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“We’ll be fine. Enjoy your evening,” I told her. “Studying?”

“Studying,” she agreed with a sigh, though she returned my smile. We’d been able to increase Mina’s wages and she was no longer behind on her tuition payments. She’d also moved to a new apartment, one closer to school and the shelter, and far more comfortable than her previous cramped accommodations.

She pulled on her coat and headed out. I paused to pet Thoreau, who was napping by the fire. Banshee, I assumed, was downstairs with Havelock. This had become her habit whenever Havelock was in his workshop, which hadn’t been often these past two weeks; he had been occupied with tracking down Valérie’s remaining followers. Whether it was to destroy their Artefacts and discourage future attacks upon himself or simply to seek revenge, I wasn’t clear—given the charity’s newfound popularity, I’d had little time for the intrigues of magicians.

Ambulance, meanwhile, had found a home—with Laurent.

He’d come to apologize the day after Valérie’s attack, and though Élise had been disinclined to let him through the door, I had been pleased to have the opportunity to officially forgive him, and had accepted his apology warmly, ignoring Élise’s ferocious glare from across the room. She would say later that Laurent had taken advantage of my generosity, as others had done before, but as I was often reminding her, I would rather be taken advantage of now and again than go through life seeing monsters everywhere.

Laurent had seemed relieved by my reaction, and I could tell that his conscience had not been easy since our last encounter. It was only when he had asked if he could do anything else to make amends that I had felt my gaze slide to little Ambulance.

Did it give me some fleeting satisfaction to contemplate the broken cups and vases, not to mention hours of lost sleep, that Laurent would have to contend with in the coming weeks? I will not deny it. However, I would not have given Ambulance over to Laurent if I did not think the match a good one. Laurent’s guilty conscience, I suspected, would be a strong motivator for him to make a proper house cat out of Ambulance, who had seemed intimidated by Laurent’s cool confidence in handling him. The cat needed boundaries.

We’d spent the past few days in peace, more or less; the newspapers had at last stopped reporting on our doings and printing endless speculation about Havelock’s whereabouts, and had moved on to the next story. It helped that Havelock had made himself scarce, as I’d asked, admitting not even magician visitors to his workshop. Our foot traffic had yet to lessen, and I was beginning to make plans to open another shelter on the north side of the city. Élise joked that we would soon run out of cats to house, which was not a fantasy I would allow myself to entertain yet, though as the days passed with cats being adopted almost as soon as they arrived and donations pouring in, it seemed less and less improbable.

As for Havelock, on the few occasions I’d seen him, I’d had the sense that he was on the verge of saying something to me—something meaningful, not another wry remark—but each time I’d given him the chance, usually with a warm, encouraging look, he’d made some excuse and disappeared, once literally. I was beginning to think I’d imagined that there was anything connecting us beyond the banality of landlord and tenant.

I went to the back room and lifted the trapdoor. “Havelock?” I called. I wasn’t certain what exactly I wanted him for, only I preferred to know where he was, out of some desire to fix him to the tangible world, I think. He still ate and slept but rarely, and vanished mysteriously with such frequency that he often seemed to exist merely as a lurking presence, or perhaps a sentient shadow, and I wished to change that.

I went down to the first floor, where I found his worktable cluttered and abandoned. I wondered if he’d gone to speak to Yannick, who was over at the other shelter, filling in for one of our volunteers. Yannick had taken a shine to our charges and had even worked out how to embed a wellness spell in a cat’s claws, which was longer-lasting than spells attached to the cats themselves. We didn’t enchant the cats often these days—just one or two, here and there, to ensure the rumours kept circulating.

“Havelock?” I called again. My voice seemed to dissolve against the cabinets full of Artefacts, gleaming in the spiderlight—for of course Havelock had recast the enchantment on the poor spiders. The first floor of the basement was still filled with cabinets of beautiful antiquities, but it was a desert from a magical perspective; not one Artefact had retained its enchantment after Havelock had unleashed the magic in Vortigern’s lantern. As much as Havelock had moaned about it, he still had plenty of Artefacts to continue his experiments, as the other floors had been unaffected.

There came a low rumbling sound I knew well, and I followed it around the side of Havelock’s worktable to find Banshee curled up on his chair, blinking sleepily at me.

“Well!” I said, giving her nose a teasing tap. “And what would the Witch King think of this? Don’t tell me—he scowled, and insulted you in some witty fashion, then pretended that he didn’t need the chair after all?”

Banshee gave a contented stretch. She looked about, then gave a huff and hopped to the floor.

“He’s downstairs, is he?” I said, and could not help smiling as Banshee continued to stalk forward as if determined to give Havelock a dreadful lecture for sneaking off without her knowledge. But then Banshee had often seemed to view Robin and me as if we were troublemaking wards she must watch over, rather than the reverse, which she seemed now to have extended to Havelock.

Banshee’s reaction to His Majesty’s departure had been difficult to gauge—I had assumed she would appreciate it; His Majesty might have excepted Banshee from his bullying, but he had rarely been kind to her. Yet at times I had the sense that she was looking over her shoulder for someone, and she seemed small and forlorn resting on the armchair she had been wont to share with the larger cat. She had taken to Cataclysm instantly—that was what we had named the black kitten, whom I hadn’t put up for adoption, given Banshee’s affection for her. I wondered if the other cat, having been plucked from her own time by enchantment, bore some lingering scent of magic enticing to Banshee’s danger-loving nose. They now spent much of their time curled up together by the oven.

There had been one clear beneficiary of His Majesty’s departure: Thoreau.

With the old cat now safe from His Majesty’s vicious brand of bullying, I had officially adopted him. Not that he didn’t have other suitors; given the newfound popularity of Les Amis des Chats, even our older or more difficult cases were often spoken for within days, but I’d found that, once the prospect was actually before me, it was too difficult to contemplate parting with him.

I had seen His Majesty—and Valerie—again, purely by chance. Valérie had been emerging from a hotel only a few blocks away, her hood drawn up to hide her face. I would have thought she would flee Montréal as soon as possible, but according to Yannick, she’d been lurking around the shelter for days, clearly hoping to cross paths with Havelock without having to actually beg him for an audience, either out of fear or pride. Yannick thought she would try to convince Havelock to undo Vortigern’s enchantment, but I wondered if it wasn’t a guilty conscience where her brother was concerned, or some sentiment at least, that had kept her in the city.

His Majesty had been sprawled over Valérie’s shoulder, her hand supporting his rear end and his front paws dangling, looking as happy as if he had been presented with a dish of raw sparrows. What he saw in Valérie, I doubt I will ever know, or perhaps he simply enjoyed her habit of carrying him about with her like an emperor on a litter. But I had known, in that moment, that I could not take him from her.

I would have gone home that instant and cried myself sick, but the wind had blown Valérie’s hood back a little, and I caught a glimpse of her face. She was looking at His Majesty, perhaps to check his balance, and in her eyes I saw exasperation mixed with affection, characteristic of every cat owner I knew. The warmth in it made me start, and even if it lasted only a heartbeat before she turned to the waiting car, her usual marble serenity settling over her once more, I could not stop thinking about it.

I followed Banshee down to the fourth floor of the basement, where the greatest convocation of spiders always gathered, making the place feel almost like full day, and there I found Havelock on his knees, rummaging through a chest, having swept the hem of his cloak around him to use as a kneepad. It was one of his odder ones, shabby and grey but with unexpected flounces, exactly the style I pictured on a travelling magician in the Renaissance.

“Did you not hear me calling you?” I demanded. “Have you been down here with the spiders all day?”

Havelock blinked at me, then glanced around at the spiders as if noticing them for the first time. “I must hold court with my subjects sometimes, mustn’t I?”

“Come upstairs,” I said. “I already know you haven’t eaten. Rémy brought us a quiche.”

“One moment.” He held up one ringed hand and stood, seeming to forget all about whatever he had been looking for in the chest. “I finished work on them today. I was going to wait until you went out, so as to surprise you when you returned. But knowing you, you’ll be here till midnight cleaning cages, then up at dawn to do your accounts over again, and not give me another opportunity.”

“Finished work on what?” I said. “Also, my accounts never need doing over, as I do them correctly the first time.”

He only held up his hand again, then he sifted through his pocket, unearthing a piece of string, then a crystal, then a compass, a pinecone, and a handful of pearls. These he picked through until he found the largest one, then rummaged about in his other pocket until he came out with a beautiful yellow feather that looked distinctly tropical. He held them in either hand and muttered incantations over them, and the air filled with the smell of magic. Then the building gave a gentle rumble.

“What was that?” I cried, grabbing at the nearest cabinet. “Please tell me you haven’t moved the shop again.”