Katherine had seen KaSandra do many things in the two years since KaSandra had come to the house — measure a room's danger in a single glance, hold a grieving group together with nothing but her voice, tell them all Sebastian was dead without letting the telling break her — but she had never seen her hands shake until tonight, and she had never seen them stop shaking so fast either.
By the time they got Thomas onto the kitchen table, KaSandra was steady again.
It was a specific kind of steady. Katherine recognized it because she'd built a version of it herself, the same discipline she used when the dark element wanted to be felt instead of used — the fear folded down small and put somewhere it could be dealt with later, because later was a luxury the present moment hadn't earned yet.
"William," KaSandra said, and the air near the back door, half-open on the beginning of something, went still. "Stop."
William stopped with his hands still raised, the door he'd been building hanging half-formed in the air like a held breath.
"You said five minutes," he said.
"I did. And I need you to close what you started, because I'm not taking him through a light door." KaSandra had both hands flat on Thomas's chest now, and something was moving under her palms that had no name Katherine knew, dark and slow, spreading down through him the way water spreads through cloth. "Light doors are fast, but they're loud. Whoever sent her—" she did not look at where the assassin had been, and none of them looked either, "—will feel a light door the second it opens, and I am not walking a slow poison and an unconscious man through a door that announces exactly where we've gone."
"Then how—"
"I have my own way," KaSandra said. "It's older than William's. And it doesn't advertise."
William closed his hands. The half-door in the air folded back into nothing, and the ordinary kitchen light came back into the space where it had been.
"KaSandra." Tierney's voice, from the doorway, tight and controlled the way it went when she was one degree from not being controlled at all. "What is happening to him."
KaSandra didn't answer immediately. Her hands were still moving over Thomas, and something in her face had gone somewhere private, somewhere none of them could follow, cataloguing whatever it was she could feel under her palms with the same total focus she gave everything that mattered.
"He's going to sleep," she said finally.
"He looks like he's dying," Niall said. It wasn't cruel. It was Niall, who said the true thing because the true thing was usually the most useful one, regardless of what it cost to hear.
"He is dying," KaSandra said. "Slowly. That's the entire design of what's in him — slow enough that by the time anyone understands what's happening, it's already finished. I'm not going to let it finish." She looked up, at the room full of faces watching her with the particular stillness of people who understood they could not help with the thing that was actually happening and were choosing to stay anyway, because staying was the only thing left that they could offer. "What I'm doing right now isn't healing. I can't heal this — not yet, not with what I know how to do. What I can do is put him somewhere the poison can't reach him as fast. A sleep, deep enough that his body stops being an easy target. It buys time."
"How much time," Katherine said.
"Enough to get him where he needs to be." KaSandra's hands stilled. Under them, Thomas's breathing had changed — slower, evener, the shallow uneven catch of it smoothing out into something that looked, for the first time since the garden, almost peaceful. "There."
The kitchen exhaled with her.
"Where does he need to be," Dean asked.
KaSandra straightened. She looked, for a moment, older than Katherine had ever seen her look — not in her face, which hadn't changed, but in something underneath it, some weight she was about to pick back up after three weeks of not carrying it.
"The Coven of Light," she said.
Carlyle frowned. "I've never heard of it."
"Most people haven't. It isn't the kind of thing that advertises itself either." KaSandra looked at the window, at the dark that had fully claimed the garden now, the old tree just a shape against a shape. "It's a group of witches — old ones, powerful ones, older than most of what we've fought. They live in the mountains. The Himalayas, if you want the map version of it, though the map version isn't the whole truth of where they are." A pause. "They hold knowledge nobody else kept. Healing that goes past what Carlyle can do, past what any healer in this house or any healer we could hire could do. If anything in this world can pull that poison out of Thomas before it finishes what it started, it's there."
"Then we're coming with you," Katherine said.
"No."
It came out flat and immediate, with none of the softening KaSandra usually gave hard answers, and the room felt it land the way rooms felt things that were absolute.
"KaSandra—"
"The coven doesn't take visitors," KaSandra said. "It barely takes me, and I have a reason to be let through their door that none of you have. If I bring six of you to their gates uninvited, the best outcome is they turn us all away and Thomas dies somewhere in a mountain pass because I spent the last of our time arguing with a mountain instead of walking through it. The worst outcome is worse than that, and I'm not describing it tonight." She looked at each of them in turn — Katherine, Niall, Carlyle, Kristen and Jasper standing close together near the stairs, Tierney and Dean by the door, Fenix silent in the corner with his arms crossed the way he stood when he was holding something in. "I go alone. I always have."
"You said 'always,'" Kristen said quietly. "How many times have you been?"
KaSandra was quiet for a moment.
"More than I've told any of you," she said. "It's where I'm from, before I was anything this house knows me as. It isn't a place I go to visit. It's a place I go to answer for things." She looked down at Thomas, at his slowed, evened breathing, at the ring still on her hand catching the kitchen light instead of the garden's gold. "I would rather answer for this than for anything else I can think of."
The house held its silence around that the way it held everything.
"How will we know," Tierney said. "If it's going wrong. If you need—"
"You won't," KaSandra said, and there was something in it that was almost gentle, the first gentleness she'd allowed herself since the garden. "That's the part I can't fix. Where I'm going, nothing here will reach me, and nothing there will reach you. You'll have to hold the house and trust that I'm doing what I said I'd do." Her jaw set. "I've never once told this house something I didn't intend to see through. I'm not starting tonight."
Niall looked at the floor, then back up. "Then let us do the only thing we can do."
"Which is?"
"Wait well," Niall said. "Instead of waiting badly."
Something moved across KaSandra's face that was almost, briefly, the small real smile from the garden.
"Wait well, then," she said.
She gathered Thomas up the way she had in the grass, careful of everything, the long dark coat settling around them both, and Katherine watched her walk toward the wall at the end of the kitchen — not the door, not any door the house had — and felt the air begin to change the way it had changed in the garden right before the assassin arrived, except this cold had a different quality to it entirely. Not a hunting cold. A doorway cold, ancient and enormous, the specific temperature of somewhere very far from anywhere the house had ever been.
"KaSandra," Katherine said.
KaSandra looked back once.
"Bring him home," Katherine said.
"I intend to," KaSandra said.
The wall opened onto dark — not the ordinary dark of a room with the lights off, but a dark that seemed to have depth to it, a dark that things could be inside of, and for a moment before she stepped through it Katherine saw KaSandra's silhouette against it, Thomas held against her chest, the two of them framed in a doorway made of nothing the house had built.
Then she stepped through, and the wall was a wall again, ordinary and solid and exactly where it had always been, and the kitchen was very quiet with the specific quiet of a room that has just watched something leave it that it doesn't know how to get back.
Tierney sat down heavily at the table.
"Well," Dean said, into the silence, because someone had to say something and it was usually Dean who decided it should be him. "I suppose we wait well."
Nobody laughed. But Courtney, sitting on the stairs with her knees drawn up the way she sat after hard things, made a small sound that was close to it, and in the kitchen that had just swallowed a door into the dark, it was almost enough.