Fifteen-year-old Brooklynite Clary Fray is at a nightclub with her best friend Simon when she witnesses a murder by a group of teens at the club she is at, surprised that Simon and the club's security guard cannot see the killer, a teenage boy called Jace. Jace claims that the boy he murdered was a demon before Clary leaves with Simon, confused by how she can see them yet no one else could. The next day, while at a coffee shop with Simon, Clary sees Jace yet again, once again invisible to everyone but her. After Clary hesitantly goes outside with him, he offers to introduce her to his "tutor." Before she can respond, she receives a distressing phone call from her mother, who frantically demands her not to come home, obviously to avoid some type of danger. Clary ignores her mother's warnings and rushes home anyways. Upon her arrival, she finds her mother missing, the apartment trashed, and a monstrous creature (later revealed to being a Ravener demon) waiting. She defeats the creature by shoving a weapon of Jace’s, called a Sensor, down its throat, but is injured in the process. Jace, who is a demon fighter known as a Shadowhunter, finds her and takes her to his home, called "The Institute." The Institute is an old Gothic cathedral that humans, known by the term "mundanes" or "mundies" in the Shadowhunter world, can't see, because it is shaded from human eyes with magic called glamour. Here, she recuperates; sleeping for three days. After she wakes up, she meets Hodge Starkweather, Jace's tutor, as well as his adoptive siblings Isabelle and Alec Lightwood.