Read Angels Twice Descending for Free Online

good.
    “You’re right, George. I do have more than enough best friends.”
    George’s face fell, so slightly that only someone who knew him as well as Simon would have noticed.
    “But there’s something else I’ve never had,” Simon added. “At least until now.”
    “What’s that?”
    “A brother.” The word felt right. Not someone you chose—someone the fates assigned you, someone who, under any other circumstances, might never have given you a second look, nor you him. Someone you would die for and kill for without a second thought, because he was family. Judging from George’s radiant smile, the word sounded right to him, too.
    “Are we going to have to hug now or something?” George said.
    “I think that may be inescapable.”
    *    *    *
    The Council Hall was intimidatingly beautiful, morning light streaming in through a window in its high domed ceiling. It reminded Simon of pictures he’d seen of the Pantheon, but this place felt more ancient than even ancient Rome. This felt timeless.
    The Academy students huddled together in small clumps, all of them looking too nervous and distracted to do much more than comment blandly on the weather. (Which, as always in Idris, was perfect.) Marisol gave Simon a bright smile and a sharp nod when she saw him enter the chamber, as if to say, I never doubted you . . . almost.
    Simon and George were the last to arrive, and shortly after they did, everyone took their places for the ceremony. The seven mundanes were arranged in alphabetical order in the front of the chamber. There were meant to be ten of them, but apparently Sunil wasn’t the only one who’d reconsidered at the last moment. Leilana Jay, a very tall, very pale girl from Memphis, and Boris Kashkoff, an Eastern European with ropy muscles and ruddy cheeks, had both slipped away sometime in the night. No one spoke of them, not the teachers, not the students. It was like they never existed, Simon thought—and then imagined Sunil, Leilana, and Boris out there in the world somewhere, living alone with their knowledge of the Shadow World, aware of evil but without the will or ability to fight it.
    There’s more than one way to fight evil in this world, Simon thought, and it was Clary’s voice in his head, and it was Isabelle’s, and his mother’s, and his own. Don’t do this because you think you have to. Do it because you want to.
    Only if you want to.
    The Academy’s Shadowhunter students—Simon never thought of them as the “elites” anymore, just as he no longer thought of himself and the other mundanes as the “dregs”—sat in the first two rows of the audience. The students weren’t two tiers anymore; they were one body. One unit. Even Jon Cartwright looked proud of, and a little nervous for, the mundanes at the front of the chamber—and when Simon caught him locking eyes with Marisol and pressing two fingers to his lips and then his chest, it seemed almost right. (Or, at least, not a total crime against nature, which was a start.) There were no family members in the audience—those mundanes with living relatives (and there were depressingly few of them) had, of course, already severed ties. George’s parents, who were Shadowhunters by blood if not by choice, could have attended, but he’d asked them not to. “Just in case I explode, mate,” he’d confided to Simon. “Don’t get me wrong, the Lovelaces are hardy folk, but I don’t think they’d enjoy a faceful of liquefied George.”
    Nonetheless, the room was almost full. This was the first class of Academy mundanes to Ascend in decades, and more than a few Shadowhunters had wanted to see it for themselves. Most of them were strangers to Simon, but not all. Crowded in behind the rows of students were Clary, Jace, and Isabelle, and Magnus and Alec—who had made a surprise return from Bali for the occasion—tag-teaming their squirming blue baby. All of them—even the baby—were intensely fixed on Simon, as if they