To the Most Honourable Ho Fang,

Edward is dead. I was shot at the rite and survived, which I mention only to explain the handwriting. So I will be brief. The Rite of Ascension at Misr House on the second of February was destroyed. I believe four Americans are responsible.

They must have been watching us for weeks. They came to our club, sat at our tables, and we took them for nothing. When we gathered in the woods for the rite, they were behind us in the house, in the passages beneath, among Edward's papers. Then they put on our robes and opened fire from the treeline during the ritual itself. That is the kind of people they are.

I observed them at the club and can describe them. A man named Vincent Lamar, dark-haired, bearded, well dressed, who spent his evening cataloguing the room rather than enjoying it. A second man, Declan Webb, fair and young with a soldier's bearing, the kind who shoots before the situation has finished developing. I spoke with the woman, Abigail Barclay, myself in the smoking room. Auburn hair, pale, well-moneyed in her presentation. I have spent my life reading people across the smoke of a cigarillo and I could not read her, which I do not say lightly. There is something behind the composure that has nothing to do with ambition, and she spoke of a murdered friend with the detachment of someone describing the weather. I thought of her on the drive home I don't say that lightly. The fourth is a girl called Iris, no surname that I know, red-haired and slight, who danced at our club as though she had not a care in the world. At the rite she conjured a fog from nothing that swallowed the clearing whole. She has real power. Treat her accordingly.

Whatever they found in that house, they will have read it.

Guard the island. Guard the Pale Viper. When they come, and they will, meet them with everything you have. I have seen what half measures earns against these people. I cannot leave London. I will not be coming.

Z.S.