Ragnor nodded his shaggy head slowly. “One would think,” he said. “And yet what we are seeing here is that someone has cleared the minor demons out of London in order to make a path for those even more dangerous.” Ragnor hesitated. “Among warlocks, my name is often invoked when dimensional magic is spoken of—the most difficult and unstable kind of magic, the kind that involves other worlds than ours. I have made myself a student of it, and none knows more than I. Demons cannot appear in daylight. It is a rule of nature. And yet. Are there ways to bring demons into this world that would make them impervious to it?”

“Yes?” Lucie hazarded.

Ragnor glared. “Don’t expect me to tell you what they are,” he said. “Only that they are forbidden by the Spiral Labyrinth, for they involve complex dimensional magic that presents a danger to the fabric of the world itself.” He shook his white mane of hair. “I do not have solid information, only rumors and guesses. I would not betray one of my own kind to a member of the Clave unless I knew for certain that they were guilty of a crime, for the Clave would arrest them first and examine the evidence later. But you… you are children. Not yet in the Clave. If you were to look into this…”

“We won’t tell Father anything you don’t want us to,” James promised. “We won’t tell anyone. We swear it on Raziel’s name.”

“Except Cordelia,” said Lucie hurriedly. “She is to be my parabatai. I cannot hide things from her. But we will not tell anyone else, and certainly not a single adult.”

There was a murmur as the others promised along with her. To swear something, for a Shadowhunter, was a serious thing; to swear on the name of the Angel was even more serious.

Ragnor turned to James. “Few warlocks could perform this magic, and even fewer would be willing. In fact, I can think of only one so corrupt. Emmanuel Gast. Word among the warlocks is, if the price is high enough, there is no work too low for him. I do not know if the rumor is true, but I do know his address.”

Ragnor went to the writing desk in the corner of the room and scratched the address down upon a sheet of paper. Lucie stared at the Waterman’s gold-embossed fountain pen in Ragnor Fell’s heavy hands, an extra joint on each finger making the shadow of his hand upon the page seem almost a claw.

“Thank you,” said James, when the warlock was done.