Leon had returned to his apartment almost immediately after delivering me to St. Paul. He’d only stopped a moment to speak with Esther. Then his eyes had met mine, and his brow had furrowed. He hadn’t spoken, not even to demand his shirt back again. I was still wearing it. I wore it to bed that night, curling up tight beneath the green-and-pink bedspread and listening to the drone of traffic out my window and desperately hoping not to dream.

The next few days were tense. Every time my phone rang, every time I saw Esther’s grim face, or Charles worried and frowning, I expected news. When it came, it was never good. Another member of the Kin had vanished, and then another. No bodies were recovered, but the crime scenes matched. Houses found trashed, furniture broken. Blood on the floor.

And then came the words I’d been dreading.

“Verrick attacked another Guardian,” Esther informed me Thursday evening.

My throat was so tight, I had to fight the word out. “Who?”

“Anthony.”

I nodded. I knew Anthony, peripherally. He’d been injured during one of Susannah’s attacks. “Was he hurt?”

Esther’s answer was a succinct: “He will live.”

She didn’t offer many details beyond that. Gideon had retreated once more, after wounding Anthony—but he was growing bolder.

More like Verrick. Less like Gideon.

I was still trying to find a solution of my own. Iris’s warnings rang in my ears, loud accusations that it was me, my fault, that I had to kill Gideon. I’d been puzzling through her words, dissecting them. If she was right about the reason the Beneath had woken up—that it was the Astral Circle’s power that was feeding it, through Gideon’s link to both of them—that didn’t mean Gideon had to die, I reasoned. It just meant we had to somehow break his connection to the Circle. After that, I could figure out some way to help him.

Not that I had any idea of how to do that. But there had to be some answer, I told myself. The connection between Verrick and my father was severed, but maybe there was still some way of sealing Verrick himself—the Harrower part of him. It had been sealed before. He’d spent seventeen years sleeping, while Gideon smiled and laughed and grew, all unknowing.

But since my attempt to get information on sealing from the elders had been rather horrifically interrupted, I wasn’t certain where else to look.

It was Tink who suggested we try Dora Hutchens.

Tink had been haunting the St. Croix household since I started staying there. She’d stopped going on patrol. She was afraid of running into Gideon before we figured out some way of helping him.

“That old woman,” she said Friday morning when I mentioned that my search for information had come to a standstill. “The one with all the hats. She keeps records, doesn’t she? I remember hearing about that.”

It took me a second. “Dora Hutchens?” The hat reference baffled me, but I remembered Esther’s friend who kept Kin histories. Though Dora was more of a hobbyist—her records weren’t extensive or official—she was something of an expert on Kin lore. “It’s worth a shot,” I said.

When we arrived at Dora’s house that afternoon, she ushered us in and offered tea, but she didn’t have any detailed information on how sealing was done. She found a few relevant journals to look through, however, and we spent the day skimming through them for anything that might help.

“What should we be looking for?” Tink asked.

“Anything about the Circles. How they were created, or anything about their power…being tapped into, I guess. And anything about the blood of the Old Race. It was used to make the Circles.”

Tink wrinkled her nose. “Just how I wanted to spend my summer. Searching through old journals to read about blood.”

“This was your idea,” I reminded her, flipping through one of the books Dora had brought me.

Most of the information I knew already. The Circles were thought to have been made, in some way, from the blood of the Old Race after they crossed over from Beneath. The Old Race hadn’t been able to close the Beneath behind them, so with the last of their power, they’d formed the Circles—barriers that protected our world from the Beneath. The energy that created them was the same power that gave Guardians their strength and abilities; it was the blood that made someone Kin, and had been sealed away within my father. There was no evidence that the Circles had ever been bound to anyone before, at least not before me. And there was no information, anywhere, on if sealing had ever been tried directly on a Harrower.

Tink was having less success than I was. “My eyes are beginning to glaze over. I can’t make sense of any of this.”

“There has to be something here,” I argued. “Something we’ve overlooked.”

“If Iris wants you to use the Circle to kill Gideon…can’t you use it to just, like, disconnect him?”

“How? If there’s a plug to pull, I can’t find it.”

In the end, we thanked Dora for her help and headed home with a few more of the journals to look back over that evening. Tink dropped me off back in St. Paul, telling me she’d call if she found anything in her stack of books.

When I wasn’t looking through documents, I spent my time texting Mom for updates, or training with Elspeth whenever she was home. Which wasn’t often. She was spending as much time with Iris as she could—probably, I thought, because she wasn’t certain how much time they would have. The Guardians were too preoccupied to search for Iris, but she couldn’t remain in the Cities indefinitely. Eventually, she would have to leave, or go back Beneath.

If Esther was aware of Iris’s whereabouts, she didn’t mention it to me. I wondered if she knew that Elspeth was hiding her, or if she was being willfully ignorant. She’d told me before that she believed it had been Iris’s own choice to betray the Kin—but I’d never been certain she meant it. Iris was still her granddaughter. And if there was one thing Esther believed in, it was family.

So I didn’t ask her about Iris. I asked about my father, instead.

“Have you heard from him again?”

“Briefly,” she said. She was in her sitting room again, in her plush chair, closing her eyes as she spoke. “It’s going to take him some time. Elliot is with him.”

“Does he remember everything?” I asked, biting my lip.

“He hasn’t told me what he remembers.”

“You and Charles aren’t going to go see him?”

“There are matters to deal with here.”

“He’s your son,” I said.

She sighed. “To be honest, I never expected to see him again. Not as he was. For now, I am granting him a little time to rediscover who he is.”

When I asked if the Kin leaders had come up with any solutions for how to deal with the Beneath, she shook her head—but she informed me they had sent reinforcements. Though they were wary of weakening their own defenses, each Circle had sent three Guardians to Minneapolis. They’d started arriving that evening, and were going to coordinate their efforts with the Cities’ Guardians.

But when I called Tink later that night to see if she’d found anything in her journals and asked who was currently leading said Guardians, the answer was apparently no one.

“Mr. Alvarez is still on a break from the Kin?”

“No one has even seen him. Camille says he hasn’t been on patrol.”

“I wonder what he’s doing,” I said.

“Sitting in his apartment and eating french fry pizza would be my guess.”

Since we’d had a pizza party in Precalc at the end of the school year, I knew she wasn’t making that french fry thing up. Mr. Alvarez was lucky that Guardians had such high metabolisms.

The following day, Esther looked worried at dinner, and the shadowy circles beneath her gold eyes seemed to have deepened. I cornered her in Charles’s study later that evening. The study smelled of paper and leather and the lingering scent of cigar smoke; it was the only room where he indulged in the habit, even though it clung to the books and yellowed the walls. The tall windows behind the desk showed the falling dusk outside, the darkened lawn. I trailed my fingers along the top of Charles’s armchair and asked Esther what she’d learned.