After William left, the room did not immediately move to planning.
It held what he had brought into it for a while, the way a room holds the shape of something significant after the person carrying it has gone, the particular resonance of information that changes what you know and therefore changes what you are walking toward.
Thomas had moved the paper William left to the center of the table.
He had not opened it yet.
The address of Victor's building sat folded on the low table and the room looked at it with the collective understanding that opening it was a next step, and that next steps required the steps before them to be fully completed first.
"The book," Katherine said.
She was looking at KaSandra.
KaSandra was still in the chair near the hallway. She had not moved through William's entire account, had listened with the golden eyes very still and the particular quality of someone receiving information they already had most of and were checking the new parts against the existing shape.
She looked at Katherine now.
"You said you would name it when you named what it was," Katherine said. "William named it. The Book of the Dead." She held KaSandra's gaze. "Now tell us what it is."
KaSandra looked at the room.
At all of them, assembled in the winter light, in the specific arrangement they had taken on naturally — Thomas standing, Tierney on the couch, Carlyle and Katherine near the table, the others distributed in the way the room had learned to hold them over the months of being theirs.
She was quiet for a moment.
Not the silence of withholding. The silence of a person choosing where to begin something that has many possible beginnings and where the beginning matters.
"The book was not found," she said. "It was made. It was made by a specific person for a specific purpose and that person is the reason we are in this room having this conversation." She paused. "Her name is Alyssa."
"The demon queen," Niall said.
"Yes," KaSandra said. "Though she was not always that. That is what she became. What she was before is the part you need to understand first."
She rose from the chair and came to stand near the table, near the low candles that were lit as they always were when she was in this room, and she looked at the surface of the table for a moment and then looked at the group.
"Alyssa was a witch," she said. "The most powerful witch who has ever existed in the history of that power. Not because she was born with more than others — though she was — but because she did something that no witch before or after her has done. She went past the boundary."
"What boundary," Courtney asked.
"Every power has a boundary," KaSandra said. "A limit past which the power cannot go without the person carrying it being changed by the going. For most people, that limit is never reached — they use what they have and the limit is theoretical. For Alyssa, the limit was something she found and then chose to cross." She paused. "What is on the other side of the boundary is not something I can describe precisely because it is not something that has human language attached to it. But the short version is this: past the boundary, the power does not belong to you anymore. You belong to it. You do not lose yourself entirely — not at first. But the self that remains is something different from the self that crossed. The crossing changes the nature of what you are."
"She became the demon queen by going past the limit of her own power," Jasper said. He said it slowly, working it through, with the specific thoughtfulness he brought to things that required sitting with.
"Yes," KaSandra said. "Not immediately. Not in a single moment. It was a process. It took years. And during those years, before the crossing was complete, she built the book."
The room was very still.
"She made it while she still had enough of herself left to make something deliberate," KaSandra continued. "The book is her. Not a representation of her — literally her. The knowledge she had accumulated, the power she had developed, the record of everything she had studied and learned and become, all of it poured into the book and held there. The book is what she put outside herself before the crossing finished, before she lost the capacity to make things with intention." She looked at the table. "It was, I believe, a form of preservation. A way of ensuring that what she had built would survive what she was becoming."
"She left herself an inheritance," Engel said quietly.
"Yes," KaSandra said. "Though not for herself. She would not need it after. For anyone who found the book. Anyone with enough of the right kind of knowledge to use it."
"Victor," Thomas said.
"Victor's line found it first. Whether Alyssa intended that or whether it was simply the result of a family that had spent generations looking for exactly this kind of thing — I don't know. I have wondered." She looked at the folded paper on the table. "The book is Alyssa's record and it is also her anchor. Her rising is not possible without it because the book is what connects her current state — past the boundary, in the place between — to the world on this side of it. Without the book the connection frays. She cannot fully cross back."
"That's why we need the book," Katherine said. "Not just to stop Victor. If we take the book, we cut the connection."
"Yes," KaSandra said. "Take the book and her rising stops. Not permanently — she is old and powerful enough that eventually, given enough time, she would find another way. But taking the book sets her back by decades. Perhaps centuries. And without her power anchoring it, the witch hunters' reconstruction collapses. They go back to what they were." She paused. "Stopped."
"But Victor still has the blood of the chosen ones to complete the ritual," Carlyle said. He had been listening with his arms folded and his brow slightly furrowed, the expression he had when he was holding multiple threads of something and checking them against each other. "William said the blood is the final component. He doesn't have it yet, but if he gets it —"
"He will try to get it in Miralba," KaSandra said. "That is what Sebastian is for. Sebastian's specific knowledge of witches and chosen ones makes him the instrument for that collection. Victor does not need all of it at once — he needs it in sequence, at the right point in the ritual, and the ritual is built around the battle in Miralba. The battle is not incidental. It is intentional. Victor designed it to be the occasion."
The room held this.
"He designed a fight so that in the middle of it, Sebastian could collect what he needed from us," Katherine said.
"Yes," KaSandra said.
"He built the whole thing as a trap," Tierney said. Not with surprise. With the specific tone of someone who has been thinking about Victor Glass for a long time and is finding that he is exactly as thorough as she believed him to be.
"Not a trap," KaSandra said carefully. "A mechanism. A trap implies he expects you not to come. Victor expects you to come. He is counting on it." She looked at Katherine. "He has always been counting on it. The chosen ones coming to Miralba is part of the ritual, not an obstacle to it."
"So going to Spain is what he wants," Niall said.
"Going to Spain and losing is what he wants," KaSandra said. "Going to Spain and winning is something he has prepared for the possibility of but has not built his ritual around. There is a difference." She held the room's gaze. "Victor is meticulous. He is not infallible. The version of this he has planned for is the version where you arrive in Miralba and fight the witch hunters and Sebastian takes what he needs in the chaos of that." She paused. "The version he has not planned for is the version where you understand all of this before you arrive."
"Because we understand it," Katherine said slowly, "we can build for the version he doesn't expect."
"Yes," KaSandra said.
"We know the blood is the target," Katherine said. "We know Sebastian will go for it specifically. We know the book is the anchor and taking it collapses everything." She looked around the room. "We go to Miralba knowing all of that. We build around it."
KaSandra looked at her.
"Yes," she said. "That is precisely the difference."
Kris, in the chair he had taken near the window, looked at his sister with the amber eyes and something in them that was the expression of someone watching a person they have known their whole life do the thing they have always been capable of doing and arriving finally at the moment to do it.
He didn't say anything.
He didn't need to.
Thomas looked at the folded paper on the table.
He reached out and unfolded it.
The address was written in William's careful handwriting, precise and minimal, a street and a number and a city district, and Thomas looked at it for a long moment with the green eyes and then set it flat on the table so the room could see it.
"Alright," he said.
He looked at the group.
"Now we plan."