KaSandra did not sit down.
She stood at the far side of the table with the map still lit between the candles and her hands folded in front of her and she looked at Thomas with the expression she had when someone had said exactly the right thing and she intended to honor it by telling the truth.
"Victor Glass," she began, "has been building toward this for longer than any of you have been alive."
The room was very still.
"Not the witch hunters specifically," she continued. "Victor does not think in specifics. He thinks in instruments. The witch hunters are an instrument. A very old one that he has spent a considerable amount of time and a considerable amount of power learning to pick back up." She looked at the map. "The connection between them is not new. Victor's family has been connected to the witch hunters since the beginning. Since the first time."
"The first time," Tierney said carefully.
"Sixteen ninety-two," KaSandra said.
She said it the way she said things that carried more weight than the words themselves, and the room felt it, the number landing with the particular heaviness of a year that meant something specific to the history of witches and of those who hunted them.
Katherine looked at her hands.
Sixteen ninety-two.
She had heard that year before. She did not know where. But the dark element in her power moved when KaSandra said it, the slow deliberate spiral from the night before resuming as though it had only been waiting for the conversation to arrive at the right place.
"The Glass family was there," KaSandra said. "Not as hunters themselves. They were never the kind of people who did the work with their own hands. They were the kind of people who funded the work. Who pointed the hunters in the right directions. Who ensured that what was hunted stayed hunted." She paused. "When the witch hunters were stopped, the Glass family went quiet. The way families like that go quiet — not by stopping, but by waiting. Passing the knowledge down. Keeping the records. Keeping the connections." Her golden eyes moved to Tierney. "Victor is the last of his line. And he has had his entire life to prepare for exactly this."
"The witch hunters answer to him," Dean said. Not a question. He was confirming what he already understood.
"They answer to the person who revived them," KaSandra said. "Which is Victor. Yes."
"How does someone revive a witch hunter?" Niall asked. He had set down the toast. His dark blue eyes were very focused, the expression he had when something had moved past the point where he was going to pretend it wasn't serious. "They were dead. You said they were stopped, but — they were dead. How do you start something dead again?"
KaSandra looked at him with something that was almost gentle.
"That," she said, "is the question that matters."
She reached into her coat again. Not another vial. A folded piece of paper, old and creased along the folds with the particular softness of something that had been opened and closed many times over many years. She unfolded it carefully and set it on the table beside the map.
It was a name.
One name, written in the same script as the markings on the map, in the center of the page with nothing around it.
Victor Aldric Glass.
Below the name, in smaller script, a single line.
He did not find the book. The book found him.
Courtney looked at the page. Her wrapped hands moved slightly in her lap, the unconscious gesture she made when the Blood Magic was responding to something before she asked it to.
"The book found him," she said quietly, reading the line.
"Yes," KaSandra said.
"What does that mean?" Carlyle asked. "Books don't find people."
"Most books don't," KaSandra agreed. "This one is not most books."
She folded the paper and put it back inside her coat and looked at the room and made the small decision Katherine had seen her make before, the decision about how much to say and in what order, the weighing of information against readiness.
"The book has a name," KaSandra said. "I will tell you the name when I tell you what it is. Not before. What I will tell you now is this." She looked at the map, at the pooled light in the corner that marked the small forgotten town in Spain. "Victor used the book to bring the witch hunters back. The book gave him the method and the power required to use it. Without the book, what he has done would have been impossible." She paused. "The witch hunters are in Spain because Victor sent them there. He needed them away from him while the larger work continues. Away from anything that might draw attention." Her voice stayed level and even. "The town is called Miralba. It sits in a valley that has not appeared on a public map in sixty years. The people who live there know what they are living alongside and have chosen to stay regardless, which tells you something about what kind of place it is."
"How many hunters?" Thomas asked.
"Enough," KaSandra said.
Thomas looked at her steadily. "That is also not an answer."
"It is the only honest one I have," KaSandra said. "The reading gave us location. Not numbers. Ashton."
Ashton, who had been quiet since the working ended, looked up from the edge of the table where he had been studying the map.
"Twelve that I've tracked movement for," he said. "Could be more who haven't moved. The disturbances in Miralba are consistent with a concentrated group, not individuals. They're not wandering. They've settled."
"Settled," Engel said from near the window. He said it with the particular weight of a man who had spent years keeping himself and his daughter unsettled, moving and moving, and understood what it meant when something dangerous decided to stop moving. "That means they're waiting for something."
"Yes," KaSandra said.
"For Victor to tell them it's time," Dean said.
"For Victor to finish what he started," KaSandra corrected. "The witch hunters are not the main event. They are preparation for it. Victor is using them to clear the way. To eliminate anything that might interfere with what he is actually doing." She looked at the room. "They will come for this house. For this group. Eventually. If we let them."
"So we don't let them," Katherine said.
She had been quiet for most of it, sitting with the dark element cycling in its slow spiral, listening to the shape of what KaSandra was building toward. Now she looked up from the table and across to where KaSandra stood and her expression had the particular quality it had when she had finished deciding something.
"We go to Spain," Katherine said. "We find them in Miralba before they find us here. We stop them before Victor finishes whatever he's finishing." She looked at Thomas. "And while we're doing that, someone finds out what Victor is actually doing. What he's finishing."
Thomas looked at her.
He looked at KaSandra.
KaSandra's expression held the specific quality it had when someone had said what she had been waiting for them to say.
"Yes," she said simply. "That is the shape of it."
"It's not a plan yet," Tierney said. She was not disagreeing. She was being precise, which was what Tierney did when the stakes required precision. "It's a direction. Plans have details."
"The details come next," Thomas said. He looked around the room, at all of them, the seventeen assembled in the morning light of the living room with the map glowing between the candles and everything that was coming already in motion somewhere beyond the walls of the house. "But Katherine's right about the shape." He looked at KaSandra. "We need someone closer to Victor. Someone who can get us what we need about what he's actually doing while the rest of us move on Miralba."
KaSandra held his gaze.
"Yes," she said again. "We do."
"You already know who," Thomas said.
It was not a question.
KaSandra looked at the table. At the map. At the pooled light in the corner that marked the place in Spain where twelve witch hunters were waiting for the right moment to begin.
"Yes," she said. "I do."
The candles burned steady.
The room waited.
Outside the window the pale thin morning held its light without warmth and somewhere in a valley that had not appeared on a public map in sixty years, in a small forgotten town called Miralba, something old and stopped was moving again.