For the next twenty-four hours, Eliza laid low.

  She purchased a cheap smart phone from a second-hand electronics store with the sixty pounds she received for her shoddy gemstone conjuration and went back to Nocturne to take down the bartender’s number for future reference.

  Then, she traveled to Beacon Hills.

  Alone.

  She found it the same way she had found Nocturne in London — by resonance.

  Every supernatural territory carried an emotional epicenter. A place where grief pooled. Where power rooted. Where history refused to dissipate. She followed the pressure behind her ribs, the tightening in her lungs, the subtle vibration that only someone born to siphon vital energy could interpret.

  Beacon Hills did not hum.

  It thrummed.

  Layered emotion pressed against her senses — old sacrifice, new loyalty, terror that had not fully faded, love that had survived things it shouldn’t have. It was chaotic and alive and bound together by something stubbornly resilient.

  And at its most concentrated point, the energy amplified into something too potent to pass up.

  She had been expecting a building. A crossroads. Something with edges.

  She had not been expecting another tree — or rather, the stump of one.

  It was enormous. Its roots broke the surface of the earth in great arced ridges, like the knuckles of something very old and very patient half-buried beneath the clearing. The bark was dark. The clearing around it existed in a permanent, held-breath quiet that had nothing to do with its depth inside the forest.

  She stopped at the edge of it.

  Her gift opened without asking her permission, the way it did in the presence of things that had absorbed too much to contain. Not the ambient intake she had learned to manage — the low, background hum of ordinary human emotion that she had lived with since she was sixteen. This was different. Deeper. The specific, saturated weight of a place that had witnessed sacrifice and held the memory of it in the wood and the soil and the particular quality of the air, the way old stone held cold.

  She pressed two fingers to her sternum and breathed through it.

  The wide stump of the tree did not acknowledge her. She had half-expected it to — something in her had braced for it, the way she braced for things in places that carried this much accumulated weight. But it simply stood. Ancient. Indifferent. Full to its roots with everything it had been asked to hold.

  She understood that. She had lived somewhere like that once.

  The difference was that what lived in the tree stump was not malicious. It was not light, either. It was simply honest — old and dense and entirely without agenda, the impartial witness of something that recorded without judging. Whatever had been done in this clearing had been done by people who understood the cost, and had paid it anyway, and the tree had been here for all of it.

  It took longer than usual for the intake to level off into something manageable.

  When it did, she crouched and pressed her palm briefly to one of the roots. The shock of it moved through her cleanly — cold and clarifying, the way truth arrived when you had stopped arguing with it.

  She stood. She withdrew her hand.

  She did not look back at the clearing when she left it, because she already understood that the stump of the tree was not the kind of thing you lingered at. It was the kind of thing you acknowledged, respected, and moved on from.

  She consulted the address on the cheap phone she had purchased with her black market gem winnings earlier in the day.

  The veterinary clinic was twenty minutes on foot.

  She walked.

  Beacon Hills was smaller than she had expected and stranger than it had any right to look. It wore its surface like a borrowed coat — the ordinary suburban grammar of it, the tree-lined streets and the school visible on the hill and the hardware store with the handwritten sign in the window — while underneath it thrummed with something she had no name for yet. Not darkness, exactly. Something more complicated than darkness. A place that had been tested repeatedly and was still standing, and knew it, and carried that knowledge in its foundations the way old cities carried their dead.

  She had grown up in London, which was a city that had survived things. She recognized the quality.

  She liked it, she decided. Tentatively. She reserved the right to revise that.

  She found the clinic on a quiet street behind a row of low commercial buildings. The sign read Beacon Hills Animal Clinic in plain lettering, and the parking lot held two cars and a bicycle locked to a post that had been there long enough to rust at the joints. She stood outside it for a moment, hands folded protectively across her chest, and let herself acknowledge that this was the part where things would either go one way or another and that she had done everything within her power to prepare for that and could not do more.

  Then she went in.

  The waiting room smelled like antiseptic and something older underneath it — herbs, she thought. Something that had been burned and scattered and absorbed into the walls over a long period of time. She stood just inside the door and cataloged it the way she cataloged everything now: automatically, without deciding to.

  The man behind the reception desk had the particular stillness of someone who was not surprised to see her.

  That, more than anything, told her she was in the right place.

  “Eliza Lovelace,” she said.

  “Alan Deaton,” he replied, with the measured courtesy of a man who had long since stopped finding unusual visitors unusual. He studied her for a moment with calm, dark eyes that she recognized immediately as the eyes of someone who knew more than they were currently saying. “Scott is on his way. Can I offer you something to drink?”

  “Please.”

  He disappeared through a door behind the desk. She stayed where she was, arms still folded across her chest, and looked around the room. It was ordinary in every surface detail — the chairs, the pamphlets about flea prevention, the cheerful photograph of a golden retriever above the door — and completely extraordinary underneath. She could feel it. The building had been warded, carefully and over time, layered protections built up like sediment. Whoever had done it knew what they were doing.

  Deaton returned with two cups of tea and set one on the counter in front of her.

  “You warded this building,” she said.

  “I did.”

  “Mountain ash?”

  “Among other things.” He folded his hands on the counter and regarded her with the equanimity of a man who had been asked about his wards before. “You have a good eye.”

  “I have a good sense,” she corrected. “It’s different.” She picked up the tea and wrapped both hands around it. “You’re a druid.”

  “An emissary,” he said with the faint precision of someone who valued distinction.

  She nodded. She filed it — the word, the weight of it, the particular kind of power it implied.

  She did not know what it meant in practice, but it apparently meant a man who made tea in a veterinary clinic and looked at her as though he were reading something written in a language she hadn’t known she was written in.

  She found, to her own surprise, that she didn’t mind.

  She was halfway through the tea when the door opened.

  The young woman who walked in was tall, with the kind of physicality that announced itself without effort — not aggressive, just present, the way a large predator is present in a room even when it’s doing nothing threatening. Her light brown hair was pulled back. Her eyes moved to Eliza immediately and stayed there with the focused assessment of someone who had already been briefed and was running the briefing against reality.

  “You’re the witch,” she said. Not a question. Not an accusation, exactly, though it carried the shape of one.

  Eliza met her gaze. “And what are you?”

  The woman’s eyes flashed — a vivid, startling blue — and she bared her teeth in a way that was not entirely human and not entirely animal.

  “Werecoyote,” she said evenly.

  Eliza noted the eyes. The particular shade of blue that meant something in the supernatural world that carried a history she was not going to name aloud in the first thirty seconds of an introduction. Killer. She said nothing.

  “Malia,” the woman added, as though the name were an afterthought to the more important information.

  “Eliza.”

  Malia dropped into one of the waiting room chairs with relaxed ease. She looked at Eliza with the direct, unfiltered attention of someone who had never learned to perform politeness and had decided this was not a significant loss.

  “Jackson told us,” she said. “That you were kidnapped at sixteen. Put under a trance for eight years.”

  “That’s correct.”

  Malia’s eyes didn’t leave hers. “How do we know you’re still not under one?”

  Eliza blinked. Then, despite everything — despite the exhaustion and the accumulated weight of the last forty-eight hours and the general ongoing catastrophe of her life — something shifted in her chest that might, in another context, have been the beginning of a laugh.

  “That’s the right question,” she said.

  “I know it is,” Malia said, without satisfaction, just fact. “How do we know you’re not still under it? Or that you’re not an agent he sent deliberately? That this whole thing isn’t a way of getting close to Scott’s pack?”

  Deaton, Eliza noticed, was watching the exchange with the quiet attention of a man following a conversation in a language he knew well.

  “You don’t,” Eliza said. “Not yet. You can’t know it from what I tell you, because if I were still under his control I would tell you exactly the same things and tell them convincingly,” she admitted. “I suppose the only way you’ll know is with time. Watching me. Seeing what I do and don’t do.” She held Malia’s gaze. “I think you already understand that. I think that’s why you’re here instead of someone more diplomatic.”

  Something shifted fractionally in Malia’s expression — not softening, nothing so legible as that, but the faint recalibration of someone who had asked a test question and received a response worth considering.

  She said nothing further. She sat back and crossed her arms and continued watching Eliza with the patient, unblinking attention of something that was very good at waiting.

  Eliza drank her tea.

  Scott McCall arrived eleven minutes later.

  She knew who he was before he introduced himself from the way the room changed when he walked into it. It was subtle and entirely unperformed. Simply the quality of his presence, which had a particular gravity that she associated with people who had survived things that should have finished them and had come out the other side not harder but deeper — like wood that had been through fire and was denser for it.

  He was younger than she’d expected. In years, but also in the way of someone who had not yet let the weight of what he carried turn his face old. He looked at her with brown eyes that were straightforward and serious and, beneath the seriousness, genuinely kind. The last quality landed somewhere in her chest with a quiet, disorienting force.

  She was not accustomed to being looked at with kindness by people who had reason to be suspicious of her.

  “Eliza Lovelace,” he said.

  “Scott McCall.”

  He shook her hand with the directness of someone who had decided to treat her as a person first and a variable second, at least until she gave him reason to reverse that order.

  “Jackson called,” he said, sitting down across from her, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees in the posture of someone genuinely listening. “I’d like to hear it from you.”

  So she told him.

  She told it the same way she had told it at Nocturne — the Bloodworth family, the witch hunters, the sixteen years of ordinary life that had turned out to be a stage set with nothing real behind it. She told him about Lucien finding her on her sixteenth birthday, about her family dying, about eight years under a trance she had only partially understood she was under until the night it broke and she found herself standing in a Paris chamber with a cold clarity pouring through her skull like light through a broken window. She told him about the hierarchy Lucien intended to build, the supernatural infrastructure already moved into position, the attack on Nocturne as a single move on a much larger board.

  Scott listened without interrupting. When she finished, he was quiet for a moment.

  Then his eyes dropped to her hand.

  “The ring,” he said.

  She looked down at it. The ruby caught the clinic’s light and held it, darker in this fluorescence than it had been in Nocturne’s red glow.

  “I can’t take it off,” she said. “It manifested the night my powers did. Bound itself to me. I’ve tried to remove it once.” A pause. “Once was enough.”

  Deaton set down his tea with careful deliberation.

  “A binding object produced by a magical contract — the arranged marriage between the Bloodworth and Nox families — has the potential for danger,” he said. “If Lucien Nox has had eight years of intimate contact with both Eliza and her magic, it’s possible — not certain, but possible — that a connection exists through the ring. A thread he could follow. Or, in certain circumstances, pull.”

  Silence.

  “So he could find me through it,” Eliza said. Flat. The tone of someone confirming what they already considered and simply hadn’t wanted confirmed.

  “It’s a possibility worth taking seriously,” Deaton said.

  Scott looked at her. “We’ll get it off.” Not a reassurance. Not the hollow brightness of someone saying what the moment seemed to call for. A statement of intent. “I don’t know how yet. But that’s a problem we can solve.”

  She looked at him for a moment.

  She thought of all the things she had been told were problems that could be solved, over eight years, by someone who had not solved them and had not intended to.

  She thought that Scott McCall was not that person.

  She nodded.

  “In the meantime,” he said, his voice shifting into the register of someone moving from assessment to action, “you can’t stay at the motel.”

  “I know.”

  “Lucien knows you’re gone. If that ring is any kind of connection point, a motel with no protections is —“

  “I know,” she said again. “I’ll figure something out.”

  “We already have.” He stood and pulled out his phone. “I want to make a couple of calls. There are people here with a property that has the protections you’d need. And the experience with situations like this that would make them useful to have close.” He paused at the door to the back of the clinic, looking at Malia briefly with the compressed fluency of two people who knew each other very well. “I won’t be long.”

  Then he was through the door, his voice dropping low as he dialed.

  The waiting room settled.

  Deaton excused himself with the tact of a man who understood when a room needed fewer people in it.

  Eliza looked down at the ring.

  She became aware, after a moment, of Malia watching her.

  She looked up.

  The hard assessment had not left Malia’s face, but something else had joined it. Something Eliza recognized as the specific expression of someone deciding how much they were permitted to be concerned about someone they had not yet decided to trust.

  “Are you okay?” Malia asked.

  Blunt. Stripped of scaffolding. The kind of question that made dishonesty difficult because it hadn’t left room for the polite evasions that usually cushioned it.

  “I’m fine,” Eliza said.

  She said it with the practiced evenness of someone who had given that answer ten thousand times — in castle hallways and at Lucien’s dinner table and in the mirror of a pub bathroom in London — and she delivered it as cleanly as she always did.

  But Malia’s eyes moved. Just slightly. Just for a fraction of a second.

  And Eliza knew with the particular helpless certainty of someone in a room with a supernatural predator that Malia heard exactly what her heart did when she said it.

  She didn’t call her on it.

  She simply held Eliza’s gaze a moment longer than necessary, and something passed between them — not understanding, not yet, but the precise shape of the space where understanding might one day be.

  Then Malia looked away. She reached across the counter, picked up the second untouched cup of tea, and pushed it toward Eliza without a word.

  Eliza looked at it.

  She picked it up.

  Outside, through the clinic’s thin walls, she could hear Scott’s voice — low and steady, the sound of someone calling in people who would come. She didn’t try to make out the words. She sat with her tea in a warded building in a town she was only beginning to know, with a werecoyote who was watching her too closely and an emissary who was reading things in her she hadn’t written, and she let herself be still.

  It was only the third time in eight years that she had managed it.

  She was beginning to suspect that stillness, here, might mean something different than it had meant in Paris.

  Through the door, she caught one word in Scott’s low, careful voice. A name, spoken with the particular weight of someone calling in a favor from someone they trusted completely.

  Derek.

  Something in the air shifted when he said it.

  She noted it.

  She drank her tea.