Aline sat, and then scowled. “Now my butt is wet,” she said. “Nobody warned me.”

Helen thought of several saucy things to say but held back. Aline was looking especially gorgeous right now, she thought, in a skirt and flowered top, her brown shoulders bared to the sun. She wore small gold earrings in the shape of Love and Commitment runes. “You never sat on the beach on Wrangel?” she asked.

“No way. It was freezing.” Aline wiggled her bare toes in the sand. “This is much better.”

“It is much better, isn’t it?” Helen smiled at her wife, and Aline turned pink, because even after all the time they’d been together, Helen’s attention still made Aline blush and play with her hair. “We’re going to run the Institute.”

“Don’t remind me. So much paperwork,” Aline grumbled.

“I thought you wanted to run the Institute!” Helen laughed.

“I think steady employment is a good idea,” said Aline. “Also we need to keep an eye on the kids so they don’t become hooligans.”

“Too late, I think.” Helen gazed down the beach fondly in the direction of her siblings.

“And I think we should have a baby.”

“Really?” Helen opened her mouth. Closed it again. Opened it. “But—darling—how? Without mundane medicine—”

“I don’t know, but we should ask Magnus and Alec, because it seems to me that babies just fall from the sky when they’re around. Like toddler rain.”

“Aline,” Helen said in her be serious voice.

Aline tugged at her skirt. “Do you—want a baby?”

Helen scooted close to Aline, pulling her wife’s cold hands into her lap. “My love,” she said. “I do! Of course! It’s just—I still think of us in exile, a little bit. As if we’re waiting for our real life to truly start up again. I know it’s not logical. . . .”

Aline lifted their joined hands and kissed Helen’s fingers. “Every single minute I’ve spent with you has been my real life,” she said. “And even on Wrangel Island, a better life than I ever had without you.”

Helen felt herself starting to get teary-eyed. “A baby would be like a new sister or brother for Ty and Dru and Tavvy,” she said. “It would be so wonderful.”

“If it was a girl, we could name her Eunice,” Aline said. “It was my aunt’s name.”

“We will not.”

Aline grinned impishly. “We’ll see. . . .”

*

When Alec came up to talk to Mark, Mark was in the middle of making balloon animals for Tavvy, Rafe, and Max. Max seemed content, but Rafe and Tavvy had grown tired of Mark’s repertoire.

“It is a manticore,” said Mark, holding up a yellow balloon.

“It’s a snake,” said Tavvy. “They’re all snakes.”

“Nonsense,” said Mark, producing a green balloon. “This is a wingless, headless dragon. And this is a crocodile sitting on its feet.”

Rafe looked sad. “Why does the dragon have no head?”

“Excuse me,” Alec said, tapping Mark on the shoulder. “Can I talk to you for a second?”

“Oh, thank the Angel,” said Mark, dropping his balloons and scrambling to his feet. He followed Alec toward the bluffs as Magnus moved in to amuse the children. Mark overheard him telling Rafe the dragon had lost its head in a game of poker.

Mark and Alec stopped in the shadow of a bluff, not far from the tide line. Alec was wearing a lightweight sweater with a hole in the sleeve and looked calmly pleasant—surprisingly so for a Consul trying to piece together a shattered government.

“I hope this isn’t about the balloons,” said Mark. “I don’t have much training.”

“It’s not about the balloons,” said Alec. He reached around to rub the back of his neck. “I know we haven’t really had much of a chance to talk, but I’ve heard a lot about you from Helen and Aline. And I remembered you for a long time after we met you in Faerie. When you joined the Hunt.”

“You told me if I went to Edom with you, I’d die,” Mark recalled.

Alec looked faintly embarrassed. “I was trying to protect you. But I thought about you a lot after that. How tough you were. And how wrong it was, the way the Clave treated you, just because you were different. I always wished you were around to join the Downworlder-Shadowhunter Alliance. Working with it has been something I’m really going to miss.”

Mark was startled. “You’re not going to work with the Alliance anymore?”

“I can’t,” Alec said. “I can’t do that and be Consul—it’s too much, for anyone. I don’t know how much you’ve heard, but the government is setting itself up in New York City. Partly because of me—I can’t be too far from Magnus and the kids. And it has to be somewhere.”

“You don’t need to apologize about it,” said Mark, wondering where this was all going.

“There’s so much we have to do,” said Alec. “We have connections all over the world, with every religious organization, with secret societies that know about demons. They’ll all have to decide who they tithe to—us, or the government in Alicante. We have to face that we’re going to lose at least some of our allies. That we’ll be struggling—for funds, for credibility. For so much.”

Mark knew that Shadowhunters survived on the money they were given by organizations—religious, spiritual, mystic—who knew of demons and valued the guarding of the world. He’d never thought about what would happen without those funds. He didn’t envy Alec.

“I wondered if you’d want to join the Alliance,” said Alec. “Not just join it but help us head it up. You could be an ambassador to Faerie, now that the Cold Peace is being dissolved. It’s not going to be a short process. We have a lot of reconnecting to do with the fey, and we need to help them understand that the government in Idris no longer represents the majority of Shadowhunters.” He hesitated. “I know things have been crazy for your family, but you would truly be a valuable asset.”

“Where would I need to live?” Mark asked. “I don’t want to be too far from my family or Cristina.”

“We were going to ask Cristina to join us as well,” said Alec. “Her knowledge of faeries will be helpful, and her family’s relationship with them as well. You can both have a place in the New York Institute, and you’re welcome to Portal back to see your family whenever you want.”

Mark tried to wrap his head around the idea. New York seemed far away, but then, he hadn’t paused at all to consider what he might want to do now that the crisis seemed to be over. He had no interest in anything like the Scholomance. He could remain in Los Angeles, of course, but if he did, he’d be away from Cristina. He already missed Kieran, as did she; he couldn’t bear to miss her, too. But what would his purpose be, if he followed her to Mexico? What did Mark Blackthorn want to do with his life?

“I need to think about it,” Mark said, surprising himself.

“All right,” said Alec. “Take all the time you need.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ve got something important I have to do.”

*

Cristina sat with her legs tucked up under her, gazing out to sea. She knew she should join the rest of the party—her mother had always scolded her for hanging back in her room during social occasions—but something about the sea was comforting. She would miss it when she went home: the steady drumbeat of the tide, the ever-changing surface of the waves. Always the same yet always new.

If she turned her head a bit she could see Emma with Julian, Mark talking to Alec. That was enough for now.

A shadow fell across her view. “Hello, friend.”

It was Diego. He sat down beside her on the large, flat-topped rock she’d found. He looked more casual than she’d seen him in a long time, in a T-shirt and rolled-up cargo pants. The brutal, vicious scar across his face was healing quickly, as Shadowhunter scars did, but it would never fade to invisibility. He would never quite be Perfect Diego again on the outside. But he had changed so much for the better on the inside, she thought. And that was what truly mattered.

“En qué piensas?” It was the same question he’d always asked her, so common it was an inside joke between them. What are you thinking about?

“The world seems so strange to me now,” she said, gazing at her toes in their sandals. “I can’t quite fathom that Alicante is lost to us. The Shadowhunter homeland is our home no longer.” She hesitated. “Mark and I are happy to be together but also sad; Kieran being gone feels like a wedge cut out of our relationship. It’s like having Idris cut out of the world of the Shadowhunters. A piece that’s missing. We can still be happy but we won’t be whole.”

It was the first time she had spoken to Diego about the odd nature of her relationship. She had wondered how he would react. He only nodded. “There is no perfect world,” he said. “What we have now is a wound, but it’s still better than the Cold Peace was, and better than the Cohort was. Very few people have the opportunity to reach out and change the injustices they see in the world, but you did, Cristina. You always wanted to end the Cold Peace, and now it’s over.”