Clary expresses surprise at the idea that her mother deliberately tried to hide the world of fairies and hunters from her.  Again, I’m not shocked, because I thought we all knew this from the start.  What part of everything we know about Jocelyn is supposed to make this contrary?  Is in the idea that no mother should be ‘mucking around’ in her own child’s head?  Well, Clary herself doesn’t treat it as more than a minor annoyance, to be mentioned only when the author remembers, so I don’t see why Jocelyn would have any hang-ups.

Clary goes on to call what was done to her mind-rape, and I’d like to agree with her, really.  But we had such a lackluster introduction to the concept.  Yes, one’s mind should be an intimate part of themselves, and messing with it is messing with someone’s core being, a gross violation.  It just hasn’t been treated like that.  Clary balks at the idea, then shrugs it off, then suffers no emotional effects after the fact.  It’s like the book is treating it as a philosophical question, rather than a situation which should be having actual consequences.  Clary should be feeling violated, or even questioning if her personality is her ‘real’ self or just what her mother created by having her mind altered.  It’s those feelings that make the mind-mucking a bad thing.  That, not some intangible moral thought-exercise that arbitrarily declares it wrong, which is how the books is treating it.

Magnus explains what he did to Clary: he put a spell on her mind that made her forget magic/fairy things as soon as she saw them, which was a safer option than deliberately crippling her inner eye.  The spell has to be renewed every two years, and he was out of town when the expiration date came up this time, which is how Clary randomly started seeing things at the club.  (This almost explains why she didn’t see/notice her mother’s scars, but her forgetful spell had worn off before she last saw her mother, so why didn’t she notice them then?  It’s not because they’re just too faint to see; she saw Jace’s scars right away.)

Magnus says he can’t undo the spell, because undoing something is a lot harder than doing it in the first place, and one mistake could leave Clary mentally broken.  (Oh, come on, it’s not like she’s got anything going on in there to begin with.)  Conveniently enough, he doesn’t need to take it off, though!  Since they’re at the end of the two-year time limit, it’ll fade on its own, and all Clary’s memory will come back in time.

Clary starts boo-hooing about how she always knew she was different, and Magnus gives her a verbal smack-down about how every teenager thinks that.  In this case, she happens to be right, but the fact that she was having normal teenager angst isn’t his fault.  He then tells her all about how being different (in his case, half demon) is a horrible thing and it’s made his early life a misery.  He tells his sob story in succinct, stark terms, and he doesn’t seek pity in the telling of it, so I kind of like it.   If only Magnus hadn’t used up all his credit with me by being horrid to that vampire last chapter.  Anyway, the point of his story is that to be different leads to all sorts of not-glamorous things, and Clary shouldn’t be angry at her mother for trying to protect her from that kind of pain. 

Man, too bad the book had to shoe-horn in that bit with the vampire.  It was completely unnecessary and did nothing but paint her own characters in a bad light, even though clearly she thought it was edgy and cool.  If she’d just left it out, I’d be Magnus’s number one fangirl right now.

Clary ignores all of that whines about how she’s not her ‘true self’ because she has this mind spell on her.

Alright, philosophy time.  This is all purely my opinion, so feel free to disagree violently with me.  But.  We don’t have predestined selves.  We aren’t born with a personality intact that we happen to grow into.  What Clary’s mother did changed how Clary grew up, but it didn’t fundamentally change her personality.  Yes, she might be a different person now if she’d known about all this hunter stuff from the start, but that’s not what Clary is saying here.  Changing someone’s circumstances going forward is not the same as changing who someone already is.  In short, Clary already is her true self.  Unless Magnus is lying, she grew into her current lump of a bland personality all on her own, without any deliberate crafting.  It’s like saying that a blind person has a fake personality just because they would have turned out different had they not been blinded.  Her current personality isn’t fake just because it could have been different.  If that’s true, then everyone can make the same claim.  Maybe my personality is fake because, if doctors hadn’t saved my brother at birth, I might have grown up an only child.  Or one of a million other things that happened in my life that could have easily gone a different way if one person had made a different choice.  What Clary’s mother did is still invasive, but it’s not wrong for the same reasons that Clary is currently whining about.

Magnus takes pity on her and her whining, even though he was all “bitch, please,” just a moment ago.  He takes down a book full of runes and tells her to stare at a particular one until it ‘changes her mind.’  So…she does.

No, really, that’s how easy these god awful runes are in this book.  She just stares at the thing until the meaning of it pops into her head without any effort or willpower on her part.  So, basically, the hunter who knows the most runes is just the hunter that has the most free time to spend staring dumbly at pages all day.

Furthermore, how does this fall under the ‘humans don’t do magic’ issue?  Is the book now a magic tool?  Is it giving her the understanding, rather than her magically knowing things?  What counts as ‘do’ in this situation, and why do they keep mucking about with magic if they have a stigma against it!?!?

Not only that, but the rune that she read?  It’s magic power is to make her automatically be able to read all the other runes.  How convenient is that?  It’s like the author realized belatedly that she’d created an effort-based system, where things had to be learned over time, and then wrote in a shortcut so that Clary wouldn’t have to sit through any school.

Magnus then learns that they’re after the cup, and he assures Clary that she doesn’t know anything about it.  He also tells us that the cup is one of a set of three things, the other two being a mirror and a sword. 

“If you insist on disavowing that which is ugly about what you do,” said Magnus, still looking at Alec, “you will never learn from your mistakes.”

Why is Magnus getting all the decent lines, when I’ve already resolved to hate him for being a prick?  Man, I might have to change my mind at this rate, and we all know how much I hate doing that.

Alec sat up straighter. “But without the Cup, we can’t—”

“Make more of you. I know,” said Magnus. “Perhaps not everyone regards that as quite the disaster that you do.”

You tell those assholes, Magnus!

…Alright, I’m a convert.  Let’s just pretend that scene with the vampire never happened, can we?

Magnus points out that the hunters are full of assholes, so while they’re marginally better than “Kill ‘Em All” Valentine, he’s still not going to help them.

Magnus, standing by the door, snapped his fingers impatiently. “Move it along, teenagers. The only person who gets to canoodle in my bedroom is my magnificent self.”

“Canoodle?” repeated Clary, never having heard the word before.

I love you and your word choice, Magnus.  Please don’t do something later that makes me regret saying that.

the musicians segued into another haunting song, the melody as delicate and translucent as rock crystal.

How is a crystal ‘delicate’?  Isn’t it, by definition, the opposite of delicate?  I’m used to thinking of both rocks and crystals as incredibly hard.  The only way they could be delicate is if carved into a particular shape, and even then, it’s the craftsmanship that’s delicate, not the actual rock.

They get back into the party, and Isabelle is in a panic because Simon drank something and turned himself into a rat.  Clary finally shows some signs of life and joins the panic, trying to find Simon so they can turn him back.

“I didn’t leave him. He ran under the bar,” Isabelle protested, pointing. “Let go! You’re denting my bracelet.”

“Bitch,” Clary said savagely, and flung a surprised-looking Isabelle’s hand back at her, hard.

Clary, you finally come out of your stupor, and it’s only to make me hate you.

It’s not Isabelle’s fault that Simon’s a rat.  He drank something blue at a warlock’s party.  At that point, it’s kind of his own fault.  And Isabelle hasn’t abandoned him; she knows where he is and that he’s safe, she just can’t do anything about it.  She’s clearly upset about not being able to do anything.  Also, if you’re gripping hard enough to dent a bracelet, you’re gripping hard enough to hurt a wrist.  In short, there was absolutely no reason for Clary to call Isabelle a bitch here, other than her own generally spiteful attitude toward Isabelle.  (Who, need I remind, has done nothing at all to deserve this except be prettier than the main character.)

Clary rescues Simon from under the bar.

“I can’t believe she let you drink that blue drink,” Clary said to rat-Simon. “Now you see what you get for being so shallow.”

WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU, CLARY?!?!  ISABELLE IS NOT HIS KEEPER.  IT IS NOT HER RESPONSIBILITY TO MAKE SURE HE DOESN’T DO STUPID SHIT.  SHE EVEN TOLD HIM NOT TO DRINK THE COCKTAILS.  Clary’s even doubly-blaming Isabelle here.  She almost blames Simon, but instead of blaming him for drinking an unknown drink, she just twists it around to be about Isabelle again.  Simon is not a child.  He is old enough to take responsibility for his own actions, and Isabelle didn’t do anything.

Fuck you, book.  I’m going to love Isabelle just because you hate her.  She even seems like the nicest one in this group.

“If it weren’t for me, he wouldn’t have been here at all,” Clary said in a small voice.

“Don’t flatter yourself. He came because of Isabelle.”

WHY?  WHY BOOK?  WHY?  As hard as this may be to believe, sometimes men can fuck up all on their own without being tempted by the slutty female into doing it. Or they can do good things without being tempted by a female into it.  After all, we haven’t heard from Simon what his reasons for coming back are, and as I mentioned before, he could have a variety. 

Magnus won’t reverse the spell because it’ll undo itself in a few hours, and putting too much magic on a person is really hard on them.  Seems like a perfectly valid reason to me, but all the others are upset.  Apparently they’d rather put Simon through a traumatic ordeal just so they can selfishly have their buttmonkey back.  Magnus still refuses to do it, so they decide to go home and wait it out.

D’aw, and Magnus has a crush on Alec. 

Before they finally leave (and they’ve been talking about leaving for several pages now), Magnus pulls Clary to the side and repeats that everything Jocelyn did was for Clary’s own safety and protection.  He tells her not to undo all that by being stupid, but I’m not sure that’s necessary.  It’s not like she’s doing anything at all, stupid or smart.

“She wouldn’t want me to save her?”

“Not if it meant putting yourself in danger.”

“But I’m the only person who cares what happens to her—”

Shenanigans.  Clary has yet to do anything towards finding her mother.  All she does is follow along while other people try to find her mother.

“And one last thing.” His eyes flicked toward the door, through which Jace, Alec, and Isabelle had disappeared. “Keep in mind that when your mother fled from the Shadow World, it wasn’t the monsters she was hiding from. Not the warlocks, the wolfmen, the Fair Folk, not even the demons themselves. It was them. It was the Shadowhunters.”

Um, nice try, but she was running from one small crazy sect of the shadowhunters, not the group in general.  Also, she was part of that crazy sect and tried to kill everyone.  It’s like saying that the US is evil because we executed Timothy Mcveigh.  Maybe we’ll find out later that the Clave is the uber bad guys, but we don’t have a scrap of evidence yet. 

As they leave, they see the vampires all milling around their ruined motorcycles and generally being put off that someone destroyed them.  Jace reminds us all what a horrible person he is by being amused at their displeasure.

I’m just not even sure what’s going on here.  It could be that the author is attempting (poorly, but attempting) to make the hunters into a morally gray group.  She seems to be trying to hint that with what Magnus said earlier, but it just doesn’t work.  That would fit better if we saw them being overly strict, to the point of being totalitarian, but so far that hasn’t been the case.  The only hunters we see are these three, and they’re not strictly adhering to any law, they’re just general assholes.  To be morally questionable, there has to be at least the option of being in the right, and these guys aren’t even close to that.

The other option is that the vampires are bad guys, and the author knows this, but she forgot that we don’t know that yet.  She knows they’re bad, so it’s okay to have bad things happen to them, because in her mind it’s proper comeuppance.  The problem being, we haven’t seen them do bad yet, so it winds up being nothing more than petty, racist hatred.  (Also, the idea that petty hatred can be earned is a complete different can of worms.  If they are doing morally reprehensible things, they should be stopped, not vandalized.  If they are just generally unpleasant to be around, then ignore and avoid them.  There is literally no scenario in which Jace’s actions are actually right.)

“It’s not your fault,” Alec was saying. He sounded weary, as if he’d been through this sort of thing with his sister before. Clary wondered how many boyfriends she’d turned into rats by accident.

Probably none, considering she didn’t turn Simon into a rat either.

Isabelle insists that she would be distraught if anything happened to Simon, and Alec says that’s bullshit because she’s only known him a day, so she can’t be in love with him.  Um…Alec, it is possible to care about another human being without being in love with them.  Hell, it’s possible to be upset about the accidental rat-i-fication of a complete stranger, just because it’s a generally crappy thing to have happen to a person.  There doesn’t need to be any love involved here, just basic empathy.

Although I don’t know why I’m surprised that in a YA book, romantic love is the only interpersonal attachment that’s given any validity. 

Clary goes to check on Simon in her backpack and realizes that he’s missing.  The zipper is torn, so they figure it happened while they were leaving the party.  Jace and Clary go back to investigate while the siblings continue on to the subway.

Turns out everyone from the party is already gone, including the vampires with the broken bikes.  Wow, that happened fast.

Magnus doesn’t know where Simon is, but figures the vampires took him.  He saw a vampire leave with a rat, but vampires often turn into stuff (bats, rats, piles of dust, whatever) when drunk, so he didn’t think anything of it.  Again, I love this little detail, mostly because it’s just given as a matter of course and not dwelled on like we’re supposed to be impressed.  It’s funny and unassuming and just nice.

“Wait,” Clary interrupted. “What would they want with Simon? I thought they weren’t allowed to hurt people…”

“My guess?” said Magnus, not unkindly. “They assumed he was a tame rat and thought it would be funny to kill a Shadowhunter’s pet. They don’t like you much, whatever the Accords might say—and there’s nothing in the Covenant about not killing animals.”

So…let me guess.  No one’s going to point out the fact that if Jace hadn’t fucked with their bikes just for the lolz, this probably wouldn’t have happened?  Seriously, even Magnus seems to have forgotten that point and acts like vampires are just jerks like that.  No one seems willing to point out that Jace is the one that started everything for no reason at all.

Magnus says there’s a chance they thought Simon was one of their own, in which case he’s safe until he turns back into a human.  Clary guilts Magnus into telling them where the vampires live, since he mucked with her memories all her life, and then the two run off to go rescue poor Simon.