The Lost Herondale Read Online Free PDF

looked every inch the warrior.
    For a brief moment, Simon imagined himself saying no. Raising his hand, asking to be excused. Admitting that he didn’t know what he was doing here, that every fighting tactic he’d been taught had evaporated from his mind, that he would like to pack up his suitcase, Portal home, and pretend none of this had ever happened.
    “As I’ll ever be,” he said—and stepped through the Portal.
    From what Simon remembered, traveling by school bus was a filthy, undignified experience, rife with foul smells, spitballs, and the occasional embarrassing bout of motion sickness.
    Traveling by Portal was significantly worse.
    Once he’d regained his balance and his breath, Simon looked around—and gasped. No one had mentioned where they were Portaling to , but Simon recognized the block immediately. He was back in New York City—and not just New York but Brooklyn. Gowanus, to be specific, a thin stretch of industrial parks and warehouses lining a toxic canal that was less than a ten-minute walk from his mother’s apartment.
    He was home.
    It was exactly as he’d remembered it—and yet, wholly different. Or maybe it was just that he was wholly different, that after only two months in Idris, he’d forgotten the sounds and smells of modernity: the low, steady hum of electricity and the thick haze of car exhaust, the honking trucks and pigeon crap and piles of garbage that had for sixteen years formed the fabric of his daily life.
    On the other hand, maybe it was because now that he could see through glamours, he could see the mermaids swimming in the Gowanus.
    It was home and not home all at the same time, and Simon felt the same disorientation he had after his summer in the mountains at Camp Ramah, when he’d found himself unable to fall asleep without the sound of cicadas and Jake Grossberg’s snoring in the upper bunk. Maybe, he thought, you couldn’t know how much going away had changed you until you tried to go home.
    “Listen up, men!” Scarsbury shouted, as the final student came through the Portal. They were assembled in front of an abandoned factory, its walls streaked with graffiti and its windows boarded up tight.
    Marisol cleared her throat, loudly, and Scarsbury sighed. “Listen up, men and women . Inside this building is a vampire who’s broken the Covenant and killed several mundanes. Your mission is to track her down, and execute her. And I suggest you do so before sunset.”
    “Shouldn’t the vampires be allowed to deal with this themselves?” Simon asked. The Codex had made it pretty clear that Downworlders were trusted to police themselves. Simon wondered whether that involved giving alleged rogue vampires a trial before they were executed.
    How did I get here? he wondered—he didn’t even believe in the death penalty.
    “Not that it’s any of your concern,” Scarsbury said, “but her clan has handed her over to us, so that you children can get a little blood on your hands. Think of it as a gift, from the vampires to you.”
    Except “it” wasn’t an it at all, Simon thought.
    “Sed lex, dura lex,” George murmured beside him, with an uneasy look, as if he was trying to convince himself.
    “There’s twenty of you and one of her,” Scarsbury said, “and in case even those odds are too much for you, experienced Shadowhunters will be watching, ready to step in when you screw up. You won’t see them, but they’ll see you, and ensure that you come to no harm. Probably. And if any of you are tempted to turn tail and run, remember what you’ve learned. Cowardice has its price.”
    *    *    *
    When they were standing on the curb in the bright sunlight, the mission had sounded more than a little unsporting. Twenty Shadowhunters in training, all of them armed to the gills; one captured vampire, trapped in the building by steel walls and sunshine.
    But inside the old factory, in the dark, imagining the flicker of motion and the glimmer of fangs behind every