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embarrassed that he’d never told them.
    Or maybe she was lying.
    Simon hated this, the not knowing. It made him feel like he was walking on quicksand, every unanswered question, every new discovery about his past sucking him farther down into the muck.
    “Let me go, Daylighter,” she whispered. “You would never have hurt one of your own.”
    He’d read in the Codex that vampires had the ability to mesmerize; he knew he should be guarding himself against it. But her gaze was magnetic. He couldn’t look away.
    “I can’t do that,” he said. “You broke the Law. You killed someone. Many someones.”
    “How do you know?”
    “Because . . .” He stopped, realizing how feeble it would sound: because someone told me so .
    She guessed at the answer anyway. “You always do what you’re told, Daylighter? You never think for yourself?”
    Simon’s hand tightened on the dagger. He’d been so worried about discovering he was a coward, too frightened to fight. But now that he was here, facing the supposed monster, he wasn’t afraid—he was reluctant.
    Sed lex, dura lex .
    Except maybe it wasn’t so simple; maybe she’d just made a mistake, or someone else had, maybe he’d gotten the wrong information. Maybe she was a cold-blooded killer—but even so, who was he to punish her?
    She angled past him toward the door. Without thinking, Simon moved to block her. His dagger swung up, slicing a dangerous arc through the air and whistling past her ear. She danced backward, laughing as she lunged for him, fingers curled like claws. Simon felt it then, for the first time, the adrenaline surge he’d been promised, the clarity of battle. He stopped thinking in terms of techniques and moves, stopped thinking at all, and simply acted, blocking and ducking her attack, aiming a kick at her ankles to sweep her legs out from under her, slashing the dagger across pale skin, drawing blood, and as his mind kicked into gear again, a step behind his body, he thought, I’m doing it. I’m fighting. I’m winning.
    Until she wrapped a hand around his wrist in an iron grip, flipped him over onto his back as if he were a small child, and straddled him. She’d been playing with him, he realized. Pretending to fight, until she got bored.
    She lowered her face toward his, close enough that he would have felt her breath—if she’d been breathing.
    He remembered, suddenly, how cold he had been, when he was dead. He remembered the stillness in his chest, where his heart no longer beat.
    “I could give it all back to you, Daylighter,” she whispered. “Eternal life.”
    He remembered the hunger, and the taste of blood.
    “That wasn’t life,” he said.
    “It wasn’t death, either.” Her lips were cold on his neck. Everything about her was cold. “I could kill you now, Daylighter. But I’m not going to. I’m not a monster. No matter what they told you.”
    “I told you, I’m not a Daylighter anymore.” Simon didn’t know why he was arguing with her, especially now, but it seemed important to say it out loud, that he was alive, that he was human, that his heart beat again. Especially now.
    “You were a Downworlder once,” she said, rising over him. “That will always be a part of you. Even if you forget, they never will.”
    Simon was about to argue, again, when a shining whip lashed out of the shadows and wrapped around the girl’s neck. It yanked her off her feet and she landed hard, head cracking against the cement floor.
    “Isabelle?” Simon said in confusion, as Isabelle Lightwood charged at the vampire, blade gleaming.
    He’d never before realized what a horrible crime against nature it was that he had lost his memories of Isabelle in action. It was clear that it was her natural state. Isabelle standing still was beautiful; Isabelle leaping through the air, carving death into cold flesh, was unworldly, burning as brightly as her golden whip. She was like a goddess, Simon thought, and then silently corrected