“Please don’t mistake our intent,” Ariadne said in an even, soothing tone. “We are not looking to bring trouble to anyone. Jesse Blackthorn is long dead. We only wish to know what happened to him.”

Hypatia stared suspiciously at the three of them for a long moment, then threw up her hands with a sigh. She pushed her papers aside, searching the counter until she found a dish of candy pastilles and selected one, not bothering to offer any to the others. “So tell me, what is it you think this warlock was hired to do?”

“You know about first runes?” Lucie said, and Hypatia nodded, looking bored. “Most children get through the procedure easily. A few suffer ill effects. Jesse Blackthorn died in agony.” She swallowed hard. “And—we are told a warlock may have been involved in what happened to him.”

Hypatia popped the sweet into her mouth. “Would his mother have been a woman with a peculiar Russian sort of name?”

“Yes,” Lucie said eagerly. “Tatiana.”

Hypatia regarded them over her tented hands. “Some years ago she sought a warlock’s help in putting protection spells on her son. He had just been born, and she did not want to involve the Silent Brothers or Iron Sisters. She claimed she didn’t trust Shadowhunters. Can’t blame her, but none of us wanted to get involved—none of us except Emmanuel Gast.”

Emmanuel Gast. A shudder ran through Lucie as she remembered Gast’s body lying ruined on the bare floorboards of his flat. Flesh and bone had been carved apart, ribs cracked open to show a collapsed red cavern. Blood had sunk in black grooves into the wooden floor. The most human-looking part of him left were his hands, his arms outflung with the hands turned palm up as if he were begging for mercy he had not received.

Emmanuel Gast had done Belial’s bidding, and been killed for it. A suspicion stirred in the back of Lucie’s mind, though she kept her expression blankly curious.

“The warlock who was killed during the summer?” said Ariadne.

“That’s the one.” Hypatia seemed unperturbed. “He was quite corrupt—the warlock council eventually had to forbid him to practice magic.”

“So is it possible,” said Ariadne, “that he placed the protection spells on Jesse Blackthorn, but he did it incorrectly? They’re meant to be done by the Silent Brothers.”

“And that caused the first rune to malfunction somehow? A clever thought,” said Anna, and the two girls looked at each other, seeming to enjoy a moment of shared detecting.

Maybe it was more than detecting. Ariadne gazed at Anna with unabashed longing, Lucie realized, and Anna—was there a softness in the way she looked back at Ariadne? It was not a look Lucie had seen on Anna’s face before.