Angels Twice Descending by Cassandra Clare, Robin Wasserman Page A

assumed high school would lead to college, which would lead to rock stardom . . . or at least a moderately cool job at a moderately cool record label. Before he knew there was such a thing as demons, before he knew there was a race of superpowered, angel-blooded warriors eternally pledged to battle them—and definitely before he’d volunteered himself up to be one of them.
    So instead of Java Jones, he was in the Academy’s student lounge, squinting through candlelight, sneezing from two centuries’ worth of dust, and dodging the intimidating glares of noble Shadowhunters past whose portraits lined the room, their expressions seeming to say, How could you possibly imagine you could be one of us ? Instead of Eric, Matt, and Kirk, who he’d known since kindergarten, he was with friends he’d met only a couple of years before, one of whom nurtured an intense affection for rats and another who shared his name with them. Instead of speculating about their futures in rock and roll, they were readying themselves for a life battling multidimensional evils. Assuming, that is, they survived graduation.
    Which wasn’t exactly a safe assumption to make.
    “What do you think it will be like?” Marisol Garza asked now, nestled beneath Jon Cartwright’s beefy arm and looking like she was almost happy to be there. “The ceremony, I mean. What do you think we’ll have to do?”
    Jon, like Julie Beauvale and Beatriz Mendoza, descended from a long line of Shadowhunters. For them, tomorrow was just another day, his official farewell to student life. Time to stop training and start battling.
    But for George, Marisol, Simon, Sunil Sadasivan, and a handful of other mundane students, tomorrow loomed as the day they Ascended.
    No one was quite sure what it meant: Ascension . Much less what it entailed. They’d been told very little: That they would drink from the Mortal Cup. That they would, like the first of the warrior race, Jonathan Shadowhunter, sip the blood of an angel. That they would, if they were lucky, be transformed on the spot into real, full-blooded Shadowhunters. That they would say good-bye to their mundane lives forever and pledge themselves to a fearless life of service to humanity.
    Or if they were very unlucky, they would die an immediate and presumably gruesome death.
    It didn’t exactly make for a festive evening.
    “I’m just wondering what’s in the Cup,” Simon said. “You don’t think it’s actual blood, do you?”
    “Isn’t that your specialty, Lewis?” Jon sneered.
    George sighed wistfully. “The last time Jon makes a stupid vampire joke.”
    “I wouldn’t count on it,” Simon muttered.
    Marisol whacked Jon’s shoulder. “Shut up, idiot,” she said. But she said it rather too lovingly for Simon’s taste.
    “I bet it’s water,” Beatriz said, always the peacemaker. “Water that you’re supposed to pretend is blood, or that the Cup turns into blood, or something like that.”
    “It doesn’t matter what’s in the Cup,” Julie said in her best obnoxiously knowing way, even though she clearly didn’t know any better than the rest of them. “The Cup’s magic. You could probably drink ketchup out of it and it would still work.”
    “I hope it’s coffee, then,” Simon said with a wistful sigh of his own. The Academy was a caffeine-free zone. “I would be a much better Shadowhunter if I got to Ascend well-caffeinated.”
    “Sunil said he heard that it’s water from Lake Lyn,” Beatriz said skeptically. Simon hoped she was right to be skeptical; his last encounter with Lake Lyn’s water had been unsettling, to say the least. And given that some unknown percentage of mundanes died upon Ascending, it seemed to him like the Cup didn’t need any additional help on theoccasionally fatal front.
    “Where is Sunil, anyway?” Simon asked. They hadn’t exactly made a plan to meet up tonight, but the Academy offered limited recreational options—at least if you didn’t enjoy spending