Morning came the way mornings came after nights like that one — too early and without apology, the light pressing through the curtains before anyone had slept enough to feel ready for it.
Katherine was already downstairs.
She had the card in her hand. Not Asher's deck — he had taken those back, handled them with the same deliberate care he handled everything and tucked them inside his jacket before going to bed. This was the card from the table, the one that had been left face up through the whole of the previous evening while the room sat around it and tried to decide what it meant. Somewhere between midnight and the gray early hours someone had turned it over, and Katherine had picked it up when she came down and had been holding it since.
She was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea that had gone cold.
Ashton came in from the back door.
He stopped when he saw her. He was in his training clothes, his dark hair damp at the edges from the cold morning air, and he had the look of someone who had been up for a while and had spent that time doing something physical rather than thinking, which was how Ashton handled most things that required thinking.
He looked at the card in her hand.
He looked at her face.
He poured himself a glass of water and sat down across from her without being asked and without saying anything for a moment, which was the right thing to do and he knew it.
"You sleep at all?" he asked.
"Some," Katherine said.
Ashton nodded. He drank his water and looked at the window above the sink where the morning was still making up its mind about what kind of day it intended to be.
"She's already in the living room," he said.
Katherine looked up.
"KaSandra," Ashton said. "Has been since before I got up. I don't think she slept."
"Does she sleep?"
Ashton considered this with genuine uncertainty. "I genuinely do not know."
Katherine set the card down on the table face up and looked at it one more time. The witch burning on the stake. The fire that was not destruction.
She pushed back her chair.
The living room had been rearranged.
Not dramatically — the furniture was where it had been the night before — but KaSandra had moved the low table to the center of the room and placed four candles around it, white, already lit, the flames perfectly still the way they always were when she was in a room. The card was gone from the table. In its place she had laid out a map.
Not a printed map. Not any kind of map Katherine recognized from a store or a screen. It was drawn on something old, the material a pale gray that was not paper and not fabric but something between the two, and the lines on it were not roads or borders but something else entirely, a network of markings that moved across the surface in patterns Katherine could feel at the edges of her power without being able to name.
KaSandra stood at the far side of the table.
She looked up when Katherine and Ashton came in.
Thomas was already there, standing at the wall with his arms folded and his coffee, and this time he was drinking it, which said something about the night he had passed. Tierney sat on the edge of the couch nearest the table, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, looking at the map with the expression she had when she was already several steps into a problem and didn't like where the steps were leading.
The others filtered in over the next few minutes. Niall with a plate of toast he was sharing with Kristen without being asked. Courtney in the armchair, her wrapped hands in her lap, her light brown eyes quiet and present. Carlyle and Samantha together in the doorway, Jasper just behind them. Dean leaning against the wall across from Thomas, which was the particular symmetry those two had developed, two people who approached problems from the same direction and never needed to discuss it. Engel and Grace near the window. Fenix on the floor near the hallway.
Asher came last.
He sat near the table and looked at the map and something in his expression confirmed that he recognized it.
When everyone was settled KaSandra looked at the room.
"The witch hunters did not revive in one place," she said. Her voice was low and even, filling the room without effort the way it always did. "They never operated from one place. That was their strength and it is their strength again now." She gestured at the map without touching it. "What you are looking at is not a map of geography. It is a map of energy. Every place in the world where something old has been disturbed, where the boundary between the living and the stopped has been pressed against." She paused. "The witch hunters leave a mark when they move. Not a visible one. But a felt one."
"Felt by what?" Carlyle asked.
KaSandra looked at him. Then she looked at Ashton.
Ashton set down his water glass.
"By me," he said. He said it without performance, the same way he said most things, as a plain fact about a plain reality. "It's what I've been doing since before you brought me in. Tracking disturbances. Places where the old energy shifts." He looked at the map. "I've been feeding what I find to KaSandra for three months."
The room absorbed this.
Niall looked at Ashton with the expression of someone recalibrating a person they thought they already understood. Kristen's green eyes moved between Ashton and KaSandra with the particular sharpness she had when she was connecting things that hadn't been connected yet.
"Three months," Thomas said. His voice was careful.
"Three months," KaSandra confirmed, meeting his gaze with the patient steadiness that meant she had anticipated this response and had made peace with it. "I did not tell you because there was nothing actionable to tell. Disturbances without location are patterns without meaning. I needed enough of them to show us something."
"And now you have enough," Tierney said. It was not quite a question.
"Now," KaSandra said, "with what Ashton has found and what Courtney's reading confirmed last night, yes." She looked at the map. "We have enough."
She reached into her coat and produced something small. A vial, dark glass, the liquid inside catching the candlelight in a way that suggested it was not entirely liquid. She set it on the edge of the map carefully, the way you set something down that has been carried a long time and deserves to be set down with intention.
"This will interact with the map," she said. "It will show us where they are concentrated. Where the largest disturbance is." She looked at Ashton. "But it needs both of us to work it. What I carry and what you carry together."
Ashton looked at the vial.
He looked at KaSandra.
Something passed between them, the particular look of two people who have been working in the same direction for long enough to have a shorthand the room couldn't fully read.
"Alright," he said.
He moved to the other side of the table and stood across from her, the map between them and the candles burning steady on all four sides.
The room held its breath in the way rooms did when something was about to happen that it did not have language for.
KaSandra uncapped the vial.
The liquid inside moved before she tilted it, shifting toward the open air the way a flame leans toward wind, and when the first drop hit the surface of the map it did not land the way a drop of liquid lands. It spread. Not in a circle but in a line, finding the channels already drawn on the map, moving through them the way water finds the lowest ground, tracing and retracing the network of markings until the entire surface was faintly lit.
Then it stopped.
And then, very slowly, it began to gather.
The light in the map pulled toward a single point, not all at once but in increments, the way stars appear one by one in a clearing sky, each small movement deliberate and certain. Ashton's hands were flat on the table at the edge of the map, not touching it, and his eyes were closed and there was a tension in the line of his jaw that said he was doing something the room couldn't see, contributing something to the working that had no visible shape.
The light gathered.
It settled.
In the southeast corner of the map, in a cluster of markings Katherine didn't recognize, the light pooled and held and did not move again.
KaSandra looked at it for a long moment.
Then she looked at the room.
"There," she said.
Thomas unfolded his arms and came forward to look at the map. His eyes moved across the markings to the pooled light and then to the label beside it, small and precise in a script that was not modern.
His expression changed.
"That's Spain," he said.
"A town in Spain," KaSandra said. "Small. Old. The kind of place that has been forgotten by enough of the world that it is useful to people who need to be unfound." She looked at Tierney. "They have been there for weeks. Long enough to have established something. Not long enough to have finished it."
"Finished what?" Dean asked from the wall.
KaSandra looked at the pooled light on the map.
"Preparing for what comes next," she said. "For what Victor needs them to do."
The candlelight held everything steady in the room and the map glowed in its quiet corner of the table and outside the window the morning had finally made its decision about the day, the sky settling into a pale thin blue that offered light without warmth.
Katherine looked at the point of light on the map.
She looked at KaSandra.
"Then we know where they are," she said.
"Yes," KaSandra said.
"So we go."
KaSandra looked at her with those golden eyes that held things in layers.
"Not yet," she said. "There is something we need to understand before we go anywhere." She looked at the room. "Something about what we are walking toward and what it will cost to walk toward it." She paused. "We go when we understand. Not before."
Thomas picked up his coffee.
He looked at it.
He drank it.
"Then start talking," he said.