The weapons room looked exactly the way something called “the weapons room” sounded like it would look. Brushed metal walls were hung with every manner of sword, dagger, spike, pike, featherstaff, bayonet, whip, mace, hook, and bow. Soft leather bags filled with arrows dangled from hooks, and there were stacks of boots, leg guards, and gauntlets for wrists and arms. The place smelled of metal and leather and steel polish.

The danger, of course, in using an opening line like that is: That’s not what I’d imagine a weapons room to look like.  We don’t get a real good picture of what the place looks like, just that it has metal walls, and I can’t imagine why any place that’s inside a regular building would have metal walls.  And why are all the weapons hanging on the metal walls?  Get some fucking weapons racks like normal people.  Weapons that hang on walls are generally for display, not for storage.  If everything is hanging on walls, you’re limited by how much wall space you have, and making the room bigger doesn’t actually give you a whole lot of extra wall space, it just takes up more floor space.  And why is the armor/gear just ‘stacked’?  Put that shit in something.  A box, a chest, a set of shelves, anything.  And what’s with all the weapons?  A whip?  A pike?  There’s a reason most of these things have gone out of style: ranged weapons work better.  If you have bows and arrows, your pikes are obsolete.  And you have ‘Sensors’  that can make demons vomit to death, so why are you bothering with all this shit?  

This isn’t a weapons room.  It’s a movie set, and it’s clichéd as hell.

Well, in this movie set, Jace and Alec are working on three somethings called seraph blades.  I’m sure they’re going to be plot-important and very awesome later on, which begs the question of why they’re the type of thing that can be worked on in one’s spare time.

“Those don’t look like knives. How did you make them? Magic?”

Alec looked horrified, as if she’d asked him to put on a tutu and execute a perfect pirouette.  “The funny thing about mundies,” Jace said, to nobody in particular, “is how obsessed with magic they are for a bunch of people who don’t even know what the word means.”

“I know what it means,” Clary snapped.

“No, you don’t, you just think you do. Magic is a dark and elemental force, not just a lot of sparkly wands and crystal balls and talking goldfish.”

…

“Look, we don’t do magic, okay?” he added ,not looking at Clary. “That’s all you need to know about it.”

No, that’s not all she needs to know about it. For that matter, that’s not all we need to know about it.  Look, the readers picked up this book because it promised magic.  We, the audience, know that magic isn’t ‘sparkly wands and talking fish.’  We’re used the concept of magic being an ‘elemental force,’ because that’s pretty much what it is in every book in this genre.  Telling us that magic isn’t just for tricks and shows is like telling us that our nose is on our face. 

And besides that, these fuckers can turn invisible and put ‘runes’ on their skin that give them special powers.  If that isn’t magic, then the book needs to define what is magic and then tell us what that other shit is.  Science?  Religious miracles?  (Hey, they did drink angel blood.)  Light magic over dark magic that they gave a different name to separate themselves out from those dark magic users?  Come on, give us something, anything.  Especially since we’re not idiots and we’ve seen you doing magic all through this book.

Clary decides this isn’t an important question and just drops the subject like a good little puppet.  She tells Jace that she wants to go home.  Jace agrees, but when Alec asks to come along, Jace shoots him down.

The look Alec shot Clary was as sour as poison.

Poison is usually bitter.

Also, I’m now going to read forward with the assumption that Alec has a huge boy-crush on Jace.  I assume it will only improve the story.

Jace checks to see if she has her house keys (she does) because breaking in would probably upset any wards that are around the place.  Um…why?  If these were normal, average, anti-break-in wards, I could see that.  After all, you don’t want your alarm system to go off every time you come home.  But Jocelyn and Luke are out of the picture, so the only people setting up wards would be demons hoping that Clary comes home, and unless they are fatally stupid, they should have warded the front door.

Clary brings up the whole “hey, you gave me a mark that could have killed me, how did you know it wouldn’t?” thing and he admits that he wasn’t sure, he just guessed.

He pressed a button in the wall, and the elevator lurched into action with a vibrating groan that she felt all through the bones in her feet. “I was ninety percent sure.”

“I see,” Clary said.

There must have been something in her voice, because he turned to look at her. Her hand cracked across his face, a slap that rocked him back on his heels. He put his hand to his cheek, more in surprise than pain. “What the hell was that for?”

“The other ten percent,” she said, and they rode the rest of the way down to the street in silence.

I like this side of Clary.  Can we see it more, please? 

Jace spent the train ride to Brooklyn wrapped in an angry silence. Clary stuck close to him anyway, feeling a little bit guilty, especially when she looked at the red mark her slap had left on his cheek.

Sigh.  I guess not.  Look, I don’t mean to advocate violence, and it’s good to have a conscience, but the guy might have killed you.  Don’t give up that thought so quickly.  A slap to the cheek isn’t really that bad in the grand scope of the situation.

Farther down the train, two teenage girls sitting on an orange bench seat were giggling together. The sort of girls Clary had never liked at St. Xavier’s, sporting pink jelly mules and fake tans.

That’s right, how dare those bitches…um, have fake tans.  Let’s judge them by how they look!  Let’s think mean thoughts about them for daring to display signs of enjoyment and friendship in public! 

The girls are just there to make flirty eyes at Jace so the book can remind us that he’s hot.

She could taste the terror she’d felt when she’d first seen the Ravener. The taste was sharp and coppery on her tongue like old pennies.

Okay, yeah, pennies taste like copper.  But you know what else does?  Blood.  Also, you know what’s scary?  Blood.  You know what’s not scary?  Pennies. 

They get inside her building and find fresh blood on the stairs.  They get inside her house and realize all the furniture is gone.  Jace reacts as if this just something mundanes do, pack up all the worldly belongings of a family that has mysteriously gone missing, and not an obvious sign of suspicious activity.

They go to Clary’s room, but a…giant zombie demon (?) attacks them.  Jace has one of those seraph blades, and oh look, it turned out to be handy just a few pages after it was introduced.  Sigh.

Jace and the creature fight for a while and destroy part of the building, then they both fall down the stairs.  Jace almost kills it, and the text says it’s ‘flopping around’ on top of him, but then Clary and Jace proceed to treat it like it’s already a dead weight.  Um, hey, remember that last demon we saw?  The one that nearly killed Clary while in its death throes?  The one that reminded us all that nearly-dead things can be just as dangers as fully-alive things?  Yeah, these characters don’t remember that either.  (Seriously, Clary, his knife is right there.  Just grab it and finish off the monster before talking.)

They take their sweet time before Jace finally finishes stabbing the monster to death.

Jace uses one of his marks to insta-heal himself, thereby removing any drama or lingering consequence.  Also, you know, that totally wasn’t magic right there.  Nope, that was just some average, anyone-can-do-it instahealing.  Vastly different from magic, don’t you know.

Also, after the mark is done instahealing him, it turns into a faint scar.  Clary still doesn’t put together that her mother had a ton of faint scars, and was a shadowhunter as well.

Jace explains that the thing they just fought wasn’t a demon, it was a person who’d been turned monster by getting marks when they didn’t have special blood.

“Runes have great power and can be used to do great good—but they can be used for evil. The Forsaken are evil.”

Clary stared at him in horror. “But why would anyone do that to themselves?”

“Nobody would. It’s something that gets done to them. By a warlock, maybe, some Downworlder gone bad. The Forsaken are loyal to the one who Marked them, and they’re fierce killers. They can obey simple commands, too. It’s like having a—a slave army.”

So, the Forsaken are just poor humans who got forced into being zombie slaves, and who are in great, constant, burning pain the whole time, but they are the evil ones?  Fuck you, Jace.  The fairies that turned them are evil: the Forsaken themselves are just victims.

Jace starts to go upstairs, but Dorthea randomly shows up to tell them that there’s more Forsaken in the apartment.  (And if they’re such mindless, ruthless, pain-crazed killers…why are they waiting patiently upstairs instead of nomming on these two idiots?)  Jace and Dorthea banter for a while, Dorthea casually mentions that Jocelyn is alive but ‘gone,’ Clary once again does not follow up on this comment and insist on finding her mother, and then they all go inside to have tea.