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“I thought that was true,” she said, folding her arms around herself. I realized then how frightened she was. Élise didn’t show fear in the usual ways: she became still and quiet, and seemed to focus on something inside herself. She was like that after our parents died, as we sat in the hospital waiting room alongside the weeping relations of other patients. I recalled one of the nurses looking at her askance, thinking her cold, but I had known better.

“Agnes,” she said, “you should leave now. Before he comes back.”

I stared at her. “And go where?”

“I don’t know. Anywhere. You can stay with me and Gabriel until you get yourself sorted.”

“But the cats—”

“Your life is more important than the cats.” She came forward and put her hands on my shoulders, pinning me in place with her grey eyes, so much like mine. “Agnes, he tried to start an apocalypse.”

“Unsuccessfully,” I said, even as another wave of nausea swept over me.

“And why was he unsuccessful?” she asked rhetorically—no one knew what had stopped Havelock’s spell. The skies had darkened, the streets had filled with otherworldly shadows, and unnatural tremors had shaken the ground. Most assumed Havelock hadn’t had the power to end the world, not that he’d had some change of heart.

“And will he do it again?” Élise added.

“No,” I said. “I don’t think it’s true about him, Élise. Not everything, I mean. He claimed he was never trying to bring about the end of the world.”

I said it with more conviction than I felt. Because that hadn’t been what Havelock had said. What had he said? That it was complicated? Hardly a reassuring defense. Yet in my internal struggle between terror and fantasy—my fantasy about expanding the shelter, that is, and taking on more cats—it seemed that fantasy had won the day. Perhaps it was partly some form of self-defense against all I had seen, an excuse to think about something familiar, earthly. And yet—

I looked at the cats. Some slept in their nests of blankets, others watched me and Élise. I’d let a few out of their cages: those who wished to stretch their legs and were inclined to get along with one another. Clowder and her kittens were curled up in a heap by one of the radiators, and Thoreau, in one of his rare bursts of energy, was stalking a spider. I knew in that moment that I wouldn’t abandon them for any reason.

I’d always known this, of course, but I suppose I’d never truly understood how far my resolve would go, that it might even stretch wide enough to accommodate villains like Havelock. The realization was both distressing and comforting.

“Oh, well, if he wasn’t trying to,” Élise said with dark amusement. “An honest mistake on his part, was it? He meant to cast the spell for ironing his shirt, but he got it mixed up with the apocalypse one he had lying around?”

“Please,” I said, and something in my voice made her face soften. I knew she wasn’t done arguing with me, but Élise had always followed my lead. It was a relic from our childhood, when we’d been each other’s world.

“You know how I always tease you for needing to think the best of people?” she said. “That it’s a compulsion, and one day you would regret it? I knew you’d prove me right, I just didn’t expect it to be on this magnitude.”

“Believe me, I have no desire to think the best of Havelock Renard,” I said.

Élise gave me a long-suffering look.

“I don’t,” I insisted.

“I’d like to believe that,” she said. “The alternative is that you’ve grown tired of indulging figurative monsters and now feel the need to humanize the real ones. Well, let’s get to it.” She looked around the shelter, her expression grim. “I assume you made a checklist?”

I had, in fact, made a checklist while I’d been waiting for Élise, which listed all the requirements for equipping a second cat shelter. We spent much of the day securing additional cages, which required us to trudge through the snow to a farming supply store on the outskirts of the city, where we arranged to have them delivered to the shelter. Ordinarily I’d never have been able to afford so many new cages, not without scrimping and saving for months, but the recent increase in adoptions had brought with it an increase in donations, which gave us just enough to cover the cost.

On our way back to the Sainte-Sophie shelter, I convinced Élise to pass through an alley where I’d found cats sheltering before. There we met another orange tabby, who came barreling out of the cardboard box he’d been living in with an air of having expected us, then circled around me, screeching, as if I were monstrously late. He was a ragged little thing, not quite full grown, shivering in the cold.

He did not like to be picked up, evincing the contrariness that would be notable by its absence in any cat, but after I tucked him into the warmth of my coat he seemed to see the advantages, and dug his claws into my sweater. We walked the last mile back to the shelter thus, me cradling the cat with his head poking out of my coat, and him making an endless ruckus, mewling sonorously with what seemed like a combination of delight and terror. Well, I could understand that feeling well enough. His voice was remarkably loud and grating for such a tiny creature. Needless to say, Élise and I attracted stares the whole way home, as well as laughter and shouted remarks.

“He’s Banshee’s opposite,” Élise remarked during a brief moment of silence while the beast caught his breath.

“It’s like having an ambulance down my coat,” I grumbled, and thus Ambulance we named him.

The grim reality was that, with winter setting in, the city’s cat population would begin to decrease without our assistance. Soon we would be inundated with reports of cats sheltering on balconies and landings in the hopes of snatching tiny scraps of warmth, and we would not be able to help them all. But with a second shelter?

“We easily have space for another fifty here,” I told Mina the following morning—I’d sent her a telegram directing her to our new location. “I’d like you to telegram all our volunteers, past and present—I want people out searching no later than tomorrow. And I’m going to speak to Havelock about paying you a salary.”

The girl looked astonished. I’d told Mina the truth about our landlord’s identity and the threat we were facing, for I trusted her. Her reaction had surprised me—far from being terrified, she’d merely grimaced, then nodded with a dubious sort of acceptance. More than once I’d wondered what sort of life the girl had lived before our paths crossed.

“You’ll speak to—him?” Mina repeated.

“Of course,” I said, ignoring the little shudder that coursed through me. “I daresay he owes us some remuneration for the danger he’s put us in. And I’ve no doubt that horrible shop of his turns a healthy profit.”