In the shower, Stan tipped his head back under the rainhead and let three days of Antarctic ice and werewolf blood and Void Sovereign trials and civilian bodies on frozen roads and the small tight quaver in the voice of everyone he had called from the sedan simply, for a moment, run off him.
The water was very hot. The steam rose slowly around him and gathered against the frameless glass.
He stood under it for a long minute without moving.
Somewhere, halfway through, an unwelcome thought surfaced.
Camilla had, at one point right before he gave her that mission to destroy all toys, casually mentioned observing the entirety of the military base through her spirit sense, as if she were flipping through the pages of a large-format book.
She had catalogued the location of the scientific outpost. Without breaking eye contact with him, she had once described the layout of a coastal town three hundred kilometers away.
