Clary and her group walk in silence over to the hell portal.  Since “silence” means they can’t talk about the plot, Clary steps in and thinks about the plot instead.  Because heaven forbid we look forward.

The Queen takes them to a chamber with three paths leading out, two nice looking and one covered in thorns.  True to the series’ completely unoriginal style, this was all lifted from the ballad of Thomas the Rhymer, and Alec even spends a whole page talking about Thomas’s tale. 

They pick the path to hell, the straight and boring looking one, and then think to wonder if the Queen will warn Jonathan that they’re coming. 

Jace paused. He held the seraph blade in his hand, the tip pressed up against the Seelie Queen’s back. Its light flared up onto his face, carving out its beauty in peaks and valleys, the sharpness of cheekbones and the angle of jaw. It caught the tips of his hair and licked them with fire, as if he were wearing a crown of burning thorns.

Just in case, in this tense (ish) moment, you forgot that Jace is the resident pretty-boy, here’s a whole paragraph about his oh-so-symbolic looks!  Because this book has priorities, ya’ll, and Priority Number One is that you never forget that Jace is oh-so-very-pretty.

Instead of killing her, which wouldn’t really accomplish much and would make everything stickier, they make her swear that neither she nor anyone in her court will warn Jonathan that they’re coming.  So, bets on what sort of security system Jonathan has in place that has already alerted him?  My money is on some magic mumbo-jumbo that basically boils down to “security cameras.”

As they walk, they notice someone following them and go on the attack, but it’s just Mark Blackthorn.  He was with the “Hunters,” who were all talking about Clary and Jace’s group, so I guess I’ll end up losing my bet and the real answer will be “Hunters told them.”  They aren’t part of the Queen’s court, technically.

They spend a long time talking to Mark, telling him his family alive.  Mark ate Fairy food after they told him everyone had died, because he figured it didn’t matter, so now he’s stuck there.  He wants to go with Clary’s group (and damn the impossibility of it) but they convince him to stay and try to warn the other Shadowhunters and…you know, not die from breaking magical fealty and all that.

Which is all fine and well, but somehow at the end of it they manage to turn the whole situation into several more pages of angsting for Jace.  Shit, this kid just had the bummest deal in the world handed to him, but you’re going to cap it off with a bit of “man, Jace’s life is so hard”?

Because this book has priorities, ya’ll, and every last one of them begins and ends with JACE.

They finally reach the end of the tunnel and the entrance to Edom.

So naturally we switch over to the Seelie Queen, because heaven forbid we get too much plot at once.  That might actually be interesting!  Anyway, she’s warning Jonathan about the group.

His face transformed with a wolfish grin. “And they didn’t make you promise not to tell me that they came to your court?”

“They did,” said the Queen. “They said nothing about telling you of leaving.”

Man, I should have known.  The Shadowhunters and Praetor haven’t figured out “security cameras” over hundreds of years of supposedly working this business, of course no one’s going to think of them now.

Back with Clary, who is apparently stuck in a vision of what life would be like if Valentine weren’t completely fucked up.  Jonathan is there and normal, Luke is un-wolf-i-fied and married to Jocelyn, they have a little girl, and everyone’s getting ready for a wedding.  Clary’s wedding to Jace.

Sadly (or rather, fortunately for us, what a waste of space) that spontaneously ends and she finally wakes up in Edom.

I lied.  We’re still stuck with this, but we have to go through everyone else’s happy dreams, too.  Simon is a rock star married to Clary, Isabelle is with Simon having a birthday party,  and Alec is getting hailed a hero and engaged to Magnus.  All of them wake up on their own with no prompting and no struggle beyond the “aw, shit, that was fun and waking up sucks” sort.  So why bother?  Just to let us know that they all want to be happy?  Wow, no shit, Sherlock, couldn’t have figured that one out on my own.