“No.” I shake my head. Something in these tunnels is calling to me. I have to know what it is.

The buzzing reverberates through each cell of my body, mounting until it becomes a pressure behind my eyes so strong, I begin to tear up. It’s like it’s picking me apart from the inside out, delicate and precise and devastating.

In the low light, just in front of me, Maxine doesn’t seem to be faring much better.

“Shit,” she curses as she stumbles forward, clutching at her ears.

“You feel it too?” I ask weakly.

She nods, grim. “Must mean we’re close.” It’s close to what that remains the question.

We follow the hallway left. The tunnels smell of fresh rain and something dead.

The light from Lena’s spell illuminates something on the wall. I stumble with a gasp, nearly falling to my knees.

“I—” I clutch my chest in shock, my heart pounds beneath my palm. “Did you see that?”

I lift the light I’ve conjured between my hands closer to the wall, and what I see is so terrifying for a moment I think I may be sick.

Staring back at me, large sockets devoid of eyes, mouths permanently open, is an entire wall of human skulls.

Lena swings her hands to the opposite wall, illuminating an elaborate crisscrossing pattern made of arm and leg bones.

This is hell. That’s the thought that first enters my head. I’ve walked into hell itself.

Maxine huffs out a laugh and shakes her head. “It’s the catacombs. We’ve found an entrance to the catacombs.”

“The what?” I ask, nearly on the verge of tears in fear.

“A few hundred years ago, Paris ran out of cemetery space,” she explains. “They relocated all the bodies down here to make room for new ones. I’ve heard there are entrances all over the city. The tunnels stretch on for miles, allegedly.”

“Miles…,” Lena marvels. “We should probably turn back then, before we get lost down here forever.”

I want nothing more than to return to the surface of the earth, away from the bones and the sharp buzzing, but I can’t go yet, not until I know what this is.

“Please,” I beg. “Just a little farther, then we’ll all go up together.”

Lena and Maxine look to each other, then nod.

We turn another corner, on and on through this labyrinth of bones.

The buzzing continues, awful and scratchy under my skin, but if I have destroyed the veil between the living and the dead, if my magic and the lives of others hang in the balance, I have no choice but to press on.

The light changes so subtly I think I’m imagining it at first. No longer pitch dark, there is a weak silvery-blue light, barely visible along the seam where the earth meets the bones.

Then we turn the corner and I see it.