This chapter opens with the book’s favorite tropes all in one!  Dreams, angels, and ice!  Clary dreams about Jonathan and Jace standing around on a frozen lake while sprouting angel wings.  Does it have any point or purpose besides showing off that the book thinks it looks pretty?  …well, none of her other dreams have led to any plot-relevance, they’ve just been around to force-feed us symbolism, so I doubt this one will be any different.

By the by, in City of Glass we find out that the angel in Valentine’s basement sent her those prophetic dreams from before.  That angel is now dead.  So where are these new dreams coming from?

Clary wakes up to find Jace is snuggled up in bed with her, in a clear violation of her rights and personal space.  Look, I know they’re dating, but dating does not mean that everything is okay forever and ever.  He still has to ask before he spoons with her.  If they had a previously established “yeah you can do that without asking first” agreement, then he should at least have assumed that agreement was null and void once he started hanging out with a demon spawn.  In fact, that’s the kind of situation where he should be especially careful of her personal space, because that represents a large chance in their relationship and things need to be discussed again.  (If they ever were at all, which I doubt.)

Just because you date someone, that someone does not own you or have a right to your body. 

The fact that Clary things of nothing other than the fact that he’s pretty does not change this.

Now, I’m not saying that Clary should, in the name of feminism, put a grinding halt to the narrative and explain to him that personal space is a good thing.  I’m not even saying that she can’t be happy to have him in her bed.  But…uhg, even some sort of reaction other than “his hair makes a halo BECAUSE HE’S AN ANGEL, Y’ALL” would be nice.  She could have a moment of “holyfuckwhatPERSON IN MY BED” before she calms down.  She could be glad that he’s present and alive and apparently unhurt, but still get out of the bed because she’s not happy snuggling with someone when she doesn’t know his motives.  Pretty much anything at all to show that she has some sort of self-preservation instinct would be nice.

this lazy, predatory, consuming look that made her heart pulse unevenly in her chest.

One moment he was lying beside her, and the next he was on top of her, one hand clamped down over her mouth.

She knew he was faster than her, that there was no move she could make that he wouldn’t outpace

for the moment he seemed to be treating their interaction as a game, something playful.

Alright, so we’ve established that Jace is assaulting her and being generally creepy, but…

He bent closer to her, and she realized her tank top had pulled up, and she could feel the muscles of his flat, hard stomach against her bare skin.

This book can’t stop making that assault sexually appealing at the same time.  It just cannot stop itself from pointing out that its prettyboy characters are, in fact, pretty sexy boys, no matter what’s going on.  It doesn’t care what’s going on, it just cares about there being boys, and those boys being pretty.

It pretty much thinks that as long as there’s boys and those boys are pretty, then everything must be positively sexual, even if that thing happens to a boy assaulting a girl after sneaking into her bed.

Did you hear that?  Assault is okay as long as there’s a pretty boy involved.

It’s shit like this that makes me really, really not look forward to the attempted rape scene I know is coming.  We’re already mired down in sexual assault that the book can’t bother to recognize, so I get the feeling that Jonathan’s assault will only be considered “bad” because he’s not Clary’s “soul mate.”

They spend a while bantering and establishing that they both know everything that we know.

I needed to know if you still loved me, if you would go to the Council or not about what you’d seen.

Uh, I’m pretty sure all that means is that Clary doesn’t want him dead.  She can not want him dead and also not love him at the same time.  Oh, right, silly me.  We’re in Fictionland where only romance counts for shit and it’s perfectly alright to do all manner of amoral things to non-significant-others.  Man, why do I keep forgetting that?

They start to make out, because that’s really all these two do when left alone together, and then all of a sudden Jonathan comes in.  So, now Clary is faced with her murdering, evil, half-demon brother who just broke into her room and….yeah, nothing happens.  They stand around and banter.  Come on, if a demon-brother can’t inject some life in this sad excuse for a plot, can anything?  I guess not, since Jonathan just goes back out to wait in the hall while Jace and Clary talk some more.  How…tepid.

Suddenly she wanted to be covered up in front of him, in front of all that familiarity and beauty and that lovely predatory smile that said he was willing to do whatever with her, to her, no matter who was waiting in the hall.

Book, would you please slow down and address this instead of throwing that out like it’s perfectly normal to feel this way while in some idealized relationship?  Please? 

…no?  You’re just going to move on like that wasn’t incredibly fucking creepy?  *le sigh*

Jace wants her to go with him.  He talks about Jonathan as if he’s some great guy who just wants to do good in this world and it’s only an accident when he does bad.  When Clary brings up Max and other bad things Jonathan has done, he reacts kind of half-way, like something is preventing him from processing/properly remembering those things.  I think this all points very neatly to both possession and Stockholm, as suggested last chapter.  Maybe you guys shouldn’t have dismissed those options quite so readily. 

Before Jace can prove his Stockholm-ness any more clearly, they’re distracted by Jocelyn screaming in the kitchen.  She just found Jonathan. 

Sebastian looked at her, his black eyes quiet and narrow. “If you were a real mother,” he said, “a good mother, you would have known I was alive. There was a man once who said that mothers carry the key of our souls with them all our lives. But you threw mine away.”

I haven’t talked much about Jocelyn’s depression in this book, mostly because when it comes up people do admit that she hasn’t done anything wrong.  But sometimes an offhand remark isn’t good enough.  If a book dwells on how Jocelyn feels just so bad about how her son turned evil, if the book dwells on lines like this, and then it barely gives mention to the idea that it wasn’t her fault, that’s some pretty slanted presentation.  It’s saying that her guilt is worth more to the story than her innocence.  Glorifying something in fiction doesn’t require that you outright say that it’s good, rather it just requires that you spend an undue amount of time wallowing in it for the sake of just wallowing in it. 

And then we get lines like this, that make me just want to rage.

Mothers are not magical creatures.  They don’t have magical soul-connections to their children.  They do have a strong bond, yes, but it’s not magical.  It’s hormonal and mostly formed during pregnancy and nursing.  HOWEVER, that does not give them special magical baby powers!  Fathers can form close infancy bonds with their children simply by being the primary caretaker, or at the very least more involved than has been traditional to date.  The reason mothers are mostly the caretakers is 1) they’re physically worn out from the birth and don’t want to go back to work, so they stay home with the kid and 2) they have boobies.  They get an early boost on figuring out the kid just from being around it more often, and as time goes on, it becomes just easier to let them keep taking care of the kid because they have learned all the tricks.  But if you had a stay-at-home father with formula or pre-pumped breast milk, he’d be just as good at the job as any mother.  He’ll learn the tricks, he’ll learn if the kid needs to be rocked to sleep or needs a certain toy, or needs whatever.  He’ll be the more logical and efficient choice.  Because taking care of children is a learned skill, not something magically conferred to people by their woman-parts.

The idea that women have magic kid abilities is just one more excuse to put them in the home and out of the work place.  People argue that women have to stay at home with the kid, because no one else knows how.  It just takes away their autonomy and forces them into a preconceived role. 

When Jocelyn spends the majority of the book so far wracked with guilt because she thinks she should have magically figured out that Jonathan was alive, because she thinks she failed at raising a half-demon child, it feeds into the idea that it was some failing of the magic mother-son connection.  The book seems to want to present the idea that the connection failed because of Jonathan’s demon blood, not because there’s no magic mommy connection to begin with.  Then it delights in her guilt over the failed magic mommy connection.  And that just pisses me off to no end.

Okay, enough of that.  Man, I’m soapboxing more than usual with this book…

Jocelyn says if they both go now, she won’t tell the Clave about them.  Then a second later she runs at Jonathan with a knife.  So…I guess she meant right now?  Jonathan dares her to do it and says still, but she can’t quite push the knife home.

“Maybe you know that there is no such thing as conditional love for a child. Maybe if you loved me enough, you could save me.”

Is my copy missing some letters again, or did the author forget to put an ‘un’ in front of that ‘conditional’?  Because otherwise, this makes no sense.  Is he trying to mock Jocelyn because she secretly does have unconditional love for him?  Because if that’s true, if her love is unconditional, then it wouldn’t be hampered by the condition of him being part-demon, and therefore the second sentence would make no sense.  If she has unconditional love for him, then she’s already loving him as much as she can.

Jocelyn brought the blade up in a swift, clean, cutting arc. A perfectly placed blow, it should have driven up under Sebastian’s ribs and into his heart.

She had the knife pressed against his chest already.  She put it there and hesitated while they talked, never taking it away.  Damnit, Jocelyn, you could have ended this book early if you hadn’t drawn your weapon back just so you could do a fancy ‘arc.’

Anyway, Jonathan gets a scratch, then Jace gets a scratch in the same place.  Anything that happens to one happens to the other.  So Clary jumps in to protect the genocidal maniac, because her boyfriend is more important.

Then Luke comes out with a shotgun and says that if he can’t blow Jonathan’s head off, he can still blow a leg off and keep him from escaping.  Clary stops him from doing that, because now even Jace’s legs are more important than all else in the world. 

Even knowing everything she knew, the shock of it, seeing Luke, who had stood up for Jace countless times to her mother, to Maryse, to the Clave—Luke, who was basically gentle and kind—seeing him actually strike Jace across the face was as if he had hit Clary instead.

Now his face is important than all else in the world.

Guys, really, if Jace gets a papercut, the whole of the EU has to shut down business until he feels better.  He’s that fucking important.  Seriously.  It’s because he’s pretty.

Jonathan stabs Luke with a silver knife, there’s a bit more scuffling, Clary finally shows the amount of initiative she should have shown in the first book by knocking Jonathan over, and then the boys both disappear out of there. 

Clary realized Jocelyn had not asked her a single question about Jace and Sebastian, or why she and Jace had emerged from her bedroom, or what they had been doing there. She was entirely focused on Luke.

And also it’s been like two seconds since the fight ended?  This book has some serious issues with time.

This was her fault. She didn’t deserve to get to comfort Luke, or herself. She deserved the pain, the guilt.

God damnit, Clary, stop arbitrarily declaring everything to be your fault!