The din continued unabated, however, until the first Sid brought his massive fists together above his head and shouted, “Oi! Quiet or I’ll crush your mangy skulls!”

“That’s right!” agreed the other Sid; apparently they had put their differences behind them.

There was a fair bit of grumbling, and a nearby werewolf muttered, “Mangy! Well!” But eventually, the crowd quieted down.

“Steady on,” James whispered. “How is a mermaid going to get down the stairs?”

There was a pause, and Christopher, who had taken off his spectacles to clean them, said, “How did the mermaid get up the stairs?”

Thomas shrugged.

“Good evening, my friends!” Matthew called, to a smattering of polite applause. “Tonight we have something truly exceptional to present to you in honor of an old friend of the Devil. You have been kind enough to tolerate the presence of us Merry Thieves for several years now—”

“We just thought you Shadowhunters were raiding the place,” Polly spoke up with a smirk, “and taking your time about it.”

“Tomorrow, one of us—the first of us—marches to his doom and joins the ranks of you poor married sods,” Matthew continued. “But tonight, we send him off in style!”

Hoots and cheers accompanied shouted jests and pounding on tables. A satyr and a squat horned creature near the front stood up and pantomimed a lewd embrace, until someone threw a sausage at them. At the piano, one of the hobgoblins struck up a light comic tune. Music filled the room, and Matthew held up his witchlight. Glimmering, it illuminated a figure descending the stairs.

James wondered for a moment whether this was the first time someone had used a witchlight rune-stone as stage lighting before he realized what he was looking at and his mind went blank. Christopher made a small noise in the back of his throat, and Thomas stared wide-eyed.

The mermaid had human legs. They were long and really quite shapely, James had to admit, loosely draped in diaphanous skirts made of woven exotic seaweeds.

Unfortunately, from the waist up she was the front half of a gaping, staring fish. Her scales were shiny metallic silver and reflected the light in a way that almost, but not quite, distracted from her dinner-plate-size, unblinking yellow eyes.

The audience went mad, cheering and hooting twice as loudly as before. One of the werewolves howled, “CLARIBELLA!” in a mournful, yearning voice.

“May I present,” Matthew cried with a grin, “Claribella the Mermaid!”

The crowd whistled and banged their approval. James, Christopher, and Thomas struggled to find words.

“The mermaid’s backward,” said James, having regained some of his vocabulary—though perhaps not all of it.

“Matthew hired a reverse mermaid,” Thomas agreed. “But why?”

“I wonder what kind of fish she is,” said Christopher. “Are mermaids a specific kind of fish? Sharks, or herring, or such?”

“I had kippers for breakfast this morning,” Thomas said sadly.