I wracked my brain, trying to figure out her connection to us. The more I stared at her, the harder it became to concentrate on her face, like she was being erased from my memory in real time. Then I thought about the picture of Frankie’s mom. The woman with the blurry face in the background—it was her.

The missing piece snapped in place. I remembered the suspicious squirrel on our walk home from school. “Where’s Frankie?” I demanded, my voice trembling. I wouldn’t let myself fear the worst.

Butcher smiled, and it was full of spite and mischief. “You four will fetch a fair reward from the Lord of Shadows. Better than the one I got for helping break Tyana Nulan and the others out of prison.”

Her words cut deep. Everything was falling apart. The Lord of Shadows had yet another ally. Captain Nulan was free, along with all the prisoners from Alsar. And here was another crony looking to seed chaos with no regard for anyone else. She didn’t have to come out and say what happened to Frankie’s mom. She wasn’t called Butcher for nothing.

Eli cracked his knuckles, and an icy breeze swept through the room. Shadows peeled away from the portraits on the walls and settled into the ghosts of the past head librarians.

“What is happening in my library?” one of them said.

“Is that dust on my portrait?” said another. “How untidy.”

“I need you to focus,” Eli told them, then he turned back to Butcher. “Where. Is. Frankie?”

Butcher wagged her finger. “That’s for me to know and you to find out.” Two figures emerged from the shadows. The man at the top of the spiraling staircase was twice the size of a pro wrestler, with bulging biceps and sharp spikes along his forearms. The second man appeared in the mouth of the hallway in front of us. He had translucent skin, puckered fish lips, and four tentacles instead of arms and legs. These were the other two Azurians in the photo with Frankie’s mom. “Meet my friend Spike,” Butcher said, looking up at the man on the balcony, then she turned to the one with the tentacles. “And Crusher.”

“Did you clowns get your names from the back of a cereal box or what?” Eli said as his ghosts closed ranks. “So unoriginal.”

Butcher smiled again, revealing sharp, pointed teeth that hadn’t been there moments ago. Conveniently, she also had grown claws. Eleni let out a little gasp beside me, and I swallowed hard. Zeran tugged at his sleeves. Then he seemed to realize that he’d lost his prods when we went up against the adze in the bayou. Instead, he tried to make one of his animations. The chairs and tables and photos in the lobby shook, but they resisted his pull.