“I will,” Marcello promised.

The blue door closed. We stood in the Street of the Ratcatchers, forced close together by the narrow passage.

“The old woman burned.” I took a breath sharp with horror. “Marcello, do you think she …”

“It’s not uncommon.” Worry furrowed his brow. “You heard Jerith. Once they succumb to their flames, warlocks have little to no control over whom they kill.”

“And she heard Jerith, too.” I gripped my falcon’s-head brooch until the pin pricked my skin. “We have to find her. Come on. Let’s check that abandoned laundry.”

The back door to the laundry hung off its hinges, splintered wood showing fresh and white. I caught a rank whiff of mouse droppings wafting out. With boards covering the windows, the interior was black as a demon’s soul.

Marcello took out a pocket luminary from his pouch and shook the glass globe vigorously until a pale glow kindled within.

“This will only give us a few minutes of light,” he warned.

“I know.” Holding my breath, I stepped past him through the door.

The faint glow cast hulking shadows behind empty laundry vats and struck a glitter off some broken glass. A messy bundle of blankets lay on the stone floor in one corner, next to a cracked pitcher and the stub end of a candle. A stingroach scuttled away from the light.

Unease hooked cold claws through my chest. “She’s not here.”

Marcello shone the luminary around, but the spark inside it was already fading. “You’re right. Let’s go.”

Back outside, I stood closer to Marcello than was strictly necessary, for the reassurance of his unquestionable solidity and warm gunpowder-and-leather smell. “Why would she prefer that over the Mews?”

“It’s not that this is better,” he said. “It’s that she didn’t get to choose.”

The chill night air cut straight through my stockings. I rubbed my ankles together to keep them warm. We’d been walking for hours, and a dull weariness spread through my limbs.

“Now what?” I asked.

“We keep searching. She’s around here somewhere, looking for her lost dog, of all things. Can you pick up any sense of where she might be?”

I tried to focus. Water slapped against the walls of a nearby canal. Someone was singing not far off, in a voice lubricated with wine.

An itch nagged at the back of my mind—a feeling I’d forgotten something important.

“Maybe,” I said.

Marcello nodded encouragingly. “Where? Which way?”

“I don’t know.” But if I had to pick a direction …“That way?” I pointed, unsure why it felt right, only knowing it did.

“All right.” His voice deepened with grim purpose. “Let’s find Zaira, before someone else does.”