The living room had become KaSandra's classroom before, but it had never felt quite like this.
Last time, it was Thomas with a book and a group of teenagers who didn't fully believe magic was real yet. Now the couch had been pushed back, the coffee table moved to the wall, and KaSandra stood in the center of the room with two white candles lit on either side of her, the flames perfectly still despite the fact that the window was cracked open.
Katherine and Carlyle sat across from her on the floor, their legs crossed, weapons set aside.
The rest of the group had scattered themselves around the edges of the room. Niall was on the couch with his arms folded, watching with quiet curiosity. Kristen sat beside him with her legs tucked under her, leaning forward slightly. Courtney was in the armchair nearest the window, her hands resting in her lap. Dean leaned against the doorframe with his arms crossed, and Thomas stood near the far wall with a cup of coffee going cold in his hand because he kept forgetting to drink it.
Tierney stood just behind Katherine and Carlyle, close enough to step in if something went sideways.
"Locating a chosen one is not like searching for a person on a map," KaSandra began, her voice low and even, the kind of voice that filled a room without raising itself. "It is more like listening for a sound you have never heard before but somehow already know." She looked at Katherine and then at Carlyle. "The two of you will learn this together because your connection to one another makes the signal stronger. A twin bond is rare. Use it."
"What exactly are we supposed to feel for?" Carlyle asked.
"Their power," KaSandra said. "Every chosen one carries a frequency, like a heartbeat that belongs only to them. When you reach out far enough and quiet your mind enough, you will feel it the way you feel a change in weather before it arrives. You don't see it. You simply know."
Katherine nodded slowly. "Okay. So how do we start?"
"Close your eyes. Both of you." KaSandra waited until they did. "Now I want you to think about your own power. Not what it does. What it feels like. Find the center of it and sit there."
The room was quiet enough that the candle flames made a sound, a faint soft breath of burning.
Carlyle found his center quickly. He had always had an easier time with stillness than Katherine, something she had teased him about more than once. He felt his power settle in his chest like cool water and held it there, waiting.
Katherine was not as quick.
She could feel her power, all of it, the heat of fire, the pull of water, the deep hum of earth, the sharp edge of wind, the dark undercurrent that ran beneath all of them like a river no one could see. The problem was that it never sat still. It moved constantly, shifting from one element to the next, restless and searching, the way a flame leans toward air.
Sit still, she told it.
It didn't.
Katherine.
She opened her eyes. "I can't get it to stop moving."
KaSandra did not look surprised. "I know. Your power is not the kind that sits." She tilted her head slightly. "So don't ask it to. Let it move. Move with it. And while you are moving, listen."
Katherine closed her eyes again. This time she stopped fighting it and let the current take her, riding the shift from one element to the next without trying to slow it down. Fire to water to earth to wind to dark and back again, a slow turning circle inside her chest.
And then, for just a second, she felt something else.
It was faint. Distant. Like hearing music from a house down the street, just enough melody to know it was there but not enough to name the song. It was airy and light and moved the way wind moves, not in a straight line but in all directions at once.
Katherine's breath caught.
"I felt something," she said, her eyes still closed.
KaSandra's voice was calm. "Don't reach for it. Let it come to you."
Across from her, Carlyle had gone very still, his brow slightly furrowed in concentration.
"I feel it too," he said quietly.
The room shifted. Niall sat up straighter. Kristen stopped leaning on her hand.
But Katherine's brow creased, and her jaw tightened slightly, and then the feeling was gone, as suddenly as it had arrived, like a radio signal lost to static.
Her eyes opened. "I lost it."
"You pushed," KaSandra said, not accusingly, just as fact.
"I didn't mean to."
"You never mean to," KaSandra replied. "But the moment you felt it you wanted it, and wanting is louder than listening." She looked at Katherine steadily. "This is the work, Katherine. Not the reaching. The waiting."
Katherine stared at the space between the candles, frustration sitting quietly behind her eyes, the kind she was too proud to say out loud but not quite good enough at hiding.
Thomas, from the wall, took a sip of cold coffee. "She gets that from her mother, for the record."
"Thomas," Tierney said flatly.
"I'm just saying."
"I know what you're saying and you can stop."
Carlyle pressed his lips together to keep from laughing. Katherine shot him a look.
"Don't," she said.
"I didn't say anything."
"You were about to."
KaSandra watched the two of them with an expression that was almost fond. She let the moment breathe before she spoke again.
"We will try again tomorrow," she said, rising from her position on the floor with an ease that didn't match her age. "And the day after that if we must. Finding the last three chosen ones depends on the two of you learning to do this well." She looked at Katherine one last time before turning toward the hallway. "You felt it today, Katherine. That matters more than losing it."
She blew out the first candle with a breath so soft it barely moved the air.
"The signal is there," KaSandra said. "You simply have to learn to be quiet enough to hear it."
She blew out the second candle.
The room felt different with both flames out, a little darker, a little heavier, and full of something that hadn't quite been named yet.
Katherine sat in it and said nothing, her eyes fixed on the thin curl of smoke rising from the nearest wick.
She had felt it though.
And she was not going to lose it again.