Three hunters left.
Katherine picked up the vial.
She held it and felt the dark element of her power register what it contained — the blood of seven chosen ones, the ritual's final requirement, the thing that completed what Victor had been building toward — and she understood, holding it, that the plan had arrived at exactly the right place through a route none of them had fully predicted.
Sebastian had defected from the plan at the last moment.
Victor still didn't have what he needed.
But the battle was not finished.
Three hunters left, and the hunters without Sebastian were not following a plan, were not executing a transaction — they were simply what they had been built to be, which was the thing that stopped witches, and they came at the group now with the specific quality of things that have lost their purpose but have not lost their function.
The group met them.
It was shorter without the strategy. Without the gap creation, without the distribution designed to protect Sebastian's movement through the battle, the remaining three hunters were three opponents against seventeen people who had been fighting together for months and who had the specific advantage of knowing exactly what they were fighting and how to fight it.
Four minutes.
Fenix ended the last one with the precision fire that moved like intention rather than destruction, contained and exact, and the square went quiet.
The square was quiet.
Miralba was quiet.
The twelve witch hunters were stopped.
Not the field of sixteen ninety-three — not the forbidden magic, not the chaos magic, not the grandmother's vial used for its full purpose. The battle had ended before it came to that, which was the version of events that allowed the vial to be saved for what came next.
Katherine stood in the center of the square in the cold November air and felt the group around her — battered, breathing hard, Dean with a cut along his forearm that was going to need attention, Niall's new shoulder wound reopened, Fenix with a bruise forming along his jaw that was going to be remarkable tomorrow — but standing. All of them standing.
She looked at the vial in her hand.
She looked at KaSandra.
KaSandra was standing where Sebastian had left her, at the center of the square, her hand at her side. The cut was small and had already stopped bleeding, the specific inconsequential wound of someone who had let a thing happen that they could have prevented, and what was in her face was the expression Katherine had come to recognize as KaSandra processing something she had not fully predicted.
"He didn't give it to Victor," Katherine said.
"No," KaSandra said.
"He set it down."
"Yes."
Katherine held the vial.
She looked at it for a moment — at the dark glass and the specific content of it, the blood of the seven collected with three hundred years of specific knowledge and three hundred years of specific purpose — and then she closed her hand around it and looked at Carlyle.
"When we get home," she said, "we destroy this."
Carlyle looked at the vial.
"Yes," he said.
Thomas came to stand beside Katherine. He had blood on his sleeve from somewhere in the battle that he had not mentioned and was not going to mention, which was Thomas. He looked at the vial. He looked at the stopped hunters around the square. He looked at the shuttered houses of Miralba beginning, one by one, the way they had in the second memory, the way they always did when something that had been present in a place for a long time was finally absent, to show their lights.
He looked at KaSandra.
"Sebastian," he said.
"He left," KaSandra said.
"Where."
KaSandra looked at the direction Sebastian had gone, the narrow street at the far edge of the square that led out of the town and up toward the valley road and the world beyond it.
"I don't know," she said.
Thomas looked at her.
She looked back at him with the golden eyes.
"He set it down," she said. "That was his choice. What he does with the rest of it is his."
Thomas looked at the street for a moment.
Then he looked at the group.
He looked at all of them — battered, present, standing in the square of a town that had been holding something for sixty years and had been released from the holding — and his expression was the expression Katherine had seen on his face at the funerals and in the kitchen and at every moment when the full weight of what they were doing had arrived at a single clear point.
Proud.
Not said. Not announced. Simply present in the green eyes of the man who had been carrying this since before any of the chosen ones knew what they were.
"Good," he said.
He looked at his coffee, which he was still somehow carrying, which was cold, which was always cold.
He drank it.
He looked at Katherine.
"Now," he said. "We go make sure Tierney didn't do anything dramatic with the book."
Niall made a sound that was almost a laugh.
Kristen put her hand over her mouth.
The square held the November quiet and the warm lights of the opening shutters and the seventeen people who had come to a forgotten valley in Spain and done what they came to do, and Katherine held the vial in her closed hand and felt the dark element of her power cycling in its long familiar circle — fire to water to earth to wind to dark and back again — and she looked at KaSandra.
KaSandra looked at her.
The golden eyes held everything they always held.
And something else now.
Something that had not been there before the memories and the floor and the morning in the kitchen and Kris's hand on her shoulder and the grandmother's gift and the square.
Something that was not warmth exactly, but that was so close to warmth that the distinction no longer mattered.
"Home," Katherine said.
"Home," KaSandra agreed.
And the group moved.