Guess what?  MORE BANTER!  This time they are joking about how normal-sized the cup is.  Dorthea wants to see the cup.

she took a step toward Clary, holding her long red-nailed hands out for the Cup. Clary, without knowing why, shrank back.

Oh, come on!  This is just painful, now.  If Clary doesn’t know why she shrank back, then why did she do it?  Does this author just have an allergy to people using their fucking brains?  Dorthea does an attitude 180 from the last chapter in the space of a second, and she’s “gimme gimme” enough to make anyone give pause, so why can’t Clary be hesitant for the obvious fucking reasons?  Usually I can figure out the reasoning behind bad tropes, but this one continues to flummox me.  I just don’t understand why it became a trope in the first place.

Jace is on board the anti-Dorthea train and pulls a knife on her, so she buries him in drapes.  Behind the drapes is the five-dimensional door (which is now called The Portal, caps and all, for no good reason.)  The door is open, and something big and monstery comes out of it.

Then Dorthea turns into a monster.  So…what came out of the door? 

Scattered among the jewels were what looked like small white stones. It took Clary a moment to realize that they were teeth.

Teeth don’t look like stones.  They look like teeth.  And if they got knocked out of her head, they probably look like bloody teeth.  If this were the first time this happened, I would be more forgiving, because at least it’s better than the crow/hunchback bit.  But there’s only so many times I can stand Clary not knowing what something is while staring right at it, and the book has more than used up its allotment. 

They get stuck at the front door, which has been magiced shut.  Some big knobby monster comes out and announces that its name is Abbadon.  This is what Dorthea turned into.  Apparently the demon possessed her, she died, and it’s using her body to turn into this monster.

So…what came out of the door?  Damnit, something came out of that door, and don’t tell me it was pre-possession Abbadon.  Dorthea was acting weird-eyed at the start of this chapter (though not in the last chapter; continuity, what’s that?), so it stands to reason she was already possessed then.  There is an extra black monster shape wandering around this story, and I demand to know what happened to it.

Abbadon wants the cup.  I sincerely hope we don’t find out that this guy works for Valentine later, because Clary already announced that she wants to give it to Valentine anyway.  (And, yeah, what’s up with that?  She knows what happens if Valentine gets the cup: child army, war, mass deaths, etc.  But she doesn’t even pause for a moment of angst before deciding to hand the cup over?  And everyone else goes along with this plan without even blinking?  The fucking fuckity-fuck am I reading?  Author, I do not care more about Clary’s mother than I do about the rest of the world.  Really, I don’t.  I am not on board with this plan to save woman at the cost of thousands of others, so stop treating this like it’s a matter of course.)

They start fighting the demon and it kicks all their asses.  Boy, sure glad you guys didn’t call for any backup.  You guys were just so smart to leave the other hunters out of this.  Your way of getting your butts kicked is clearly superior. 

“Tell them to give me the Cup,” Abbadon snarled, talons hovering just above Jace’s skin. “Tell them to give it to me and I will let them live.”

Um…okay!  “Hey, Clary, give him the cup.”  “No.”  “Well, I told her to, so now you have to let us go.”

Uuuuuuhg, I just realized.  Alec is out of action, Jace is pinned down, so the only two left are Isabelle and Clary.  But the monster can’t deal with them, can’t demand to them ‘give me the cup.’  Instead it tells the only male left to order the females to do something, then assumes that’s good enough, like the females can’t just say ‘fuck you and the horse you rode in on.’  And the text treats this as a legit dramatic moment, even makes Jace hesitant to tell them anything, as if Jace’s words have any bearing at all on what the other two do.  Fuck this book.

Suddenly, Simon bursts in the front door with a bow.  (He mentioned archery was a long-standing hobby of his, so this isn’t quite as out of the blue as it sounds.)  He shoots out the skylight that’s above the demon, making it scream and cry about all the daylight.  Then it catches on fire and burns all up.

You know, this makes sense for vampires.  Usually, there’s nowhere they can go that isn’t daylight half the time.  But demons are from another dimension.  Why would they ever come to earth, where they have a good chance of death for a full half the time?  They’ve made it sound like there’s a ton of dimensions, so why don’t they go find one that isn’t out to kill them with something as omnipresent as sunlight?

“Don’t thank me,” he said, “thank the archery program at B’nai B’rith summer camp.”

Wait…so Simon is Jewish and making racist jokes about Jews?  Well, I guess not the first time that’s happened, but still horrible.  (Also, it makes me more convinced than ever that the author doesn’t even realize how racist she is.  Like she thinks this is just some funny thing the Jewish community jokes about among themselves.  Because, you know, it’s not like the stereotype of money-grubbing, skinflint Jewish people has ever done any harm or nothing…)

Also, I would just like to point out: fuck you hunters.  There were three of you and you all got whooped.  Who killed the demon?  A normal human.  There have been three demon deaths so far in this book, and two of them have been by humans, or close-enough-to-human.  These stupid hunters continue to fail to give me a reason for why they are so fucking special.  This author could have made them ninjas can cut out the magic crap altogether. 

In fact, I’m still pulling for the “Valentine is secretly building and army of ninjas and doesn’t need the cup at all” plan.

If you can’t tell, I have a thing for ninjas.

 Anyway, Alec is whooped worse than the others, because Abbadon poisoned him when it cut him.  Their magic marks won’t heal him, so they have to rush him back to the Institute.

When she turned her head now, she saw Jace kneeling next to his friend as blood seeped through the blanket. She thought of the little boy with the dead falcon. To love is to destroy.

Love didn’t destroy shit.  Big giant demons with claw-hands destroyed.  I know you think this theme is deep, book, but you can’t just slap it on every bad situation and expect it to stand up.

“I know,” Isabelle said. “Simon—what you did, that was incredible. You moved so fast. I wouldn’t have thought a mundane could have thought of something like that.”

You told him demons can’t take sunlight.  How much brain power does it take to come up with “demon + sun = no more demon”?  The hunters must be really bad at their jobs if this is really so impressive to them.

I knew it was there, Clary thought. I should have acted on it. Even if I didn’t have a bow and

arrow like Simon, I could have thrown something at it or told Jace about it. She felt stupid and useless and thick,

And this is our main character, people.  The one we’re supposed to identify with.  She spends the whole time doing nothing, then feeling stupid.  I don’t want to identify with her.  I want to stay far, far away from identifying with her.

Alright, looks like I finally got an answer to one of my demands.  The Abbadon was only half-possessing Dorthea, and the rest of it is what came out of the portal.  But…if it had actual mass that needed to come out of the portal, then why the fuck did it need Dorthea for anything at all?

They get to the Institute and rush Alec inside.  While Alec is being treated, Jace and Clary have an emo moment.  Jace thinks its all his fault, because during the fight he was thinking about keeping Clary safe instead of keeping Alec and Isabelle safe.  As dumb as that is, it’s not unreasonable.  People don’t exactly think straight when their loved ones get hurt.

But again.  Jace has supposedly killed hundreds of demons with Isabelle and Alec.  Has one of them never gotten hurt before?  Has this issue never come up, where one party feels guilty because another got hurt?  And where are the fairy psychiatrists?  Or at least the training (which they’ve supposedly had so much of) that tells them not to do this?  This should be a known issue, and they should have codes and traditions for how to deal with it.  Intensive training before a traumatic event can help you deal with the after-effects.  It won’t get rid of them, but it’ll help.  This should be not popping up here like it’s something totally unexpected.

Hodge comes out and says he has to write to the Silent Brothers and ask them to come, because Alec is in it in a bad way.  They follow him to the library and show him the cup to demonstrate that they did manage to get it.  Hodge gets all weird and randomly tells Jace he looks like his father, then the crow attacks Clary and steals the cup.

Jace is somehow unconscious now and Clary’s in an invisible cage.  Turns out Hodge is working for Valentine.  Speak of the devil, Valentine shows up at the most convenient moment.

Valentine and Hodge banter for a while.  Clearly they made a deal where Hodge gets something in exchange for the cup, but they’re taking their sweet time about getting around to it.  Valentine keeps going on about how Hodge probably hates Alec and Isabelle’s parents.  Um…does any of this have relevance?

Apparently Hodge was not just banished, he’s been cursed, and he can’t get in the sunlight.  What a strange punishment.  Do these people think that prisons are just boring or something?  (Knowing this author, probably.)  Valentine has agreed to lift the curse in exchange for the cup, which he does, but he also takes Jace when he goes.

And…Clary just sits there, watches all this, and utters not one word about her mother.  Once again, I have to ask: why the fuck is she even in this book?  She’s the main fucking character and she could be removed entirely without messing up the plot one bit.