Clary wakes up back in Amatis’s house, with Jocelyn hovering over her.  Jocelyn is concerned, because Clary almost killed herself trying to heal Jace.  I’m…still confused on that entire point, though.  We’ve never seen runes taking any particular amount of effort before.  Clary has never suffered for making them, and she’s never seen anyone else getting low on “energy.”  Hell, they write these things on each other just before going into battle; one would think if that had a draining effect they wouldn’t do it right before they need a lot of energy.  Maybe Clary wasn’t “willing to sacrifice herself for a dude,” maybe she literally had no idea it was any amount of dangerous.  Certainly we had no reason to think it might be.

But instead of point that out, Clary just insists that she had to do it, so I guess there is some sort of energy conversion going on and we just never got to hear about it before now?

“It’s all right,” he said, misunderstanding her distress. “The Amatis that is serving Sebastian is no more my sister than the Jace who served Sebastian was the boy you loved. No more my sister than Sebastian is the son your mother ought to have had.”

This continues to bother me.  Maybe the reason all these characters insist that the Bad Guys (I just can’t make myself write that awful official name) can’t be cured is because they have always, from square one, thought that any changes in a person invalidates that person.  Even when the change is involuntary.  “You’ve been mind-controlled?  YOU NO LONGER EXIST!  YOU ARE DEAD TO ME!”

I’m like 98% certain that this is just from the author “knowing” how things end and either setting up for a dramatic reversal or confirming things too early.  It doesn’t have an ideological feel to it.  But the basic mindset of “if a person changes they aren’t a person anymore” is the start of so many disturbing thoughts in our culture.  It’s bad enough that people freak out when someone voluntarily changes, as if personalities are completely static and liking something new is a sign of problems, but it’s especially bad when that change is brought on violently and involuntarily. 

They sit around and talk about the battle and some random backstory for a while.   Clary finds out about Jordan’s death just in time for Simon to walk in and assure her that he didn’t die, too.  Such convenient timing, Simon.  Did you use your vampire hearing to arrange that?

They talk for an even longer while, until Clary notices that Simon is almost ready to pass out from hunger because he hasn’t eaten in three days.  You know, I’d be more on board with this whole “Simon doesn’t eat blood” thing if it felt more consistent.  As it stands, he generally just…forgets for long stretches of time, but as soon as blood is readily available, he’ll chow down without a blip of conscience.  It doesn’t feel like some sort of personal issue he’s got; instead it feels like he’ll just forget any time the book wants some vampire flavored drama.

Back with Maia and the werewolf funeral.  She talks with Bat about her history with Jordan.

When I was six, my mom tried to throw me a Barbie-themed birthday party. They make a black Barbie, you know, but they don’t make any of the stuff that goes with her—party supplies and cake toppers and all that. So we had a party for me with a blonde doll as the theme, and all these blonde girls came, and they all giggled at me behind their hands.” The beach air was cold in her lungs. “So when I met Jordan and he told me I was beautiful, well, it didn’t take that much. I was totally in love with him in about five minutes.”

…Kudos, book.  Kudos.

“And I thought, how much can you hold someone accountable for what they did when they couldn’t control themselves? I thought I should forgive him, he just wanted it so damn much. He’d done everything to make up for it. I thought we could go back to normal, go back to the way we used to be.”

And then you have to segue into that.

I never really did give my thoughts on Maia/Jordan, did I?  I was going to save it for CoFA, and then I threw a hissy fit about never touching that book long enough to write the review.

So.  At its most basic heart…I’m sort of okay with it?  I mean, it suffers from inconsistent writing, so it’s hard to tell if Jordan really was a good guy before turning or just a “nice” guy.  When they were giving Maia a tragic backstory, they certainly included plenty of warning markers for Jordan, and those appear to have been retconned for the sake of romance.  But, if we take the new version and believe that he was a sweet and perfect boyfriend who, in a moment of ajkfdhdaslkhfalksdjf;aslkdjfasldkfj, did a bad thing, then…I can roll along with forgiving him. 

What I ABSOLUTELY CANNOT go along with is the general tone of this book and all the characters in it that Maia HAS to forgive him.  Like she’s morally obligated to just because “he wanted it so damn much.”  He want until he’s blue in the face and the cows come home, but that’s his issue.  Maia is not and never has been obligated to forgive him.  Was it his fault?  In the very narrow, very exceptional circumstances of this book, not really.  Does that make Maia any less the victim of violence?  Hell no.  Her first priority is to herself, to do what it takes to protect herself mentally and emotionally.  Jordan’s mental health is the responsibility of Jordan himself, no one else, certainly not his victim.  Fault does not play into this equation in any way.  I had a catastrophic car crash one time and I avoided driving in inclement weather for a full year after that.  Was it because I blamed the sky?  No.  Actually, no one was at fault in that case; it was just an accident.  Did that make me any less nervous (and therefore likely to cause another accident due to distracted driving)?  No.  I wasn’t going to do something that put me at risk just because “it’s not the sky’s fault.”

The fact that Maia forgave him doesn’t bother me.  The fact that everyone else basically bullied her into suppressing her own needs for his bothers the hell out of me.  And passages like this make it rather clear that that’s what happened.  It wasn’t just that she willingly forgave him and the circumstances were poorly written, no, the book hammers in the fact that she felt guilted into it.

Maia does say she was going to break up with him, but she cites the fact that they’d both changed a lot as the reason.

And now we switch back to Jace, who is leaving the hospital against medical advice.  Or magical advice, I suppose; not a lot of medicine involved in “just draw pictures on a person until they get better.”

He demands to see Brother Zach before he goes and threatens to disrupt all the other sick and injured people there if his demands aren’t met.  Our hero, ladies and gentlemen.

Along the way we find out that one of the Bad Guys has been captured, and they’re trying to reverse the spell.

Then we finally get to Zach’s room, and low and behold, all that heavenly fire burn turned him back into a regular person!  He can talk out loud and spew philosophy-laden backstory and everything!

“But I have made a study of Shadowhunters now, over the past century, and let me tell you that we are more human than most human beings. When our hearts break, they break into shards that cannot be easily fit back together. I envy mundanes their resilience sometimes.”

Truly one of the surest ways to get slapped with a melodrama label is to claim that your pain is so much worse than the pain of literally everyone else ever.

“The process of shaping language in the ordinary way, of finding speech, does not come easily to me now.”

…you’ve been giving a theology lesson for the past three pages, complete with bible verses and everything.  Not one single stumble involved.

They literally spend this entire section just talking about Zach’s backstory (which is impressive, since they don’t give anything clearly, I guess you’ll have to read TID to find out) and spouting off grand phrases about broken hearts.

Clary and Simon talk on the way to see Raphael and then talk still more when they get there and just omg there is so much fucking talking going on.  I whined about all the talking going on in City of Bones, but holy hell, that would be downright terse compared to this.  Seven fucking pages of absolutely nothing going on, except that Simon got his bottle of blood and downed it with nary a blink. (As usual.)

Simon stumbles around like he’s drunk after that, and since they’re right next to Isabelle’s house, he starts waxing philosophic about how hard her life must be.  Then he starts calling for her to open the window, all Romeo-style.  Isabelle yells at him through the window and Robert comes out to scowl at him for causing such a ruckus. 

Guess what the result of all this (admittedly amusing) bullshit I had to read through is?

FUCK-A-NUT NOTHING.

Instead, Simon and Clary stumble on back home, and after Clary puts Simon to bed on a couch, she discovers Sebastian is in her bedroom!  Dun dun dun.