Martin’s suction finally took, and the creature’s body weight began to decline, slowly at first, then more noticeably. Martin, by contrast, began to flush red through his curtain of dirt. She felt the life go out of the human. The body became limp. A moment later, Martin let go.

“There’s more,” she said.

He slumped. “I cannot.” He found a chair, fell into it. At least he wasn’t crawling anymore. That was an improvement.

The blood and fluids that were left had to be taken. The remnant could not be left to rot. She carried it across the room and sat also, on the foot of the stairs. She laid the body out on her lap, bent down and sucked it until there was nothing left to take, just the dry, cream-colored skin tight across the bones.

“Is there acid in any of the vats?”

He shook his head. “That’s all finished. No more tannery.”

Too bad. It had been a great convenience in the old days, because the remnants could simply be dissolved. It had been Mom’s charming idea to let the tanners come in.

“What do you do?”

He looked at her. “Miriam—it is you, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Martin.”

“I haven’t eaten in a year.”

Her mouth opened, but she did not speak, could not. She’d heard of Keepers going hungry for six months, even more—but how could he ever have survived this? How could he still live?

“Martin —”

“I begged for death, many times. But it did not come. Would not come.” He smiled a little. “I was turning into one of those . . . those things that you make.”

He was referring to her humans, to what happened to them when her blood in their veins stopped keeping them young. Keepers might not communicate with each other much, but it seemed that everybody knew of Miriam and her humans.

“It’s nothing like that. You would have died in the end.”

He nodded.“No doubt.” He raised his eyes to hers. She looked deep into the burning, black pools. Martin was thousands of years older than she.

“We are coming to our end, Miriam,” he said.

“We aren’t!”

He nodded slowly, not as if he was agreeing with her, but more as if he was humoring her. “You need to find a way to destroy that,” he said. “They’ll miss that man soon, and they’re bound to come here searching.”

“Why here? We’ve always been safe here. This is my mother’s house.”

“The City of Paris owns this structure. There are plans to make it part of the Musée des Gobelins, starting next year.” He made a dismissive gesture with his hands, a gesture that expressed vast defeat, vast sorrow. “They’ll clear all this rubbish out.”

“Martin, you were thriving just—well, just a few years ago.”

His face, which had filled out and now bore a smeared, filthy resemblance to the narrow-lipped elegance she remembered from the past, opened into a smile. The smile quickly turned bitter and ugly. “During the war, the Resistance built a secret headquarters in the Denfert-Rochereau ossuary. They heard us, deeper down, in the old labyrinth.”