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himself—she was like an avenging angel, her vengeance swift and deadly. Before he could lever himself off the ground, the vampire girl’s throat was split wide open, her undead eyes rolling back in her head, and like that, it was over. She was dust; she was gone.
    “You’re welcome.” Isabelle extended her hand.
    Simon ignored it, rising to his feet without her help. “Why did you do that?”
    “Um, because she was about to kill you?”
    “No, she wasn’t,” he said coldly.
    Isabelle gaped at him. “You’re not seriously mad at me? For saving your ass?”
    It wasn’t until she asked that he realized he was. Angry at her for killing the vampire girl, angry at her for assuming he needed his ass saved and being pretty much right, angry at her for hiding in the dark, waiting to save him, even though he’d made it painfully clear that there couldn’t be anything between them anymore. Angry that she was a supernaturally sexy, raven-haired warrior goddess and apparently against all odds still in love with him—and he was apparently going to have to break up with her, again .
    “She didn’t want to hurt me. She just wanted to go .”
    “And what? I should have let her? Is that what you were planning to do? There are more people in the world than you, Simon. She killed children. She ripped out their throats.”
    He couldn’t answer. He didn’t know what to feel or think. The vampire girl had been a murderer. A cold-blooded murderer, in every sense of the word. But he’d felt a kinship with her as she’d embraced him, a sort of whispering in the back of his mind that said we are lost children together.
    He wasn’t sure there was a place in Isabelle’s life for someone lost.
    “Simon?” Isabelle was like a tightly coiled spring. He could see how much effort it was taking her just to keep her voice steady, her face free of emotion.
    How can I know that? Simon wondered. Looking at her was like seeing double: one Isabelle a stranger he barely knew, one Isabelle the girl that other, better Simon loved so much he would have sacrificed everything for her. There was a part of him—a part beneath memories, beyond rationality—desperate to close the space between them, to take her in his arms, smooth back her hair, lose himself in her bottomless eyes, her lips, her fierce, protective, overwhelming love.
    “You can’t keep doing this!” he shouted, unsure whether he was yelling at her or himself. “It’s not your job to choose for me anymore, to decide what I should do or how I should live. Who I should be. How many times do I have to tell you before you hear me? I’m not him. I will never be him, Isabelle. He belonged to you, I get that. But I don’t . I know you Shadowhunters are used to having everything your way—you set the rules, you know what’s best for the rest of us. But not this time, okay? Not with me.”
    With deliberate calm, Isabelle coiled her whip around her wrist. “Simon, I think you’ve mistaken me for someone who cares.”
    It wasn’t the emotion in her voice that cracked his heart, but the lack of it. Behind the words were nothing: no pain, no suppressed anger, only a void. Hollow and cold.
    “Isabelle—”
    “I didn’t come here for you, Simon. This is my job. I thought you wanted it to be your job, too. If you still feel that way, I’d suggest you reconsider some things. Like how you speak to your superiors.”
    “My . . . superiors ?”
    “And for the record, since you brought it up? You’re right, Simon. I don’t know this version of you at all. And I’m pretty sure I don’t want to.” She stepped past Simon, her shoulder brushing against his for the briefest of moments, then slipped out of the building and into the night.
    Simon stared after her, wondering if he should follow, but he couldn’t seem to make his feet move. At the sound of the door slamming shut, Jon Cartwright blinked his eyes open and woozily eased himself upright. “We got her?” he asked Simon,