The Whitechapel Fiend (2 page)

“Not bad,” Scarsbury said as George hobbled back to Simon. He was rubbing his arm.

“You do not want to do that,” he said to Simon as he approached.

Simon had already worked that out. The confirmation didn’t help his spirits.

Simon watched his classmates go up the tree one by one. For some, that took up to ten minutes of grunting and clawing and occasionally falling off halfway up. This got a loud “I told you, not on your back” from Scarsbury. Jace stayed in the tree the entire time, like some kind of rakish bird, at points smiling at the students below. Sometimes he looked elegantly bored and walked up and down the branch for fun.

When there was simply no avoiding it anymore, Simon approached for his turn. Jace smiled at him from above.

“It’s easy,” Jace said. “You probably did it all the time as a child. Just do that.”

“I’m from Brooklyn,” Simon replied. “We don’t climb trees.”

Jace shrugged, suggesting that these things were not to be helped.

The first thing Simon learned about the tree was that while it appeared to lean to the side, it was really just straight up. And while the bark was rough and cut into the meat of the hands, it was also slippery, so every time he tried to get a foothold, he lost it. He tried to do it the way he’d seen Jace and George do it—they seemed to grip the tree very lightly. Simon tried this, realized it was futile, and grabbed the tree in a hug so intimate, he wondered if they were now dating. Using this awkward clutching method and some froglike leg pushes, he managed to get up the trunk, scraping his face along the way. About three-quarters of the way up, he felt his palms slick with sweat and he started to lose his grip. The falling feeling filled him with a sudden panic and he gripped harder.

“You’re doing fine,” Jace said in a voice that suggested Simon was not doing fine, but that was the kind of thing Jace was supposed to say.

Simon made it to the branch using a few desperate moves he knew looked very bad from below. There was almost definitely a moment or two when his butt must have been on display in a less-than-flattering manner. But he made it. Standing up was the next trick, which he accomplished with more fevered gripping of the trunk.

“Good,” Jace said, giving a quirky little smile. “Now just walk to me.”

Jace walked backward down the branch.
Backward
.

Now that Simon was on the branch, it didn’t look like it was fifteen feet off the ground. It looked like it was in the sky. It was round and uneven and slippery as ever and it wasn’t meant to be walked on, especially not in the sneakers Simon had chosen to wear that morning.

But he’d gotten this far and he wasn’t going to let Jace just do his magic backward walk while he clung to the trunk. He had gotten up there. Climbing down was a bad prospect, so there was really just the one option, and at least it was quick.

Simon took his first step. His body immediately began to shake.

“Look up,” Jace said sharply. “Look at me.”

“I need to see—”

“You need to look up to keep your balance.
Look at me
.”

Jace had stopped smirking. Simon looked at him.

“Now step again. Don’t look down. Your feet will find the branch. Arms out for balance. Don’t worry about down yet. Eyes on me.”

Somehow, this worked. Simon made it six steps out onto the branch and was amazed to find himself standing there, arms rigid and out like airplane wings, the wind blowing hard. Just out on a tree branch with Jace.

“Now turn to face the Academy. Keep looking out. Use it as a horizon. That’s how you stay balanced—you choose a fixed point to concentrate on. Keep your weight forward—you don’t want to go over backward.”

No. Simon really didn’t want to do that. He moved one foot to meet the other, and then he was standing facing the pile of rocks that formed the Academy, and his fellow students below, all looking up. Most did not look impressed, but George gave him a thumbs-up.

“Now,” Jace said, “bend a bit at the knees. And then I want you to just step off in one large stepping motion. Don’t jump with both feet. Just step. And as you go down, bring your legs together and keep yourself relaxed.”

This should not have been the hardest thing he’d ever done. Simon knew he’d done more. He knew he’d fought demons and come back from the dead. Jumping out of a tree should not have felt this terrifying.

He stepped into the air. He felt his brain react to this new information—
There’s nothing there, don’t do it, there’s nothing there
—but momentum had already pulled his other leg off the branch and then . . .

The good thing that could be said about the experience was that it was quick. Points to gravity on that one. A few seconds of almost blissful fear and confusion and then a hammering feeling as his feet met the earth. His skeleton juddered, his knees buckled in submission, his aching skull lodged a formal complaint, and he fell over sideways in what would have been a roll if he had rolled and not, in fact, just remained there on the ground in a shrimp position.

“Get up, Lewis!” Scarsbury yelled.

Jace landed beside him, like a large killer butterfly, barely making a noise.

“The first one is always the hardest,” he said, offering Simon a hand. “The first few dozen, really. I can’t remember.”

It hurt, but he didn’t appear to
be
hurt. The wind was knocked out of his lungs, and he needed a moment to take a few deep breaths. He staggered back to where George was waiting, a sympathetic look on his face. The last two students completed the task, each looking as miserable as Simon, and then they were free to go for lunch. Most of the group was limping as they made their way back across the field.

*    *    *

Since Catarina had buried the soup in the woods, the kitchens of the Academy had been forced to try to come up with some other kind of foodstuff. As usual, an attempt was made to feature food from around the world, to reflect the many nations the students had come from. Today, Simon was informed, featured Swedish cuisine. There were meatballs, a vat of lingonberry sauce, mashed potatoes, smoked salmon, fish balls, beet salad, and at the very end, a strong-smelling item that Simon was informed was a special pickled herring from the Baltic region. Simon got the sense that, prepared by people who knew what they were doing, everything on offer would have looked a lot more delicious—except possibly the pickled herring from the Baltic region. In terms of what a vegetarian could eat, there wasn’t much. He got some potatoes and lingonberry sauce and scraped one portion’s worth of beet salad out of the practically empty container. Some kind Shadowhunter from Alicante had clearly taken pity on the students and provided bread rolls, which were eagerly snatched up. By the time Simon limped up to the basket, it was empty. He turned to make his way to a table and found Jace in his path. He had a roll in his hand and had already taken a bite.

“How about you sit with me?”

The Academy cafeteria looked less like a school dining hall and more like a terrible, cheap restaurant that had gotten its furnishings out of Dumpsters. There were big tables, and tiny, intimate ones. Simon, still too sore to make jokes about lunch dates, followed Jace to one of the small, rickety tables on the side of the room. He was aware of everyone watching them go. He gave George a nod, hoping to convey that he just had to do this—no offense in not sitting with him. George nodded back.

Jon, Julie, and the others in the elite course, who had been devastated to miss Falling Out of Trees with Jace Herondale 101, all stared over as if ready to leap up and save Jace from the bad company he’d fallen into, carry him away in a litter made of chocolate and roses, and bear his children.

Once they sat, Jace tucked into his lunch and didn’t say a word. Simon watched him eat and waited, but Jace was all about the food. He had taken large helpings of most things, including the pickled Baltic herring. Now that he was even closer to it, Simon began to suspect that this fish had not been pickled at all. Someone at the famed Shadowhunter Academy kitchens had
attempted
to pickle fish—something that took skill and precise adherence to instructions—and had probably just invented a new form of botulism. Jace shoveled it back. Then again, Jace was the sort of
Man vs. Wild
guy who would probably be happy to fish a trout out of a stream with his bare hands and eat it while it was still flopping.

“Did you want to talk to me about something?” Simon finally asked.

Jace forked up a meatball and looked at Simon meditatively. “I’ve been doing research,” he said. “Into my family.”

“The Herondales?” Simon supplied, after a short pause.

“You might not remember, but I have kind of a complicated family history,” Jace said. “Anyway, I only found out I was a Herondale a little while ago. It took me a while to adjust to the idea. They’re kind of a legendary family.”

Back to the food for a few minutes. When his plates and bowls were empty, Jace sat back and regarded Simon for a moment. Simon considered asking if Jace was kind of a big deal, but decided he wouldn’t get the joke.

Jace went on. “Anyway, the whole thing, it started to remind me—well, of you. It’s like there are these important things in my history but I don’t know all of them, and I’m trying to pull together an identity that has all these holes in it. The Herondales—some of them were good people, and some of them were monsters.”

“None of that needs to affect you,” Simon said. “The choices you make are what matter, not your bloodline. But I imagine you have a lot of people in your life to tell you that. Clary. Alec.” He looked at Jace sideways. “Isabelle.”

Jace’s eyebrows went up. “You want to talk about Isabelle? Or Alec?”

“Alec hates me and I do not know why,” Simon said. “Isabelle hates me and I do know why, which is almost worse. So no, I do not want to talk about the Lightwoods.”

“It’s true you have a Lightwood problem,” Jace said, and his golden eyes glinted. “It started with Alec. As you astutely observed, you two have a history. But I shouldn’t get in the middle of that.”

“Please tell me what’s going on with Alec,” Simon said. “You are really freaking me out.”

“No,” Jace said. “There are so many deep feelings involved. There’s so much hurt. It wouldn’t be right. I didn’t come here to stir up trouble. I came here to show potential Shadowhunters how to drop from heights without breaking their necks.”

Simon stared at Jace. Jace stared back with wide, innocent golden eyes.

Simon decided that the next time he saw Alec, he would have to ask Alec himself about the secrets that lay between them. This was obviously something he and Alec had to work out on their own.

“But I will say this about your Lightwood problem,” Jace said, very casually. “Isabelle and Alec both have difficulty showing when they feel pain. But I can see it in both of them, especially when they try to hide it. She’s in pain.”

“And I made it worse,” Simon said, shaking his head. “This is my fault. Me, with my memory wiped out by some kind of demon king. Me, with no concept of what happened in my life. Me, the guy with no special abilities who’s probably going to get killed
in school
. I’m a monster.”

“No,” Jace said evenly. “No one blames you for not being able to remember. You offered yourself as a sacrifice. You were brave. You saved Magnus. And you saved Isabelle. You saved me. You need to bend your knees more.”

“What?”

Jace was standing up now.

“When you first step off. Bend the knees right away. Otherwise you did pretty well.”

“But what about Isabelle?” Simon asked. “What do I do?”

“I have no idea,” Jace said.

“So you just came here to torture me and talk about yourself?” Simon demanded.

“Oh, Simon, Simon, Simon,” said Jace. “You may not remember, but that’s kind of our thing.”

With that, he walked away, clearly aware of the admiring glances that followed his every step.

*    *    *

After lunch they had a history lecture. Usually the two groups of students were divided for classes—but in certain cases, everyone was assembled together in the main hall. There was no grandeur to the hall—just some crooked benches, and not enough of them. The chairs from the cafeteria were dragged in to supplement, but there still weren’t enough seats. So some students (the elites) had chairs and benches, and the dregs sat on the floor at the front, like the little kids in middle school. After this morning, though, a few hours of sitting on a bare, cold, stone floor was luxury.

Catarina took her place at the wobbly lectern.

“We have a special guest lecturer today,” she said. “She is visiting us to talk about the role Shadowhunters play in writing history. As you are likely aware, though I don’t want to make any overly optimistic assumptions, Shadowhunters have been involved in many prominent moments in mundane history. Because Shadowhunters must also guard mundanes from knowing about our world, you must also sometimes take control of the writing of that history. By this I mean you have to cover things up. You need to provide a plausible explanation for what’s happened—one that does not involve demons.”

“Like
Men in Black
,” Simon whispered to George.

“So please give your full attention to our esteemed guest,” Catarina went on. She stepped aside, and a tall young woman took her place.

“I am Tessa Gray,” she said in a low, clear voice. “And I believe in the importance of stories.”

The woman at the front of the room looked like she might be a sophomore in college. She was elegantly dressed in a short black skirt, cashmere sweater, and paisley scarf. Simon had seen this woman once before—at Jocelyn and Luke’s wedding. Clary had said she had played a very important role in Clary’s life when she was a child. She had also informed Simon that Tessa was about a hundred and fifty years old, though she certainly didn’t look it.

“For you to understand this story, you have to understand who and what I am. Like Catarina, I am a warlock—however, my mother was not human but a Shadowhunter.”

A murmur from around the room, which Tessa glossed over.