Dorthea’s apartment is a mirror image of Clary’s even though it shouldn’t be.  See, Clary’s apartment building is really just a huge house that got sectioned off into apartments.  When was the last time you saw a house that had an identical upstairs and downstairs layout?  Yes, I’m sure it got renovated in the conversion, but houses are not made of legos.  You can’t gut them and then put it whatever interior walls you want.  Cookie-cutter apartments only work in a building that was created to have cookie-cutter apartments.

They have tea and talk about how Jace doesn’t like bergamot.  Apparently this is to show that he knows shit, because they banter about it.

Jace talks about how all the stuff in Dorthea’s place is fake, even though she obviously knows stuff about shadowhunters, given their banter in the last chapter.  Clary finally points out what I’ve been saying all along: he uses magic.  Jace gets ticked and tells her that he uses magic tools, but he doesn’t ‘do’ magic. 

He scowled furiously, silencing her. “I do not do magic,” he said. “Get it through your head: Human beings are not magic users. It’s part of what makes them human. Witches and warlocks can only use magic because they have demon blood.”

Okay, so they have a stigma attached to magic, and that’s why he’s so upset.  That…almost works.  But it’s so poorly executed that it’s hard to actually tell what’s going on here.  Clearly there’s some sort of stigma around magic, but Jace doesn’t bat an eye over admitting that he uses magic tools.  Yet earlier, both he and Alec got all up in arms over there mere mention of magic, and tried to deny that there was any magic involved at all in their clearly-magical-knives.  So what’s the deal?  Is there a stigma against generating it, but nothing against using it?  Is there a stigma against magic in general, and there are ‘civilian’ Idrisians (?) who frown on even magical tools, but the shadowhunters use them anyway?  Do all hunters hate all magic, except for Jace and his little band of special people?  From Jace and Alec’s reaction, I’m inclined to think that they don’t like any magic at all and are only using the tools under duress, but in this scene, Jace doesn’t stumble at all over the subject of using magic things.  In fact, none of them seem to have any problem with it, unless Clary starts talking about it, at which point they over-react.  (She only asked if his magic knives were magic, not if he did magic.)  Over-reacting is not the sign of a clear, rational social attitude toward a thing.

And for that matter, if doing magic means you have demon blood, then who made all the magical tools that they are currently using?  Is it only humans doing magic that’s bad, and but other fairies can do it without getting the stink-eye from Jace and his friends?

Dorthea interrupts my head-scratchy attempts to make sense of their social attitudes and calls everyone in to tea.  There is some vastly unfunny banter about how having a parlor is so old-fashioned and dandy.

Madame Dorothea shot him a dark look. “If you were half as funny as you thought you were, my boy, you’d be twice as funny as you are.”

Yeah, that’s pretty much how I feel about this whole book.

They sit down to afternoon tea and you know what?  Didn’t Jace almost die like five minutes ago?  Why is Clary so calm, as if being attacked by giant zombies happens every day?  Get upset, Clary!  There is no sense of continuity from one scene to the next, no feeling or atmosphere that gets carried through.  It’s like every time they go into a different room, the emotional standard gets completely reset, and we’re in a different story from the one we were just reading.  In the last short story: Zombies!  In this short story: Tea!

Also, more sloppy worldbuilding in which we find out a few random things about a few random creatures.  Vampirism and lycanthropy are ‘diseases,’ witches are half-breeds between demons and humans, fairies are half-breeds between demons and angels.  Also, Jace randomly decides ‘enough talking’ in the middle of explaining what the hell he thinks an angel is, so I’m guessing that’ll be awkwardly important later.

Dorthea reads their tea leaves.  Clary is un-readable, and Jace is pretty standard.  So she has Clary pick a tarot card instead.  Clary recognizes it has been painted by her mother.

After Jace, not Clary, asks the appropriate questions, Dorthea finally tells as what we’ve known for a while: Jocelyn was a shadowhunter before she quit.  She and Dorthea made the house into a sanctuary so that not-quite-so-evil fairies could hide from the black-and-white laws of Jace’s group.

Jace finds a door in Dorthea’s house that she calls a ‘five dimensional door.’  It can take a person anywhere in this dimension.  So…it’s not really five dimensional, is it?  Clary realizes that her mother picked this house because of that door, because it’s an escape hatch, and that Jocelyn didn’t leave that night because she was waiting for Clary to get home. 

Clary suddenly decides she wants to know where her mom would have gone if she had escaped.  (Notice she continues not to care where she actually is.)  Over the protests of the other two, Clary opens the door and jumps through.