The Mortal Instruments (Book 1-3)

07. Meeting the Other Mundane

It wasn't that Daphne particularly disliked Clarissa Fray.

But in that moment, she just really really wanted to kill her.

The moment they were sent through the portal door, Jace and Daphne's hands shot out for each other. Their fingers quickly intertwined and they held each other tightly as they fell through the portal.

Distantly, Daphne could hear Clary screaming, and suddenly they were falling through the trees. Jace and Daphne reached the ground first. They landed easily, gracefully, and took in their surroundings. Jace's hands left Daphne's as he moved forward. "I wonder where we—"

Before he could finish his sentence, a screaming Clary Fray landed on him. 

"Oomph!" Jace made a grunting sound as he went down, and Clary stopped screaming. She rolled over, sucking the air back into her lungs.  "Ouch." Jace said, his tone indignant. "You landed on me."

Clary shot up, quickly getting off. Her face was flushed with embarrassment. "Well I couldn't exactly control where I landed!"

Jace scowled, and got up, brushing himself off as he walked back over to Daphne. "What were you thinking, leaping merrily through that Portal like you were jumping the F train? You're lucky it didn't dump us out in the East River."

"You guys didn't have to come after me."

"Yes, we did." He said. "You're far too inexperienced to protect yourself in a hostile situation without us."

"This hardly seems like a hostile situation," Clary brushed herself off, and looked up at their surroundings before she froze. "I know where we are."

Jace paused. "What?"

"This is Luke's house." She said slowly, walking forward. 

They stood in front of a small gray row house, nestled among the other row houses that lined the Williamsburg waterfront. A breeze blew off the East River, setting a small sign swinging over the brick front steps. Daphne read the block-lettered words: Garroway Books. Fine, Used, New, and Out-of-Print. Closed Saturdays. She glanced at the dark front door, its knob wound with a heavy padlock. A few days' worth of mail lay on the doormat, untouched. 

Jace looked over at Clary. "He lives in a bookstore?"

"He lives behind the store." Clary glanced up and down the empty street, which was bordered on one end by the arched span of the Williamsburg Bridge, and by a deserted sugar factory on the other. Across the sluggishly moving river the sun was setting behind the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan, outlining them in gold. "How did the Portal take us here?"

Daphne examined the padlock. "It must be the type of Portal to take you to whatever place you're thinking of. Fancy bit of magic. The warlock who adopted Madame Dorothea must've been fairly powerful."

"But I wasn't thinking of here," Clary objected. "I wasn't thinking of anywhere."

"You must have been." Jace said, but dropped the subject, seeming uninterested. "So, since we're here anyway..."

"Yeah?"

"What do you want to do?"

"Leave, I guess," Clary said bitterly. "Luke told me not to come here."

Jace shook his head. "And you just accept that?"

Clary hugged her arms around herself. "Do I have a choice?"

"We always have choices," Jace said. "If I were you, I'd be pretty curious about Luke right now. Do you have keys to the house?"

Clary shook her head. "No, but sometimes he leaves the back door unlocked." She pointed to the narrow alley between Luke's row house and the next. Plastic trash cans were propped in a neat row beside stacks of folded newspapers and a plastic tub of empty soda bottles.