretched across like a very satisfied and very dangerous cat. She looked pointedly at Simon’s shirt, which was still on his body.
“Well. Then.” Simon stood above her, unsure what to do next.
“Simon.”
“Yes?”
“I’m looking pointedly at your shirt.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Which is still on your body.”
“Oh. Right.” He took care of that. Dropped down beside her on the couch.
“Simon.”
“Yes? Oh. Right.” Simon leaned toward her and pulled her close for a kiss, which she indulged for about thirty seconds before extricating herself.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“You tell me,” she said. “I, your incredibly sexy girlfriend that you never get to see, am prostrating myself before you half-naked, and you seem like you’d rather be watching a baseball game.”
“I hate baseball.”
“Exactly.” Isabelle sat up—though, mercifully, she didn’t put any clothes back on. Not yet. “You know you can talk to me about anything, right?”
Simon nodded.
“So if, hypothetically, you were feeling a little nervous about this whole Ascension thing tomorrow, and wondering whether you still wanted to go through with it, you could talk to me about that.”
“Hypothetically,” Simon said.
“Just picking a topic at random,” Isabelle said. “We could also talk about Avatar: The Last Airplane, if you want.”
“It’s the Airbender,” Simon said, suppressing a grin, “and I love you even if you are nerd-clueless.”
“And I love you, even if you are a mundane,” she said. “Even if you stay a mundane. You know that, right?”
“I . . .” It was easy for her to say, and he thought she probably even meant it. But that didn’t make it true. “You think you would? Really?”
Isabelle let out her breath in an irritated puff. “Simon Lewis, are you forgetting that you were a mundane when I first kissed you? A rather scrawny mundane with terrible fashion sense, I should point out. And then you were a vampire, and I started dating you. Then you were a mundane again, but this time with freaking amnesia. And still, inexplicably, I fell in love with you all over again. What could possibly make you think I have any standards left when it comes to you?”
“Uh, thank you, I think?”
“?‘Thank you’ is the correct response. And also ‘I love you, too, Isabelle, and I would love you even if you lost your memory or grew a mustache or something.’??”
“Well, obviously.” Simon tugged at her chin. “Though I’d draw the line at a beard.”