City of Bones recap

Fifteen-year-old Clary Fray watches three teenagers kill a demon in a Manhattan club, an event nobody else can see, and within a day her mother is abducted and her ordinary life is gone. Taken in by the young hunters of the New York Institute, she learns that she is Nephilim, one of the Shadowhunters who police demons and Downworlders, and that her memories have been deliberately blocked for years. Her mother's disappearance is the work of Valentine Morgenstern, a Shadowhunter who once led a rebellion and now wants the Mortal Cup, the object that creates new Shadowhunters. Clary recovers the Cup from a tarot deck her mother painted, learns that her family friend Luke is a werewolf, and discovers a talent for creating runes nobody has seen before. Their tutor Hodge betrays them and delivers the Cup and Jace to Valentine, who reveals that he is father to both Jace and Clary. Valentine escapes with the Cup, and the two are left believing themselves to be siblings.

Clary Fray and her best friend Simon Lewis talk their way into the Pandemonium Club in Manhattan, where Clary watches three armed teenagers her own age corner and kill a blue-haired boy. Simon sees none of it, and when she reports it there is no body. The next day her mother Jocelyn is frightened and insistent that the two of them leave the city immediately, and mentions people and words Clary has never heard. Clary storms out. When she calls home that evening she hears a struggle, and her mother tells her not to come back and to call their old family friend Luke. She goes home anyway to find the apartment wrecked and her mother gone, and is attacked by a demon that she manages to kill with a device one of the club hunters had planted on her. Jace, the fair-haired boy from the club, arrives and takes her, wounded and half-conscious, to a converted church in Manhattan called the Institute.

At the Institute, Clary meets the Lightwoods, Alec and Isabelle, and their tutor Hodge Starkweather, and learns what the world actually contains: Shadowhunters, descended from an angel, who hunt demons with runed weapons under a body of law called the Clave, and Downworlders, the vampires, werewolves, warlocks and faeries with whom they keep an uneasy treaty. Clary is one of the Nephilim herself, and something has been blocking her memories for years. The Institute is attacked, which tells Hodge that Clary matters to somebody. Returning to her ruined apartment with Jace, she meets her downstairs neighbour Madame Dorothea, who knows far more about Jocelyn than a neighbour should. Luke turns Clary away coldly when she goes to him, and she overhears him speaking with two strangers about a man named Valentine and about the Mortal Cup, the object that makes new Shadowhunters, which they are certain Jocelyn has hidden.

Hodge explains the recent history: Valentine Morgenstern founded the Circle, a movement that meant to purge Downworlders and overthrow the Clave, and its uprising was put down years ago; Valentine is believed to have died in a fire, and Jocelyn was his wife. The Silent Brothers take Clary down into the Bone City to search her mind, and find a block placed by the warlock Magnus Bane. Clary and the others crash Magnus's party to demand answers, and he admits Jocelyn paid him to wipe her daughter's memories over and over. During the party Simon is briefly turned into a rat and carried off by vampires. Clary begins to piece together how much of her life was arranged for her, and to notice how easily she and Jace fall into each other's company.

The group raids the vampires' derelict hotel to get Simon back, arriving on a flying motorcycle and leaving with Simon alive but badly frightened, having been bitten. The vampire Raphael Santiago is careful to keep the incident from becoming a breach of the treaty. Clary's memories keep returning in fragments, and she works out that her mother would never have kept the Mortal Cup anywhere but close to hand. She and Jace grow closer, and on his birthday they end up alone in the Institute's greenhouse, where he tells her something of his childhood: his father was killed in front of him when he was ten, and he was raised afterwards by the Lightwoods. Simon, who has loved Clary for years, walks in on them.

Clary realises the Mortal Cup is inside a tarot deck her mother painted, and pulls it out of the card with a rune she invents on the spot, a talent nobody has seen before. Before they can leave, a greater demon rises in the apartment, using Madame Dorothea's body; Dorothea is killed and Jace is very badly hurt driving the thing off. Luke arrives with a pack of werewolves, and everything he had hidden comes out: he is a werewolf, and before that he was Lucian Graymark, a Shadowhunter, Valentine's closest friend and sworn partner. He tells Clary the rest of it, that Valentine survived, that Jocelyn took the Cup and ran, faking her own death, and that Clary's whole childhood was an act of concealment. Magnus heals Jace, and the Cup is finally in Shadowhunter hands.

Hodge, a former Circle member cursed never to leave the Institute, betrays them all. He takes the Mortal Cup from Clary and delivers Jace to Valentine to buy his own freedom. Clary and Luke follow to a ruined hospital on the river, where Valentine is holding Jocelyn, unconscious and unwakeable after drinking a potion to keep herself out of his hands. Valentine tells Jace that he is his true father, that he raised him under another man's name, and then tells them both that Clary is his daughter as well, so that the two of them are brother and sister. Neither is given any grounds to doubt it. Valentine escapes through a Portal with the Cup, and Clary destroys the mirror behind him. Jocelyn is carried out alive but comatose and taken to a hospital; Simon has survived; and Clary is left with a father she never knew, a brother she had been falling in love with, and a mother nobody can wake.

Hodge Starkweather, once a member of Valentine's Circle and cursed by the Clave never to leave the Institute, betrays the household: he takes the Mortal Cup from Clary and hands Jace over to Valentine in exchange for his freedom. Clary and Luke follow to a derelict building on the river, where Valentine reveals that he raised Jace as his own son under a dead man's name, that Jocelyn is his wife, and that Clary is therefore his daughter. Jace and Clary, who had just begun to fall in love, are told they are brother and sister, and neither of them is given any reason to doubt it. Valentine escapes through a Portal with the Mortal Cup; Clary shatters the mirror behind him so he cannot be followed. Jocelyn is recovered alive but locked in a coma of her own making, and is taken to a hospital where no ordinary doctor can help her. Simon has survived being turned into a rat and nearly drained by vampires; Luke's true nature as a werewolf and former Shadowhunter is out in the open; and Clary is left knowing exactly who her father is, with the Mortal Cup in his hands and her mother beyond waking.