For a minute, there is silence. Then there is the noise of my tears once more, dripping on the dirt floors of the catacombs, leaving little spots where they fall like confetti at the end of a terrible party.

It’s over. He is gone.

The veil is no longer the veil, it’s just a wall.

I fall back to my knees and sob but no sound comes out, it’s all stuck in my throat and I’m choking on it. He’s gone, he’s gone, he’s gone. Lena and Maxine appear on either side of me and haul me to my feet. “C’mon, Frances,” Lena encourages gently. “We need to go.”

We round the corner where the Brothers of Morte d’Arthur and Benny sit tied up. Oliver undoes Benny’s ropes and helps him to his feet. “Thank you, thank you.” Blubbers.

“What about them?” Oliver whispers to my father, and gestures to Pascal and the others who still lie unconscious.

“They’ll be all right,” my father says. “The next guard watch will be here at midnight. They’ll untie them.”

Oliver turns to Benny. “Tell the others,” he says. “Tell Les Selectionnes who Finn really was, that he’s dead.”

I swallow the new sob that bubbles up in my throat. Oliver’s eyes are full of pity, but I know he doesn’t understand my tears for Finn. I don’t know if I’ll ever have the words to explain them.

“And what will they do now that the veil is shut?” Oliver asks my father.

My father replies, “They’ll do what they have always done. They will stand watch in holy places and pray it opens once again.”

“And what about the men who used the spell to make themselves immortal?” Lena asks.

My father makes his way for the exit, and we follow him as he explains. I trip over my own feet, my eyes still too swollen to see clearly. Maxine takes her arm around my waist and steadies me. “Who knows if the spell is worth anything. We’ll have fifty more years before we can know for certain. And if there is a small group of men who have cursed themselves to walk this earth forever, living until she dissolves into flames, well… that is their own problem to solve, isn’t it?”

But some part of me remembers the strange duke and believes it to be true.

We navigate the serpentine halls by the light of my mother’s spell and climb the rickety staircase up out of the depths of the earth. Maxine all but carries me out, my hiccupping sobs echoing off the walls of the catacombs no matter how hard I try to quiet them.