Page 91 of Better in Black
The pink warlock seemed to swell with anger. “Problem? Tryemergency! Someone at the Shadow Market sabotaged my wares!”
“Er—what kind of wares, exactly?” Simon asked.
The warlock crossed her arms over her chest and glared at them. “I specialize in candy.”
Jace raised an eyebrow. “You have a candy emergency?”
“Laugh all you want, Shadowhunter. But something dark is afoot.”
Jace sighed and looked over at Simon and Isabelle. “I know you’re off patrol tonight, but…”
“It’s fine,” Izzy said. She still wouldn’t meet Simon’s gaze. “We’ll look into it. You guys go deal with the Shax.”
“Yeah, we got this,” Simon said. “Don’t we, Iz?”
Isabelle gave him a long, dark look before walking off toward the club’s exit. Clary looked worriedly over at Simon. “Is everything okay?”
“Just a misunderstanding,” Simon said. “It’ll be fine.”
The pink warlock snorted. “Love sucks,” she said.
Simon was inclined, for the moment, to agree.
—
The New York City Shadow Market was housed in a cavernous abandoned theater on Canal Street. It was one in the morning and, judging from the deserted streets, the city that supposedly never slept was taking a bit of a cat nap. But the Shadow Market was bustling. Downworlders dashed from one bizarre booth to another. Some kind of creature had made a nest up in the rafters. It might have been a bat, but…Simon didn’t think bats usually had three-foot-wide wingspans. He decided best to stop thinking about it, period.
For a semi-illegal and more-than-semi-dangerous marketplace in the middle of the night, the market had a strangely festive vibe. Simon could imagine that under other circumstances, he might actually enjoy the chance to look around.
But right now he was too worried about things with Isabelle to really focus. All he wanted was a chance to talk to her. To explain why taking the job at the Scholomance was actually about him and her. About their future. About the fact that Izzy and her family had given him so much, and he wanted to give something back.
For a while, he and Izzy had been bobbing along on the current, never really discussing what they were doing in their relationship or what would come next. He’d hoped this new job might be a way of redirecting the current. But maybe it was too big a change, too soon. The problem was, when Simon needed advice, he usually went to Izzy. But he couldn’t go to Izzy about this.
The pink warlock, whose name turned out to be Candy, brought them over to her booth. It looked like Valentine’s Day had thrown up all over it. Chocolate hearts, pastel sweets, fussily wrapped gummies, all of them the same shade of hot pink as Candy’s skin. Simon picked up a lollipop the size of his head.
“You want it?” Candy asked. “That’s fifteen bucks but you get the Shadowhunter discount. So you can have it for twenty-five.”
“For alollipop?”
“It’s for you and your lady friend to share,” Candy said.
“Twenty-five divided by two is still too much for a lollipop.”
“How about a lollipop that will turn you into exactly who your little girlfriend wants you to be, and vice versa.”
He turned to Izzy. “What do you want me to be?”
Izzy smiled sweetly. “It wasn’t so bad when you were a rat.”
Simon dropped the lollipop back on the table like it was toxic. “Too soon,” he said, and shuddered. It would always be too soon to laugh about the night he’d spent scrabbling through the Hotel Dumort trying to escape from his vampire captors. That night had set the course for his entire life, and he did like his life…but he still begrudged the chaos and loss that had gotten him there.
And he was a little surprised at the way Isabelle had brought it up. She knew it wasn’t his favorite memory, and even when she was mad, Izzy usually wasn’t unkind. Odd.
“Everything here looks fine,” Izzy said, surveying the sweets. “So is this a joke, or is it a trap? And before you answer, I should warn you I’m not really in the mood for either.”
“Fine? Are you blind?” Candy pointed to a display of candy hearts. Simon crouched down to get a better look. Each heart had a little message on it, like the kind he remembered from elementary school, except these messages weren’t exactly heartwarming:
you smell
