They came back to the living room changed.
Not visibly. Not in any way that could be pointed to or measured. But the quality of the group that had gone into the field and the quality of the group that returned from it were not identical, the way water that has passed through something is not identical to the water before it passed through, even when it looks the same.
Katherine still had the vial.
She had carried it back the way you carry things you received in a place between times — carefully, with both hands, understanding that the object was the same object in both worlds but that its significance belonged to the one it came from and needed to be handled accordingly.
She set it on the low table.
The room looked at it.
"It works," KaSandra said. She was not speaking to the room specifically, she was confirming something she had been examining since the girl in the field held it out, reading it in the way she read things, at a layer below the visible. "The construction is not one I know, which means she developed it specifically for this purpose. But the principle is sound." She paused. "It will do what she said it will do."
"Distribute the cost," Thomas said.
"Yes. Among those present when the forbidden magic is used. Each person takes a fraction of what would otherwise be taken from one." She looked at the vial. "It will still hurt. But it will not kill."
Kris was looking at the vial from his position near the window. The expression on his face was the expression of someone who had been carrying the weight of a condition — together or not at all — and had just watched the condition become something he had not known it could become. Not resolved. Transformed. Something that could be done without the specific terror attached to doing it.
He did not say anything about it.
He did not need to.
"Alright," Thomas said. He put his coffee down on the shelf — the cold coffee, the one he had been ignoring for the last twenty minutes — and looked at the room. "We have everything we came to get. The vial. The understanding of how the hunters were stopped the first time. The location in Spain and the address of Victor's building." He looked at the group. "The question is timing."
"Soon," Dean said. From the doorframe, arms folded, the expression he had when the calculation was already done and the answer was not comfortable but was the answer. "Victor's timeline is weeks. Ashton said it three days ago and three days have passed."
"William said he'd move when we move," Carlyle said.
"Which means we tell him when," Katherine said.
Thomas looked at her.
"When," he said.
"Three days," Katherine said. "Two to finish the preparation. One to travel." She looked at the room. "Long enough to be ready. Not so long that Victor finishes what he's finishing."
Thomas held her gaze for a moment.
Then he looked at Tierney.
Tierney looked back at him with the expression she had when she agreed with something and did not need to say so.
Thomas looked at the room.
"Three days," he said.
The three days were full.
Not with the heavy suspended quality of days that are full of waiting, but with the specific productive weight of days that are full of necessary things being done. Weapons checked and packed. Routes confirmed. The seventeen sorting themselves into two groups — the larger one for Miralba, the smaller one for Victor's building — with the particular negotiation of people who each had reasons to be in both places and had to decide together which reasons mattered most.
Kris stayed.
He had not been asked to and he had not announced himself as staying, he had simply not left, and on the second day Katherine found him in the kitchen teaching Courtney something about the construction of protective wards that Courtney was learning with the specific focused attention she brought to everything her Blood Magic touched. Kris taught the way his sister ran rooms — giving exactly what was needed in the right order without excess — and Courtney received it the way she received things her power understood, completely and at depth.
Katherine watched them for a moment from the doorway.
Kris looked up.
"She has good instincts," he said. To Katherine, about Courtney, in the specific tone of someone paying a compliment that is also an assessment.
Courtney did not look up from what she was doing but the line of her shoulders said she had heard it and that it had landed in the place where things landed when they were true.
"Yes," Katherine said. "She does."
Kris looked at her for a moment with the amber eyes.
"You're not sleeping enough," he said.
"No," Katherine agreed.
"You should sleep."
"I will."
He looked at her with the expression that said he doubted this but had decided not to push it. The specific expression, Katherine noted, that Thomas had perfected years ago and that Kris appeared to have arrived at independently, which was perhaps something that happened to people who had been around the Duke family long enough.
She went to find what the day required of her.
On the third morning Thomas gathered everyone.
Not for a briefing in the formal sense — not with maps and assignments and the tactical language that planning sessions used. Just the seventeen of them in the living room in the morning light, and Thomas standing at the center of it the way he stood at the center of things when something needed to be said that was not logistical.
He looked at the room.
He looked at Niall, who had his shoulder healed now, fully, the particular set of his posture saying he knew it and was glad of it and was ready. He looked at Kristen, who had her arms folded and her green eyes clear and the specific quality of someone who had decided in advance what the day required of her. At Courtney, in the armchair, with her scarred hands in her lap and the Blood Magic in her sitting quietly and fully present. At Samantha with the blue eyes that were reading the air in the room the way she read all air. At Jasper still and attentive beside her. At Carlyle with his elbow on his knee and the twin bond humming between him and Katherine in the way it did when both of them were paying full attention. At Dean against the wall, even and steady and saying nothing, which was Dean's version of being completely ready. At Engel near the window with the quiet presence he always had. At Grace beside him. At Fenix near the doorframe with the hazel eyes open in a way they had not been open three weeks ago.
At Ashton.
At KaSandra in the chair near the hallway, golden eyes holding what they always held.
At Tierney.
He looked at his sister last, the way he always did, the specific look of their shared language that needed no words.
Tierney looked back.
Then Thomas looked at Katherine.
Katherine looked at him.
"You know what we're walking into," Thomas said. To the room but to each of them individually, the way he said things when they needed to reach each person rather than the group collectively. "You know the full shape of it now. All of it." He paused. "I'm not going to tell you it will be easy or that we will all come back from it unchanged. I don't know that. None of us do." He looked around the room. "What I do know is this." He paused again, the pause of someone choosing the exact right words and not settling for approximations. "This group was not built from strength. It was built from the willingness to be in the room with each other through the difficult things. All the difficult things." He looked at each of them in turn. "That is what we take to Spain."
The room was very quiet.
Then Niall said, "When do we leave."
"Tonight," Thomas said. "After dark."
"Okay," Niall said.
He said it the way it had been said before in this house, the word carrying its full weight, the weight of someone who has received all the information and made the decision and is done with the deciding and ready for what the deciding leads to.
One by one the room said it.
Not out loud, not all of them — some said it in the way they stood up straighter and some said it in the way they looked at each other and some said it in the way they simply stayed present in the room and did not look away from what was coming.
But it was said.
KaSandra looked at the candles on the low table. At the four flames burning steady in the still air of the living room of the house that had held them and was about to release them toward the thing they had been building toward since the reading cards and the witch on the stake and the fire that was not destruction.
She looked at Kris.
Kris looked at her.
"I'll be here," he said. "When you come back."
"I know," she said.
She looked at Katherine.
Katherine looked at her.
Nothing needed to be said between them either.
The morning moved toward afternoon.
The afternoon moved toward evening.
And when the dark came the house released them, all seventeen, into the night and the city and the road that led to Spain and the small forgotten valley where twelve witch hunters waited in a town that had not appeared on a public map in sixty years, led by a man who had been suspended for three hundred years and who knew every one of their names.
The last of the before was behind them.
The after was Spain.