Malachi’s fists were clenched. “We should take her now, Lela. We can get her back to the Guard house. Interrogate her. We could find out where the nest is. And then we can kill this body and release your mother’s soul.”

He was almost pleading with me, and I couldn’t understand why. Something she’d said had made him desperate, though, and willing to stray from the careful plan we’d laid out. One in which he didn’t kill my mother in the middle of the DCYF building.

“We can’t take her,” I answered. “Listen to her. She’ll pitch a fit, and we’ll get ourselves in trouble.” I glared at him, willing him to remember the freaking plan—to follow her back to the nest.

Malachi stepped back as a few social workers walked by and cast anxious glances into the room.

“Lela,” Rita said, edging around the opposite side of the table. “Sil say you come to him, he let you friends live. We go … away.”

“You’re saying that if I go to Sil, you guys will leave my friends alone and, what? Just disappear?” It was a ridiculous offer. Wherever they went, we’d have to hunt them.

She nodded, her eyes darting across the table to Malachi, who looked like he was about to lose it as she inched closer to me. “Podrías estar con tu mamá.”

“Shut up,” Malachi snapped. “Cuando te matamos, quedará libre el alma de su madre.”

Rita’s eyes grew wide, and her mouth dropped into an O-shape. And then she started to laugh, this high-pitched, hooting giggle. “No,” she said. “Nunca será libre. Una vez que el alma de un humano se atrape, no tiene ninguna salida de la ciudad de los Maziquines.”

Malachi froze. “You’re lying.”

“Translate,” I said. “Now!”

He ignored me and stalked around the table, sending Rita scurrying toward me. Words I didn’t understand flew from his mouth while he followed her. She wasn’t paying attention to him, though; she was whispering to me.

“Sil say you come to him,” she kept saying. “You friends. He kill them if you don’t come. He take them. Make them us.”

“And if I come?” I asked, my heart hammering as she got close, my stomach roiling as I inhaled her sweet, sick scent.

“Lela, do not dare consider this.” The urgency in Malachi’s voice was impossible to miss.

“Translate,” I said from between clenched teeth, refusing to look at him.

He obeyed. Rita smiled and replied in Spanish, and whatever she said was the last straw. Malachi lunged for her, and she pitched onto all fours and scuttled around by my feet, pulling me in front of her. She grabbed my hand and kissed it, and then tossed a crumpled piece of paper onto the table and ripped the door open.

“He wait for you,” she said to me. “But not forever.”