Clary and Jonathan return to the magic apartment.  Notably missing last chapter was any amount of proof that Jonathan isn’t a demon-dealing murderer.  He promised proof that he wasn’t going to hand over earth to demons, and all he showed her was a bunch of angst and a disgraced Iron Sister.  What part of that was supposed to be proof-y?

When they get back, Jonathan shows her the secret door to get into the weapons room, where Jace is.  Once again, the whole place looks like a movie set instead of anything that would logically be used for training.  Why would you have every single weapon hanging on the walls like it’s a display hall instead of a practice area?

Jace’s was smooth, pale gold skin over muscle

Jace has been describe as “gold” so often in these books that I can’t stop imagining him as King Midas.  Everything about the kid is gold, from his skin to his eyes to his hair.  Which is a step away from the first book, when he had “white-gold” hair.  But we can’t have him looking like Jonathan, I guess, so we retconned that away.  And either way, having that much “gold” on one person is just a big neon sign saying “YUP, THE AUTHOR IS TOTALLY IN LOVE WITH HER OWN CREATION.  EVERYONE PAUSE FOR A MOMENT AND SWOON OVER THE GOLDEN BOY.”

the boy in Idris who had shouted at her for spoiling all his careful plans to keep her safe. But this Jace was different. His hands didn’t shake when he looked at her, and the pulse in his throat stayed steady.

Jace has to be mind-controlled into not being an abusive, controlling jackass.  And worse, the text seems to be sorry that he’s not more controlling.  As if the shouting reaction was the good one.

Randomly, Jonathan throws a ninja star at Jace, and Jace knocks it aside.  Clary gets all “oh, you could have killed him.”

“Anything that injures him injures me,” said Sebastian. “I was showing you how much I trust him. Now I want you to trust us.”

…that makes no sense.  That’s not even trust.  It’s self-serving on both sides.  It’s not like Jace stopped the star/knife for Jonathan.  I guess you could phrase it as Jonathan having trust in Jace’s skills, but that’s just another way of saying “I’m really, really sure that he’s good.”  And that has nothing to do with making plans, which is what they’re currently sitting around talking about.  That’s a completely different kind of trust.  It’s all just so random and stupid and ARGH.

Anyway, we know Jonathan wants to bring badass demons to earth and then kill them.  He plans to do that by have Magdelena make a new Mortal Cup out of the adamas they gave her.  The plan they’ve presented to the demons is to use the second cup as a reverse of the first, pour demon blood into it and make people drink it to make demonic shadowhunters.  Only, when the demons show up to do that, they’ll die instead.  I can’t tell if something about the cup is going to kill them, or if Jonathan plans on just going “LOLNOPE.  Stab time instead.” 

The Laws handed down by the Angel are arbitrary and nonsensical, and their punishments are worse.

Well, from what we’ve seen, that’s very true.  Only problem is that most nonsensical legal systems grow into that, because they started out with a simple(ish) system and added in exceptions and loopholes and addendums and other self-serving laws and obsolete laws don’t get cleaned up and new laws have don’t match current needs and so on and so forth until the whole thing turns into a mess.  In this book’s case, we’ve only seen a few laws, and they’ve been so random that it’s hard to tell if they’ve ever been connected at all or if they exist independently of each other.  There’s no sense of an unwieldy frankenstein of a legal system going on here, just a few really stupid things created to engineer drama when needed. 

“Our mandate is to destroy demons,” said Sebastian. “But the Clave has been pouring all its energy into other tasks.

GOD DAMNIT, BOOK, WHAT OTHER TASKS, WHY WON’T YOU TELL ME?

Then Clary and Jace decide to go have a nap together, and Jonathan has a very obvious jealous moment.  Because if we’ve got to have incest in these books somehow. 

Clary and Jace get up to his room and start making out.  He starts getting all strippery with her, but Clary stops him saying she doesn’t want to have sex.  Thankfully, she just straight up says that.  She doesn’t waffle around or make excuses.  She says “I don’t want to” and then knows that’s good enough, no other reason needed.  And Jace backs off to go take a cold shower.  He’s not happy, but he’s allowed to not be happy as long as he backs off and doesn’t slide to “angry” or “guilt-tripping.”  So, finally, the book has gotten something right.  It only took four volumes of fuckery first.

In fact, when Jace gets out of the shower, he even apologizes for pushing for sex in the first place!  Yay!  Of course, it’s delivered with this book’s usual amount of “god, we’re so perfect it hurts” angst, so there’s that to contend with, but I’m still pretty happy.

Then there’s angst about angels.  Jace says he’s happy not to be part of the Clave because it means he can be better than a human but not subservient to any laws.  Um…yay, anarchy?  What?  It’s kind of strange  here, because nothing was keeping him bound to any laws except peer pressure and culture.  It’s not like he has to break free of some angel-blood-based compulsion magic in order to do whatever the fuck he wants, and frankly he hasn’t been law-abiding at any point in these books.  Really, all he’d need to be an anarchist is just to run away, not “oh, I was so relieved when I thought I had demon blood and was free” bullshit needed.

And…what’s so stifling about these laws that we never see, anyway?

Raziel doesn’t care about us. We can’t even pray to him. We pray to nothing. We pray for nothing.

[…]

I want to be something else. Stronger, faster, better than human. But different. Not subservient to the Laws of an angel who couldn’t care less about us. Free.

I really don’t get it.  The angel doesn’t pay attention enough to force them to be law-abiding, but…for some reason he has to get out from under the thumb of the angel?

What would he do if “free”, anyway?  Continue to kill demons and snark and hanging out in weapon-filled movie sets?  Would he spontaneously decide to go be a peace-loving scholar instead?  What’s he trying to get away from?

So they make out a little bit more and then Clary says she wants him to read to her until she falls asleep.  So he does.  Um…exciting?

—

Simon goes to Central Park to meet up with his sister.  It’s been so long since anyone mentioned Simon’s family drama that I’d almost forgotten about it.

he took it, silently thanking the forethought that had made him put on gloves that morning, so that if he touched her she wouldn’t feel the chill of his skin.

Yeah, but unless those were electric gloves, they’re not going to keep him from getting cold.  See, gloves (and socks and pretty much any warm weather clothing) works by keeping your body heat from escaping.  If you aren’t producing body heat, then you could wear as many layers as you want and still not be warm to the touch.

Becky tells Simon what she’s been up to, that Simon’s mom said he was dead, that she went to the house and freaked out over all the religious symbols.  She’s convinced that her mother is mental ill and unstable and talks to Simon about getting her to doctors and on medication and all that.  Simon tries (very poorly) to say that their mom is correct, so Becky assumes that their mom has been hitting him.  Because…only physical abuse could have made Simon call himself a monster, and not heaps of mental abuse?  Really, book, what the fuck are you trying to get at here?

Finally Simon proves he’s a vampire by showing off his fangs.

She screamed, and fell off the bench onto the hard-packed dirt and leaves. Several passersby looked at them curiously, but it was New York, and they didn’t stop or stare, just kept moving.

Yeah, not buying it.  Not even in New York.  I know the stereotype, but humans just aren’t built to ignore screaming.  Especially screaming from a clearly frightened girl being approached by a taller male.  Maybe if they’d heard a scream and couldn’t find the source, they wouldn’t stop and look for it, but in this situation?  “New York-ness” can only excuse so much.

She shook her head, her hand still over her mouth. She was sitting in the dirt, her scarf trailing in the leaves. Under other circumstances it might have been funny.

You…think it’s funny to scare your sister into falling in the dirt?

And then…Becky gets over it.  She calmly sits and tells him that he’s still her brother and she loves him and she wants to be around him.  Wow, that sure was easy.  Just like every other point of drama in this book, no one ever has to work through anything.  It always just comes out that people either are mean and say “fuck off” or are perfect and say “I accept you.”

—

Jordan sits around in his room doing normal stuff and wasting time.  It’s really, really fucking boring and I only had to read it for a page.  Fortunately, well not really, something comes along to move boredom into hatred.

He was restless. Restless in the way he sometimes got before the full moon, knowing the Change was coming, feeling the pull of the tides in his blood. But the moon was waning, not waxing, and it wasn’t the Change making him feel like crawling out of his skin. It was Maia. It was being without her, after almost two solid days in her company, never more than a few feet away from her.

So, now being out of a woman’s company is being equated to the same blind urge that made him tear out her throat in the first place.  I don’t think the book realizes it make this comparison, but it did, and that’s very, very creepy.

It’s placing the onus for Jordan’s mental health on Maia.  It’s saying that he “needs” her in a way that implies she needs to just stop being so selfish by taking time out for herself.  And it’s very, very dangerous behavior.  This is the kind of thinking that leads to stalking and abusive controlling, this idea that one person needs to near someone else as a physical imperative, and that they can’t help themselves if that other person decided to be somewhere else when they were “needed.”

There was no reason for him to go with her, but the moment she was gone, the restlessness kicked up inside him. Was she leaving because she was sick of being with him?

Creepy.  Creepy, creepy, creepy.

Maia comes back and things just get worse.  She says she told Luke about Maureen being rouge, because the pack operates in the same area where she’s killing people.

Besides, I wanted his advice about whether we should tell Simon or not.”

“What about my advice?” He was playing at sounding hurt, but there was a little part of him that meant it.

Okay, what about your advice?  She already knows what you said, stop getting butthurt because she wanted a second opinion.  Despite what this book keeps claiming, it’s really not all that great to confine yourself to one other person for all your advice-getting needs.

And then they make out, and then Jordan has a moment of “we sure make out a lot, should we talk?” and then when asked what he wants to talk about, he says never mind and they make out more.  Because the book may recognize that they need to have a conversation or two, but it doesn’t want to bother with actually showing it.