The crossing takes six hours.

  Six hours of gray water and grayer sky, the ferry rolling on swells that make the other passengers clutch their stomachs and retreat to their cabins. The wind carries salt and cold and something else—a presence that presses against my awareness like a weight, like a question, like the attention of something vast and patient and infinitely curious.

  But I stand at the rail the whole time, watching the water, feeling the carved symbols beat in rhythm with the waves. England disappears into the fog behind us, taking with it the Hound and his hunters, taking with it Crane's burned surgery and Shaw's drowned legacy and all the other horrors we've left in our wake. Ten names remain on my list. Ten more monsters to find and kill before I can rest.

  If I can ever rest. If the emptiness ever fills. If the marks ever stop their tidal song.

  The Deep One is everywhere in the ocean. I can sense it now—a vast presence spread across the depths, patient and eternal, watching everything that moves on the surface with the detached interest of something that has existed since before life crawled onto land. It's not hostile, exactly. Not friendly either. Just aware. Curious about the marked thing standing on this boat, wondering what I'll do next.

  I wonder the same thing.

  A wave breaks against the hull, and I see something in the spray—a shape, a suggestion, gone before I can focus on it. The marks flash hot below my heart, and I feel that crushing scrutiny sharpen. It's showing me something. Or trying to. Or maybe I'm just losing my mind, seeing patterns in chaos, meaning in madness.

  "You should come inside." Corrine appears at my elbow, her face pale from the rough crossing. "The fog is getting worse."

  "I'm fine."

  "You're standing in freezing spray staring at nothing. That's not fine."

  "I'm staring at the Deep One." The words come out before I can stop them. "I can feel it. In the water. Watching."

  She's quiet. Her hand finds mine on the rail, cold and slightly damp.

  "What does it want?"

  "I don't know. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything." I watch the waves break against the ferry's hull. "It showed me things, in the ritual. Visions of what's coming. A ship in fog. Four faces. Something that felt like the end of the world."

  "The prophecy Shaw mentioned. The final ritual."

  "I think so. The congregation has been building toward something for centuries. Whatever the Deep One wants, whatever it's been waiting for—it's almost ready."

  "And you're part of it."

  "Maybe. Or maybe I'm the thing that stops it." I turn to face her. "I don't know what I'm becoming, Corrine. The marks are changing me. I don't need sleep like I used to. I know things before they happen. I feel less every day—not just the emptiness, but everything. Love. Fear. Compassion."

  "You still feel those things."

  "Do I? Or do I just remember what they felt like and go through the motions?" The question has been building for weeks, ever since the warehouse, ever since I calculated whether to poison a child. "What if the ritual didn't just mark me? What if it started turning me into something like them?"

  "Eleanor." Her grip on my hand tightens. "You're nothing like them."

  "How do you know?"

  "Because they never questioned what they were doing. They never lay awake wondering if they were becoming monsters. They just did terrible things and told themselves it was holy." Her eyes meet mine, fierce with certainty. "You question everything. Every kill, every choice, every moment of numbness. That's not what monsters do."

  "What do monsters do?"

  "They stop asking." She steps closer, blocking the wind, blocking the spray. "The day you stop asking whether you're becoming something terrible—that's the day I'll worry. Until then, you're still Eleanor. Still human. Still fighting."

  I want to believe her. Want to trust that the questioning is enough, that doubt is salvation, that I can carry the marks and serve the hunt and still remain myself.

  But the Deep One watches from below, patient and eternal, and I wonder if it asked the same questions once. Before it became what it is. Before it learned that the answer doesn't matter.

  We dock at Calais as dawn breaks.

  The French port is smaller than Dover, quieter, less chaotic. We slip through customs with forged papers—Mrs. Ashworth and Miss Grey again, English widows touring the continent—and emerge into a morning that smells of bread and coffee and possibility.

  "We need to reach Paris," Corrine says, consulting a map. "Devereux's archive is somewhere in the catacombs beneath the city. Mei's contact can get us in."

  "Mei." I think about the hunter who trained me, who sent me here, who is even now pursuing her own target across Europe. "Have you heard from her?"

  "A message reached Morrison's network last week. She's in Munich, tracking Aldric Voss."

  "The man who took her sister."

  "Twenty-two years she's been hunting him. Twenty-two years of patience and planning and waiting for the right moment." Corrine's voice is soft. "She's dying, Eleanor. Something from her years hunting the congregation—poison, curse, I don't know. She has months, maybe less."

  The news lands like a blow. Mei has always seemed immortal—ageless, tireless, an avatar of vengeance who would keep hunting until the last cultist fell. The idea that she might die before finishing her work—

  "Does she know?"

  "She knows. That's why she's going after Voss now, despite the risk. She wants to finish what she started before—" Corrine stops, breathes. "Before she can't."

  I reflect on Mei's flat eyes and precise movements. The way she taught me to kill quickly and cleanly. The way she never talked about her sister except in terms of mission parameters. Twenty-two years of grief compressed into efficiency, distilled into purpose.

  "Her sister was thirteen." Corrine's voice softened. "Mei told me once, when she was teaching me to track. Lian was thirteen, and she wanted to be a painter. She used to paint watercolors—birds, flowers, the mountains near their village."

  "And Voss took her for a ritual."

  "Worse. He took her for study. Mei said he was the scholarly one—documented everything, treated the children like specimens. Lian lived for three days after the ritual. Voss kept notes on what happened to her body as it changed." The words taste like poison, but I need to say them. Need to remember why we do this. "Mei found the notes years later. That's when she started hunting for real."

  If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

  Corrine is quiet for a long moment. The carriage jolts over a rough patch of road, and outside the window, a village church rises white against the morning sky.

  "Twenty-two years." I shook my head slowly. "Do you think she'll find peace? When it's done?"

  "I don't know. Do any of us find peace?" My thoughts turn to the numbness in my chest, the way it refuses to fill no matter how many names I cross off the list. "Mei told me once that the kills don't fill the emptiness. That filling it was never the point."

  "Then what is the point?"

  "Making sure they can't hurt anyone else. That's all. That's the only thing that matters."

  Is that what I'm becoming? Will I spend decades hunting, killing, until the emptiness consumes everything else? Will I end up like Mei—patient, efficient, dying alone in some foreign city with only a list of names to show for my life?

  The thought should frighten me. It doesn't. The marks hum their tidal rhythm, and I feel only the cold clarity of purpose.

  "We'll see her again," I manage, though I'm not sure I believe it. "When this is done. When we've both finished what we started."

  "I hope so." Corrine reaches across the carriage, takes my hand. "She was the first person who believed I could be more than what Celeste made me. The first person who saw a defector instead of just another cultist."

  "She believed in me too. Saw something worth saving in a drowned girl who couldn't stop screaming."

  "Maybe that's her real gift. Not the hunting. Not the killing. Just... seeing people. Really seeing them, beneath all the damage and the scars."

  We hire a carriage for the journey to Paris. The French countryside rolls past—fields and villages and occasional glimpses of ancient churches—and I watch it all without really seeing. My mind is on Mei, on the Hound, on the congregation's vast network spreading across Europe like a cancer.

  Ten names remain on my list. Marsh is somewhere in England, protected by the congregation's remaining forces. Celeste is building something in London—Corrine's sister, the one she can't quite bring herself to talk about. The others are scattered across the continent, each one a thread in the web that connects the faithful.

  And beneath it all, the Deep One waits. Patient. Eternal. Curious about what I'll do next.

  "Tell me about Devereux,"

  "He's old. Ancient, some say—though that's probably exaggeration. He's been the congregation's archivist for at least fifty years, probably longer. Every ritual, every member, every sacrifice—he's documented all of it." Corrine's expression is grim. "If we can get access to his records, we'll have everything we need to dismantle them."

  "And if we can't?"

  "Then we kill him and take the records anyway." She meets my eyes. "He's not innocent, Eleanor. He may not wield the knife, but he makes their work possible. Without his organization, his documentation, his systems—the congregation would be just another death cult. He made them efficient."

  "Then he dies like the rest."

  "Yes." She looks out the window, watching France scroll past. "But getting to him won't be easy. The catacombs are vast, unmapped, filled with things that shouldn't exist. And Devereux has been hiding down there for decades. He knows every tunnel, every trap, every horror that lives in the bones."

  "Then we'll need a guide."

  "Mei's contact. A man named Fontaine who claims to know the paths. He lost his daughter to a ritual fifteen years ago and has been gathering intelligence on the congregation ever since." She pulls a card from her coat—an address in the Latin Quarter. "He'll meet us when we arrive."

  "Another parent who lost a child." I think about Sullivan—the Hound—and the letters from his daughter that he kept and read nightly. "The congregation leaves a trail of broken families behind it."

  "They do. And sometimes those broken families become weapons." Corrine tucks the card away. "Fontaine has contacts inside the congregation. Servants, guards, people who've seen too much and want revenge. He's been building a network for years, waiting for someone who could actually use the information."

  "Someone like us."

  "Someone exactly like us."

  Paris waits ahead, its spires visible now on the horizon—Notre Dame rising against the gray sky, the Arc de Triomphe a distant smudge, the whole city spreading along the Seine like a living thing. I've been here before, hunting Mercer, and the memory arrives uninvited: his kind face, his gentle lies, the way he died confused in a Montmartre alley.

  This time will be different. This time we're going deeper—into the catacombs, into the bones, into the place where the congregation keeps its secrets.

  "What do you know about the catacombs?" I ask.

  "They're old. Ancient, in places. The Romans used them as quarries, then the Christians filled them with bodies when the city's graveyards overflowed. Miles of tunnels, millions of bones, and things living down there that shouldn't exist." Corrine's voice drops. "The congregation has used them for centuries. Ritual sites, hidden archives, passages that let them move unseen beneath the city. Devereux built his archive there because no one would think to look."

  "And these things that live in the tunnels?"

  "Some are congregation creations—failed experiments, guards, creatures bound to protect the sacred spaces. Others are older. Fontaine says there's something down there that predates the cult entirely. Something that bargains for passage."

  The marks pulse at her words. Recognition, maybe. Or warning.

  "We'll deal with whatever we find."

  "I know we will." She squeezes my hand. "That's what we do."

  The carriage rolls on toward Paris. Somewhere beneath that city, in tunnels built of the dead, a man named Devereux keeps the congregation's secrets.

  We're going to take them.

  And then we're going to burn the congregation to the ground.

  The marks hum their approval, and in the depths of my chest, the emptiness echoes with something that might almost be anticipation.

  Ten names remain.

  The hunt continues.

  And somewhere beneath the city, in tunnels that have held secrets since before the Revolution, something stirs. The archive keeper has sensed our approach. The walls themselves are beginning to wake.

  We're walking into the congregation's memory.

  And memories, I'm learning, can bite back.

  Author's Note: Thanks for reading. We're almost through Arc Three. The catacombs are next.