She answered the door at 1:07 PM on Sunday with the expression of someone who had been working and had been interrupted in a way that was acceptable depending on the purpose.
He said: "I need to tell you something I should have told you two weeks ago."
She stepped back.
He told her everything about the Court — the invitation, the gathering, the offer, the Grandmaster's platinum mask and his voice and the specific language of our myth, the imitator attack, Jake Torres's wired jaw and his mother's dried tears in a hospital corridor. The two-week window. The white owl feather under the door.
He told her about Jason Blood in the chapel the previous night, not because it was immediately tactically relevant but because she was going to have questions about why the resonance boost hadn't happened and the honest answer required the full account.
She didn't interrupt once.
When he finished, the loft was quiet for approximately eight seconds.
"How long," she said.
"The invitation arrived January 4th. I received it the same night we had coffee."
"So when I examined your power on the 10th, you already knew about this."
"Yes."
"And when we had the study session on the 16th — when I was developing a tool specifically to help you operate at full capacity in high-pressure situations—"
"Yes."
She stood and walked to the kitchen, which in the loft's open floor plan put her about fifteen feet away from him without removing her from the conversation. She ran water into the kettle for something to do with her hands and then set it on the stove and turned back.
"I told you on the fourth — our first coffee — that I would not report to the League unless there was a public safety concern. I told you we were going to do this as an ongoing research arrangement. I explained my instruments before I used them. I gave you my actual number, not a contact channel." She was not shouting. Her voice had the specific quality of controlled anger, which was louder than shouting in its own way. "I've been examining your power — which is an extremely intimate form of professional trust — and you were withholding that a secret society with Talon assassins was threatening you the ENTIRE TIME."
"I wasn't certain I could trust—"
"That's not the answer I wanted."
"It's the honest one." He held it. "I'd known you for a week. The Court has my civilian identity and a file on my operational history and the resources to hurt people I'm connected to. I didn't know where your reporting obligations were with the League, I didn't know whether telling you would redirect your attention toward intervention rather than research, and I didn't know if being fully honest with you would—" he stopped.
"Would what."
"Change the dynamic in a way that made things more complicated."
She was quiet for three seconds. "You mean you were worried that if I knew you were in danger, I'd make decisions based on that instead of on what you needed."
"Yes."
"That's—" she stopped. The kettle was beginning to heat. "That's actually not a completely unreasonable concern. And it's also exactly what you do when you don't trust someone." She crossed her arms, which was not a defensive posture but a containing one — the body language of a person keeping their own energy organized. "So here's what I need you to understand. I'm a professional. I've worked with people in dangerous situations for fifteen years. My response to 'there is a threat' is not to panic and call for help without consulting you. It's to say: what are the threat parameters, what resources do we have, and how do we address this together." She met his eyes. "If you're going to work with me — and especially if this is going to be more than a professional arrangement — I need you to give me the chance to be what I actually am rather than what you're afraid of."
He thought about three months of operating alone. Every decision made in the specific isolation of the only person who knew the full picture. Batman's collaboration was real but functionally one-directional — Batman provided resources and direction, Elijah reported in. Kaplan had been a research partner until the catacombs became dangerous. Sarah had been a genuine civilian friend for six weeks before the Syndicate had made that dangerous too. He had been building an operation that was structurally isolated by design, because the secrets were load-bearing and removing any of them felt like removing walls.
"You're right," he said.
She looked at him.
"I should have told you two weeks ago," he said. "Not because the tactical decision was obviously wrong — I still think the caution was defensible — but because I was treating you as a resource rather than as someone who had offered to be a partner. Those are different things and I knew the difference and made the wrong choice." He paused. "I'm sorry."
The kettle was building toward a boil.
She uncrossed her arms.
"Okay," she said. "Then we plan."
She made tea with the efficiency of someone who had made tea in a dozen temporary residences and had learned to find each space's rhythm quickly, and set a cup in front of him without asking how he took it — he'd mentioned black at some point in their library conversation, filed without comment — and brought her own to the cleared floor space where she dropped to a cross-legged sit and looked at the catacomb map he'd brought.
"The Court expects you to come to the catacombs tonight or tomorrow," she said. "That's why Blood was there — they may have sent him as a scout, or he may have been genuinely independent."
"He was independent. The Court doesn't send someone like Jason Blood. They don't have that kind of leverage."
"Agreed." She traced the catacomb's tunnel network with her finger. "But they'll have their own people watching the entrances. The attack on the imitator was three days ago. They're monitoring."
"I need the chapel's resonance," he said. "The BP gap to Tier 3 is still substantial. Without it, I'm going into the confrontation at current capacity."
"Which is."
He ran through the honest assessment: Level 11, Pale Rider Tier 2, stats in the superhuman range, Witch-Hunter's Sense at a hundred meters, Brand that functioned as a weapon against supernatural entities, Dread Presence. Against Talons — genuine Heroic-tier combatants — the system's own assessment was still insufficient for direct engagement. One cold-starting Talon in November had nearly killed him.
"The chapel has three-century-old resonance from the original contract," he said. "If I can interact with it deliberately — perform in the space rather than just pass through it — the system should generate a significant BP event. Enough, combined with what's already accumulated, to push toward Tier 3."
"Toward," she said.
"Toward. I can't guarantee the gap closes completely in one session."
She was quiet for a moment, looking at the map. "Talons are impervious to most of my attack spells. But they have to be able to find a target to attack it." She looked up. "I can ward the chapel against surveillance. Make it appear, to any Court monitoring, that the space is empty. You perform inside the ward. They send no response because their sensors show nothing happening." She tilted her head. "It's not a guarantee. If they have someone physically stationed inside the tunnel network, the ward doesn't help. But it addresses magical and most technological surveillance."
"How long to prepare the ward."
"Twenty minutes in the space. I'd need to visit it first to calibrate." A pause. "You were going to ask if I wanted to come down there."
"I was."
"The answer is yes." She sipped her tea. "If we're doing this as partners, then we go together." She held his gaze. "And when the deadline arrives — the Court confrontation — I'll be there too. Not in the room. But present."
He looked at her across the catacomb map on the hardwood floor and thought about what it meant that someone had offered to stand with him against a threat without being recruited, assigned, or bargained into it. Kaplan had been a professional collaborator who didn't know the full stakes. Batman had been a transactional arrangement. Zatanna had been told the full picture — minus the three things he couldn't tell anyone — and had argued with him about it and resolved the argument by starting to plan.
"That's the first time anyone's offered that," he said.
"I know," she said. "Don't make it weird."
He almost smiled. She was looking at the map.
They spread the catacomb layout and the Court brownstone blueprints across the floor and worked until 5 PM, and the argument was three hours behind them by the time they finished and neither of them had apologized for it — it had simply been processed through action, which was apparently how both of them handled conflict when the conflict mattered. Elijah noted this with the part of his mind that tracked significant data and moved on to the next tactical question.
The planning had a specific quality that he'd been missing since September: the feeling of building something with someone who understood the full stakes and was bringing their own capability to bear on the problem rather than asking him to explain, again, why the stakes were real.
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