The PowWow

We were back at the apartment with Curtis's files on the laptop and the address printed on a piece of paper that had been sitting on the coffee table between us for twenty minutes.

Jacob was in the chair. I was on the couch. The piece of paper was between us.

"We should go," I said.

"We should pray," Jacob said. "And wait."

I looked at him. "She's been in that house for three years."

"Yes," he said. "And she was there yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. One more day while we seek guidance is not abandonment."

"We have the address," I said. "We have her name. We have Curtis's file on Royce. We know what's happening in that house."

"We know what the records suggest," Jacob said. "We don't know what we're walking into."

I picked up the piece of paper. Put it down. Picked it up again.

"Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness," Jacob said. Quiet. Certain. "And all these things will be added to you."

There it was. The Matthew 6 argument — not patience for its own sake, not delay for the sake of protocol, but priority. Put the Lord first and trust that what needs to be found will be found. Jacob lived this with his whole body, from the soles of his bare feet to the top of whatever theological ceiling he operated under, and I knew he was right in the abstract the way I always knew he was right in the abstract, and I also knew that there was a woman an hour outside this city who didn't know her brothers existed.

"Guard your heart above all else," I said. "For it determines the course of your life."

Jacob looked at me.

"Proverbs 4," I said. "My heart is telling me something, Jacob. And I think the Lord put it there." I held his eyes. "I'm not going to approach. I'm not going to knock on the door or make a move she's not ready for. I just need to see that the address is real and that she's real and that what we're planning to do has a living person at the center of it." I set the paper down. "That's not impatience. That's — I need to know she exists."

Jacob was quiet.

He looked at the paper on the table. Then at his hands. Then at me with the particular look he had when he was not conceding the argument so much as recognizing that the argument wasn't his to win.

"You go alone," he said. "You don't approach."

"I know."

"If something feels wrong, you leave."

"I know."

"And you call me the moment you have eyes on the address."

"Jacob."

"The moment," he said.

"Yes," I said. "The moment."

He nodded once. That was it. The concession complete, no ceremony around it.

I picked up my keys.

I knew why he had given in. Not because my scripture had outweighed his — Jacob's theological architecture was considerably more load-bearing than mine on a good day, and we both knew it. He had given in because he could see that I needed this, and because needing it was not the same as being wrong about it, and because Jacob, for all his compressed speech and unmovable certainty, understood the difference between a man arguing from impatience and a man arguing from something that had been placed in him and was not going to be quiet until it was honored.

He didn't say any of that. He said you go alone and you don't approach and that was enough.

I took the piece of paper and left.

The address was real.

It was a house on a residential street an hour outside the city — the particular kind of ordinary that exists in the space between the city and the countryside, neighborhoods that had arrived at their current form through gradual accumulation rather than deliberate design. An ordinary suburb. A driveway. A front garden that had been tended. A normal house, on a normal street, with a normal look to it.

I parked down the road. Far enough. Engine idling, hands on the wheel.

For a moment there was nothing. Just the street, the afternoon, the ordinary Tuesday business of a neighborhood going about itself.

Then the front door opened.

She came out carrying something — two bags of soil that she shifted to one arm while she pulled the door closed behind her. Moving through the ordinary business of her day with no particular awareness of anything at the end of the block.

Tall. Broad-shouldered. Long dark hair pulled back with the practical efficiency of someone who wore it that way because it was out of her face, not because she had considered the effect. The particular way she carried herself — the proportion, the build, something in the balance of her that registered before I had words for it.

I knew it. Without having seen it before, I knew it.

The recognition arrived in my body before it arrived in my mind. The build. The proportion. Jacob in different form, distributed differently, present in her the way certain things are present in bloodlines — not identical, not a copy, but the same source expressing itself through a different instrument. And those soil bags are anything but light.

And then the Calling arrived.

I had felt it once before — in the lobby of Neph Lim Industries, before Nathanial Lim had said his name or shown us his bare feet or done anything except step out of an elevator and smile. A frequency. A recognition that operated below the level of observation, below the level of the five senses and everything I had learned to do with them. The Nephilim awareness of kindred blood — not a sound, not a feeling exactly, more like a tuning fork finding its note in another tuning fork across a room.

It had announced Nathanial Lim as opposition. As threat. Something in the frequency of him that the Calling had read as wrong before my brain had caught up.

This was not that.

This was something older and quieter and so much more personal that the comparison felt almost inappropriate. Where Nathanial had been a wrong note, this was — recognition. The particular resonance of something finding the thing it was always going to find, the way Jacob described prayer at its most complete — not asking and waiting, but arriving.

Family.

Down the street she stopped.

Not gradually — stopped, the way you stop when something interrupts the ordinary flow of a moment without announcing what it is. She set down what she was carrying. Looked up. Looked around — scanning the street, the neighboring houses, the unremarkable Tuesday afternoon — with the expression of someone who has felt something they have no category for and is trying to locate its source in the available landscape.

She didn't find the Highlander. I was far enough. The afternoon was bright and I was still and the car was one of several parked along the street.

She stood there for a moment longer than she needed to, looking at the street with the focused attention of someone waiting for the thing they felt to declare itself.

It didn't.

She made the small headshake of a person who has decided to file an unexplained sensation under coincidence and move on. Picked up what she was carrying. Went back to what she had been doing.

I sat with my hands on the wheel and did not move.

Not for a long time.

She was real. The address was real. The Calling was real and she had felt it and she didn't know what it was because nobody had ever told her, and she had been eleven years at that address with no before, and three years in a house with Royce and his quiet gradual control, and she had gone back to what she was doing because the unexplained sensation had nowhere to land.

She was an hour from where her brothers had been sitting their entire lives.

I picked up my phone. Jacob answered on the first ring.

"She's here," I said. My voice came out steady, which I was choosing to count as a victory. "And Jacob—" I stopped. Tried again. "I felt it. The Calling. She felt it too."

Silence on his end.

"She just doesn't know what it is," I said.

Jacob was quiet for a moment. The particular quiet of a man receiving something large and holding it carefully.

"Come home," he said. "We go to Jeremiah."

I looked down the street at the house.

"Yeah," I said. "Okay."

I started the car.