City of Fallen Angels recap

Six weeks after the war, Clary is training as a Shadowhunter, Jocelyn and Luke are planning a wedding, and Jace has begun avoiding Clary without explanation, tormented by dreams of hurting her. Simon, a Daylighter carrying the Mark of Cain, is thrown out by his mother, hunted by vampires who want to use him, and taken in by a werewolf named Kyle who turns out to be a guard assigned by the Praetor Lupus and, worse, the man who bit Maia. Camille Belcourt, the old head of the New York clan, tries to recruit Simon; Alec, worried about Magnus's immortality, secretly asks her for a way to make him mortal. Shadowhunters are being murdered and drained, and Clary traces the pattern to a cult repeating Valentine's demon-blood experiments on infants. Its leader is the demon Lilith, who has been controlling Jace through a rune and intends to raise Jonathan Morgenstern from the dead. On a rooftop, Simon's Mark destroys Lilith and Clary frees Jace, but the ritual has already worked. Jonathan wakes, and Jace, still bound to him, disappears with him.

Clary Fray grew up an ordinary New Yorker before learning she was a Shadowhunter and that her father was Valentine Morgenstern, who tried twice to overthrow the Clave and purge the Downworlder races. Valentine gathered the three Mortal Instruments and summoned the angel Raziel at Lake Lyn, killing Jace to do it; Clary had rewritten the ritual in her own name, so the angel answered to her instead, destroyed Valentine and granted her one request, which she used to bring Jace back. Before that, Jace and Clary spent two books believing themselves brother and sister, which turned out to be a lie of Valentine's. Jace is a Herondale, taken as a newborn and given angel blood; Valentine's true son, Jonathan, was given demon blood and grew up to pose as a Shadowhunter named Sebastian Verlac, kill Max Lightwood and betray Alicante to demons before Jace killed him on the battlefield. His body was never found. Clary's mother Jocelyn was woken from her coma and is with Luke, a werewolf pack leader who was born a Shadowhunter. Clary's oldest friend Simon became a vampire, then a Daylighter able to walk in sunlight, and carries the Mark of Cain, which turns any harm done to him back on the attacker sevenfold. The war ended with Downworlders seated on the Clave's Council for the first time.

Six weeks after the war, Simon is trying to hold together a life that no longer fits: his mother has found out what he is and reacted by calling him a monster, so he has left home; he is seeing both Isabelle Lightwood and Maia Roberts and has not told either about the other; and his band is playing small Brooklyn shows. Strangers keep approaching him and dying rather than answering questions, and vampires attack him more than once, protected only by the Mark he carries. Clary is training at the Institute and preparing for her mother's wedding to Luke. Jace has begun avoiding her, refusing to explain, sleeping badly and turning up at odd hours. Meanwhile a Shadowhunter's body is found in the city, drained of blood and left where it will be blamed on Downworlders.

A musician named Kyle joins Simon's band and offers him a spare room, which Simon takes because he has nowhere else. More dead Shadowhunters turn up. Simon is summoned by Camille Belcourt, the ancient vampire who led the New York clan before Raphael and has returned to the city; she tells him people are hunting him for his Mark and offers him a place beside her if he will help her take the clan back. He refuses to answer either way. Luke and the Institute try to keep the murders from breaking the new Accords. Jace, questioned by Clary, tells her only that he is dreaming of hurting her, and will not let her near him.

Kyle is revealed to be a werewolf, sent by the Praetor Lupus, an order that assigns guardians to newly turned Downworlders, and he has been assigned to Simon. Camille is captured with Magnus's help and held for the Clave, and while she is in custody Alec goes to see her alone; she offers to tell him how a warlock's immortality might be ended, which is the question he has not been able to stop asking about Magnus. Clary follows the trail of the killings to a disused church in Brooklyn where a cult calling itself the Church of Talto meets. In its basement she finds evidence of experiments on unborn children with demon blood, and a dead infant, which is exactly what Valentine did to his own son.

Kyle's full name comes out: he is Jordan Kyle, the boy who bit Maia and vanished afterwards, and Maia is not remotely willing to hear his apology. Simon's living arrangement becomes untenable and his double relationship collapses in front of both girls at once. Clary brings what she found in the church to Jocelyn, who tells her more about the experiments Valentine performed and about the child he raised on demon blood. Alec keeps returning to Camille without telling Magnus. The Shadowhunter murders continue, all of them tied to the cult, and the Clave still has no suspect.

Clary goes back to the cult's building and finds the woman who leads it, veiled and evasive, presiding over followers who have been giving up their unborn children to her work. The bodies in the basement are the failures. Investigating further, Clary finds a rune on Jace that neither of them put there, and learns that it has been on him since the end of the war. It explains the dreams, the withdrawal and the sleeplessness: he has not been himself, and whoever placed the rune has been steering him for weeks. Jace, understanding at last what has been done to him, tries to keep Clary away from what is coming, and cannot.

The woman is Lilith, greatest of demons, and the experiments in the church were rehearsals. Her real work is on the roof of a half-built luxury tower, where she has kept the body of Jonathan Morgenstern in a coffin surrounded by her runes. Jace has been her instrument, drawn to the site by the rune she set on him, and his blood, carrying the angel blood Valentine gave him, is part of the ritual. She needs one more thing: the blood of a Daylighter, because Simon's power came from drinking Jace's. Simon is taken to the roof, and Clary and Jace are there with him, one of them unable to act freely at all.

Simon refuses to give his blood. When Lilith attacks him the Mark of Cain reflects the blow sevenfold and destroys her. Clary breaks the rune binding Jace and he comes back to himself, but the ritual has already done what it needed to do: Jonathan Morgenstern wakes. He is alive again, Jace is tied to him by Lilith's work, and the two of them leave the roof together and disappear. Camille, still at large, turns Simon's young fan Maureen into a vampire. Alec's dealings with Camille come to light. Simon has lost his home and his mother; Maia and Jordan have started, cautiously, to talk; and Clary is left on the roof with Jace gone, taken by the brother she believed dead.

On the roof of a Manhattan building, Lilith completes the ritual she has been building all book: Jace, marked and controlled by her since the war, has supplied his blood, and Simon's is the last ingredient because it carries Jace's angel blood in it. Simon refuses to give it, and when Lilith strikes at him the Mark of Cain destroys her, throwing her attack back sevenfold. Clary breaks the rune that has been holding Jace and he is himself again for the first time in weeks. It is too late: the ritual has gone far enough. Jonathan Morgenstern, Valentine's son, wakes in the coffin Lilith prepared for him, and Jace, still bound to him by her work, leaves with him. The two vanish from the roof, and neither the Clave nor Clary has any idea where they have gone. Elsewhere, Camille Belcourt turns Simon's young fan Maureen into a vampire. Simon has lost his home and nearly lost himself; Alec has learned that Camille offered him something he had no business considering; and Clary is left standing on the roof with a ring in her hand and Jace gone, taken by the brother she watched die.