The inside of the house was warm in the way that houses are warm when they have been lived in well, not just heated but inhabited, full of the accumulated presence of people who had made a real life inside the walls.
Books were everywhere. On shelves that ran floor to ceiling along two walls of the main room, stacked on the low table by the window, piled beside the armchair near the fire with markers tucked between pages as though the reading had been interrupted mid-thought and would be resumed shortly. The walls held maps, old ones and new ones both, some with markings on them in ink that Katherine recognized as the kind of notations someone makes when they are tracking something over a long period of time.
Engel had made tea before they arrived, as if he had known exactly when they were coming, which Katherine suspected he probably had in whatever way he had learned to know things over the years of paying attention to a world most people couldn't see.
He moved through the house with the quiet ease of a man who had made peace with his own space and himself inside it. He was not large or imposing but there was a steadiness to him, a deep unhurried quality, that made the room feel anchored when he was in it. He had his daughter's eyes, Katherine noticed. Or she had his. The same clear blue, the same calm directness.
Samantha sat at the far end of the table and watched the group fill her house with the careful attention of someone taking inventory. She watched Niall examine the bookshelf nearest him with unconcealed interest. She watched Kristen look at the maps on the wall. She watched Courtney settle into a chair with the natural stillness that Courtney always carried. She watched Dean and Thomas exchange a quiet word near the door that Katherine couldn't hear.
Then she looked at Katherine again, the way she kept doing, not intrusively, just honestly, the way people look at something they are trying to understand.
Katherine looked back.
Engel set the tea on the table and sat down and folded his hands and looked at Tierney.
"You are Victoria's granddaughter," he said.
Tierney met his eyes. "Yes."
Something moved through his expression. "I knew Victoria. A long time ago, before everything." He paused. "She was remarkable. I'm sorry for what happened to her."
"Thank you," Tierney said quietly.
He looked at Katherine. "And you are the new dark element."
"Among other things," Katherine said.
The corner of his mouth lifted. "Yes. Among other things." He looked around the table at all of them with a steady unhurried gaze. "KaSandra sent word ahead. Not much. Enough." He turned his cup slowly in his hands. "You have found two of the three and you need Samantha to complete what you are building."
"Yes," Tierney said.
"And Victor is moving."
"He is."
Engel nodded slowly, the nod of a man confirming something he already knew. He looked at his daughter at the far end of the table. Samantha was looking back at him with an expression that was calm and waiting, the expression of someone who has been patient for a long time and has learned that patience is not the same as passivity.
They looked at each other for a moment in the particular way of people who know each other so well that entire conversations happen in the space between words.
"You have questions for her," Engel said, not to Tierney but to Katherine.
Katherine looked at Samantha. "I have one."
Samantha tilted her head slightly.
"When you're outside and the wind changes," Katherine said, "and you feel something in it that other people don't feel. What does it feel like to you."
The table was quiet.
Samantha looked at Katherine steadily for a moment, and something in her expression shifted, the careful neutrality giving way to something more unguarded, the look of a person hearing themselves described accurately for the first time.
"Like a conversation," she said. "Like someone is talking and I'm the only one who can hear it." A pause. "When I was small I thought everyone could hear it and I didn't understand why no one talked about it." She looked down at her cup. "Then I got older and I understood."
"What did you do with that?" Courtney asked gently from her chair.
Samantha considered the question honestly. "I stopped talking about it," she said. "And I came out here as often as I could, where the wind is loud enough that it fills everything up and I don't have to explain it to anyone."
"You don't have to explain it to us," Niall said from near the bookshelf, and his voice was so straightforward and sincere that Samantha looked at him with something that might have been surprise before it settled into something warmer.
"I know," she said. "I can tell."
Engel looked at his daughter again and when he spoke his voice was low and careful, the voice of a father choosing words the way you choose footholds on uncertain ground.
"Samantha," he said.
She looked at him.
"I have told you everything I know about what you are and where you come from and what it might mean," he said. "I have told you about the chosen ones and about the old war and about the darkness that is coming again." He paused. "I have told you that one day people might come and ask you to be part of stopping it." He looked at his hands for a moment and then back at his daughter. "I want you to know that whatever you decide today I will support it completely. There is no right answer that I need from you. There is only your answer."
The room was very still.
Samantha looked at her father for a long time.
Then she looked around the table at the group assembled in her house, at these people who had come across an ocean to find her, who carried weapons and powers and the particular worn quality of people who had already been through something real and had come out the other side of it still standing and still together.
She looked at Katherine last.
Katherine said nothing. She had meant what she said on the rocks. Samantha had been waiting a long time. This moment belonged to her and Katherine was not going to rush it or shape it or tip it in any direction.
Samantha looked back at her father.
"You've been preparing me for this my whole life," she said. "Every lesson, every story, every morning you took me outside and taught me to listen to the wind." She paused. "You knew what I would say."
"I hoped," Engel said. "I didn't know."
Samantha turned her cup in her hands, the same gesture her father had made, unconscious and inherited.
"I'll go," she said.
The words were quiet and certain and final in the way that true decisions are final, not dramatic, just done.
Engel exhaled slowly. Katherine thought she saw his eyes brighten briefly before he got hold of it.
"Okay," he said.
"With one condition," Samantha added, looking at Tierney.
"Name it," Tierney said.
Samantha looked at her father.
"He comes too," she said.
Tierney looked at Engel. Engel looked at Tierney with an expression that was asking nothing, waiting for nothing, entirely prepared to accept whatever the answer was.
Tierney looked at Thomas. Thomas gave a single small nod.
Tierney looked back at Samantha.
"We wouldn't have it any other way," she said.
Something in Samantha released, subtle and real, a tension she had been carrying so long she had probably stopped noticing it.
Engel stood up from the table and went to the kitchen and came back with more tea and set it down without ceremony and sat back down, and the quality of the room changed the way it changes when something has been decided and everyone present knows it and the deciding is done.
Kristen leaned toward Niall and said quietly, "Told you Iceland would be good."
Niall looked at her. "You said no such thing."
"I thought it very loudly."
"That does not count."
"It counts to me."
Samantha looked at the two of them and the almost smile from the rocks came back, a little fuller this time, a little less like the shape of something and a little more like the thing itself.
Outside the green roofed house the Icelandic wind moved across the open land and came off the water cold and steady and honest, and inside, around a table full of tea and maps and people who had only just met and were already becoming something to each other, Engel Remial looked around at all of them with the quiet eyes of a man who had waited a very long time for this particular room to exist.
He looked like he couldn't quite believe it finally did.