Chris and I walked swiftly through the narrow and muddy streets of the Pigalle quarter, the only light coming from between the homeless huddled around piles of burning trash in the alleyways, their emaciated forms hidden by layers of rags. The buildings were pressed tightly together, windows boarded over and wooden frames weak with rot. Every so often, we passed a building that had collapsed from an earthshake, its bones picked away for wood to burn until nothing remained but the foundation.

The air was filled with the smell of the harbor fish markets, but Pigalle itself smelled like too many people stuffed into too small a place. Human filth, waste, and desperation. It made me think about what the King had said to me on the beach. It made me think he was right.

“This isn’t a safe part of town to be in, especially after dark,” Chris muttered, eyeing the brothel on our left, shrieks of laughter coming from its open doors.

“Why do you think I didn’t come alone?” I whispered back.

“How do you know this La Voisin woman isn’t a charlatan like all the others?”

“I felt the magic, and even if I hadn’t, I saw what the potion did to Julian,” I said. “One minute, he was devastated about my mother’s pending retirement, and the next, he couldn’t have cared less. Impassioned one moment, pure cold logic the next.”

“And Sabine meant for you to drink it?”

Angry heat prickled along my skin, but I shrugged it off. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“All right,” Chris said, rolling his shoulders uncomfortably as a group of dockworkers staggered by. “So it’s possible we could be walking toward Anushka herself?”

“I doubt it.” I laughed humorlessly, although that had been my original hope before I’d thought it through a little more. “Do you really think the woman who cursed the trolls to an eternity of captivity lives in the slums of Pigalle?”

“Good point,” he said. “So what are we doing here then?”

I bit the inside of my cheeks and said nothing, because I wasn’t precisely certain what I expected to gain from this mysterious witch. “A way to find Anushka.” A way to kill her.

“I think this is it,” Chris said, stopping in front of a short wooden building that was squeezed between two run-down boarding houses. Lines of laundry hung between windows of the taller buildings, dripping dirty water on the witch’s abode. The front of the building had no windows, only a narrow, unmarked door.

“Charming,” Chris muttered. I swallowed hard, knocked once, and opened the door.

It took a long moment for my eyes to adjust to the dim interior, and even longer for them to take in the chaos filling the room in front of us. The walls, what I could see of them, were jammed with shelves full of herbs, stones, and small statues. There were bottles containing creatures suspended in fluid, some animals, some I didn’t care to identify. The tables and cupboards littering the center of room were piled nearly to the ceiling with papers, books, bolts of fabric, more herbs, crystals, and unlit lamps, turning the room into a maze that I didn’t look forward to navigating. A small dog ran around a stack of books, barked at us once, and disappeared again.