I know something’s wrong the moment we step into the hotel.

There’s no icy chill, no sudden cold current, only a feeling in the air. There are too many people in the lobby, and about half of them look as if they’ve been caught in a storm. Which is weird, because it’s been nothing but sunny since we got to Paris.

The desk clerk sees us and frowns, as if we’re responsible for whatever’s happened.

I shift a little. Maybe we are.

“What’s going on?” asks Dad, approaching the counter.

The desk clerk’s frown deepens. “Ah, Monsieur Blake. There has been, as you can see, an incident.” She gestures to the damp patrons scattered across the lobby. Oh dear. “The sprinklers went off on the third floor. Most unusual. It seems the alarm was triggered from your room.”

“Not it!” says Jacob quickly, holding up his hands. “Totally something I would do, but I didn’t.”

I roll my eyes. Obviously.

Dad shakes his head. “But we’ve been gone all day.”

“Be that as it may,” says the clerk, “something in your room triggered the fire alarms, and thus, the sprinklers. Perhaps,” she adds, lifting something from beneath the desk, “it was le chat noir.”

She sets Grim’s cat case on the counter.

A pair of green eyes glares out, looking about as happy as the clerk as she slides the carrier toward us.

“You think our cat somehow triggered a fire alarm?” asks Mom.

“Je ne sais pas,” says the woman curtly. “What I think is that things usually run smoothly here in the Hotel Valeur …”

Dad’s face flushes as the clerk continues. “We got your things out as quickly as possible. I assure you, they will be clean and dry in your new room. Unfortunately, as you can tell, those new rooms are not available just yet.” She nods at a drinks trolley, unsmiling. “Please enjoy some coffee while you wait.”

Dad starts to say something, but Mom takes his elbow in one hand and Grim’s carrier in the other, and leads us to a set of chairs to wait.

“He was thinner than that,” says Jacob, perched on the arm of a lobby sofa.

I’m sitting cross-legged on the marble floor, with a piece of scrap paper and one of Mom’s chewed-up pencils. I’ve already made a list of things we know about the poltergeist, adding Catacombs beneath the words short and young and, on Jacob’s insistence, creepy. Now I’m trying to put together a sketch while Jacob leans over my shoulder, offering suggestions, some helpful, and most maddening.

Dad’s reading a book, while Mom raps her nails absently on the show binder with a soft duh-duh-dum as we wait. The other guests disappear by ones and twos as they’re led to their new rooms, but we appear to be last on the list.

I force myself to focus on the drawing.

“No, his head was more like …” Jacob holds his hands as if gripping a basketball. Or … a football? A lopsided football?

“Not helpful,” I mutter, erasing my first attempt, focusing instead on the boy’s clothes. I wish I could thrust the pencil into Jacob’s hand. Unfortunately, only one of us is real enough to hold it, so I’m left wearing eraser marks into the thin paper.

“Wouldn’t it be great if you had something that could capture people’s images … what’s that called again?” Jacob is saying. “Oh yeah, A CAMERA.”

I roll my eyes. My camera picks up pieces of the Veil, but last time I checked, it didn’t do a great job of accurately rendering ghosts. And even if it did, I don’t exactly have a darkroom, or the time to develop a roll of film just so I can maybe get a photo of the creepy dead kid so I can go around asking people if they know who he was before he started haunting me.

Jacob folds his arms. “Well, when you put it that way …”

He’s been in a mood ever since the mirror incident.

“Have not,” he mutters. I bite my tongue, suppressing the urge to ask Jacob again about his past, his memory. But I know he hears me thinking, because he scowls and looks pointedly away.

I keep working on the sketch until I have a decent rendition of the poltergeist. A boy in tall black socks, shorts that come down to his knees, and a top that might be a shirt and might be a jacket, a wide collar clasped in front like a kerchief.

Brown curls cover the top of his round face, but something’s missing.

I dig a red pen out of my bag and draw little circles around his eyes.

There.

I snap a photo with my phone and send the drawing to Lara. She texts back almost immediately.

Lara:

Did you take an art class in your American school?

Me:

No.

Lara:

I can tell.

Jacob snorts. I resist the urge to text back a snarky reply, but only because I see she’s still typing.

Lara:

These clothes look like they belong to the early 20th century.

Lara:

Did you find out his name?

Me:

Not yet.

Duh-duh-dum.

I look at Mom again, the show binder under her hand, and sit up.

“Can I see that?” I ask, reaching for the binder as Mom nods. I tug it into my lap and begin turning back through the location pages, flicking past the Eiffel Tower, the Jardin du Luxembourg …

And then I find it: the Catacombs.

I skim the information sheet, which is mostly about the history of the tomb’s construction, the different graveyards it drew from.

“Whatcha looking for?” asks Dad, leaning in as if he can smell research. Always the teacher, his eyes brighten at my obvious quest for information.

My mouth is already open, the word nothing bubbling up in that automatic way, when I stop myself.

Dad is Dad, but he’s also a historian.

He’s the perfect person to ask.

“When we were down in the Catacombs,” I say, “you mentioned that there were people who’d gotten lost down there.”

He nods gravely. “Yes, it’s really no place to go wandering. Not that danger has ever stopped fools. There’s an entire history of people who simply thought, ‘Nothing bad will happen to me.’ ”

“Sure,” I say quickly. “But do you have any of their names?”

It’s a long shot, I know, more hope than certainty, but the way the red light stained that place, the way it exhaled the same strange cold, all of it felt like an extension of the boy. Like it belonged to him, or he belonged to it.

I hold my breath as I wait for Dad to answer.

“Not in there,” he says, and my heart sinks a little before he adds, “But I’m sure I wrote them down.”

He produces a battered leather notebook, the kind he always keeps in his back pocket. I’ve never been so glad my dad is such a nerd.

“Your mom and I come across a lot of stories,” he says, turning through the pages. “We don’t use them all in the show. Ah, here we are. There were a pair of teenage backpackers, Valerie and Michel Gillet.”

He licks his thumb and turns the page.

“An older American man, George Kline. A young boy named Thomas—”

“How young?” I cut in, heart slamming in my chest.

His lips move as he does a bit of math, then says, “He would have been seven.”