Clary finally finds her voice and yells for Hodge to let her go.  Why she wasn’t doing this the whole time Valentine was there, we’ll never know.  Hodge refuses to let her out because she’ll try and kill him, but…she’s a 16 year-old girl with no training and he’s part of the a group of super-ninjas.  Eh, I guess it would be inconvenient to have to brush her off.

“But Hodge,” she said desperately, “didn’t you hear him? He’s going to kill Jace.”

“He didn’t say that.” …

“Hodge,” she said carefully, “Valentine said Jace would be with his father soon. Jace’s father is dead. What else could he have meant?”

Hodge didn’t look up from the paper he was scribbling on. “It’s complicated. You wouldn’t understand.”

Hm, let’s see, what else could he have meant?  He could be taking Jace to his father’s grave.  Valentine could be Jabba the Hut-esque and have Jace’s dad’s body on display in his evil lair.  Jace’s father could be still alive.  Jace’s father could be someone else, someone other than the man who got killed.  We’ve got lots of possibilities.

Also, Hodge, the only reason she doesn’t understand is because you won’t tell her.  This is bad, bad wring.  It’s trying to engineer drama and draw it out by having a mystery that could be solved in one second, but the characters just aren’t talking, so we’ll have to suffer through more of this “Jace’s father” bullshit.

Hodge gets all emo and asks Clary if she’ll leave once he lets her out.  She says no, because of Jace.  Hey, guess what’s missing in this conversation?  JOCELYN!  She’s still MIA, but everyone acts like abandoning Jace is the only thing that matters here.  Clary was going to trade the cup for her mother, now the cup is gone, and her mother’s fate is still unknown.  But this book barely remembers that fact.

Hodge leaves her alone, and after a while Clary remembers that she has a stele still.  Took her a while.

Already an image was forming in her mind, like a fish rising up through cloudy water, the pattern of its scales growing clearer and clearer as it neared the surface. Slowly at first, and then more confidently, she moved the stele across the wall, leaving searingly bright ash-white lines hovering in the air before her.

I had to read that and so do you.  Also, remember, humans don’t do magic because that comes from icky demon blood.  They just spontaneously know things, out of the blue, without learning them previously.  Can’t you do that?  Everyone can, because it’s so totally not magic.

Well, this so-totally-not-magic mark that came to her through so-totally-not-magic means does the job of breaking the invisible cage she’s in.  She runs to a window and sees Hodge crossing the street.  Even though she was in that cage for long enough to get ‘exhausted’ by trying to kick her way out and then sit and emo, Hodge has only just now left the building.  I hope he used that time to cure Alec before leaving, and not to pack.  Although considering the skills of this author, I wouldn’t be surprised if he spent the time staring at his navel.

Clary runs outside to chase him down.

She caught sight of herself in the darkened window of an apartment building as she careened around a corner. Her sweaty hair was plastered to her forehead, her face crusted with dried blood.

This is important because…?  Really, it’s just so randomly thrown in there.  Clary should not be focusing on her appearance right now, and neither should we.  It’s pointless and has no bearing on the story.  So she looks run-over, so what?  Unless the blood is going to get into her eyes and keep her from chasing Hodge, I really don’t see how it matters.

She follows him into some random alley behind a restaurant.

She remembered a poem she’d read in English class: I think we are in rats’ alley/Where the dead men lost their bones.

So…do you think of that line every time you see an alley?  Because there’s nothing special here about this one.  There’s no rats and no bones and no reason to bring up that random line of a poem.  Oh, except that the author thinks it sounds cool and wants to shove it in, just like she does with every lame joke and ‘witty’ bit of banter we’ve seen so far.

Hodge tells Clary to leave, but she won’t, so he gets ready to fight her.  Suddenly, werewolves!  Again.  A wolf jumps out of nowhere and fights Hodge for her.  It maybe kills Hodge (hard to tell), then grabs Clary by the leg and drags her off. 

Yeah, because it’s twilight on a busy street in New York City, at a time when five seconds ago Clary had to push through crowds of people to get to the alley.  But no one’s going to notice a giant wolf dragging an unconscious girl around by the leg?

Also?  Going unconscious because you got knocked on the noggin?  That’s considered brain damage.  It’s not a harmless little plot device you can use without consequence.  Not that Clary has much of a brain to damage, but still.  Most knocked-on-the-head episodes will only put you out for a few seconds.  Anything longer than that (like the several hours it took Clary to wake up) is indication of some major trauma, which will result in severe and lasting consequences.

Except in bullshit land, where Clary wakes up like she’d merely fallen asleep, and everything’s fine.  Just a little bit of pain that then goes away, no consequences whatsoever.  (Something that involves a loss of consciousness lasting from 30 minutes to 24 hours is classified as a moderate Traumatic Brain Injury.  “A person with a moderate or severe TBI may have a headache that does not go away, repeated vomiting or nausea, convulsions, an inability to awaken, dilation of one or both pupils, slurred speech, aphasia (word-finding difficulties), dysarthria (muscle weakness that causes disordered speech), weakness or numbness in the limbs, loss of coordination, confusion, restlessness, or agitation.^[34] Common long-term symptoms of moderate to severe TBI are changes in appropriate social behavior, deficits in social judgment, and cognitive changes, especially problems with sustained attention, processing speed, and executive functioning.^{[27][36][37][38][39]}Alexithymia, a deficiency in identifying, understanding, processing, and describing emotions occurs in 60.9% of individuals with TBI.^[40] Cognitive and social deficits have long-term consequences for the daily lives of people with moderate to severe TBI, but can be improved with appropriate rehabilitation.)

Clary wakes up in a dank, dark room that smells like wolves. 

He was carrying a lamp, its light brighter than the candle, which made her blink and turned him into a back-lit shadow.

Unless he’s walking backward or carrying it behind him, he’s not going to be back-lit.  That’s what back-lit means: light from behind.  If he’s carrying it like a normal person, then she’s just going to be blinded, and he’ll be a hard-to-see shape behind the light.

The shapeshifter is Luke.

There are two main ways to fuck up a big reveal.  One is to give hints that are so heavy that only an idiot wouldn’t put it together, and then assume your readers are idiots.  The other is to give no hints at all, then toss in your twist totally at random.  This book has managed to do both in one scene.  We all already knew that Luke wasn’t a bad guy, so that’s the first fuck-up right there.  But we also had no idea Luke was a shapeshifter, nor did we have any reason to suspect that anything was going wrong at all.  No comments from Clary that he disappeared for odd lengths of time, or that he had a wolf motif going or that he had exceptionally harry friends that visit around full-moon time.  Nothing.  We had no reason to suspect anything was ‘off’ about Luke, so the reveal that he’s a wolf doesn’t make us go “oh, that’s what it was,” it makes us go “the flying fuckity-fuck is this?”

Luke fails to tell Clary that he lied about hating her, not that he lied about liking her, and instead hangs his head in shame while Clary gets mad at him.  Why, book ,why?  What do you have against clear and open communication?  We all know what’s going on.  So why do you insist on making your characters even dumber than you think your readers are?

Turns out Hodge isn’t dead, but he is missing, because Luke couldn’t find the body when he went back for it.  Two more shapeshifters come in, and one of them is the wolf Clary stuck with a knife.  He seems very forgiving of that fact and gives her the knife back.

It occurs to me that these shapeshifters really suck at rescuing people.  At the hotel, they came at Clary and Jace all snarling, when they could have just turned human and said “we’re here to help, quick, run this way while we hold off the vampires.”  Luke could have shifted back in the alley and said “I still love you like family.  Quick, run to the subway while I make sure this other guy doesn’t wake up and throw knives at you again.”  Instead we get snarling attacks and drag-through-the-street bullshit.

“In command,” said Luke slowly. “I am the leader of this particular wolf pack. That’s why Gretel called me ‘sir.’ Believe me, it took a fair bit of work to break her of the habit of calling me ‘master.’”

But…he didn’t have the same problem with the male shapeshifter because…?  Because only a female would call a male ‘master,’ and other males don’t submit, because submitting is weak and pathetic and feminine?  Fuck this book and everything in it.

“I would have told you,” said Luke. “But your mother was adamant that you know nothing of Shadowhunters or the Shadow World. I couldn’t explain away my being a werewolf as some kind of isolated incident, Clary.

Why?  Why couldn’t you have said “I’m a werewolf” without saying “oh, and also there’s fairies and shit”?  Don’t throw this out and expect me to just take your word for it.  It would have been very easy to tell Clary about this isolated incident without telling her about anything else.  The only way this would have turned difficult is she wanted to know everything you did while wolfy.

Clary gives him the reader’s digest version of what she knows, then yells at him for ‘abandoning’ her mother.  She seems to be hanging a lot on the words she overheard, where Luke told the bad guys that he didn’t care about Clary or her mother.  She does also say that because Luke didn’t go on a suicide run to save her mother, that counts as abandonment, and I could see someone thinking that.  But it’s the blind assumption that what he told the bad guys about not caring that makes me bang my head on a wall.  It’s one thing to get up in arms over what he did (or didn’t) do, but this is the first time she’s even thought about that.  Before now, she’s been hung up on what he said.  Plus, she doesn’t even spare one single though wondering if Luke might have been lying to the bad guys, instead of wondering if maybe a lifetime of friendship actually counts for shit.  She gave up on him ridiculously fast back there, and now he’s having to beg her for forgiveness.

Here’s a thought: Maybe Luke LIED TO THE BADGUYS YOU STUPID FAILURE OF A PROTAGONIST!  Maybe he said he didn’t care so that the bad guys wouldn’t watch him too closely as he gathered up his wolfy buddies to protect you/find your mother.  Maybe he’s actually DOING SHIT to find Jocelyn.  And maybe, just maybe, Luke is a halfway competent person who knows that misinformation can be deliberately given to serve a point, unlike everyone else in this book.  They just hold back information they should give and give information they should hold back for no fucking reason at all.  At least he’s doing it on a plan.  (God, I hope he’s doing it on a plan.  You’ve got something competent – not brilliant, but competent – here, book.  Don’t ruin it with bad writing.) 

Luke decides to sit down and tell her his story, but you guys are going to have wait until tomorrow to hear it.