Back with Emma, the doors of the building they’re in burst open and all sorts of maniacle bad guys pour in.  Someone warns Emma with a “Watch out!”

She whirled, and screamed. A faerie warrior was looming above her, decked in silver armor; his hair was not hair at all, but a ropy tangle of thorned branches. Half his face was burned and bubbling where he must have been sprayed with iron powder or rock salt. One of his eyes was rolling, white and blinded, but the other fixed on Emma with murderous intent. Emma saw Diana Wrayburn, her dark hair whirling as she spun toward them, her mouth open to cry a warning.

…wow, way to suck the tension out of that moment, book.

This is one reason I dislike fight scenes in a lot of books, and why they have to be handled very carefully.  Of course you don’t want to leave your readers with no more information than just “a fairy,” but at the same time, description has to handled delicately.  It breaks up the flow of the action by forcing your readers to pay attention to something other than…well, action.  Emma screamed.  Now wait a couple minutes.  Now something else happens.  Was the level of detail for this fairy (who literally dies in the next paragraph) worth that pause in the flow?

While she’s doing that, Julian’s (evil-fied) father attempts to lure his younger children to him.  Why?  …fuck if I know, the guy is evil now and the hall is being overrun.  I don’t know why, in the middle of all that, he felt the need to coax them from one square of the floor to another.  They weren’t even hiding.

Anyway, Julian kills him.

Julian pulled the shortsword from his belt and threw it. It sang through the air, straight and true

By throwing a fucking sword.

I just…I…I need to take a break already.

He was staring at the place where his father had fallen; the other Endarkened were already moving forward, trampling the body of their fallen comrade.

I am consistently amazed at how people in these books are able to have these weird, isolated tableaus in the middle of situations that we are assured are too busy for such things.

In fact, even after this line, Julian manages to find the space and time to stare around in shock and sit down.  Um…wow, what a tense rush of oncoming baddies?

We spend a page with Clary, who watches as Jonathan starts to close the portal to our world by bleeding on some ruins.  Apparently this is going to take a while.

Down in the bowls of the building (what even is this building, anyway?  It’s a mirror of whatever the Guard is in Alicante, but what is the Guard?  Do we ever get a good answer, besides being some sort of catch-all place?) Alec and Magnus are stumbling around and notice that the walls are literally closing in on them.  Apparently, once the path to the other world is closed, Jonathan will have control over every aspect of the demon world.  Because…cheese.

Fuck it, we’re not getting any other reason for it.  “Hey, BTW, this will happen.  No reason or lead in or explanation, it’s just gonna happen.  Cheese.”

Elsewhere, Isabelle and Simon are also dodging falling building parts, but they realize said parts are loosely herding them somewhere.  They end up in the room with Clary and Jonathan, and everyone else follows shortly.  I might care if only this hadn’t taken so long.  And also if I weren’t too busy being annoyed at all the POV switching and the fact that Magnus’s scene was utterly useless.  Yeah, the walls are closing in, now let’s repeat that the walls are closing in again with new characters, it’s just so fucking important to get that information twice.

In Clary’s life she had seen many things that were wonderful and beautiful, and many things that were terrible.

…thanks for the update?

They all stand around listening to Jonathan’s villainous monologue (because, you know, we so need another one of those).

“Clary, no!” Jocelyn cried; Luke tugged her back, but she was paying attention to nothing but her daughter. “Don’t do this—”

 “I have to,” Clary said

Um…she’s sitting in a chair.  She saves the whole world in exchange for sitting on a chair.  What’s your alternative, Jocelyn?  Sacrifice yourself bravely in bloody battle?  You can do that here, if you want, but let him close the door first.

They really go on and on for a while about how Clary has to do “this,” by which eventually they mean…idk, I guess make out with Jonathan or something, but really all he’s asked her to do is sit in a chair.  She can sword fight him to the death after this; her objective has already been reached.  There’s no need to cry about how this is a lifelong deal when really Jonathan is the only one who can’t go back on his word.  Granted, “death or demons” isn’t a great choice, but you were all willing to go that route before.

She saw Jace swallow. He dropped the bracelet into Sebastian’s open palm. “Clary is yours,” he said, and stepped back.

*sigh*

And lastly Jace, his blond head bowed, went to his knees, and Clary heard the window behind her shatter into pieces. It sounded like her breaking heart.

Want to know how you take a legitimately hard choice and despairing outcome and make it melodramatic?

Make it all about boys.

Seriously, this set up doesn’t have to bomb, but once it turns into “woe for I have to date this evil dude” and “oh, my poor bbcakes,” I just roll my eyes.  So much about this is (somewhere, off the page) devastating, but all we hear them talk about is “I guess I can learn to love him” “No, babe, he’s going to stay evil, trust me, I married his dad, I know.”

At a certain point, there is such a thing as too much romance.  We passed it a while back.

But we’re not done yet.  Because now that the last door is closed, the next big point of drama is that Jonathan wants her to make out with him in front of their audience.

Instead of kissing him, Clary stabs him with her sword.  Apparently there is now something special about her sword, because it sets him on fire.  During Jonathans protracted immolation, we learn that when Jace had his hissy fit in the desert, Clary figured out how to put all his heavenly fire in her sword.

the rune she had once seen, it felt like so long ago now, on a rooftop in Manhattan: the winged hilt of an angel’s sword.

A gift from Ithuriel, she guessed, who had given her so many gifts. The image had rested in her mind until she’d needed it.

I feel like this is some attempt to assure us that the series had a plan from the start, but since that rune literally could have done anything thanks to the fact that it was so completely random and unconnected, still feels like an asspull.  Stuff like this is more satisfying when you can look back and see the inevitability.

Jonathan burns for quite a long time, and when he’s finally done, instead of being dead he’s just demon-free.  He’s still dying from the gaping hole in his chest, but he’s nice now.

Weird, Jace got stabbed like that and didn’t have any physical wound leftover…

Anyway, Jonathan is literally (so they claim) a different person now, all repentant and sweet and forgiving.

And yet he had not done them, not exactly. This person, the boy her mother was holding as if he were her penance, was not Sebastian, who had tormented and murdered and wrought destruction.

While that was irritating as fuck before, it makes even less sense now.  Jonathan had demonic influences, sure, but he was still formed into his personality from birth by his upbringing.  He has nothing else to fall back on, no previous personality that was overshadowed by demon blood.  It’s not like Jace, where he had a different set of mores that he was magically kept separate from.  You take away Jonathan’s evilness, there’s nothing left, unless you want to call it a blank slate.

I think a lot of what bothers me about this whole theme is the way it simplifies entire personalities to “magic” and negates the beautiful complexity of the human experience.  Everything is done in brute force, and then either wholly accepted or rejected.  Entire characters are based on arbitrary acts of magic.  Is it any wonder that these characters have little in the way of development when environmental factors of personality are trumped by “big shiny fire magic”?

Well, this entirely new character that we’ve never seen before who is suddenly nice advises Jace to go and cup open a demon corpse that was hanging around in the room.  (It was summoned earlier, I’ve forgotten why.  If there even was a reason.)  Inside is the evil cup, which will be ruined if they throw it into the circle of runes and, subsequently, kill all the evil shadowhunters as well.

So, they do.