The fire signal was the last one.
Katherine had expected it to be the hardest, the way last things often are, but when she sat down with Carlyle on the sixth morning before their departure and closed her eyes and let her power move the way it wanted to, the fire signal came to her faster than either of the others had.
Maybe because fire was already in her.
She felt it the moment her power cycled through its familiar rotation and hit the heat at the center of it, that deep furnace warmth that had always lived in her chest alongside everything else. It recognized something out there the way a flame recognizes oxygen, reaching toward it before she even asked it to.
She didn't fight it.
She let it reach.
And something reached back.
It was hot and bright and impatient, crackling at the edges like a fire that had been burning too long in a confined space and needed somewhere bigger to go. It moved differently from Samantha's signal, which drifted and circled, and differently from Jasper's, which lingered and waited. This one pushed. This one had no interest in being subtle about its existence.
Katherine almost smiled.
Bold, she thought. Whoever you are, you are very bold.
She held the connection steady and felt Carlyle find it beside her, their twin bond threading through the signal and anchoring it from both sides. The image that came was not a picture exactly, more a collection of impressions. Cold air and mountains. Military infrastructure. The feeling of confinement, of being watched, of power held in check by something external rather than by choice.
Not imprisoned. But not free either.
She let it go gently and opened her eyes.
KaSandra was already looking at her.
"Canada," Katherine said.
"Yes," KaSandra said.
"He's not there willingly."
KaSandra was quiet for a beat. "No. Not entirely."
The room shifted. Dean uncrossed his arms. Thomas set down the book he had been pretending to read for the last twenty minutes. Tierney's expression went carefully neutral in the way that meant she was concerned and choosing not to show all of it at once.
"The suits have him," Dean said. It wasn't a question.
"They have him adjacent," KaSandra said. "He is not in a cell. But they have made themselves very present in his life and the lives of his family." She folded her hands. "Victor has been aware of Fenix Tempest for some time. He has been cultivating that awareness carefully."
"Of course he has," Kristen muttered.
"Fenix is the fire chosen one," KaSandra continued, her voice measured and even. "His father, Mr. Tempest, was the original fire chosen one. His mother, Mrs. Tempest, has powers of her own. They are not without resources or strength." A pause. "But they are outnumbered and they have been for a while."
"So we go to Canada and we pull him out from under Victor's nose," Niall said.
"That is the simplified version, yes," KaSandra said.
"I like simplified versions."
"I know you do."
"What is he like?" Katherine asked.
It was the same question she had asked about Samantha, and KaSandra answered it with the same genuine consideration she had given that one.
"Hot headed," she said, and the faint curve of her mouth suggested she was aware of the double meaning. "He is passionate and quick to react and he does not back down from a confrontation. He is also fiercely protective of the people he cares about and underneath the fire there is a great deal of warmth." She paused. "He will not be easy to convince. He has been told his whole life to be careful about who he trusts, and the suits being this close to him will have made that worse." Another pause, this one carrying a different weight. "But he is not unreachable."
Katherine turned this over quietly.
Hot headed. Protective. Not unreachable.
She thought about the signal, that bright impatient heat that had pushed toward her before she even asked it to, and something in her recognized it in a way she couldn't entirely explain.
"His name," she said. "You said Fenix Tempest."
"Yes."
"Tempest," Thomas said from across the room. "Mr. and Mrs. Tempest." He looked at KaSandra. "The same Tempests who helped the last chosen ones?"
"The very same," KaSandra said.
Thomas let out a slow breath that carried the weight of someone putting together a picture that had been incomplete for a long time. "So they have been in this since the beginning."
"Most of the original families have never truly left it," KaSandra said. "They simply learned to live quietly inside it."
Tierney had been standing still through all of it, arms folded, eyes moving between KaSandra and her children with that particular expression she wore when she was calculating something she hadn't finished calculating yet. Now she looked at the room.
"Iceland first," she said. "Then New Orleans. Then Canada." She looked at Katherine and Carlyle. "In that order. We don't rush it and we don't skip steps. Each one of the last three needs to be found the right way or we risk losing them before we even begin."
"Agreed," Thomas said.
"Anyone disagree?" Tierney asked.
Silence.
"Good." She looked at KaSandra one last time. "Is there anything else we need to know before we leave?"
KaSandra looked around the room slowly, at all of them, and her golden eyes held something that was not quite worry and not quite pride but lived somewhere between the two.
"Only this," she said. "When you find Fenix, be careful. Not of him." She let the pause sit for exactly the right amount of time. "Of what Victor will do when he realizes you have."
The room held that thought quietly.
Outside the window the afternoon light was fading early the way it did in winter, the sky going the deep bruised blue of late day, and somewhere out there beyond the cold and the distance three people were waiting to be found, each of them carrying something they had never been able to fully explain, each of them alone with it in ways that were about to change.
Katherine looked at the darkening window.
Four days.
Then Iceland.
Then everything after.
She was ready.