Noiselessly the key is swallowed. It becomes nothing. And the veil just keeps on shimmering, rippling like nothing has changed at all.

“Did it work?” I ask, but I already know the answer.

Finn hesitates, then shakes his head. “I still feel it.” I do too.

My mother is crying now, full body-racking sobs. “It’s not going to work,” she says, finally audible. “It’s not going to work.”

I walk over to her and place my hands on her shoulders. “What are you talking about? Why are you here?” I turn to my father. “Why is she here?”

My father looks nearly as lost as I feel. “She arrived in my office an hour ago in a similar state to what she’s currently in. Said only that we needed to get to the catacombs and showed me the way here. She said you were in trouble. I sent your friends here a message by courier to meet us. Your mother said there was no time to explain. Vera, please, will you explain now?”

“How did you get to Paris?” I ask.

Light sparks in my mother’s eyes and she looks almost like herself once more. “I took a ship, silly,” she says weakly.

“And why did you take a ship, Mom? Why are you here?”

Tears fall down her hollow cheeks and she sits down on the dirt floor, collapsing in on herself. “Because I cannot lose another child.”

It is as if the air is sucked from all of our lungs simultaneously. “What do you mean?” I ask, my heart hammering so loudly I can scarcely hear myself over the blood rushing in my ears.

“I had a vision,” she says. My mother and I haven’t spoken at length about her magic since her release from the asylum, but we have discussed it a time or two. She’s a clairvoyant, like Lena. And from the little I’ve gathered, an awfully good one, when she isn’t trying to suffocate her power. It’s part of why Mrs. Vykotsky was so disappointed when she left Haxahaven.

“A vision?” I prod.

She nods. “Of you, of us, here.”

“And?” I ask.

She swallows, “And you die.”

Pascal, the two Brothers of Morte d’Arthur, and Benny are safely tied up a ways down the hall. There is no more looming threat. I don’t know what she means. The danger is gone. “Maybe you were mistaken.”

“No… no.” She cries softly.

“How do you know for certain?” Lena asks gently. “Sometimes, I misunderstand my visions.”

My mother shakes her head sadly. “I know for certain, because I know the story. I know how to close the veil.”

Her words settle like dust.

“What?” I gasp.

She takes a shaky breath. “That key was nothing. But you already know that, don’t you?”