Clary meet’s Simon at the token-underworld-diner, and once again this book just has to describe what people’s outfits look like.  Because we really fucking care about that right now.  It takes things one step further, though.

People turned to look at him as he wove his way through the tables toward her. Simon had cleaned up nicely since Isabelle had started getting on his case about his clothes,

Yup, Simon was a plain little ignorable thing, until he started dressing right and then everyone looked at him.  Because clothes are just THAT IMPORTANT, Y’ALL.  LIKE, SERIOUSLY, YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND, YOU HAVE TO WEAR THE EXPENSIVE DESIGNER CLOTHES OR NO ONE WILL EVER LOVE YOU.  Except for the part where it’s not, and I’d really love it if the book would stop implying that’s the case.  Seriously, that whole line just needs to die.

Clary catches Simon up on the events of the night, and they both emo for a while about how everything is just so terrible and such.  Which, granted, it is.  But there’s been just so much emoing in these books, and it’s all been the same flavor, and I’m kind of sick of it.  Emoing and witty banter, no matter if Jace is in jail for one stinkin night or if Luke is being knifed from the inside.  It makes it hard to take seriously.

Clary says she has a plan and pulls out the fairy rings that the Queen sent her to fetch.  Seems she did take them while she was in the library, but she just didn’t tell anyone.

I realized she was never going to give us any useful information. The rings seemed more valuable than another round with the Queen.”

…why?  How did you realize she wasn’t going to give you anything?  She said her help would be “invaluable,” and fairies by definition can’t lie.  All Clary knew at the point where she decided this was that Jace was alive and hanging out with Jonathan, she didn’t know anything else about him, so why did she decide that the queen was going to be useless?

And also, SHE’S THE FUCKING FAIRY QUEEN AND HAS UNTOLD MAGICAL POWER WHY WOULD YOU PISS HER OFF LIKE THIS?  WHY ARE YOU TOO STUPID TO LIVE?

So Clary tells her plan, which is basically just that she follow Jace into whatever interdimensional pocket he’s in and they use the rings to communicate.  Notably missing from this plan is any hint on how she’s going to find Jace and then follow him.  It’s not like he walks to these little hiding pockets.  Simon says no, then Clary says she’ll follow Jace anyway, whether he agrees to help her or not.

Then they have random philosophical talk about the morality of the “do anything for the one I love” phrase.  And then there’s some philosophical talk about hope and religion.  I can’t necessarily say I disagree with any of it (well, except for Clary’s brain-bashingly stupid declarations that Jace is all that matters), but it’s terribly out of place.  It’s just a halt in the conversation so they can shove in a few lines the author thought were deep.  When, in fact, they’re about as deep as Sesame Street just with bigger words.

Anyway, Simon eventually agrees.

Jump over to Jordan.  He gets woken up again by knocking.  It’s Maia this time, and there’s a brief moment when she thinks Jordan and Isabelle have been sleeping together, and I just really don’t care.  Their relationship already beggars belief, so I find it really hard to give any kind of shit about whatever drama pops up between them.

Maia is there to ask Jordan to ask his boss to help Luke.  Seems Magnus couldn’t get a hold of Jordan directly because…because then we wouldn’t have this scene?  I don’t know, they skip right over that part.

Maia also tells about the whole JJ Twins deal, and Isabelle is ultra worried about anyone telling the Clave.  She thinks that if the Clave knows, they’ll kill Jace just to make sure Jonathan dies.  Uh, not much chance of that happening.  They’d have to find the guy first, and no one’s been able to so far.  Really, she freaks out like she thinks Jace is still hanging out at the Institute.  Plus, earlier in the book they were worried the Clave would kill him just for hanging out with Jonathan.  Why do they keep inventing new ways to assume the Clave is going to kill this guy?  (And aren’t they busy with that space ward anyway?  We haven’t heard anything about that in a while.  I wonder if the book remembers it.)

Isabelle leaves Jordan’s place and goes to see Magnus/Alec.  On the way up the stairs, she muses about herself and gives us an infodump on all her informed attributes.  Because after four books, the author is only just now realizing that Isabelle could use some personality that goes beyond “prettier than you” and “available for fridging in the middle of battle.”  Apparently Isabelle hates relying on other people.  *yawn*  Not only is that as trite a trope as you can get, but don’t we already have a few of those hanging around in this series?  It’s pretty bad when a work drags on so long it has to reuse its own tired clichés.  Plus, by this point, we really should have seen this “independent” streak from her by now.  She’s been perfectly willing to do things in groups so far, not once eschewing help in favor of doing things on her own. 

Also, we get this line:

The other part of her, the part that had hidden her parents’ secret from her brothers all her life,

Which, just, what?  She must have hid this painful secret in the same place she hid her personality.  We haven’t had a hint that Robert and Maryse had a secret, any more than we had a hint that Isabelle knew it and was keeping it.

Book, you can’t just decide that you want to add in some new drama and then claim that drama has been there all along.  It doesn’t work like that.

As she came in, Alec looked up and saw her, and sprang to his feet, hurrying barefoot across the room—he was wearing black sweatpants and a white T-shirt with a torn collar—to put his arms around her.

No, really, why were his clothes important?  Why did you disrupt the action in order to tell us what he’s wearing?  WHY DO YOU THINK WE SHOULD CARE?  And especially why do you think it’s necessary right there?

“It’s not Jace,” Isabelle protested.

“It may not be Jace,” said Magnus, “but if he dies, your Jace dies right along with him.”

There’s been a lot of this, it just hasn’t been really focused on, and it annoys the snot out of me.  They keep insisting that Jace isn’t really Jace simply because he’s being mind controlled.  They talk about him as if he’s a different person and he’s keeping the “real” Jace locked in a closet somewhere.  No one seems to point out that it’s still the same person.  He’s not in his right mind and he’s being manipulated into doing…uh, well, nothing yet besides a bit of theft, but he’s still Jace.  Furthermore, they’re saying the only value ‘this’ Jace has is to lead them back to the other Jace.

Basically, Jace has no value to them, in fact he’s not even a real person, unless he acts the way they want him to.

He dropped his voice. “Also, did you know you smell like tequila?”

You know, yeah, I forgot about that for a moment.  She arrived at Jordan’s house at 2am, already a bit tipsy, and then shot back tequila until she was drunk enough to straight-up pass out.  It’s now 4am.  Why is she suddenly sober enough to walk around New York on her own and act perfectly rational?

Alcohol: you’re doing it wrong.

So, they called Isabelle over so she can go see the Iron Sisters with Jocelyn.  In the morning.  Not right now.  No one asks or explains why they had to call her over several hours early.  Indeed, since they’re not leaving yet, they let Isabelle sleep in the last spare bedroom.  As Magnus is taking her over there, they talk about Alec, not really saying much.  Apparently Magnus is worried Alec will lose it if Jace dies.  Because Jace is the center of the universe.  No, really.

“There are some people—people the universe seems to have singled out for special destinies. Special favors and special torments. God knows we’re all drawn toward what’s beautiful and broken;

I am so sick of Jace’s utter specialness.

Oh, okay, fine.  Magnus is actually worried because they’re parabati.  You know, from all appearances, there aren’t any benefits to being parabati.  Jace doesn’t seem to give a shit about Alec, but Alec gets the short end of the stick here by having his emotions tied to Jace’s wellbeing.  Why would anyone agree to this sort of situation?  Was their friendship meant to feature more in this story, but got crowded out by all the romance, so now all we’re left with is the disturbing bits?

She tumbled toward the ground and struck hard on her feet, sticking the landing at first.

Bad idea.  Landing on your feet like that puts a lot of undue pressure on your joints.  Gymnasts do it, but they also have padded mats, and they also have shitty joints when they grow up.  It’s much better to hit the ground and then collapse, roll, and pop back up than to hit the ground and go stiff. 

Clary portals back to Luke’s house to sit around and wait for Jace to come and find her.  Man, even when she’s being “proactive” she still ends up just sitting and waiting for the boys.

But at least the book realizes that’s dull and switches over to Simon.  He’s at home.  He gets a note from Isabelle saying she’s at Magnus’s, she’s upset about the whole Jace thing, and she wants him to come over.  Isabelle is already asleep when he gets there, so he decides to just climb into bed with her.

He’d never seen Isabelle sleeping before. She looked younger than she usually did

Isabelle was tall, almost his height, although when he put his hand on her shoulder, her bones felt delicate under his touch.

For all the book tries to tell us that Isabelle is a strong person, whenever she’s described in romantic terms, the book goes out of the way to infantilize her.  Why can’t someone who’s strong be sexy for being strong, rather than telling us that in spite of her strongness, she’s also enough of a delicate little flower to be boneable.

Isabelle wakes up and asks for a bedtime story.  Given her “looks younger” description from above, yeah, it’s pretty creepy.  One of those things that wouldn’t be bad if everything else had been handled right, but…yeah, pretty creepy here.

Oops, I spoke too soon.  It seems this book doesn’t think that waiting with Clary and doing nothing is too boring.  It just thought we needed…a romance break?  Like, just, there’d been too many pages of non-romance, so we needed to shove some in there?

Seems Clary has been waiting outside this entire time and now she’s all shivery.  Because she’s just too stupid to go wait inside.  Her thought is that if Jace is going to look for her, he’d look for her at Luke’s house, but…what, is she worried he’ll only go as far as the door?  He had no problem breaking in and getting in bed with her before, so why would he have a problem with doing the same a second time?

Well, lucky for her the “sit outside in the cold all night and hope” plan worked, and Jace shows up right at sunrise.  He asks her to come with him.  There’s more internal angst on Clary’s part.  She’s picked up a new habit: comparing everything to something that happened before.  She thinks that his offer to go with him is like the first time she saw him outside the coffee shop, and she thinks that seeing him in the sunrise…I don’t know, something about fireworks in Idris.  That one makes even less sense than the rest.  Either way, it’s really annoying.  These events weren’t that interesting the first time, and they’re not getting any more interesting as they get compared to random things.  Anyway, end point is that she agrees to go and they make out and then disappear.