The stairwell held them.
Barely.
Twenty-three people in a fire stairwell built for functional movement was twenty-three people in a space that had opinions about that number, and they moved through it with the organized quiet of people who understood that the noise they made right now was the difference between arriving at the third floor on their own terms and arriving at it on someone else's.
Thomas went first.
Katherine behind him.
The dark element of her power was doing the spiral, but it was different from the training spiral and different from the contemplative spiral — it was the combat spiral, the tight and rapid cycling that happened when something old was very close and the world between the present and what lived on the other side of it was thin enough to feel.
She had felt it before entering the facility.
Now it was different.
Now it was responding to something that was responding to it.
She stopped on the landing between the second and third floors.
Thomas stopped.
He looked back at her.
"Katherine," he said. Low.
"She knows we're here," Katherine said.
The stairwell was very quiet.
"The demon queen," Thomas said. Not a question.
"Not the facility," Katherine said. "Not the patrol. Her." She looked at her hands. The dark element was moving through her in the specific way it moved when something ancient pressed against the boundary from the other side and found the boundary thinner than expected. "She felt the dark element. The same way it feels things — the same frequency, the same kind of old. She recognized it."
Courtney came up the stairs to the landing.
She looked at Katherine's face.
Then she looked at the ceiling of the stairwell, above which was the third floor, above which was Victor's room and the lamp and the something that had been waiting in the edges of the light since the night in the room that was no longer beneath the street.
"I can feel it too," Courtney said. Her voice was very even. "The anchor. From here." She looked at her hands, the scarred hands, the Blood Magic in them registering the frequency she had read from Thomas and Dean's blood. "It's the same frequency. Exactly. The channel is right above us."
"She's awake," Katherine said. "She wasn't before — she was present but passive, building, accumulating. Now she's awake and she's looking."
"At us," Emmet said from two steps below. He had come up quietly with William beside him, and both of them had the expression of people who had just received confirmation of the thing they had most hoped would not happen yet.
"At the dark element specifically," Katherine said. "At me." She looked at Thomas. "She knows what I am. What the dark element is. And she knows that it's the one power that can close what's anchoring her here."
Thomas held her gaze.
In the stairwell with twenty-three people and the patrol somewhere below them and the demon queen awake on the floor above, he looked at his niece with the green eyes that had been looking at her since she was a girl in a school uniform and a half-unlocked power, and what was in them was not fear.
What was in them was the expression of a man who had known this was coming and had spent every day between then and now making sure the person in front of him was ready for it.
"Then she knows what's coming," he said.
"Yes," Katherine said.
"Good," Thomas said.
He looked at the door to the third floor.
"So do we."