City of Bones Chapter 7 Summary

How It All Goes Down

The Five-Dimensional Door

  • Come in, pull up a Ouija board, and grab a seat for a tour around Madame Dorothea's psychic abode.
  • She has a variety of posters hanging: zodiac signs, Chinese symbols, and the like. These are the psychic's equivalent of cute kitten posters with the inspirational phrase, "Hang in there, baby."
  • One poster of a hand says In Manibus Fortuna, which means "Upon by the hands of fortune," which sounds an awful lot like a MST3K episode we remember…
  • Okay, so Madame Dorothea isn't a total hack. And she can make a steaming pot of tea and a mean cucumber sandwich, which they all daintily munch on while talking about vampirism and lycanthropy.
  • After tea, they skip the crumpets and head straight for tealeaf reading, which is our kind of party.
  • Madame Dorothea sees "violence" and "love with the wrong person" (7.69) in Jace's cup and just a pile of green mush in Clary's cup.
  • Wait. Why doesn't Clary have a future in a teacup? Madame Dorothea believes that someone might have put a block on her mind.
  • This fortune-telling emergency requires Madame Dorothea to bust out the Tarot cards. She uses her own personal deck, which was hand-painted by Clary's mother.
  • Clary draws the Ace of Cups, and Madame Dorothea launches into a story about Clary's mother's past.
  • She says that not only was Jocelyn a Shadowhunter, but their apartment building was supposed to be a Sanctuary from Valentine (remember him?).
  • Hmm. It sure doesn't look like that worked out too well.
  • The plan, if it had worked, would have been for Jocelyn to escape through the Portal in Madame Dorothea's apartment. The Portal's a door set into an exterior wall between two windows, so it doesn't just go outside; it could teleport someone anywhere.
  • Curious to know where her mother would have ended up, Clary yanks the door open and tumbles through.
  • That's pretty much like pushing a giant red blinking Emergency Self-Destruct button, but we'll go with it.