He came three days later.
Not through the front door. Through the back, the way Kris had come, the way people came who understood that the real entrance to a house was the one that said I know this place well enough to know which door is the right one. Except William had never been to this house before, which meant someone had told him, and the someone was Ashton, and the fact of Ashton having told him said something about what the last three days had been for both of them that neither of them would explain in detail and that the group would understand better than to ask about directly.
Katherine was in the kitchen when she heard the back door.
She had her hand on the knife at her side before she registered that it was a single set of footsteps and that they moved with the particular quality of someone who was not trying to be silent but was not announcing themselves either, the specific gait of someone who had spent a long time learning how to enter rooms without alarming the people in them.
She took her hand off the knife.
Thomas came in from the hallway at the same moment, which told her that whatever perimeter they had established around the house had registered the arrival and told him before the footsteps did.
The man who came through the back door stopped when he saw them.
He was perhaps thirty. Perhaps a little more or less — he had the quality of someone whose age was difficult to read because what was in his face was not the accumulation of years but the accumulation of what the years had contained, which aged a person differently. Brown eyes. The careful kind. Dark hair, shorter than it would have been four years ago, Katherine guessed, practical rather than chosen. He was dressed in the anonymous way of someone who had spent a long time not wanting to be looked at and had gotten very good at it.
He looked at Thomas.
Thomas looked at him.
"William Voss," Thomas said.
"Thomas Duke," William said.
Something in Thomas's expression settled. Not warmly exactly — Thomas's warm expressions were reserved and took time to extend to new people — but with the specific quality of someone who had heard enough about a person to have formed a preliminary shape of them and was now finding that the shape and the reality were close enough to proceed on.
"Come in," Thomas said.
The living room filled the way it always filled, people drawn from other parts of the house by the particular gravity of something happening that everyone understood was significant, arriving in ones and twos until the full group was present and William was standing near the low table with the careful brown eyes moving across the room with the expression of a man who had been told there were seventeen people and was now doing the actual counting.
His eyes stopped on KaSandra.
KaSandra was in the chair near the hallway. She looked at William with the golden eyes and the still expression and said nothing, which for KaSandra was a form of acknowledgment.
William looked at her for a long moment.
"You sent the message," he said. "The queen's name."
"Yes," KaSandra said.
"I understood it," he said.
"I know," she said. "That is why I sent it."
William looked at the room again. At Katherine. At Tierney. At the assembled group with the particular way he looked at things, thoroughly and without appearing to, the habit of a man who had learned to gather information without the gathering being visible.
He looked at Ashton.
Ashton was near the doorframe.
Ashton gave him the small nod that said yes, these are the people, yes, this is the place, yes, it is what I told you it was.
William looked back at the room.
"You need to know how he did it," he said. "The revival. I have that now. I got to the access point before he closed it."
The room went very still.
"Tell us," Thomas said.
William came to stand near the table. He looked at it for a moment — at the surface of it, the low table that had held the reading cards and the map and the elixir cups and everything that had happened in this room over the weeks before his arrival — and then looked at the group around it.
"The Book of the Dead is older than Victor's line," he said. "Older than most things that are still operational in the world. It was made in the same era as the first witch hunters, which is not a coincidence — the same knowledge that built the hunters went into the book, and the book is what preserved that knowledge when the hunters were stopped." He paused. "The book does not revive the dead in the way you might understand revival. It does not bring them back as they were. It reconstructs them from the record it kept of them — every witch hunter who was stopped rather than killed was recorded in the book at the moment of their stopping. Name, power, the specific shape of what they were. The book held them the way amber holds insects, complete and preserved, and the revival ritual uses that record to rebuild them."
"Victor used the book to reconstruct them," Carlyle said.
"Yes," William said. "Twelve hunters, from the record. Which means the book has at least twelve complete records in it, and possibly more." He looked at KaSandra. "Including Sebastian St. Qrow."
"Yes," KaSandra said.
"The ritual required something to anchor the reconstruction," William continued. "Something living, something with enough power to bridge the gap between the record and the present. Victor used blood. His own, initially — the Glass family's connection to the original hunters goes back far enough that his blood carries a resonance the book responds to. But his blood alone was not enough to fully stabilize the reconstruction." William paused. "He needed more."
"The chosen ones," Tierney said. Her voice was very level.
William looked at her.
"Not yet," he said. "That comes later. For the initial reconstruction, what he used was the presence in the book itself. The one that has been building in it since before Victor had it. The presence that is not fully in the world yet but is close enough to lend its power to the ritual." He looked at the room. "The demon queen. Alyssa. She is not revived yet. But she is close enough to the surface that Victor was able to use the edge of her power to anchor the witch hunters' reconstruction."
"He borrowed power from something that isn't fully here yet," Niall said slowly.
"Yes," William said. "Which means two things. First, that the witch hunters exist because she is close — if she were further from the surface they would not be stable, they would not hold together without the anchor. Second, that every day they exist and act in the world, they feed back into her rising. They are both the product of her nearness and the engine of her arrival."
The room held this.
Katherine felt the dark element of her power doing the slow spiral, the one it reserved for things that were old and true and very close, and she understood the shape of what William had just described with a clarity that was not comfortable.
The witch hunters were not just a threat.
They were a mechanism.
Stop them and you slowed the queen's rising. Let them continue and you accelerated it. Victor had built the instrument of the group's destruction so that every moment they spent trying to stop it was also a moment the larger thing grew stronger.
"He's very good," Fenix said quietly, from his position near the door. He said it without admiration, simply as an assessment of someone who had spent his childhood inside the understanding of how Victor Glass thought.
"Yes," William said. He looked at Fenix with the careful brown eyes and something in them shifted slightly. "You're Fenix."
"Yes," Fenix said.
"Your father talked about you," William said. "When he was certain we were alone. Rarely. But he did."
Fenix looked at him.
Something moved across his face that had no easy name, the specific expression of someone learning that they existed in a way they had not known they existed in someone else's interior life.
"What did he say," Fenix said.
"That you were like him," William said. "That you were going to be better than him at everything that mattered."
The kitchen was very quiet.
Fenix looked at the floor.
Then he looked at the window with the expression that Katherine recognized now as the one he had when something had reached him that he was not ready to have reached him and that he was managing in the specific way he managed those things — privately, completely, without asking for anything from the room.
She looked away from him to give him the space.
Thomas looked at William.
"The book's location," he said. "You said you got to the access point."
"I got close enough to confirm it," William said. "Victor keeps it in a vault below the building he uses as his primary location. Not his public location — the other one, the one that doesn't appear anywhere. I have the address." He reached into his jacket and produced a folded paper, set it on the low table with the same careful deliberateness Asher had used with the reading cards, the gesture of someone setting down something that has been carried a long time and should be received with appropriate weight. "The vault has protections I cannot describe fully because they are not the kind I have knowledge of. What I can tell you is that they responded to the book — when he opened the vault in my presence, it was the book itself that released the lock. Without the book you cannot open the vault, and without opening the vault you cannot take the book."
"A closed loop," Thomas said.
"Yes," William said. "Victor is thorough."
"Then we take the book from him directly," Katherine said. She was looking at the folded paper on the table. "Not from the vault. From him. In the middle of everything else, when he's focused on the witch hunters and the ritual, we take it while his attention is somewhere else."
The room looked at her.
William looked at her with the careful brown eyes.
"That is very dangerous," he said.
"I know," Katherine said.
"He will know someone is coming for it."
"He'll be watching Spain," Katherine said. "He'll be watching us go to Miralba. He'll be watching Sebastian." She looked at William. "He won't be watching his own building while all of that is happening."
William was quiet for a moment.
Then something moved in the careful brown eyes that was close to what Ashton's eyes had done when he first told her about KaSandra, three days earlier — the specific quality of someone reassessing.
"No," William said slowly. "He probably won't."
He looked at KaSandra.
KaSandra was looking at Katherine with the golden eyes that held everything, and in them was the expression she had when someone had said what she had been waiting for them to say.
"No," KaSandra agreed. "He won't."
William looked at the folded paper on the table.
He looked at the room.
"I'll go back tonight," he said. "I need to be in position when it starts. Victor can't know I've been here." He paused. "When you're ready to move, I'll be where I need to be."
"When we're ready," Thomas said, "we'll let you know."
William nodded once.
He looked at Ashton.
Ashton looked back at him with the expression that had no language attached to it, the specific look of two people who had been doing dangerous work from the same direction for long enough that some conversations happened entirely in the space between them.
William looked at the room one more time. At all of them, the seventeen assembled in the living room in the winter light with everything that was coming already set in motion and the shape of it clearer now than it had been the day before.
Something in his face, for just a moment, was not the face of someone four years deep in something alone.
It was the face of someone who had somewhere to come back to.
Then he turned and went the way he had come, through the back of the house, through the yard, and into the city that was still the same city it had always been, ordinary and anonymous, waiting for what came next.