He had drawn his hands back; they were trembling. She realized with a slight shock that the metal cuff was no longer on his wrist. Grace must have taken it back. “You are the first person I’ve told, aside from Matthew. Last night—”

Christopher exploded into the room like a small cyclone. He was hatless and wore a frock coat that looked as if it had probably belonged to his father, made of herringbone with several holes burned into the cuffs. “Here you are,” he said, as if they had betrayed him by not being in a more easily discovered location. “I have come with news.”

James rose to his feet. “What is it, Kit?”

“Those wooden shards you sent me,” said Christopher. “Thomas and I were able to analyze them using the laboratory in the tavern.”

“The wooden shards? The ones we thought might be weapons?” said Cordelia.

Christopher nodded. “The peculiar thing is that the acid that had burned the wood was the blood of some sort of demon, and there was demonic residue on the wood, but only on one side of each shard.”

James’s eyes widened. “Say that again.”

“Only on one side of each shard,” said Christopher obediently. “As if it had been placed there deliberately.”

“No.” James reached into his pocket and drew out a folded paper. Cordelia recognized it as the sketch he and Matthew had found at Gast’s. He held it out to Cordelia. “I meant to ask you before,” he said, urgency underlining his tone. “I thought when I first glanced at this that they were runes—I don’t know what on earth was in my head. Some of these are alchemical symbols, but the others are clearly Old Persian writing, probably from the Achaemenid era.”

Cordelia took the paper from James. She had not been able to look at the paper closely before, but James was right—below the odd symbols was a name in Old Persian. The cuneiform writing did look a bit like runes, but she recognized it immediately; her mother had insisted she and Alastair know at least a little of the language of Darius the Great. “Merthykhuwar,” she said slowly. “It is a name for a kind of demon that existed in Persia long ago. Shadowhunters call it the Mandikhor.”

“Even mundanes have a word for it,” James said. “ ‘Manticore.’  ” He glanced over at Christopher. “I know what the shards are now,” he said. “How could I not have seen it before? They’re the remains of a Pyxis box.”

“A Pyxis?” Cordelia was startled. Long ago, Shadowhunters had developed wooden containers called Pyxis boxes to trap the essence of demons they hunted; after the Clockwork War, when Axel Mortmain had used a Pyxis box to transfer demon souls into clockwork monsters, they had been abandoned as a tool by the Nephilim. No one had used them for years.