She woke later than she had since arriving in Beacon Hills.
Not by much — an hour, perhaps slightly more — but enough to notice the difference. The quality of the light through the curtains was already past the pale, tentative stage and into something warmer and more committed. The castle had completed its particular morning grammar without her, and she had slept through it.
She lay still for a moment and considered why.
The answer arrived without requiring examination: yesterday afternoon had been ordinary. The racks and the bags and the specific, unglamorous dignity of choosing her own socks. Malia's directness and Lydia's precision and the comfortable, slightly tired ease of the drive home. The clean, quiet satisfaction of having done something that required nothing of her except to be present in it.
She had slept as a person slept when their body understood it was safe to.
She didn't examine the feeling. She simply noted it with the careful, provisional quality of someone noting an unfamiliar thing and choosing not to startle it.
The tissue paper with Trevor's number was on the nightstand.
She had taken it from her coat pocket before she went to sleep and set it there without deciding to — not a decision so much as an action, performed before the part of her that made decisions had weighed in. The paper had gone soft from being folded. Trevor's handwriting was rounded and slightly compressed, the writing of someone who had learned it in a hurry and kept the habit.
She picked it up. Looked at it.
She almost smiled.
She put it back on the nightstand and got up.
She registered them before she reached the kitchen.
Not through the gift — the aperture was still closed, the restriction Scott had placed still sitting in her chest like a locked door — but through the ordinary, reliable sense of a house and the people in it that she had been developing for weeks, the quiet accumulation of familiarity that didn't require any ability beyond attention. She had learned the particular signatures of this household the way you learned the grammar of any place you lived long enough: the specific quality of Derek's stillness, the distinct register of Peter's particular variety of being present, the space Malia took up without apologizing for it, the sound of Scott's voice in the lower frequencies when he was not performing ease.
All four of them. In the kitchen. A conversation that had been happening.
The conversation stopped when they heard her on the stairs.
She walked in.
Scott was at the table. Malia in the chair at the far end, both hands around a mug. Peter at the counter with his tea, in the position he occupied when he was performing not having orchestrated something. And Derek — Derek was by the window, and when she entered he turned and looked at her.
It was a long look. Hard in the specific, contained way of something that had been waiting for her arrival and had prepared itself. She met it, and then he turned away, and reached past Peter on the counter, and turned on the television.
"— investigators say the fire appears to have originated in the shoe department of the mall's main department store. No casualties or injuries have been reported, and officials describe the damage as contained to the affected section and two adjacent—"
She watched the footage. The yellow tape. The darkened entrance, the specific, complicated shape of a building that had been burned in a specific place and not others.
"I told you," Malia said, "not to get that shoe salesman's number."
She said it without heat. The tone she used for things she had predicted and taken no pleasure in being right about.
Eliza looked at Derek.
He was looking at the television. The muscle in his jaw was doing something careful.
"There was no rule," Eliza said, "against meeting other people."
"I didn't think," he said, still not looking at her, "there needed to be one."
The room received this.
She let a beat pass. Then:
"Does it bother you?"
He said nothing.
The silence had a specific quality — not the silence of someone who hadn't heard, or someone who was forming an answer, but the silence of someone who had heard the question very clearly and had decided that answering it was not something he was prepared to do in this room, in front of these people, at this hour.
"Well," Peter said pleasantly, into the silence, "it does seem to have bothered Lucien in any case."
"Isn't fire Cassius Aldrith's domain?" Scott asked.
His voice had the quality it had when he was doing the work of assembling a picture from pieces he already mostly held.
"Yes," she said.
"I don't suppose," he said, with the careful, provisional tone of a man who already suspected the answer, "he can do something like this from Paris."
"No." She looked at the television. The yellow tape, the dark entrance. "He would have needed to be here. Fire on this scale, targeted this precisely — that's not remote work. He was in Beacon Hills last night."
"So if the fire started last night," Malia said, "he could still be here."
The room absorbed this.
"Which means," Peter said, setting down his tea with the pleasant efficiency of someone arriving at the thesis, "that your little Romeo is in considerably more danger than he was yesterday."
She looked at him. She did not perform the look.
"So how do we protect him?"
Peter's expression had the quality of a man who had been waiting to be asked exactly that question. "Isn't it obvious?" he said. "You're going to cast every protective charm Sylvia has taught you over him. Everything she's given you that can be placed on a person. And then we're going to hope that's enough to keep Cassius at bay."
"And how am I supposed to arrange that?" she said. "I can't exactly get him to consent to me performing strange rituals over his body on our first date."
"No," Peter agreed. The timing of someone who had rehearsed the delivery. "I imagine not. That's why we're going to drug him." A pause. "And wipe his memory afterward."
"Absolutely not," she said.
"Eliza—"
"No." The flat register. The one she kept for things that were not open for negotiation. "The charms are necessary. I understand that. I'll do the charms. But I am not wiping someone's memory. He sold me a pair of boots and gave me his number. He doesn't deserve to have his mind interfered with because of something he had no part in."
"He doesn't deserve to be leverage either," Scott said. He said it without Peter's smoothness — directly, in the register he used when he had looked at a situation and arrived at a position he didn't enjoy but wasn't going to walk away from. "If Trevor doesn't remember you, Lucien has nothing to use against him. If he does remember you—" He looked at her steadily. "Eliza, if he does remember you, and Lucien's people come for him, there's nothing we can do from here. The memory wipe is the protection. It's the only thing that actually closes the door."
She looked at the table.
She thought about the shoe department as it was yesterday — the low light, the carpet, the uncomplicated warmth of an afternoon that had required nothing from her. She thought about what it looked like in the footage.
She thought about Trevor's rounded handwriting on the tissue paper.
"The charms first," she said. "All of them. Everything I know."
"Of course," Peter said. In the tone of someone who had already decided and was content to let her arrive at the same place at her own pace.
She didn't trust the smoothness. She filed it.
"Get him to come to the castle tonight," Malia said.
"What if he has plans tonight?"
"Well," Peter said, with the mild observation of someone noting an inconvenient fact, "it's not as though he has to work."
She looked at Derek.
He was already looking at her. The long, hard quality from when she walked in was still there, wearing slightly thinner at the edges.
"Tell him to come tonight," he said. "Trust me. He'll come."
The room was quiet.
Scott's eyes moved between them — briefly, carefully, with the quality of someone taking note of a thing without commenting on it because the thing was not yet his to comment on. Beside him, Malia was looking at the middle distance with the particular expression she wore when she had registered a situation and found commentary unnecessary.
The quiet lasted one moment longer than it should have.
Then she reached into her pocket and took out her phone.