The city Ashton moved through was not the city he had left that morning.
That was not literally true. The streets were the same streets. The buildings were the same buildings. The particular cold of the air was the same cold it had been when he walked out of the back door of the house and through the yard and into the alleyway that took him away from the house and toward everything that came next. Nothing about the city had changed.
But the quality of his attention to it had, and when your attention changes, the world it is attending to changes with it.
He moved the way he had learned to move in cities when the work required it — not quickly, not slowly, with the particular unhurried purpose of a person who knows where they are going and is not trying to appear as though they know where they are going. The two things looked the same from a distance and were entirely different in practice, and the difference was something you learned over time and did not learn any faster by being told about it.
He had been doing this kind of work for eight years.
He was good at it.
The address he was moving toward had been in his coat for three weeks, written in the specific shorthand that only he and one other person could read, delivered through a method he was not going to think about in detail in a part of the city where thinking too specifically about things was inadvisable. He had been carrying it since before Canada. He had not gone to it yet because the work in Canada had required him and then the funerals had required the group and then KaSandra's return had changed the shape of everything and the timing had not been right.
The timing was right now.
He hoped.
The building was on a street that had the specific quality of streets that were not quite in the center of things and not quite at the edges, the particular anonymity of the in-between, where people passed through rather than arrived and where a person standing in a doorway for an hour would not accumulate enough notice to be a problem. He passed it once before going to it, which was habit rather than necessity, reading the street the way he read all streets — traffic pattern, sight lines, exits, the handful of faces that had been there when he arrived and the ones that appeared after.
Clean.
He went to the door.
The knock was the same pattern KaSandra used: three, pause, one.
Silence.
He waited.
The footsteps that came were not the footsteps of someone unhurried. They were fast and they were light and they stopped just before the door in the specific way of someone checking something before opening it, a pause that lasted exactly as long as it took to confirm that what was on the other side of the door was what was supposed to be there.
The door opened.
William Voss looked like four years inside Victor Glass's operation.
That was the first thing Ashton registered, and he registered it with the particular assessment of someone who had known William before the four years and was now doing the involuntary calculation of what the four years had cost. Not physically — William was intact, no visible damage, the same lean build and the same careful eyes that Ashton remembered, brown, the specific brown that looked lighter in low light and darker when William was paying close attention, which was most of the time. But something in the quality of him had changed the way things change when they have been operating under sustained pressure for too long. Compressed. Efficient in a way that was not entirely comfortable.
The careful eyes moved over Ashton in a single pass.
"You're late," William said.
"I'm here," Ashton said.
William stepped back from the door.
The apartment was small and deliberately sparse, the kind of space that had been arranged to reveal nothing about the person living in it — no photographs, no accumulated objects, nothing that would tell a visitor anything except that someone slept here and kept their things somewhere that was not this room. It was the apartment of a person who had learned not to leave evidence of themselves in spaces they occupied.
William moved to the window and looked out at the street below, a habit Ashton recognized as the kind you didn't break even when the room felt safe.
"How are they," William said. Not how are you. The group.
"Intact," Ashton said. "Seventeen now."
William turned from the window.
"Seventeen," he said.
"Long story."
"I have time."
"I don't," Ashton said. "I need what you have. The signal three weeks ago — you said you found something."
William looked at him.
He had the expression of someone who had been carrying something and had reached the point where the carrying was finished, where the thing needed to be set down and given to someone else, not because he was tired of it but because the moment had come when holding it further served no purpose.
"The book," he said.
Ashton went still.
"Victor has it," William said. He turned back to the window, not to look at the street but because looking at the street was easier than looking at the room when you were saying something that had weight. "I've known for six weeks. I didn't signal sooner because I needed to be certain. The kind of certain that doesn't leave room for being wrong about it."
"How certain are you now," Ashton said.
"I've seen it," William said. "With my own eyes. In Victor's possession. In the room he keeps it in, which is not a room anyone else in his operation has access to." He paused. "I got in once. I will not get in again. He has since changed the access and I have not been able to find the new method."
Ashton sat down in the chair near the door, the only chair in the room that faced the exit, which was where he always sat.
"Tell me what you saw," he said.
William was quiet for a moment.
"The book is old," he said. "Older than anything I have a reference for. The material it's made of is not paper and not parchment — something between the two, the same way very old things are sometimes between the categories we have for them. The writing in it is not a language I recognize, though I spent two years learning every dead language Victor's line used before I went in." He turned from the window. "It responded to him. When he opened it, the writing moved. Not dramatically. But it shifted, rearranged, the way text sometimes looks in dreams when you're not looking directly at it. As though it was showing him a different page from the one that was there a moment before."
Ashton looked at him.
"It showed him what he needed," Ashton said.
"It showed him what he asked for," William said. "Those are not always the same thing and I don't know which it was. But he was reading from it when I saw him. Carefully. The way you read something that requires your full concentration to hold onto." He paused. "He had the witch hunters' names in front of him on a separate paper. All of them. Written out in his handwriting. He was cross-referencing them against something in the book."
"The revival ritual," Ashton said.
"I believe so. Yes." William looked at his hands. "There was something else in the room. Not a person. A presence, is the only word I have for it. Something that was not visible but that I felt the moment I was inside the room, the way you feel a change in temperature before your body has fully registered it." He paused. "Something old. Something that was not entirely in the room but was not entirely somewhere else either. Between." He looked at Ashton. "It felt like it was watching him work. Like it had been watching him for a long time."
Ashton was very still.
"The demon queen," he said.
William looked at him steadily. "KaSandra has said her name."
"She has."
"Then you understand more of this than I do," William said. "I have the shape of it. Not the full picture."
"The full picture," Ashton said carefully, "is that the book is how Victor is doing all of it. The witch hunters. What's coming next. The book is the source and without it none of this holds." He looked at William. "We need to know where he keeps it. The new access. Whatever he changed."
"I know," William said. "I've been trying to find it since he changed it."
"How close are you."
William looked at the window.
"Close enough that going closer will be noticed," he said. "Victor is careful. He has been careful about the book specifically in a way that tells me he knows someone has been looking." He paused. "He may know about me. I don't think he's certain. But I think he suspects."
"Then you need to move," Ashton said.
"I know."
"If he suspects —"
"I know," William said. Not with irritation. With the flat evenness of someone who had already done every calculation Ashton was currently starting and had been living in the results of them for weeks. "I have one more thing to try. One more access point that he hasn't closed yet, as far as I can tell. If I can get to it before he closes it I'll have the location." He looked at Ashton. "And then I'm done. Whether I have it or not, I'm done after that. Four years is the limit of what this work can hold without starting to become the work itself."
Ashton looked at him for a moment.
"KaSandra said to tell you the queen's name has been spoken," he said.
William looked at him sharply.
Something in his face changed. Not dramatically. But the careful brown eyes shifted in the specific way eyes shift when a piece of information has arrived that rearranges something the receiver had been holding in an incomplete form.
"She said that specifically," William said.
"Those exact words."
William was quiet for a moment.
"Then the timeline is shorter than I thought," he said. He turned from the window fully, the window-watching finished now, his attention fully in the room. "The queen's name being spoken means the ritual is past its midpoint. It means Victor isn't preparing anymore." He looked at Ashton. "He's finishing."
Ashton looked at him.
"How long," he said.
William looked at the door.
Then he looked at Ashton with the careful brown eyes that had been inside Victor Glass's operation for four years and had learned to read the shape of things from the inside, from proximity, from the specific knowledge that came from being close enough to something to feel its temperature.
"Weeks," he said.
The word landed in the sparse room with the same weight it had landed in the living room of the house when Asher had said it over the reading cards, the same weight it always landed with when the thing you had been moving toward was suddenly revealed to be closer than the distance had made it feel.
"Get what you can," Ashton said. "Then come out."
"I know," William said.
"William."
"I know," he said again. And this time there was something in it that was not just acknowledgment. Something that was closer to a person who has been alone in something for four years hearing someone say come out and understanding for the first time in a long time that there is somewhere to come out to.
Ashton stood from the chair.
He looked at William.
"There are seventeen people in a house," he said. "When you come out, that's where you go."
William looked at him.
"Seventeen," he said.
"It's a long story," Ashton said. "You'll have time to hear it."
He went to the door.
William looked at the window.
The street below was the same street it had always been, ordinary and anonymous, and somewhere beyond it Victor Glass was in a room with a book that responded to him and a presence watching him work and the witch hunters waiting in a valley in Spain for the word that would send them where he pointed.
William looked at the street for a long moment.
Then he turned from the window and went back to work.