Page 75 of Blood & Ash

Arrow walked north. His shadow moved ahead of him on the sidewalk, long and still, and was gone around the corner before the sound of his footsteps could reach anyone’s ears.

Marcus took his seat across from Gabriel. The table between them was scarred oak. A half-empty water glass sat near the head chair where no one sat. Gabriel stood instead. His right hand pressed flat against the table’s edge. His thumb dug into the grain. He had been standing for twelve minutes. His boots hadn’t moved.

The map of Ashton Grove lay unfolded at the center of the table. Pins marked key locations: the packhouse, the nest, Nightshade & Nettle, the Victorian on Maple Street with the green shutters, and a cluster near the eastern tree line where the boundary runners kept their cabins. Red thread connected some of them. The pattern meant something to someone, though not to Marcus.

Luca stood by the window. His arms were crossed. His weight rested on one hip. The late afternoon light came through the glass and threw his shadow long across the floorboards. He hadn’t spoken since they convened.

Galen positioned himself three feet from the table’s end. His posture mirrored his father’s: shoulders back, weight on both feet, jaw set. But the authority behind it was borrowed and learned, not yet earned. His eyes tracked the map, the red thread, the pins. His hand flexed at his side, opening and closing.

“The names,” Gabriel said. “The coven.”

His voice was flat. The words landed on the table between them and didn’t bounce.

Marcus looked at Gabriel’s hand. The thumb pressed harder into the oak. The knuckle had gone white. The hellforged scar along Gabriel’s temple caught the light and held it, silver against skin.

“All nine?” Marcus asked.

Gabriel’s thumb pressed harder. The wood gave under it with a small sound of grain compressing. No one answered.

Marcus pressed his knuckles against his jaw, where the tension had settled. He had been standing too long today, and his shoulders ached. His jaw ached worse.

“Does Rosalind know what he’ll do with them?” Marcus asked.

The question hung. The water glass caught the light, half-empty. Arrow hadn’t touched it, and Gabriel hadn’t offered.

“She knew what she was handing over,” Luca said.

His voice came from the window, flat and certain. He’d already run the numbers, and they didn’t change. He didn’t turn from the glass. His reflection held steady in the pane: black hair, dark eyes, a face that had stopped looking young a long time ago.

The silence that followed had edges. Galen shifted his weight. His boot scraped the floorboard. The sound was small and deliberate. He was learning to fill silences that his father would have left empty. Marcus worked his knuckles along his jaw again. The muscle didn’t yield.

The map lay between them with its red thread and pins, the architecture of a town that had been watched for longer than any of them had understood. Arrow’s footprint lay clean on oak.

Gabriel pulled his hand off the table. The wood held the impression of his thumb for a moment, a shallow dent in the grain, then it settled. Gabriel straightened. His shoulders went back. His blue eyes moved from Marcus to Luca to Galen and held on each one in turn, counting heads.

“We find out what he does next before he does it,” Gabriel said.

The words were declarative, a fact delivered to a room that had run out of useful questions. No one argued. No one nodded. They absorbed it quietly. They’d followed him through worse before and had come out fine every time.

Marcus looked at the map. The pins. The thread. The pattern still escaped him. He would study it later. When the room emptied. When Gabriel’s hand was no longer denting the table and Luca’s reflection was no longer holding steady in the glass and Galen had stopped trying to stand exactly where his father stood.

Near Galen’s chair, a quill lay dropped on the floor. Beside it, a sheet of paper. Handwritten notes in Galen’s uneven script listed dates, times, and locations, an attempt to track Arrow’s movements that had yielded nothing. The paper was crumpled at one corner. Galen had balled it, set it down, and walked away.

Marcus reached for the quill. He set it on the table. The feather was bent. He didn’t smooth it.

Galen saw him do it. His jaw worked once. The scar on his cheek pulled tight. He didn’t thank Marcus. He didn’t pick up the quill. He looked at the discarded notes on the floor. Marcus recognized the look from clinic exam rooms, the one patients wore when something they’d worked hard at turned out harder than they’d expected.

Gabriel was already moving toward the door. His boots rang on the floorboards, his tread carrying the weight of a decision already made. Autumn would be waiting upstairs or in the kitchen or somewhere he could find her without having to look too hard.

Luca pushed off the window frame. His arms came down as he walked to the map. He studied it, then traced one of the red threads with a finger from the nest to the eastern tree line, a path or the ghost of one. “Three days. That’s how long he’s had the room above the hardware store.”

Marcus nodded. He reached for the water glass. The water was room temperature and flat. He drank half of what remained and set the glass down. The map waited. The pins waited. The red thread connected points that Arrow had connected years before any of them thought to look.

Galen picked up the discarded notes. He smoothed the crumpled corner, folded the paper, and put it in his pocket. His hand came out empty. He looked at the map. At the pins. At the empty chair where his father had refused to sit.

“I’ll take the east quadrant,” Galen said. “Tonight.”

No one told him no.