Nothing But Shadows by Cassandra Clare Read Free Book Online

feeling that could tear you into pieces.
    If you saw humanity as I can see it, Uncle Jem said, a whisper in his mind, a lifeline. There is very little brightness and warmth in the world for me. I am very distant from you all. There are only four points of warmth and brightness, in the whole world, that burn fiercely enough for me to feel something like the person I was. Your mother, your father, Lucie, and you. You love, and tremble, and burn. Do not let any of them tell you who you are. You are the flame that cannot be put out. You are the star that cannot be lost. You are who you have always been, and that is enough and more than enough. Anyone who looks at you and sees darkness is blind.
    â€œBlinder than a Silent Brother?” James asked, and hiccupped.
    Uncle Jem had been made a Silent Brother very young, and strangely: He bore runes on his cheeks, but his eyes, though shadowed, were not stitched shut. Still, James was never sure what he saw.
    There was a laugh in James’s mind, and he had not laughed, so it must have been Uncle Jem. James clung to him for an instant longer and told himself he could not ask Uncle Jem to take him home after all, or to the Silent City, or anywhere so long as Uncle Jem did not leave him in this academy full of strangers who had never liked him and would hate him now.
    They would have to be even blinder than a Silent Brother, Uncle Jem agreed. Because I can see you, James. I will always look to you for light.
    *    *    *
    If James had known how life would be at the Academy from then on, he would have asked Uncle Jem to take him home.
    He had not expected Mike Smith to leap to his feet in stark horror when James approached his table.
    â€œCome sit with us,” called Clive Cartwright, one of Alastair Carstairs’s friends. “You might be a mundie, but at least you’re not a monster .”
    Mike had fled gratefully. James had seen Esme flinch once when he walked by her in the hall. He did not inflict his presence on her again.
    It would not have been so bad, James believed, if it had been anywhere but the Academy. These were hallowed halls: This was where children were molded to Ascend or grew up learning to serve the Angel.
    And this was a school, and this was how schools worked. James had read books about schools before, had read about someone being sent to Coventry, so nobody talked to them at all. He knew how hate could run like wildfire through a group, and that was only among mundanes facing mundane strangeness.
    James was stranger than any mundane could ever dream, stranger than any Shadowhunter had believed possible.
    He moved out of Matthew’s room, and down into the dark. He was given his own room, because even the mundanes were too scared to sleep in the same room as him. Even Dean Ashdown seemed afraid of him. Everybody was.
    They acted as if they wanted to cross themselves when they saw him, but they knew he was worse than a vampire and it would do no good. They shuddered when his eyes rested on them, as if his yellow demon’s eyes would burn a hole clear through their souls.
    Demon’s eyes . James heard it whispered again and again. He had never thought he would long to be called Goatface.
    He never spoke to anyone, sat at the back of class, ate as quickly as he could, and then ran away so people did not have to look at him while they ate their meals. He crept around the Academy like a loathed and loathsome shadow.
    Uncle Jem had been changed into a Silent Brother because he would have died otherwise. Uncle Jem had a place in the world, had friends and a home, and the horror was that he could not be in the place where he belonged. Sometimes after his visits James would find his mother standing at the window, looking out at the street Uncle Jem had long disappeared from, and he would find his father in the music room staring at the violin nobody but Uncle Jem was allowed to touch.
    That was the tragedy of Uncle Jem’s