Dean's arm was healing the way Dean healed everything — stubbornly and ahead of schedule, with the particular will of someone who treated injury as a scheduling inconvenience.
Tierney sat across the kitchen table from him and watched him flex the arm experimentally and watched his face do the thing it did when it was deciding whether or not to admit something hurt.
"It's fine," Dean said.
"It's not fine," Tierney said.
"It's better than it was."
"That's not the same thing as fine."
Dean looked at her with the even careful eyes and the expression that meant he had made a decision and had decided not to debate it.
"I'm back in training tomorrow," he said.
"Thomas said two more days."
"Thomas says a lot of things."
"Thomas is usually right."
"Thomas is right about most things," Dean agreed. "He is not right about my arm." He flexed it again. Less carefully this time. His face did not change. "See."
Tierney looked at him.
She had known Dean long enough to know that arguing further was a use of energy that would not produce the result she wanted. She picked up her tea. She looked out the window at the back garden where the old tree stood the way it always stood — still and patient and indifferent to everything that happened in the house behind it.
"Katherine is pushing them hard," she said.
"She should be," Dean said.
"They're still healing."
"The demon queen's generals don't care that they're still healing."
Tierney was quiet for a moment.
The kitchen was quiet with her.
"Victor revived her," Tierney said. Not like she was saying something new. Like she was saying something she had been saying to herself for three weeks and had not yet fully arrived at the other side of.
"Victor revived her," Dean confirmed.
"After everything. After the book. After Sebastian. After all of it." Tierney held her tea. "He still managed it."
"Not the full ritual," Dean said. "KaSandra was clear about that. What he produced was incomplete. The demon queen that came back is not—"
"She's back," Tierney said.
Dean was quiet.
"Yes," he said. "She's back."
Through the ceiling they could hear the particular sounds of the basement session wrapping up — feet on concrete, Thomas's voice in its clipped end-of-session register, the low murmur of the group gathering itself. The sounds of the house doing the thing the house had been doing every day since they returned from Miralba.
Getting ready.
Tierney looked at her tea.
"Where is she?" she asked. Not the demon queen. They both knew who she meant.
Dean looked at the window.
"Kris's room," he said. "She's been there most of the morning."
Tierney nodded once.
She put down her tea.
She went upstairs.
*
The door to Kris's room was open.
Tierney stopped at the threshold.
KaSandra was sitting in the chair beside the bed, her long dark coat folded over the back of it, her hands in her lap. Kris was asleep in the bed, his breathing slow and even, the amber eyes closed. He looked like a person who was simply sleeping, which was what the healer had said he was doing — sleeping, the body's most efficient form of recovery, the power restoring itself the way it always restored itself when the person it belonged to had the wisdom or the necessity to stop and let it.
The wisdom or the necessity.
In Kris's case it had been the necessity.
The forbidden magic at full extension with the grandmother's vial on top of it had cost him what the healer described as significant power depletion and what KaSandra had described as exactly what she had known it would cost, in the quiet voice of someone who had known the price before the thing was done and had done it anyway.
He would recover.
That was what the healer had said and what KaSandra had not disputed and what the house had been holding for three weeks.
He would recover.
Tierney looked at KaSandra in the chair.
KaSandra looked up.
"I brought tea," Tierney said. She held out the cup.
KaSandra looked at it for a moment.
Then she took it.
"Thank you," she said.
Tierney sat down on the small wooden chair near the door and looked at Kris sleeping and looked at KaSandra holding the tea and let the room be what it was — a room where someone was recovering and someone else was watching the recovery and neither of them needed anything from each other except company.
"He'll want to be back downstairs before the healer says he's ready," Tierney said.
"Yes," KaSandra said.
"That's a family trait, it seems."
Something moved across KaSandra's face that was very close to the expression Kris had when he was deciding whether or not something was funny. It passed quickly. But it had been there.
"He will not listen when he wakes," KaSandra said. "He never has. When we were children he climbed a tree two days after breaking his arm because he wanted to see the nesting hawk at the top. He said the arm was fine." She looked at her brother sleeping. "The arm was not fine. But the hawk was worth it, he said."
Tierney smiled.
"Was it?"
"He said so," KaSandra said. And then, quietly, with the voice she used when she meant something exactly: "Yes. I think it was."
Kris slept.
The two women sat with him in the still room, the tea warm between KaSandra's hands, and the morning continued outside the window, and the house held all of it the way the house held everything.