William came back the next morning with an address.
He came through the back door again — he would always come through the back door, Katherine understood, the habit was too old and too useful to set down in a house that felt safe — and he came with the specific quality of someone who had been working through the night and had not slept and was not going to mention either of those things.
He put the paper on the kitchen table.
Thomas looked at it.
"Canada," Thomas said.
"Northern Ontario," William said. "A small facility. Not one of his primary operations — one of the contingency locations, the kind he establishes and maintains and rotates through when his primary positions have been compromised." He sat down. He accepted the tea Emmet put in front of him without looking up from the paper. "He moved there four days ago. The pattern says he will stay for at least a week before moving again. We have a window."
"A facility means people," Thomas said.
"A small one," William said. "Contingency locations run lean. He does not bring his full operation to them — just what he needs to continue working. A handful of people. Security, but not the kind he keeps at primary positions." He paused. "And the demon queen."
The kitchen absorbed this.
"She'll be there," Katherine said.
"Where he goes, she goes," William said. "The tether. She cannot be far from him while the connection is still stabilizing. The closer she is the stronger the anchor." He looked at Katherine. "Which means wherever Victor is, she is also. That is an advantage and a risk simultaneously."
"Advantage because we find them both at once," Fenix said. He was in the kitchen doorway, had been there for some of it, the particular unobtrusive presence he had in rooms he had not been invited into but had arrived at the right moment for.
"Risk because fighting Victor and the demon queen in the same location is fighting two things at once," Emmet said.
"Yes," William said.
Thomas looked at the address on the paper for a long moment.
He looked at it the way he looked at addresses that led to things — not at the words but at what the words represented, the specific weight of a location that was going to require something from the people who went there.
"How far," Thomas said.
"Eight hours by road," William said. "Less by air. I have a contact who can arrange transport. The same kind we used for the facility in Ontario the first time — quiet, unregistered, arrives where you need it to and asks no questions."
"When," Thomas said.
"The window closes in five days," William said. "We should move in three. That gives us two days to prepare and one day to travel."
Two days.
The kitchen held the weight of that.
Two days was not long. Two days was the length of time that felt adequate until you were inside it and found that the things that needed doing in it were more than two days comfortably held.
"Then we use them well," Thomas said.
He stood.
He looked at Katherine.
Katherine looked at him.
"Get everyone downstairs," he said. "Training this morning. Planning this afternoon. We go over everything we know about the facility, the demon queen, the tether, Courtney's reading, all of it. We go into this knowing every piece of it we can know."
"And the pieces we can't know," Niall said from the hallway. He had been there long enough to have heard most of it.
Thomas looked at him.
"We account for them by being ready for anything," Thomas said. "Which is why we train this morning."
Niall looked at him.
"Double speed again?" Niall said.
"Triple," Thomas said.
Niall looked at the ceiling.
"The wall is not going to survive this," he said.
"The wall," Thomas said, moving toward the hallway, "is not what needs to survive Canada."
He went to wake the house.
William drank his tea.
Emmet sat down across from him at the kitchen table and looked at the address on the paper between them and was quiet for a moment.
"You're coming," Emmet said. Not a question.
"Yes," William said.
"I know you're going to say you're not staying behind," William said, before Emmet could speak.
"I wasn't going to say that," Emmet said.
William looked at him.
"I was going to say be careful," Emmet said. "That's all."
William held his gaze.
"I know," William said.
"I know you know," Emmet said. "I'm saying it anyway."
William looked at the address on the paper.
"You always do," he said.
He said it the way he said things he meant.
Exactly. No more and no less.
The kitchen held the two of them in the early morning quiet — the father who had argued for four months and always said it anyway, and the son who always knew he would — and through the ceiling they could hear the house waking up, feet on stairs, Thomas's voice in the hallway, the particular sounds of a group that knew what was coming and was choosing to be ready for it.
Three days.
Canada.
Whatever waited for them there.