Page 97 of Better in Black
“Come on, I know how it is. She’s the ice queen, you’re the toad guy.”
“No,” Simon said, feeling like he was losing his mind a bit, “Isabelle is not an ice queen, and I am not a toad guy! ‘Toad guy’ is not even a thing!”
He wanted to point out to Krog that it was ridiculous to bring up tension in someone’s relationship when there was a literal magic spell causing people to fight, but Krog, as far as he could tell, didn’t know that.
And Simon himself had some doubts, little niggling worms of misgiving. Was Ajatara’s magic twisting people’s hearts in cursed directions or just unleashing the dark truths that they’d been holding in? The things they’d argued about in the taxi, at the Shadow Market…they were real. Was it just that under normal circumstances, they could have worked them out easily, but Ajatara’s magic was turning every bit of tension up to eleven?
“Let me ask you,” Krog said, glancing over at Isabelle. “Is she the most stunningly beautiful woman you’ve ever met, and do you ask yourself every day why she’s chosen to be with you?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Do you suspect, deep down, that you love her much more than she loves you? That if things ended now, you’d be shattered forever and she’d probably be fine?”
Simon couldn’t bring himself to say it. But maybe the answer was all over his face.
“See?” Krog said, vindicated. “Ice queen and toad guy.”
ARGH.Simon had tried talking about this to Clary, but Claryloved him too much to be objective. She always said well-meaning things about how Izzy was lucky to have him, how any girl would be, blah blah blah. Getting a compliment from yourparabataiwas a little like getting a compliment from your mother. They wereobligatedto think you were great.
The point was, he couldn’t talk to Clary about it. And he couldn’t talk to Jace or Alec, obviously, since Isabelle was their sister. Eric was useless—or, depending on his mood, disgusting—when it came to girls. Magnus would have just made fun of him, then probably given him some devastatingly wise advice that was too painful to take. Which meant either talking to himself, as he’d been doing all too much of lately, or confiding in this temporarily man-shaped toad demon.
“Izzy and I are in love,” Simon said, “at least I thought we were in love. I mean, I’m in love, that’s certain. But she’s…”
“Bored by your rambling?”
“Do you want to know what the deal is or not?”
Krog zipped his lips and gestured for Simon to continue.
“I got offered a job at the Scholomance—which would mean moving really far away for a year, so I asked her to go with me. Which was, like, a big deal for me to do, I had to spend all week nerving myself up for it, and she didn’t even hesitate before saying no.”
“Bad sign.”
“I mean, she has good reasons not to go, so I get it, but then she made it really clear she wantedmeto go. Or at least that she didn’t care if I stayed here.”And that was before the Ajatara spell started affecting things, so she must really have meant it.
“Worse sign,” Krog said.
“I don’t want to be away from Isabelle either. It seems like a backward step, and it feels like she doesn’t care about going backward,because maybe she never planned to go forward.” Simon stopped, a little stunned. He hadn’t quite realized that’s how he felt. Or at least, he hadn’t wanted to admit it to himself. But here he was admitting it to a demon. “I mean, she could have at leastaskedwhy I want to teach at the Scholomance. Why I thought it was important.”
“Why is it important?” Krog looked sincerely interested, which was weird.
“None of your business.”
Krog shrugged his unsettlingly broad shoulders. “Okay, here’s my advice. Go to the Scholomance and burn it down.”
“Who would that help?”
“Well, me, for starters,” Krog said. “I like it when people burn to death.”
Right,Simon thought,still a demon.“I’m not doing that.”
“Hey, I had to try. Okay, here’s my real advice. Leave without telling her anything. Don’t take the job, but don’t stay here, either. Just take off, leave her alone, let her wonder what’s going on. Let her worry; maybe she’ll worry herself to death. That’s my patented Krog advice. It goes over great on YouTube.”
Simon decided not to ask Krog whether he really had a YouTube channel. “Isn’t that pretty much what you’re doing? With Ajatara? Rejecting her, refusing to talk to her?”
“Yes.”
“And how’s that working out for you?” Simon asked.
