I got to my feet. “Meh. Not enough. I need to know how you guys know so much about us. Now that would be worth something. Maybe even a quick death.”

His eyes glinted with eagerness. “We have many ways.”

“You’re going to have to be a lot more specific than that, Clarence. Do you guys have anyone else at our school?”

He nodded, smiling, his pointy teeth sticking out over his bottom lip.

“Who? Who is watching us?”

He winced and shook his head. “She would know. She would eat my heart.”

I gritted my teeth. “Then what can you tell me?”

He lifted his head off the mat. “Your mother misses you. Rita wants you so badly, girl. You are deeply in her head. So deep that my poor sister cannot get her mind off you.”

“Shut up.” I took a step back.

“Your mother didn’t even scream when we took her. No struggle. Her soul slipped free like it had been hanging by a thread. I wonder if your eyes will look like Rita’s did as the Queen takes hold of you. So wide. So perfect.”

“Enough!” Malachi roared.

I snapped to, realizing with disgust that there were tears on my face. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, how they had tied my mother to a table and torn her soul away from her. I couldn’t shake that vision of her wide gold-brown eyes, of the ropes around her wrists.

Jim touched my arm. “Raphael’s here.”

I opened my mouth, gasping in a shuddering breath. I brushed my sleeves over my cheeks and turned around. Raphael stood against the wall. “Do you know why I called you here?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Will you open the doorway?”

His eyes lingered on my face, solemn, unreadable. He nodded again.

Without looking away from me, he ran the flat of his palm along the concrete wall of the basement, and a door appeared. He turned the knob and opened it, and beyond the threshold I could see one of the stone corridors of the Guard Station in the dark city, lined with gas lamps giving off that melancholy greenish light. Malachi’s gaze flitted toward it, and then he turned away, like it hurt him to think about going back there. In the distance, I could see two of the enormous, inhuman Guards striding toward us. One of them was carrying the thick leather muzzle and mittens made especially to protect from Mazikin teeth and claws.

“Tell them to take him straight to the dark tower,” I said to Malachi, my voice hard and cold and frighteningly steady.

As Clarence began to shriek and writhe, I headed to the stairs, seeing nothing in front of my face but my mother’s eyes, feeling nothing but a restless tug in my chest, making me wonder if my soul was fastened as tightly as it needed to be to get me through whatever was coming.