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the bolero across his chest. I assumed he also had a gun stashed somewhere on his body.
    The trench coat/loose coat look that Terric, Zayvion, and Shamus always seemed to favor suddenly made sense to me. I wondered if there was a coat here I could borrow.
    “I tossed my phone. So did Zayvion,” I said. “So we can’t keep in contact that way. Any ideas, people?”
    “Did you happen to steal any of the message beads, Shame?” Maeve asked.
    “Steal? Please, Mum. Give me some credit.” Shame paused, hands on his hips. He tipped his head as if going through a list of things.
    “Might have something in the master bedroom. Just a tick.” He strode off down the hall.
    “So,” I said, “we need to get to the wells and see if magic has been tainted at those source points.
    “Zayvion and I will go to the Life well. Maeve, do you think you could get to the inn without anyone noticing and check the Blood well?”
    “Unless there were cameras at the cistern,” she said, “or someone following Zayvion, no one knows I have been Unclosed. And since I live there, I can’t imagine they would expect me to be anywhere else right now. So, yes. I think I can check. If I run into trouble, I can take care of that too.”
    Maeve was a Blood magic user. A very good Blood magic user. She might seem like a gentle soul, but she was fury in a fight.
    “I’ll go with you,” Hayden said.
    She smiled. “I’d hoped so.”
    “Where do you want me, Allie?” Victor asked.
    That was the strangest thing. Victor was my teacher, and I guess I’d sort of expected him to stay in the fatherlymentor position in my life. I’d never had him ask me what he should do before. It was strange to be taking the lead position. But not entirely unfamiliar. I’d been coordinating the Hounds for months now.
    “Two things,” I said. “Can you get in to the Faith well and see if it’s clean?”
    “I should be able to. What’s the second thing?”
    “I’d like to get information to Violet, to warn her and Kevin about the poison.”
    He thought about it a second. “I think I could contact Kevin fairly easily. Zayvion, did you Close all the years he and I have worked together?”
    “No. Just the last fifteen or so.”
    He set his shoulders, like bearing an unfamiliar weight. “Well, then. I imagine I might want to have coffee with him just to catch up on our chess game. It shouldn’t be a problem, and shouldn’t take long. What is the plan afterward?”
    “We’ll contact each other once we have information,” I said. “Find out if the wells are tainted, who’s running the Authority, what they’re sending out to stop us, and whether Violet is at a safe distance from all this. I’ll need to contact Collins to see if Davy’s doing all right, but that can wait until after we check on the wells.
    “Where should we meet up?” I asked. “Should we decide that now?”
    “Better not,” Roman said. He was still standing in the center of the room, looking relaxed, instead of like someone who was about to open a Gate halfway across the world and march straight up to the very people who could lock him away again. Or kill him.
    “The less that any of us know where we’re all going,” he said, “the less chance there is someone will Truth it out of us.”
    That made sense. “So we’ll contact each other with the information and a meeting place when the time comes,” I said. “Works for me.”
    Shame strolled in with a shoe box. “Here we are.”
    “You put them in a shoe box?” Maeve asked. “Shamus, these are invaluable. Heirlooms.”
    “Which is why I stuck them in a shoe box. Safekeeping.”
    He placed the box on the coffee table and lifted the lid. The soft scent of roses filled the room.
    “I didn’t know you’d kept these, Maeve,” Victor said. “Hugh did fine work.”
    “Yes, he did,” she said wistfully. “But as you can see, I didn’t keep them. Shamus did. So then, do they still work?”
    “I think so.” Shame