We open with one of my least favorite quirks in writing.  Maia and Jordan, several hours later, are still looking for Simon.  But since the chapter opens on an action (Jordan coming into the apartment) and that action is a significant time jump away from the last action, we have to suffer through a page and a half of “he had done this” and “they had done that” and I just really hate past perfect tense.  It’s such an awkward tense, and so rarely needed.

Anyway, Simon is kidnapped and no one can find him.  Jordan is bummed because it was his duty to protect Simon.

Maia knew she should go over to him, put her arms around him, comfort him. Tell him he wasn’t to blame.

I don’t know, I think Jordan has gotten a free pass on plenty in this series already.  I mean, is the book ever going to settle any blame on him?

Let’s really break this down.  Protecting someone isn’t about just standing in the way of bullets for them.  In fact, if anyone shoots at someone you’re protecting, you’ve already failed.  The majority of the job is in preparation.  Simon didn’t know what to do in the event of an attack, which is a fail right there, because Jordan should have come up with contingency plans and drilled Simon in them.  The apartment had no secure exits, just a haphazard fire escape, and it had no early warning system.  There’s no surveillance or security anywhere, and no one thought to put any sort of spell or even a mundane tracking chip on Simon just in case.  This shit is Bodyguarding 101.  I’m thinking there’s plenty of blame to be handed out here.

Maia has some secret she needs to tell him, but before she can, Jordan gets a fall from the Praetor HQ calling him in.

Simon wakes up in a cage wearing a leather pants outfit that even Twilight parody mockers would call excessive.  Maureen comes in, dressed in an old ball gown and jewelry made of bones.  It quickly becomes apparent that she is not completely sane.  She’s kidnapped Simon because she likes him and wants to keep him as her captive boyfriend, but also she’s got a pretty severe break with reality and seems to honestly believe that this is all…if not normal, then at least non-terrifying.

She also keeps repeating random words three times, but that part’s not crazy, that’s just stuttering while the book tries to play it off as ominous.  Stuttering is not scary.  It can develop for any number of reasons.  Kidnapping people is scary.  Please focus on the bigger problem, book.

But Maureen, of course, was different. Maureen was a child, an undead child. Simon remembered her rainbow arm warmers, her little breathy voice, her big eyes. She’d been a little girl with all the innocence of a little girl when Simon had bitten her, when Camille and Lilith had taken her and changed her, injecting an evil into her veins that had taken all that innocence and corrupted it into madness.

…first of all, she was like 12 or 13 when she turned.  And while that’s young and still firmly in the realm of “child,” it doesn’t mean she was some clueless little thing that still thinks unicorns are real.  13 year-olds are immature, not idiots.  Second, how the fuck did you get that the opposite of innocence is insanity?  Just…where did that come from?  Are you saying if she’d been a bitter drug-addicted child aged beyond her years by hardship than getting injected with demon blood would have made her…not crazy?  I don’t understand the connection you’re trying to make here.  It’s nonsensical.  You’d be better off saying that demon shenanigans messed with her head, and the fact that she still had innocent child-like dreams means she’s still stuck on princesses and fairy-tale romance, just a corrupted version of all that.  But to draw a direct, causal link between being “innocent” and being mad?  How do you even?

Back to Jordan and Maia.  Maia is still moping about her secret, when they approach the Preator building and find out it’s on fire!  Oh noes, not that building that we only saw once which we have no cares about and is full of people we don’t know!  I’m so emotionally invested in that!  They both run around the less dangerous parts of the building and see a bunch of dead bodies of characters I still know nothing about.

I hate to sound callous, because any death is tragic, not just the ones that are personal to you.  But, well, these are fictional characters.  The deaths of real people are tragic because they are real people.  These aren’t.  In books, you have to make the characters feel real.  Which is not to say that you can’t kill off random characters and still have an effect.  Sure.  But it’s a different effect than the one you get by killing ‘real’ characters, and you have to understand that difference and don’t try and tug at heartstrings by going “oh, poor Andrea!” when we have no fucking clue who Andrea is/was.

For instance, if the importance of the Praetor had been emphasized, if Jordan had actually been reliant on them instead of casually mentioning them sometimes, if he’d been hanging hopes on them or getting support or drawing emotional strength from them, then the loss of all this would mean something because it would mean the loss of that part of Jordan’s character.  But these people have done nothing, they have no place in our expectations or predictions or worries, and therefore all of this is just…well, a meaningless pile of corpses.  It sounds callous to say that, but this is fiction, and death works a little differently here.

Speaking of meaningful death, Jordan suddenly gets stabbed out of nowhere!  By Jonathan!

And then…um, they all sit around and talk?  Yeah, after violently stabbing Jordan through the chest, Jonathan just chills and kicks up his heals while Maia cuddles her wounded love.  I have no idea why he’s not just beheading them both and having done with it.  Well, I do know.  “The author said so.”

Jonathan says he’s letting her live to deliver a message, which is just “I’m doing this because I hate everyone, nya nya nya,” so it’s still a pretty weak reason.  I think everyone picked up on that well enough on their own.

Except for the bad guy monologue, I kind of like Jordan’s death.  It’s sudden, he doesn’t have any dramatic last words, and he actually dies while Maia is distracted by Jonathan, which is sort of a heartbreaking idea.  To have someone die in your arms and you didn’t even notice.  A nice sort of quiet brutality, almost.

Also, the guy was a dick and we don’t have to deal with people apologizing endlessly for him anymore, so there’s that.

Switch over to Magnus and Catarina sitting and chatting in a bar.  About his relationship.  For five fucking pages.  We learn absolutely nothing new.  Magnus loves Alec and there’s some ominous portents about “everything changing.”  No shit, Sherlock, I think we figured that out when people started getting murdered.   We do find out that the fairies invited all the other Downworlder council members to dinner, so there’s that.  Not fucking worth five pages of “boo hoo, but I really do love him, sorta, probably, no definitely this time.”