They gave it two days.
Not because two days was enough. It wasn't and everyone knew it wasn't and nobody pretended otherwise. But two days was what the situation allowed, the minimum of time that human decency required before pulling people out of grief and back into the motion of something that couldn't afford to stop moving.
Tierney made the call on the morning of the second day.
She found Niall first, because Niall was the one she was least certain about, not in terms of his capability but in terms of where he was with it, and she had learned over the months of knowing him that he processed things quietly and deeply and that the surface of him was not always a reliable indicator of what was happening underneath.
He was in the backyard sitting on the old wooden bench against the fence with his face tilted up to the gray morning sky, his breath making small clouds in the cold air.
Tierney sat beside him.
"How are you sleeping?" she asked.
"Badly," he said. "Not terribly. Just badly."
"That's honest."
"You asked," he said. He looked at her sideways. "You're going to tell me it's time to go to Canada."
"Yes," she said.
He nodded slowly. "I know." He looked back at the sky. "I've been thinking about it since the night KaSandra came. Before the calls." He paused. "My mother would tell me to go. She would say sitting here is not the same as honoring her and she would be right." Something moved through his expression, brief and real. "She was always right about things like that."
Tierney said nothing and let him have the moment.
"I'm okay to go," Niall said. "I want to be clear about that. I am not okay in general but I am okay to go."
"I know the difference," Tierney said.
"I know you do," he said.
She found Kristen in the kitchen cleaning her weapons, which was where Kristen went when she needed to do something with her hands, and Kristen looked up when Tierney came in and said, "When do we leave?" before Tierney said anything at all.
Tierney looked at her.
"Not you," she said. "Not this time."
Kristen set down the dagger.
"What do you mean not me."
"I mean you're staying here," Tierney said. "You and Niall and Courtney."
Kristen looked at her with those green eyes that were still carrying the particular brightness they had carried since the phone call, the grief and fury held in careful check.
"You need me in Canada," Kristen said.
"I need you here more," Tierney said. "All three of you. Someone has to hold this house while we're gone and I need it to be people I trust completely." She held Kristen's gaze. "You are not being sidelined. You are being asked to do something that matters."
Kristen looked at the weapon in her hand.
"My mother is still missing," she said. It was not an argument. Just the most important fact, the one that sat at the center of everything else.
"I know," Tierney said. "And we are going to find her. But right now the most useful thing you can do for your mother is make sure this group is still standing when we come back with Fenix." She paused. "Because if we come back and this house is compromised we lose everything. All of it. Including any chance of finding her."
Kristen was quiet for a long moment.
She looked at the dagger and then at Tierney.
"You'd better come back with him," she said.
"We will," Tierney said.
She found Courtney last.
Courtney was in the living room sitting cross legged on the floor with her sun blade and her moon blade across her knees, not training, just sitting with them, the way she sometimes sat with them when she needed to think.
She looked up when Tierney came in.
"I heard you talking to Kristen," she said.
"I know," Tierney said. "You don't have to hear it again if you don't want to."
"I want to hear it," Courtney said. "I want you to say it to me directly."
Tierney sat down across from her on the floor.
"You're staying," she said. "You and Niall and Kristen. You're holding this house."
Courtney looked at her blades.
"My father is in a coma," she said. "My mother is gone." She said it plainly, not for sympathy, just because it was true and she was a person who needed to say true things out loud. "I feel like I should be doing something."
"You are doing something," Tierney said. "You're protecting the people in this house and everything we've built. That is not a small thing, Courtney. That is the thing that makes all the other things possible."
Courtney looked at her.
"Who's going?" she asked.
"Tierney, Thomas, Dean, Katherine, Carlyle, Jasper, Samantha, Engel, Grace," Tierney said. "Nine people. Enough to do what needs doing without leaving this house empty."
Courtney absorbed this.
"Grace is going?" she said, with a slight lift of surprise.
"She asked to," Tierney said. "I wasn't going to tell her no."
Something softened slightly in Courtney's expression at that. "Good," she said quietly.
She looked at her blades one more time and then set them aside carefully and looked at Tierney with her light brown eyes that had seen things since all of this began that they hadn't been built to see and had adapted anyway with a grace that Tierney had quietly marveled at more than once.
"Okay," Courtney said.
"Okay?" Tierney checked.
"Okay," Courtney said again. More certain this time. The word landing the way it landed when it meant something real.
Tierney nodded.
She got up and Courtney got up and they stood for a moment in the living room with the morning light coming through the window thin and pale and Tierney put her hand briefly on Courtney's face the same way she sometimes did with Katherine, the gesture that meant several things at once without needing to name any of them.
Courtney put her hand over Tierney's for just a moment.
Then they both let go.
The rest of the morning was preparation.
Weapons checked and packed. Thomas's list consulted and added to and never quite finished. Grace moving through the house with the quiet efficiency of a woman who had packed for dangerous things before and knew the difference between what was necessary and what was comforting and which category everything she owned fell into.
Jasper stood in the doorway of his room for a moment before he came downstairs with his bag, looking at the space he had occupied for three weeks, the books Carlyle had lent him still on the desk, the window that faced the yard, the particular quality of a room that had become briefly known.
He came downstairs.
Niall was at the bottom of the stairs.
They looked at each other, the two of them, and something passed between them that was the specific understanding of two people who had been given rooms across a hall from each other and had figured each other out in the way you figure out someone when the proximity is constant and the stakes are real.
Niall put his hand out.
Jasper looked at it for a moment and then gripped it, and Niall pulled him into a brief firm hug the way Niall hugged people when he meant it, which was always.
"Come back," Niall said.
"Planning on it," Jasper said.
Carlyle came down the stairs behind Jasper and bumped his shoulder.
Niall looked at Carlyle and something moved through both their faces that was too layered to name simply and didn't need to be named to be understood.
"Be careful," Niall said.
"You too," Carlyle said. "All three of you."
In the kitchen Kristen was saying something to Katherine that was too quiet to hear and Katherine was listening with the focused attention she gave things that mattered and then she nodded once and Kristen gripped her arm briefly and let go.
Courtney hugged everyone who was leaving.
She hugged them properly, fully, with both arms and real intention, the specific embrace of someone who was not going to pretend that goodbyes were smaller than they were.
When she got to Grace she held her for a moment and Grace hugged her back with a warmth that was immediate and unguarded and when they stepped apart Courtney looked at her with something in her expression that was recognition, two people who understood something about carrying things quietly that most people didn't have to understand.
Dean was last out the door.
He stopped on the porch and looked back at the three of them standing in the hallway, Niall and Kristen and Courtney, and his expression did the thing it sometimes did where it showed more than he intended for exactly one second before he got hold of it.
"Lock the door," he said. "Check the windows. Keep your weapons close."
"Dean," Kristen said.
"What."
"We know," she said. "We've been doing this as long as you have."
He looked at her.
"Lock the door anyway," he said.
The corner of Kristen's mouth moved.
"Go," she said. "We've got this."
He held her gaze for a moment and then he turned and went down the porch steps and the door closed behind him and the sound of it was quiet and final and full of everything that had brought them all to this point and everything that was still ahead.
Niall locked the door.
Kristen went to the window and watched the group move down the street until they turned the corner and were gone.
Courtney stood in the middle of the hallway.
"Okay," she said, to no one in particular, to the house, to the three of them left in it.
"Okay," Niall said.
Kristen turned from the window.
"So," she said, looking at both of them with those bright careful eyes. "We hold the house."
"We hold the house," Courtney agreed.
Outside the world went about its business.
Inside the house three people who had each received the worst phone call of their lives within the same hour on the same afternoon stood together in a hallway and held the weight of it and each other and the responsibility they had been trusted with, and none of them fell.