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"Monday night," he says. "After Lammas. Our night off. The five of us are going to the coast."

"Who planned that?"

"Lenart." He grimaces.

I think about Grady, and the photo, and the two pages missing from the binder. Those are all still there. William's still looking. Tav still walks the Club with me before every shift, and I'll still let him.

But I've spent five weeks waiting for the next thing to fall on me. I'm tired. And I want to see the ocean with the four of them.

I finish the last line on the clipboard and put down the pen.

"Tell Lenart," I say, "to put it on the calendar."

Chapter eighteen

Tara

By ten o’clock on Thursday night, the Monster Club is so full that Kit has three barbacks running ice and still can’t keep the wells stocked.

I’m not behind the bar. That’s the strangest part. I’m standing at the end of it in a dark green dress with my hands in the pockets, and every few minutes somebody I’ve poured for a dozen times comes over to tell me congratulations before anything has happened. The troll who laughed at Calloway. Two of the harpies from the wedding, who want me to know the bride is pregnant. A very old selkie who has tipped me in Canadian coins every Saturday since June.

“You’re allowed to sit down,” Merek says behind me.

“I’m not sitting at my own bar like a customer.”

“You’re the guest of honor, so sit down and enjoy it.” He leans down, warm against my back, and says into my ear, “And your knees are shaking, Trouble.”

“They are not.”

“They are a little.”

Lenart comes through the crowd in a black suit with a dark green pocket square, which he’s never worn before and which I’m pretty sure he bought this week. He stops in front of me and looks at the dress, and then at my face.

“Ms. Iverson,” he says.

“Don’t.”

“I’m merely greeting the Oathkeeper.”

“Not for two hours.”

“I’m early,” he says. He takes my hand and kisses the back of it, which nobody has ever done to me in my life, and then he goes to talk to the council wardens by the door, because somebody has to and he likes it.

Tav I don’t see for an hour. Then he shows up at my elbow with a work light in one hand and dust on his shoulders.

“Stairs are clear,” he says. “I put a new bulb in over the stone. The old one flickered.”

“Since when?”

“Since Tuesday. It was bothering me.” He looks down at me. “You look good, Boss.”

“I look like I’m going to throw up.”

William’s been at the far wall all night with an earpiece in, watching the room. When I catch his eye across the crowd, he doesn’t smile. He just touches two fingers to the side of his jaw, where his hand went to stone against my face on Tuesday, and goes back to watching.

Corinne has a clipboard and a headset, and she’s been everywhere at once since six. At eleven-thirty she finds me.

“We’re on schedule,” she says, and tucks an index card into my pocket. It has the order of the night on it, in her neat handwriting, down to the minute. “In case you blank. The wardens are here. Mr. Pike is in Lenart’s office, and he’s asked for decaf. Twenty minutes to the presentation.” She looks past me and frowns. “And we have a problem in the Arches.”