Chapter Two

A/N: Thank you to Guest for being my first reviewer.

Jocelyn awoke to a silent room and an empty bed. Luke was not beside her, so she could only assume that he had gone downstairs. 'He can't have been up for long.' she noted, as she felt the slight warmth of his side of the bed. So she rose, throwing on a dressing gown haphazardly, before making her way downstairs.

She could hear the crackling of a fire in the living room, the pleasant warmth drifting through onto the stairs. Through the door, which was slightly ajar, she could see Luke knelt beside the fireplace, staring intently into the flames, as if they held a riddle he meant to decipher.

Jocelyn opened her mouth to speak, to ask her new husband what was wrong, but then she saw the strange flickering of the flames, the way they twisted and turned, almost as if they were letters. The woman quickly realised that they were letters; Luke was focused on the content of a fire message.

She waited silently, leant against the door frame, until the flames had died down to glowing embers. She remained in silence, approaching her husband, who was hunched over with his head in his hands, and wrapping her arms tightly around his shoulders. Luke started for a moment, before he caught sight of a lock of red hair out of the corner of his eye. Recognising his wife, he leant into her embrace.

"What's happened?" she asked after a minute or so.

Luke raised his head to look at her. His eyes were dry now, but were ringed with red, just as hers were, she expected. He answered with a sigh. "It's Maia."

Jocelyn sighed as well. Maia; another victim of the war her son had started. The loss of Jordan Kyle in the attack on the Praetor Lupis had hit the girl hard, and she was still struggling to come to terms with the loss of the boy she had loved. Having so nearly lost Luke on many occasions, as well as her first husband dead by the Angel Raziel, Jocelyn could sympathise more than most for that feeling.

"How is she coping?" Jocelyn asked gently, although she doubted the answer would be a positive one.

"Not well at all." Luke told her, his voice grave as if he were reporting Jordan's death all over again. "That was Bat who sent me the message. He says that she's finding it agonising to stay in Alicante, on the Council, knowing that Jordan and the other Praetors died for the sake of sending a message to the Clave."

A lump appeared in Jocelyn's throat, as she saw the way the conversation was turning.

"I'm sorry, Jocelyn," Luke apologised, seeing her expression, and knowing that she had guessed what would happen next. "But Maia is a vulnerable girl, not much older than Clary. I can't just leave her like this. I'm going to have to go back to Idris."

The woman had not noticed the way her husband was speaking, but she noticed it now, and fire rose in her eyes. "You are not going anywhere." she told him sharply, the same way she had used to speak to Clary when she had caught her stealing sweets from the cupboard. "Either we all go to Idris, or none of us do."

"But you couldn't wait to leave Idris in the end." he protested, placing a hand on his wife's shoulder. The reason for that remained unspoken; it did not need to be said. "And what about Clary? Simon's just starting to remember; surely she should stick around to try to help him."

"Simon has Isabelle, Alec, Magnus and Jace to help him remember, and in any case, Clary's quite adept at drawing Portals, whether I want her to or not." The last bit was added under the woman's breath, but Luke still caught it and smiled. "We have to stay together, Luke. After all that's happened, I don't want to see my family split apart again."

Immediately, Luke's hand retracted from her shoulder, to be replaced with his warm arms wrapped around her, holding her tightly to him. Normally, Jocelyn would be a little annoyed, having been comforted all through the evening by Luke and now having the gesture repeated in the morning; she had always been strong and self-reliant, had had to be, and she hated feeling as if she was weak. But it was clear in the tight lock of his arms that Luke was clinging to her far more than she was clinging to him. 'He needs me.' she remembered, and held him tighter.

Half an hour later, they were upstairs packing their bags. There had not been much to pack, given that they were only at the cottage for a honeymoon, but it still felt strange to be leaving so soon. Jocelyn's ear was still ringing from the screaming match she had had with her daughter on the phone, but the promise that she could go off to see her friends whenever she liked as long as she told them first had finally persuaded Clary to say yes. She would be meeting them at dusk in Alicante, as Luke had sent a fire message to say to expect a Portal both from New York and from the farm; Jocelyn twirled the stele in her hand absent-mindedly, glad that her daughter had passed on the skill of Portal-making to her as well, to put both their minds at rest, in case any danger reared its head again. Jocelyn hoped that it would not, that the War was over; but to be truthful, she had hoped the War had ended with the Uprising, and another one, a worse one, had merely taken its place.

"All ready?" Luke asked, placing both their fully-packed bags on the floor beside a large space on the wall. Jocelyn nodded, taking a deep breath to steady her shaking hand and pressing her stele into the paint and plaster, carving a charcoal line in the shape of a doorway. The moment her stele reached the skirting board again, the space inside the line glowed blue and seemed to turn to shimmering water, almost celestial in the way it glowed. The woman smiled at her handiwork, committing its beauty to memory; she must remember to draw it later.

Still, smiling, she took her husband's hand in her own, casting a final glance over her shoulder at the farmhouse, where so many happy memories had been made. Then she turned, staring straight through the layer of rippling ice and imagining beyond it the shimmering glass towers of the place she had once called home.

A/N: Please review!