Thomas took it better than Katherine expected and worse than she hoped.
He stood in the kitchen doorway with his arms folded and his coffee going cold in his hand — he had not yet learned, apparently, that the secret to drinking it was simply to drink it — and he looked at Katherine with the expression he had when he understood something he did not like.
"You're going without me," he said.
"KaSandra said —"
"I know what KaSandra said." He looked past Katherine toward the hallway where the sound of KaSandra moving in the small room at the end of it had already gone quiet. "Did she tell you why?"
"She said her brother has met you."
Thomas was quiet for a moment.
"Yes," he said. "He has."
Katherine waited.
Thomas looked at his coffee.
"We did not part on good terms," he said. He said it in the specific tone he used when a story was longer than the version he was telling and he had decided the shorter version was sufficient and was hoping Katherine would agree.
Katherine looked at him.
"How bad," she said.
"I turned him into a frog," Thomas said.
Katherine stared at him.
"For eleven minutes," Thomas added, as though the duration was the relevant detail. "It was an accident."
"Thomas."
"I know."
"You turned her brother —"
"It was an accident and it was a long time ago and I have apologized. He has not fully accepted the apology." He unfolded his arms and picked up his coffee properly this time. "Go. Take care of her. She won't show it but asking him for anything costs her something and she knows it." He looked at Katherine steadily. "Come back."
"Always," Katherine said.
She said it the way it had been said in this house before, the word carrying the specific weight it carried here, the requirement and the promise of it both.
KaSandra did not take a car.
She took the alley behind the house to a side street Katherine did not know existed despite having lived in this neighborhood for months, and from there she walked with the particular purposeful ease of someone who had been navigating the world on foot for long enough that distance was not a concept she gave much weight to.
Katherine kept pace beside her.
The afternoon was cold and clear, the earlier gray having burned off into a thin winter blue, and the streets they moved through grew quieter the further they went, the familiar neighborhood giving way to older streets, narrower, the buildings pressed close together and the light between them falling at angles that felt different from the rest of the city, like a part of it that had not fully agreed to keep up with the rest.
"How far?" Katherine asked.
"Close," KaSandra said.
That had been the only word she had offered since they left the house. She walked with her coat around her and her golden eyes forward and the particular quality she had when she was preparing for something, not anxious but gathered, the way a person gathers themselves before a conversation they have been putting off having for a very long time.
Katherine did not push.
She walked beside her and let the streets be what they were and watched the light change as they went deeper into the older part of the city and waited.
They stopped in front of a building.
It was narrow, three stories, squeezed between two larger structures the way things that refuse to disappear get squeezed by the things around them. The door was dark wood, old, with a handle worn smooth from use. There were no markings on the outside that Katherine could see. No name. No number. Just the door and the building and the particular feeling that settled over Katherine when she stood in front of it, the dark element of her power responding to something inside the walls the way it responded to things that were old and real and not ordinary.
KaSandra stood in front of the door for a moment.
Just a moment.
Then she knocked.
The knock was three times, then a pause, then once more. A specific pattern. Katherine filed it away without meaning to.
Silence from inside.
Then footsteps. Unhurried. The kind of footsteps that said the person making them was going to arrive when they decided to arrive and the door was going to open when they decided to open it.
It opened.
The man in the doorway was not what Katherine had pictured.
She had not pictured anything specific, she realized. She had known only that he was KaSandra's brother and that Thomas had turned him into a frog and that he had not fully forgiven it, which had produced a vague shape in her imagination of someone stern and closed-off and perhaps slightly smaller than the reality of him.
The reality was that Kris Khaos was tall.
Not Thomas-tall, but close. He had KaSandra's raven-black hair but longer, pulled back from his face, and the same sharp quality around his eyes, though where KaSandra's eyes were gold his were a dark amber that caught the afternoon light the way old wood catches it, with depth and with warmth that the surface didn't quite show. He looked perhaps ten years younger than Katherine would have guessed for a man with decades of silence behind him, which she supposed was one of the things that happened when your sister was a witch of considerable age and you shared her bloodline.
He looked at KaSandra.
KaSandra looked at him.
The doorway held between them a silence that was not empty. It was full of everything that had not been said across however many years it had been, full of the particular weight of two people who knew each other too well and had spent a long time choosing not to use that knowledge.
Kris looked at Katherine.
"Who is this?" he said. His voice was lower than KaSandra's, the same even quality but warmer at the edges, and he said it without hostility, simply with the directness of someone who did not feel the need to work up to questions he had.
"Katherine Duke," KaSandra said.
Something shifted in his expression. Brief and unreadable.
"The chosen one," he said.
"One of them," KaSandra said.
Kris looked at Katherine for another moment with the amber eyes that held more than they showed, and then he looked back at his sister.
"You need something," he said.
"Yes," KaSandra said. No preamble. No apology for the years or for the asking. Just the word, clean and honest.
Kris looked at her for a long moment.
He stepped back from the door.
"Come in then," he said.
The inside of the building was one large room on the ground floor with a staircase at the back that led to whatever was above. The room was full of the particular organized complexity of someone who worked with their hands and their craft both and had given the space over entirely to that work, shelves on every wall floor to ceiling, not cluttered but dense, every object in its place but the places close together and the objects many. It smelled of things Katherine could not individually name, layers of something herbal and something older underneath, the specific smell of a space where magic was made rather than simply used.
There was a worktable in the center of the room. Large. Scarred from use.
Kris went to stand behind it and looked at his sister across the surface of it with the amber eyes that did not look away.
"How long has it been," he said. Not a question. The same way Thomas said things that were not questions.
"You know how long," KaSandra said.
"I want to hear you say it."
KaSandra looked at him. Something moved across her face that was the closest thing to discomfort Katherine had ever seen there.
"Twenty-three years," she said.
Kris held this.
"And you come because you need something," he said.
"Yes."
"Not because you missed me."
KaSandra's expression shifted. Just slightly. In the particular way of someone who has been asked a question they had prepared an answer for and found that the prepared answer was not quite true and could not be used.
"I need the elixir," she said. "The memory elixir. I do not have everything to make it."
"I know what you're missing," Kris said. He looked at his hands on the worktable, at the particular stillness of them. "You need my blood."
"Yes."
"You need me to give you something from my body to use for your purposes," Kris said, "after twenty-three years of silence."
"Yes," KaSandra said. She did not flinch from it. She stood in the plainness of what she was asking and she did not dress it in anything softer because she had too much respect for him to do that.
Kris looked at her.
He looked at Katherine.
"Why the memory elixir," he said. "What do you need them to see."
"Sixteen ninety-two," KaSandra said.
The room changed when she said it.
Not visibly. Not in any way Katherine could have pointed to. But Kris went still in a way that was different from his earlier stillness, deeper, the stillness of someone who has just heard the name of something that lives in them and always has.
"You're going to show them," he said. "All of it."
"Enough of it," KaSandra said. "What they need."
Kris looked at his hands again. He was quiet for long enough that Katherine began to understand what KaSandra had meant about the years and the asking and the cost of it.
Then he looked up.
"Sit down," he said. He looked at Katherine specifically when he said it. "Both of you. You look like you've been carrying something heavy all day and my chairs are better than whatever you're going to tell me."
Something moved across KaSandra's face again.
This time it stayed long enough to be named.
It was relief.
Small and real and quickly managed.
But Katherine saw it.
She pulled out a chair and sat down, and KaSandra sat beside her, and Kris moved around the worktable toward the shelf nearest the window, and the afternoon light came through the glass and lay across the room in long pale strips, and outside in the old street the city went about its business without knowing what was being asked for and what was being given in the narrow building pressed between the others that refused to disappear.
"Tell me everything," Kris said.
He was looking at his sister when he said it.
And KaSandra, who had been carrying sixteen ninety-two inside her for longer than anyone in the room had been alive, looked at her brother across the distance of twenty-three years and the space of a worktable covered in the tools of their shared craft, and she began.