You owe me!

“Master Loup! Not that I would ever question the wisdom of a Master of the Beggars Guild, but is there a particular reason you are going to cook this Day Walker?”

Loup looks at me and sighs. “He followed us into the Guild.” He sounds offended at the effrontery of St. Juste’s behavior. “He entered without an invitation.”

We both look at St. Juste squirming in his bonds.

“Well …,” I say. “Before you cook him, have you asked why he dared to follow the Ghosts?”

Loup shakes his head, looking sullen. He gestures to another Ghost to remove the gag from St. Juste’s mouth.

He gasps, dragging in long breaths of air.

“You—” St. Juste starts.

“You have very little time, and even fewer words to use, so I suggest you put them to good use,” I advise him. “Why did you follow the Ghosts and enter their Guild?”

“I was looking for Lord Orso. I had a rendezvous with him, and he never appeared.”

“Why would the Dead Lord have rendezvous with a Day Walker?”

“He said he that knew my uncle, that he would tell me stories about how it was when they were young men together, before the revolution failed, before my father was fed to the guillotine, before every man, woman, and child in my family was hunted down and hanged at Montfaucon simply for bearing the name of St. Juste.

“I have never met anybody alive who could tell of them. So when he did not come, I was worried, and followed the beggars to this place.”

A lie! A lie! Feed him to the pot!

The cloth is stuffed back into St. Juste’s mouth, and he scowls, trying to talk, but nobody can decipher what he is saying.

I look around at the Ghosts, crammed into every space in the cavern, their eyes glimmering with a strange madness.

“Before you suck the marrow from his bones,” I say, “is there anyone who can verify his tale? Is there any among you that saw the Dead Lord with this Day Walker?”

A silence greets my question, and then a movement, a pushing and shoving, and the smallest Ghost, the ashen little boy who led us here, appears at the front.

“Did you witness this, Gray Brother?” Loup demands.

The boy solemnly nods.

“Was it before Father went away?”

He nods again.

“And were you ever going to speak up, Gavroche?” Loup says in a tone that is both exasperated and threatening.

Gavroche looks slightly put out, and I step hurriedly between them.

“Master Loup, what is happening? Where is the Dead Lord? What has become of him?”

“He cannot return,” Loup says. “They took him, and they put him in the place where we cannot reach him.”

All around us, the Ghosts wail their strange screeching cries.

I frown. “Who did this? Who took him, Master Loup?”

As I ask the question, I realize I already know the answer; it hums in my bones, with a certainty.