Maia goes to Jordan’s apartment to get new clothes, and though she’s upset about being in that setting again, it’s all pretty subdued.  I’m rather torn between “oh thank god, finally,” and “with any other character you’d have an entire chapter devoted to dramatic suffering and crying; did you just get tired by the time you got to Maia?”

A vampire named Lily shows up because Maia called her and asked for a meet.  Apparently it’s up to these two girls to make an alliance between vampires and werewolves because everyone else in charge is fucking up in a royal manner.  …yeah, I’m okay with this.  Except for the part where who the fuck is Lily?

Well, besides the fact that Lily doesn’t want to play ball, at least not until Maia can get herself into the position of pack leader.

No, really, who the fuck is Lily?  Out of six fucking books stuff full of useless fluff, you couldn’t cut out even a smidgeon of it to introduce this chick in a proper manner?

For instance, the next several pages is just Jace and Alec talking about things that have already happened and laying out options without offering new information or deciding on anything.  I’m pretty sure that could have been sacrificed to make room for the who the fuck is Lily question.

This is followed by even more talking about the situation, though this time they talk about the specific reactions and attitudes of all the main Downworlder groups, so at least it’s something worth talking about.  At least, it would feel more reasonable, if we hadn’t had so much talking already.

Except for some reason they’re asking Simon’s opinion on all this, and he’s the one giving an assessment.  And this isn’t just kids in this conversation, we’ve got Maryse and Robert and Jia in here.  People who have been Shadowhunters and dealt with these groups their entire lives.  Simon has, what, a year of being a vampire?  Less?  And he’s spent that entire year studiously ignoring his own group and trying to either be human or get in with Clary and her group.

These Shadowhunters have got to be monumentally stupid if four (ish) decades of dealing with someone leads to less information than one year of avoiding the same someones. 

The end result is that they think all the Downworlders will turn on the Shadowhunters if their buddies die.  Which makes sense, but still doesn’t explain why they’d side with Jonathan, aka the guy doing the kidnapping and killing.  Wouldn’t it just turn into a three-way standoff?  Granted, that would still be to Jonathan’s advantage, but still.

As they’re all trying to figure out what to do (short of actually handing Clary and Jace over), Zach comes in.  It’s only to announce that the Bad Guy they captured to experiment on finally died.  Then there is even more talking without actually accomplishing anything.

I understand that this happens in real life plenty, but this is what time skips are for.  Just because it actually happens doesn’t mean we have to read about it.

Then it’s time for a funeral of everyone who died at the Citadel.  There is so much padding in these books that I’ve quite lost track of the timeline.  It feels like an eternity since that happened, but I guess it was just a couple days or so?  We are…in Jia’s POV now, because apparently we didn’t have enough POV characters already?  Also because Jace and Clary were told to stay home from the funeral, lest they cause a riot from everyone going “kill em” and “keep em.”

Jia runs across Zach and they talk about the possibility of him going to a warlock hideyhole so he can meet up with his old flame, Tessa.  This goes on and on for a while, and I don’t care, because 1) I did not read TID, and this just capping off that series, nothing to do with this one and 2) that was three fucking pages on a discussion that ended with “nah, I’ll just stay here and not change anything.”

Also, that wad all we get for Jia’s POV, wow, so useful.

Clary and Isabelle are in her room chatting about the plot, and them Emma shows up.

AND THAT IS LITERALLY ALL THAT HAPPENS IN THIS SECTION, GOD, WHY ARE YOU SUCH A WASTE OF SPACE BOOK WHY CAN’T YOU TELL A FUCKING STORY WHY WHY WHY YOU ARE NOTHING BUT A SERIES OF CHEAP TRICKS AND MANIPULATION TACTICS TO CON A READER INTO TURNING THE PAGE BECAUSE EVEN YOU DON’T THINK YOU HAVE ENOUGH SUBSTANCE TO GET THE JOB DONE THE NORMAL WAY AND I FUCKING HATE YOU.

*ahem*  Yes, anyway, moving on.

Back in New York with the werewolf fight.  Bat and Rufus face off for temporary leadership of the pack, which seems like a really odd thing to fight to the death over.  Did Bat have to kill someone become second in command?

Rufus beats Bat pretty easily, but before he can outright kill the guy, Maia shows up out of the blue and makes her own challenge.  And even though we just had one whole fight establishing that Rufus was pretty good at this sort of thing, Maia manages to throw dirt in his face and have that be all she needs in order to get close enough to stab his brains out through his eyeball.

So, Maia is the leader of the pack now.  Wow, so glad we had who the fuck is Lily to set that up a whole…few pages ago. 

This book is really rushing through Maia’s plot line.  Was it added in at the last second or something?