Grace had conditions.
She laid them out at the kitchen table, which was different from the front room, more practical, less formal, the kind of surface where real things got decided. She sat at the head of it with her hands flat on the wood and her brown eyes moving around the group and she spoke clearly and without hesitation, the way a woman speaks when she has spent the time while everyone was outside on her front path turning something over until she knew exactly what shape it was.
Jasper sat beside her.
He had not been asked to leave and he had not offered to, and Grace had not suggested it, which Katherine understood was itself a statement, that whatever was being decided here was being decided in front of him because he was old enough to hear it and it was his life being discussed and Grace was not going to pretend otherwise even now.
"First," Grace said. "Jasper is not a soldier. He is not a weapon. He is a person with an ability that can be used in service of stopping something that should be stopped and that is the limit of what I am willing to offer." She looked at Tierney. "If at any point that changes, if he is being used as anything other than what he is, this arrangement ends."
"Agreed," Tierney said without hesitation.
Grace looked at her for a moment, checking the quality of the agreement, whether it was reflexive or real.
It was real.
She moved on.
"Second. I am going with him."
The table absorbed this quietly.
Thomas looked at Tierney. Tierney looked at Grace.
"That was never in question," Tierney said.
Something flickered in Grace's expression. She had expected to have to argue for it.
"Good," she said, and moved on before the moment could become anything it didn't need to be. "Third. I want to meet the others. Everyone who is part of this. Not just the people in this room. Everyone." She looked at Katherine. "You said you're a group of people who found each other. I want to know who that group is before my son spends any significant time with them."
"You can meet everyone as soon as we're back," Katherine said. "Samantha and Engel too."
Grace's expression shifted at the name Engel again, that same brief movement from the earlier mention, a name connected to a time she had put a long way behind her.
"Engel Remial is with you," she said. Flat and careful.
"He goes by Viento now," Katherine said. "He changed his name when Samantha was born."
Grace looked at her hands on the table. "I haven't spoken to Engel in many years."
"He said the same about you," Katherine said. "He said you were one of the strongest people he ever knew and that you carry it very quietly."
Grace was still for a moment.
Then she nodded once, short and deliberate, and moved on.
"Fourth," she said. "Jasper controls his own participation. Not me. Not you. Him." She looked at her son beside her. "If he wants to stop, he stops. If he wants to step back from something, he steps back. His power, his choice."
"Absolutely," Katherine said.
Jasper looked at her when she said it, a quick evaluating look, checking whether she meant it.
She held his gaze steadily.
He looked back at his mother.
"Fifth," Grace said, and her voice changed very slightly on this one, dropping just a fraction, carrying something underneath it that was older and more personal than the others. "You keep him safe. Not in the general sense. Not as a group priority. Individually. Specifically. You keep Jasper safe the way you keep your own people safe." She looked at Dean. "The way you would have kept someone safe if you'd gotten the chance."
The table went very quiet.
Dean held Grace's gaze.
"Yes," he said. One word. Completely certain.
Grace held his gaze for a moment longer.
Then she took her hands off the table and folded them in her lap and sat back, the posture of someone who has said what needed to be said and is now waiting to see if the weight of it holds.
"Those are my conditions," she said.
"We accept all of them," Tierney said. She looked around the table at the group. "All of us."
A murmur of agreement moved through the room, quiet and genuine.
Grace looked at each of them in turn one more time, the final round of that careful assessment she had been running since they walked in, checking faces against instincts against the accumulated years of knowing how to read a situation.
Whatever she found seemed to satisfy her.
She looked at Jasper.
He was already looking at her.
Between them passed one of those conversations that happened in the space between words, the particular language of a mother and a child who had been each other's primary world for a long time, full of things that didn't need to be said out loud to be completely understood.
Grace reached over and put her hand over his on the table.
Jasper turned his hand and held hers.
"Okay," she said to him. Quietly. Just for him even though everyone heard it.
Jasper nodded.
He looked at the group and something settled in his expression, the last piece of the decision landing into place.
"When do we leave?" he asked.
"Two days," Thomas said. "There are some things to arrange."
Jasper nodded. He seemed comfortable with two days the way someone is comfortable with a timeline when they haven't been given a choice about the larger thing and have simply decided to be practical about the details.
"I want to show you something before we go," he said. He was looking at Katherine.
"Show me what?" Katherine asked.
"Something I've never shown anyone outside this house," he said. "Something that might help you understand what I can actually do." He glanced at his mother. "If that's okay."
Grace looked at him for a moment. Then she looked at Katherine.
"Just Katherine," she said. "For now."
Katherine nodded.
Jasper stood up from the table and moved toward the hallway and looked back at her.
Katherine got up and followed him.
He led her through the house, past the bookshelves and the plants in the windows and the photographs on the mantle, through a narrow door at the back that opened onto a small walled garden, enclosed on all sides by high brick walls covered in climbing things, shaded by the overhang of the old house, private and completely still.
In the center of the garden was a single large tree, old and wide, its roots breaking the flagstones around its base, its branches filling the space above them.
Jasper stood under it and looked up.
"My mother planted this when we moved here," he said. "She said every house needs something growing at the center of it."
Katherine stood beside him and looked up at the branches spreading above them.
"She was right," Katherine said.
Jasper looked at the tree for a moment. Then he closed his eyes.
The garden changed.
Not visibly, not in any way Katherine could point to specifically, but the quality of the air shifted, the way it shifts in a room when someone enters it who changes the atmosphere of the space simply by being there. The stillness deepened. The warmth took on a different texture.
And then Katherine felt them.
Not saw. Felt. Presences at the edges of the garden, quiet and layered, the accumulated weight of things that existed in the space between what was and what came after, drawn to this spot the way things are drawn to a place that has held them safely before.
She felt the specific presence Jasper had described beside Dean in the front room.
She felt others she couldn't name.
And underneath all of it she felt Jasper's power, steady and deep and nothing like any of the others, not the bright pushing heat of fire or the circling drift of wind but something slower and more permanent, a current that moved below the surface of everything the way groundwater moves below the earth, invisible and essential and always there.
Jasper opened his eyes.
"That's what it is," he said. "All the time. Every day. Every room I walk into." He looked at her. "I learned to be quiet about it because people didn't understand. But I was never afraid of it." A pause. "I just needed somewhere it was allowed to be real."
Katherine looked at him.
"It's real here," she said. "With us. It's allowed to be exactly what it is."
Jasper looked at the tree above them.
The garden held its stillness around them and the presences at the edges were quiet and the old city moved beyond the walls with its music and its layered history and its three hundred years of stories soaking into the ground beneath their feet.
"Okay," Jasper said.
Simple and certain.
The same word Grace had said to him at the kitchen table.
Katherine understood it meant the same thing.