The question was simple.
The answer was not.
The question was: how do you send the demon queen back to where she came from when the ritual that brought her here was incomplete, when the book that was her anchor is gone, and when she has been anchored instead to a living person whose bloodline is the only thing holding the connection together.
They put it on the table the morning after Emmet's telling, the low table with the four candles KaSandra had lit before anyone else came downstairs, and they sat around it — all of them, Emmet included now, William with his tea, Kris brought down from upstairs at his own insistence over KaSandra's precise objection — and they looked at it.
"The incomplete revival works differently from the full version," KaSandra said. She was not speaking to the room. She was speaking to the problem, working through it in the way she worked through things — aloud, in order, the way a person maps unfamiliar territory by naming what they can see. "The full ritual would have produced a demon queen fully in the world. Permanent. Requiring the complete reversal of the ritual to undo." She paused. "This version is anchored. Tethered to Victor. The tether is the same bloodline resonance that made the secondary ritual possible." She looked at the candles. "The tether is also the weakness."
"You sever the tether," Thomas said. Not a question. Testing the shape of it.
"You sever the tether," KaSandra confirmed. "Without the anchor she cannot hold her position in the world. The incomplete revival collapses. She goes back behind the boundary." She paused. "Not permanently. She is old enough and powerful enough that eventually she finds another way. But she goes back. And going back buys time."
"How do you sever a tether that is a living person," Fenix said.
The room looked at him.
He looked back with the hazel eyes that asked things directly because he had spent enough time in Victor's facility knowing that the question you didn't ask was the one that got you.
"That," KaSandra said, "is the right question."
"The answer being," Fenix said.
"You don't sever the person," William said.
The room looked at him.
He had his elbows on his knees and his hands loosely linked — the same posture Emmet used, Katherine noticed, the unconscious adoption of the person who raised you — and his careful brown eyes were on the candles with the expression of someone who had been turning a specific problem over for longer than this morning.
"You sever the connection," William said. "Not Victor. The specific channel of resonance between Victor's bloodline and the demon queen's anchor. They are not the same thing." He looked at KaSandra. "The Glass family resonance opened the channel. But the channel is not Victor. It is something the bloodline carries. Something older than Victor." He paused. "If you can isolate what the channel is built from — what specific quality of the Glass resonance the demon queen's anchor is using — you can close that quality. Not permanently. But long enough."
KaSandra looked at him.
The golden eyes held the expression they held when something had arrived from an unexpected direction and she was reading its full weight.
"You have been thinking about this for some time," she said.
"Four years inside Victor's operation," William said. "You think about things."
"The channel," Thomas said, pulling it back to the practical. "How do you find it. How do you isolate it."
"Blood," Courtney said.
The room looked at her.
She had her hands in her lap and the Blood Magic in her was doing what it did when the conversation moved into territory it recognized — a faint awareness in her expression, not dramatic, the way a person looked when they could hear something faintly from the next room and were trying to catch the specific words.
"Blood is how you find it," Courtney said. "The Glass resonance lives in the blood. Victor's blood. It's the same reason the ritual used it." She looked at KaSandra. "If I can read the resonance in blood that carries it — the specific frequency of it — I can tell you what the channel is made of. What it responds to." She paused. "And once we know what it responds to, we know what closes it."
The room held this.
"Victor's blood," Niall said carefully. "We don't have Victor's blood."
"No," KaSandra said.
She looked at Dean.
Then she looked at Thomas.
The room understood at the same moment.
Dean's branch of the Glass family. The one that had walked away. The same bloodline, different road — but the same resonance running underneath it, the same inheritance carried in the blood without knowing it was being carried.
"You don't need Victor's blood," Katherine said slowly. "You need Glass blood."
"Yes," KaSandra said.
Dean was very still.
Thomas was very still beside her.
"Both of us," Thomas said.
"The resonance runs through both lines," KaSandra said. "Thomas carries it through Dean. Together the reading will be complete — one side of the line that walked away, confirmed against itself. Courtney can read what neither of them alone would fully show."
Thomas looked at Dean.
Dean looked at Thomas.
Something passed between them — not the alarmed something, not the thing that would have passed between them if this had arrived before Emmet's telling and the woman who was coming and the full weight of what the Glass name meant to their family's branch. Something quieter. Something that had processed the Glass history and arrived at the other side of it and was now simply practical.
"Alright," Dean said.
"Alright," Thomas said.
Emmet looked at both of them with the expression of someone who had known them long enough to know what it cost to say that and was not going to make it larger than they had chosen to make it.
"Then we start there," Emmet said. "We find the channel. And then we find Victor."
He looked at William.
William looked at the candles.
"I know where he was two weeks ago," William said. "He moves. But he moves in patterns. Victor always moves in patterns." He paused. "Give me a day. I'll find the current location."
Thomas looked at the group.
"Then we have our order," he said. "Courtney reads the resonance. William finds Victor. We plan from what both of them give us."
He looked at the candles on the table.
"We move fast," he said. "She is building strength every day. We do not give her more days than we have to."
The room agreed in the way the room agreed — not with noise, with the particular stillness of people who have received a shape of a plan and are already beginning to move inside it.