Three days later KaSandra came back with the documents.
She set them on the kitchen table without ceremony, a neat stack of passports and travel papers that looked entirely official and that no one examined too closely, and then she sat down and poured herself a cup of tea like she had simply stopped by for a visit.
Thomas picked up his passport, opened it, looked at the photo, and set it back down without a word.
"Is there a problem?" KaSandra asked pleasantly.
"No," Thomas said. "The photo is just very accurate."
"I thought you would appreciate that."
"I don't know how you got it and I have decided that is fine."
KaSandra sipped her tea.
Across the table Niall was looking at his passport with the expression of a person deeply curious about a process he understood he was never going to get a straight answer about. Kristen leaned over his shoulder, looked at hers, seemed satisfied, and tucked it into her jacket.
"Okay," Tierney said, standing at the head of the table with her hands flat on the surface, looking at the room. "Travel is sorted. Weapons are packed. We leave in four days." She looked at each of them in turn. "Before we go I want everyone to be clear on something. We are not going to Iceland to drag Samantha back with us. We are going to find her, introduce ourselves, and give her the choice. Her father too." She paused. "We do this right."
"What if she says no?" Carlyle asked.
"Then we respect that and we figure out another way," Tierney said. "But she won't say no."
"How do you know?" Courtney asked.
Tierney looked at her daughter, who was sitting at the far end of the table with her chin resting on her hand, listening quietly.
"Because KaSandra said she's been waiting," Katherine said, answering for her mother without looking up. "Even if she doesn't know it yet."
Tierney nodded once.
The room settled into the particular kind of quiet that comes before a plan becomes real, when the idea of a thing gives way to the weight of it.
It was Kristen who broke it, because Kristen almost always broke it.
"So while we are all in a serious planning mood," she said, leaning back in her chair, "can we talk about the spirit chosen one? Because we haven't touched that yet and I feel like we should at least know his name before we fly across the ocean and back."
KaSandra set down her cup.
"We can," she said. "Because finding Samantha will take the connection between Katherine and Carlyle to a new level. When you return, locating the spirit chosen one will be significantly easier."
"Significantly," Dean said. "So not easy."
"No," KaSandra agreed. "Not easy. But easier." She folded her hands on the table. "What I can tell you now is his name and where to begin looking."
The room leaned in slightly, almost as one.
"His name is Jasper Vale."
Katherine's eyes sharpened. "Vale. Like Viento."
"Yes," KaSandra said. "A name chosen by his mother when he was born. Before that she was known as Grace Dove."
Thomas set his coffee down. "Another original chosen one."
"Yes."
"So two of the three new chosen ones are children of the originals," Dean said slowly, working through it. "What about the fire chosen one?"
"The same," KaSandra said. "But we will come to him when the time is right."
"Where is Jasper?" Niall asked.
"New Orleans."
Kristen brightened visibly. "Okay that one I am very ready for."
"You say that now," Thomas said, "but New Orleans is not a simple place."
"Nowhere we go is a simple place, Thomas."
"That is a fair point," he admitted.
Katherine had been quiet through most of it, turning the name over in her mind. Jasper Vale. She tried to reach for the signal the way KaSandra had taught her, lightly, without grasping, and felt something at the very edge of her awareness. Not wind this time. Something different. Softer and stranger, less like weather and more like the feeling of standing in a room where someone had just left. A presence that lingered after the source of it was gone.
She pulled back before it slipped away.
"He can see ghosts," she said quietly.
Everyone looked at her.
She looked up and found KaSandra watching her with those still gold eyes.
"Can he?" Katherine said.
KaSandra's expression didn't change exactly, but something in it settled the way it did when Katherine got something right.
"Yes," KaSandra said. "He can see them and speak with them. He always has been able to." A pause. "It has made his life complicated."
"I imagine it would," Courtney said softly.
"People have not always been kind about it," KaSandra continued. "He has learned to be quiet and keep to himself rather than explain what he sees. His mother raised him to be careful." She looked around the table. "He will not be easy to approach. He will be suspicious and cautious and he will not believe you immediately. That is not stubbornness. That is survival."
"So we'll need someone patient," Niall said, and then looked at Courtney without quite meaning to.
Courtney looked back at him. "Why are you looking at me?"
"You're patient."
"I can also hear you deciding that."
"I said it out loud, Courtney."
"You decided it before you said it."
"That is how decisions work."
Katherine put her face in her hand.
"We will figure out the approach when we get there," Tierney said, cutting through it with the practiced ease of someone who had been managing this particular kind of chaos for months. "Right now we focus on Iceland. One at a time." She looked at Katherine. "Get some rest tonight. All of you. We have four days and I want everyone sharp."
The meeting broke apart slowly, people drifting out of the kitchen in ones and twos, voices dropping into smaller quieter conversations.
KaSandra remained at the table.
Katherine was the last to leave and she paused in the doorway and looked back at the older woman sitting alone with her cup of tea and the stack of passports, unbothered and unhurried, the way she always was.
"KaSandra," Katherine said. "When we find Jasper. The ghosts he sees." She hesitated. "Are any of them people we would know?"
KaSandra looked at her for a long moment.
"Get some rest, Katherine," she said gently.
It wasn't a no.
Katherine held the doorframe for one more second and then let it go, and walked down the hall toward the stairs, and did not ask again.
But she thought about it for a long time before she slept.