Angels Twice Descending by Cassandra Clare, Robin Wasserman Read Free Book Online Page A

“Slàinte!” he shouted, and as his friends broke into indulgent laughter, he took a slug.
    Simon was still laughing when the screaming began.
    The room fell dead silent, but inside Simon’s mind, there was a siren of pain. An inhuman, unearthly scream.
    George’s scream.
    On the dais, George and the Consul were engulfed in an impossible flash of blinding darkness. When it faded away, the Consul was on her feet, the Silent Brothers already by her side, all of them peering down at something horrible, something with the shape of a person, but not its face and not its skin. Something with black veins bulging through cracking flesh, something with the Mortal Cup still clenched in its rigid fist, some withered, writhing, crumbling creature with George’s hair and George’s sneakers, but in place of George’s smile, a tortured, toothless rictus leaking something too black to be blood. Not George, Simon thought furiously as the thing stopped jerking and trembling and fell still. And somehow, in Simon’s head, George screamed and screamed.
    The chamber was a storm of motion—responsible adults hustling students out of the room, gasps and cries and shrieks—but Simon barely registered any of it. He was moving forward, toward the thing that couldn’t be George, pressing toward the dais with Shadowhunter strength and Shadowhunter speed. Simon was going to save his roommate, because he was a Shadowhunter now, and that’s what Shadowhunters do.
    He didn’t notice Catarina Loss come up behind him, not until her hands were on his shoulders, her grip light enough that he should have been able to break free—but he couldn’t move.
    “Let go of me!” Simon raged. The Silent Brothers were kneeling by the thing now, the body, but they weren’t doing anything for it. They weren’t helping. They were just staring fixedly at the spiderweb of inky veins spreading across flesh. “I have to help him!”
    “No.” Catarina’s hand feathered across his forehead and the screaming in his mind fell silent. She was still holding on; he still couldn’t move. He was a Shadowhunter, but she was a warlock. He was helpless. “It’s too late.”
    Simon couldn’t watch the black veins eat up skin or the hollow eyes melt into the skull. He focused on the sneakers. George’s sneakers. One was untied, as it often was. Just that morning George had tripped over the laces, and Simon had caught him from falling. “The last time you’ll save me,” George had said with another of his wistful sighs, and Simon had shot back, “Not likely.”
    The veins were popping, with a sound like Rice Krispies in milk. The body was starting to ooze.
    Now Simon was holding on to Catarina too. He held tight.
    “What’s the point?” he said in despair, because what was the point of dying like this, not in battle, not for a good cause, not to save a fellow warrior or the world, but for nothing ?And what was the point of living as a Shadowhunter, what was the point of skill and bravery and superhuman powers, when you couldn’t do anything but stand by and watch ?
    “Sometimes there is no point,” Catarina said gently. “There only is what is.”
    What is, Simon thought, the wave of rage and frustration and horror nearly consuming him. He would not let himself be consumed; he would not waste this moment, if this was all he had. He’d spent two years making himself strong—he would be strong for George, now, in the only way left to him. He would bear witness.
    Simon summoned his will. What is .
    He forced himself not to look away.
    What is : George. Brave and kind and good . George, dead. George, gone.
    And though he didn’t know what the Law had to say about dying by the Mortal Cup, whether the Clave would consider George one of their own and give him Shadowhunter burial rights, he didn’t care. He knew what George was, what he was meant to be, and what he deserved.
    “ Ave atque vale , George Lovelace, child of Nephilim,” he whispered. “Forever