Clary wakes up from her symbolick dream about fire to find that everything is on fire.  Was that really necessary?  After all, it was Alec that woke her up, and it’s not like she needed a warning that comes after the fire is already set.

Clary’s arm burned and stung. She looked down to realize that she had begun drawing on her skin, the reflex taking over from her conscious mind.

Why?  Why do books do this?  Why can’t you just have a character look at a wall of fire and think “I should put a fireproof spell on myself”?  Why do you think it somehow becomes…better or more acceptable or I-don’t-even-know-what if they do it without thinking?

Well, now that she’s all by-the-hand-of-the-author-god-fireproofed, Clary decides to go running into all that fire to look for Jace.  When she does find Jace, he’s…somehow turning the ground into adamas.  The random adamas prompts Clary to imagine up more runes.

the first rune she had ever imagined, the rune she had spent the last days dreaming of, rose up in her mind.

Oh, I’m sorry, no, she doesn’t think about runes.  Runes randomly appear in her mind without any thought, consideration, skill, will, or effort on her part.  Because Clary doesn’t really have any power here, she’s just a tool. 

Jace is upset when he realizes she’s there, because he was expecting to up and die, but Clary insists that she knows how to fix things.  Naturally we don’t get to figure out what happens until we switch to a new viewpoint character for a while.

Isabelle, Simon, and Alec are standing around watching the fire be described in overly dramatic terms and angsting about the whole experience.  Finally the fire starts to die down and they see Clary and Jace coming towards them. 

Naturally, in the middle of all this, we have to take out a moment for relationship talk to reassure everyone that Simon does not still love Clary in anything more than a sibling way.  Because, you know, this book has priorities.

[Isabelle] broke apart from Jace and flashed a smile at Clary, who smiled shyly back.

And those priorities are “male/female relationships, no matter how platonic, over female/female relationships.  Always.”

Fuck, they almost died in a fire and you can’t even let them hug a little?

Also more banter, because when is there not banter.

They want an explanation, but all Jace gives is the bit about the demon/shade/ghost/whatever goading him, and then he says that Clary ‘helped him get the heavenly fire under control’ and now he can manage it at will.  Doesn’t say how.  In fact, refuses to say how.  Fuck you, book.  God, I hate all this secret keeping, it doesn’t do anything but drag things out.  I think it’s pretty clear that Clary drew her imaginary rune on him.

Which…means that Clary’s power is to have some invisible force deliver stuff into her brain with no effort on her part just so that a guy can willfully control his own power.  Clary has no agency except to give agency to a male counterpart.  Wow.  Special.

Hey, remember a few days ago when Mark sent a message to Emma and the kids?  We finally get to read it!  It’s just a note to the council that the fairies are in league with Jonathan, so nothing really new for us.

They take the note to Jia and then sit around talking about the Wild Hunt for a while, mostly saying that they don’t think they can get Mark out of it, which…I thought wasn’t even on the table, so why are you talking about that instead of the whole “we find out who’s been betraying you” thing?  Also, Jia wants the kids to give some testimony about finding the note.  No torture-sword this time, though.  So why did you use it the first time, if you’re perfectly willing to go without?

And back with the prisoners.  Magnus is sick.  He says his demon father is making him sick, as a way to goad Magnus into asking for help, but Magnus won’t do it.  Raphael knows who his demon daddy is, though, with the implication that he’ll do the asking if things get bad enough.  Well…thanks for that forewarning about something that will probably take several more days before it amounts to anything?

Switch over to Maia and the new alliance of werewolves and vampires.  Apparently when they decided to try and sway all the downworlders to their side, they mean “call each one of them individually and talk to them,” so now the werewolf headquarters is full of people with address books and cell phones going at it.  I kind of like it.  A very nice, mundane consequence of their decentralized nature.  That oddball warlock shows up to spout of nonsense for about a page before remembering that Catarina wants them to come over to the morgue to look at something she found.  Which we don’t get to see yet, because this book is so full of scene jumps that I want to stab things.  This one was especially terrible.  The whole thing could have been cut out and replaced with Maia et all just going to the morgue, with an off-hand line of dialogue going “we got your call and we’re here now.”

Back over to Jocelyn.

The door rattled, and she around about, sliding the barrette back into her hair.

I’ve been staring at this for a solid minute, wondering why no editor caught it.  Then again, perhaps the editors were all asleep by this point…

Jonathan comes in, they have more talk about their mutual lack of parental love that we’ve already gone over in every other scene with them already, and then he takes her to go see something.  It’s a reproduction of the big meeting/council room in Alicante, with giant thrones in it now, and Sebastian says he has doorways into both the demon world and the regular world from there.

Jonathan mocks her with how he wants to both rule the and watch the world burn, which seems quite contradictory.  I mean:

“Imagine the heights I could rise to, borne aloft on the screams of billions of people, raised up by the smoke of millions of burning hearts!”

…wouldn’t the answer to that be ‘not very far at all’?  Once they’re all dead, you’ve just got another gutted world like the demon one, which Jonathan has already mentioned is of little interest to him.

Jocelyn mocks him for a moment about how he still wants Clary by his side and Clary never will, then she tries to attack him.  Since we can’t end the book this early, alas, she fails.  Jonathan is distracted from his retaliation by the heavenly fire off in the distance, but he doesn’t seem scared of it.  Rather, he’s pretty eager to come face-to-face with Jace again.

Pretty…needlessly, poetically eager.

“Waste your fire on the desert air, my brother!” he cried. “Let it pour into the sands like blood or water, and may you never stop coming—never stop coming until we are face-to-face.”

It is too early in the day for me to need a drink this badly.