City of Broken Hearts #5
“So what’s going on with the two of you?” Krog asked, looking back and forth between Simon and Isabelle.
“Excuse me?”
“I’m picking up on a lot of tension in your relationship.”
“You’re probably imagining things,” Simon said, reminding himself that things would go very badly if he stabbed this demon in the face. Even if it was the quickest way of getting out of this conversation.
“Come on, I know how it is. She’s the ice queen, you’re the toad guy.”
“No,” Simon said, feeling like he was losing his mind a bit, “Isabelle is not an ice queen, and I am not a toad guy! ‘Toad guy’ is not even a thing!”
He wanted to point out to Krog that it was ridiculous to bring up tension in someone’s relationship when there was a literal magic spell causing people to fight, but Krog, as far as he could tell, didn’t know that.
And Simon himself had some doubts, little niggling worms of misgiving.
Was Ajatara’s magic twisting people’s hearts in cursed directions or just unleashing the dark truths that they’d been holding in?
The things they’d argued about in the taxi, at the Shadow Market…
they were real. Was it just that under normal circumstances, they could have worked them out easily, but Ajatara’s magic was turning every bit of tension up to eleven?
“Let me ask you,” Krog said, glancing over at Isabelle. “Is she the most stunningly beautiful woman you’ve ever met, and do you ask yourself every day why she’s chosen to be with you?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Do you suspect, deep down, that you love her much more than she loves you? That if things ended now, you’d be shattered forever and she’d probably be fine?”
Simon couldn’t bring himself to say it. But maybe the answer was all over his face.
“See?” Krog said, vindicated. “Ice queen and toad guy.”
ARGH. Simon had tried talking about this to Clary, but Clary loved him too much to be objective.
She always said well-meaning things about how Izzy was lucky to have him, how any girl would be, blah blah blah.
Getting a compliment from your parabatai was a little like getting a compliment from your mother.
They were obligated to think you were great.
The point was, he couldn’t talk to Clary about it.
And he couldn’t talk to Jace or Alec, obviously, since Isabelle was their sister.
Eric was useless—or, depending on his mood, disgusting—when it came to girls.
Magnus would have just made fun of him, then probably given him some devastatingly wise advice that was too painful to take.
Which meant either talking to himself, as he’d been doing all too much of lately, or confiding in this temporarily man-shaped toad demon.
“Izzy and I are in love,” Simon said, “at least I thought we were in love. I mean, I’m in love, that’s certain. But she’s…”
“Bored by your rambling?”
“Do you want to know what the deal is or not?”
Krog zipped his lips and gestured for Simon to continue.
“I got offered a job at the Scholomance—which would mean moving really far away for a year, so I asked her to go with me. Which was, like, a big deal for me to do, I had to spend all week nerving myself up for it, and she didn’t even hesitate before saying no.”
“Bad sign.”
“I mean, she has good reasons not to go, so I get it, but then she made it really clear she wanted me to go. Or at least that she didn’t care if I stayed here.” And that was before the Ajatara spell started affecting things, so she must really have meant it.
“Worse sign,” Krog said.
“I don’t want to be away from Isabelle either.
It seems like a backward step, and it feels like she doesn’t care about going backward, because maybe she never planned to go forward.
” Simon stopped, a little stunned. He hadn’t quite realized that’s how he felt.
Or at least, he hadn’t wanted to admit it to himself.
But here he was admitting it to a demon.
“I mean, she could have at least asked why I want to teach at the Scholomance. Why I thought it was important.”
“Why is it important?” Krog looked sincerely interested, which was weird.
“None of your business.”
Krog shrugged his unsettlingly broad shoulders. “Okay, here’s my advice. Go to the Scholomance and burn it down.”
“Who would that help?”
“Well, me, for starters,” Krog said. “I like it when people burn to death.”
Right, Simon thought, still a demon. “I’m not doing that.”
“Hey, I had to try. Okay, here’s my real advice.
Leave without telling her anything. Don’t take the job, but don’t stay here, either.
Just take off, leave her alone, let her wonder what’s going on.
Let her worry; maybe she’ll worry herself to death.
That’s my patented Krog advice. It goes over great on YouTube. ”
Simon decided not to ask Krog whether he really had a YouTube channel. “Isn’t that pretty much what you’re doing? With Ajatara? Rejecting her, refusing to talk to her?”
“Yes.”
“And how’s that working out for you?” Simon asked.
Krog unleashed a despairing moan that sounded like all life was seeping out of him. “Terrible.”
“I don’t want Izzy to wonder,” Simon said.
“Or worry. No matter what happens, I would never want her to be unhappy.” This too, he had never put into words for himself.
But it was not a surprise. It was the bedrock truth of how he felt about Izzy, how he’d always felt about her, since the day they met.
Whatever was going on between the two of them, he couldn’t stand to see her in pain.
“Well, it sounds like you’re really in love,” Krog said. “So I guess you’re screwed.”
—
They got off the subway at the Brooklyn Bridge–City Hall station and climbed back up to the street.
Simon didn’t spend that much time in the financial district, and never at night.
He thought of it as a boring, crowded neighborhood full of office drones in identical suits.
By day, these streets were full of businesspeople walking importantly toward their important jobs, staring down at presumably important emails and bumping into each other without noticing.
But this late at night, the streets were almost deserted.
The only people out seemed to be couples arguing in front of the doormen of their buildings. Snippets of people shouting at each other drifted on the wind:
“I hate your hat!”
“Yeah, well, I hate your mother!”
“I never liked your dog. I don’t even like that you’re a dog person.”
A gasp. “Leave Bark Twain out of this!”
Simon looked over at Izzy. She was walking with her gaze straight ahead, her mind clearly on the mission. Her lovely face was calm and determined, showing no feeling, but that’s how she always was before battle.
He wondered if the sounds of couples fighting bothered Izzy the way they bothered him: as a reminder that they, too, had been snapping at each other all evening.
But it wasn’t just the snapping, was it?
He wished the problem they had was as minor as Izzy hating his hat.
If she hated a hat of his, he would have burned it, or at least only worn it when she wasn’t around.
This was something much bigger. It wasn’t as if they never argued before, but somehow the issue of the Scholomance job cut to the heart of their relationship.
To the heart of whether or not Izzy thought they had a future together.
He refocused his attention. The pedestrian entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge was very close. As they approached, Simon’s phone lit up with a text from Clary:
We got the Shax demon onto the bridge, but I don’t know how long he’ll stay.
And then a second text:
Okay, weirdly, the demon ran into someone he knows. Kind of a tall, icy Greater Demon type lady. Should we kill her?
Simon texted back, requesting that Clary and Jace not kill either demon, but instead herd them toward the bridge’s central support—a massive granite-and-limestone column in the middle of the walkway—and retreat to the far, Brooklyn side of the bridge.
So if we’re on the far side, and you’re on the Manhattan side, we’ll have them trapped, Clary texted. Got it.
It really was wonderful to have a parabatai, and to be understood immediately without having to elaborate, Simon thought, but he had no time to dwell on that.
He, Krog, and Isabelle were already making their way onto the bridge.
Below the pedestrian walkway, the roads were completely blocked by cars that had come to a standstill so that the people inside them could fight.
At least there wasn’t a single mundane paying any attention to the Shadowhunters—everyone around them was wrapped up in arguing, busy crying, or fleeing from people who were doing both.
“I see Iago,” Simon told Izzy and Krog, as they strode along the central bridge walkway. “And it looks like Ajatara is with them.”
“Yes. I could never mistake her for another!” Krog said, pointing at the central bridge support.
Beside it was Ajatara, like a pale white ghost, her long ice-colored hair whipping around.
A shadowy, insectile shape hunched close to her.
“And that must be Iago. I recognize his handsome form from here. Perhaps he is telling her exactly what he thinks of her for betraying me. He is a loyal friend.”
Simon had only seen a few Shax demons in his time, but all had borne a strong resemblance to a giant cockroach, and this one didn’t look like it was going to be any different. Not his particular idea of handsome, but to each his own.
“I must be near her,” Krog declared, gazing at the Greater Demon. “To, ah, gauge whether her misery is complete.”
“Sure, that’s the reason,” Simon said, drawing a seraph blade from his weapons belt. “Go ahead. Just remember the plan. Make sure you stay out of sight.”
Krog nodded and rushed ahead, nearly skipping—either because Ajatara was so close or so unhappy, or possibly both—and Simon and Izzy were left, finally, alone.