They went the next morning, all of them except Engel who stayed at the guesthouse with Samantha at his quiet suggestion, reading the situation correctly enough to know that arriving at Grace Vale's door with an original chosen one she hadn't seen in years might be one complication too many for a first meeting.
Samantha had not argued. She had taken the morning to sit in the courtyard with the jasmine and let the warm southern air do what it did, and Engel had sat with her and they had talked in the low unhurried way they talked, the particular language of two people who had spent years being each other's primary company and had developed a fluency in it that didn't need volume.
The walk to Grace's street was quiet.
Dean led and the others followed and the city moved around them the way it always moved, full of itself and unaware of them, which was exactly right.
Katherine walked beside Courtney and watched the neighborhood change as they moved deeper into it, the tourist texture falling away, the streets getting quieter and more themselves, the old trees closing overhead.
"How did it go yesterday?" Courtney asked Dean's back.
"She didn't say no," Dean said.
"That's good," Niall said from behind them.
"It's a start," Dean said. "Don't expect more than that today. She needs to see you. All of you. She needs to make up her own mind about who you are before she makes any decision about Jasper."
"So we're being evaluated," Kristen said.
"You're always being evaluated," Thomas said. "Most of the time you just don't know it."
"That's an unsettling thing to say."
"It's a true thing to say."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive, Thomas."
Grace was at the door before they reached the gate.
She had seen them coming, probably from the moment they turned onto her street, and she stood in the doorway with her hands loose at her sides and watched them approach with those quiet steady eyes that took everything in without showing the work of it.
She looked at Dean first.
Then she looked at each of them in turn, moving along the group with the calm attentiveness of a woman who had learned long ago to read people quickly and accurately. She looked at Thomas and something in her expression registered recognition, not personal, more the recognition of knowing a type, a fighter, a protector, someone shaped by years of being in the middle of difficult things. She looked at Tierney and paused slightly longer, and Katherine suspected she was feeling the particular quality of Tierney's power the way people with abilities often felt each other before anything was said.
She looked at Katherine.
She looked at her the way Engel had looked at her and the way KaSandra sometimes looked at her, the look that was reading something specific, something that went beyond appearance or expression into whatever it was that Katherine carried that made people who knew what to look for stop and look a little longer.
Then she stepped back from the door.
"Come in," she said.
The house was the same as Dean had described it, warm and still and full of the texture of a deliberate life, everything placed with intention, nothing careless. Grace moved through it with the ease of a woman entirely at home in her own space, which Katherine noted was different from the ease of someone who had nowhere else to go. This was chosen. This was built.
She brought tea without asking, the way certain people always brought tea, as if the act of making it was itself a form of hospitality that words alone couldn't achieve, and she set it on the low table in the front room and sat down across from the group arranged on the chairs and the small couch.
"Dean told me about Victor," she said, beginning without preamble the way direct people do. "About where things are and where they're heading." She looked at Tierney. "You're his daughter."
"Yes," Tierney said.
"And you've been fighting him."
"For a long time," Tierney said. "In different ways."
Grace looked at her hands for a moment. "I left that world," she said. "I want you to understand that. I left it deliberately and with full knowledge of what I was doing and I have spent eighteen years building something here that is safe and real and mine." She looked up. "I am not telling you that as an excuse. I am telling you so you understand what you are asking me to consider giving up."
"I understand," Tierney said.
"Do you?" Grace said. Not confrontationally. Just honestly. "You have children in this. You chose to bring them into it. I chose the opposite." A pause. "I am not judging your choice. I need you to not judge mine."
"I don't," Tierney said. "I genuinely don't."
Grace studied her for a moment and seemed to believe her.
She looked at Katherine.
"You found the wind chosen one," she said.
"Yes," Katherine said. "She's staying at the guesthouse with her father."
"Engel's daughter," Grace said quietly, and something moved through her expression at the name. "I didn't know he had a daughter."
"He raised her alone," Katherine said. "In Iceland. He never stopped watching, never stopped tracking Victor's movements." She paused. "He never left it either. Not really. Even when he tried."
Grace absorbed this in silence.
Katherine looked at her steadily. "I'm not going to tell you what to decide about Jasper. That's not why I'm here and it's not my place." She kept her voice even and direct. "I just want you to know who we are. We're not suits. We're not Victor's people. We're not here to take anything from you." She paused. "We are a group of people who found each other because something larger than all of us needed us to, and we are trying very hard to do right by each other and by this thing we've been asked to do."
Grace looked at her for a long moment.
"How old are you?" she asked.
"Eighteen," Katherine said.
Something shifted in Grace's expression, complicated and brief.
"Jasper is eighteen," she said.
"I know," Katherine said.
The room held that for a moment.
Then from somewhere deeper in the house came the sound of a door, the back door by the sound of it, opening and then closing, and then quiet footsteps moving through the hall.
Grace did not look away from Katherine.
"He came home early," she said. Her voice was very even.
The footsteps stopped at the entrance to the front room.
Katherine looked.
Jasper Vale stood in the doorway with his light brown hair pushed back from his face and his brown eyes taking in the room full of strangers with an expression that was not alarmed exactly, more deeply and immediately alert, the expression of someone whose particular abilities meant they were always already paying attention to things most people hadn't noticed yet.
He looked at his mother first.
Grace looked back at him with an expression that was love and apology and steadiness all at once.
Then he looked at the room.
His eyes moved across each face with that careful alertness and then they stopped.
He was looking at a point just to the left of Dean's shoulder.
Not at Dean.
At something beside Dean.
Something no one else could see.
His expression shifted, the alertness giving way to something more complicated, something that was recognition and confusion and a carefully maintained composure that suggested he had a great deal of practice at not reacting visibly to the things he saw.
He looked at his mother again.
"Mom," he said quietly. "Who are these people."
Grace looked at her son, at this boy she had carried across the country and raised in a city of ghosts to give him somewhere he could be himself, and Katherine watched her make a decision in the space between one breath and the next, not the whole decision, not yet, but the first part of it, the part that said I will not keep this from him.
"Come sit down, Jasper," Grace said. "There are some things I should have told you a long time ago."
Jasper looked at the room one more time.
His eyes drifted back to the space beside Dean's shoulder and stayed there for just a moment longer than everything else.
Then he came and sat down.