He went home to New Orleans in May, ten weeks before the battle of Manhattan, and this was the visit he had been mentally marking for years: the last one before the world changed.
He was not dramatic about it. He did not tell anyone it might be the last anything. He simply went home and was in New Orleans and let the city be the city — the weight of the air, the sound of the Quarter at night, the specific quality of the light in the Bywater that he had never found exactly replicated anywhere else.
He sat at his crossroads. The shimmer was exactly the same as it had been when he was ten years old and first consciously recognized it. The same Hecate-warmth in the intersection, the same deep road-memory in the pavement, the same quality of standing at the place where choices have weight.
He sat there for a long time and did not do anything with it except be there.
Cece found him on the second evening. She had known he was coming — the letters had become phone calls and texts in the last year, modernizing without losing the care they had always had — and she came to the crossroads the way she always found him: without announcing herself in advance, simply appearing because she knew where he would be.
She was sixteen and had grown into someone that Kael found, when he let himself fully look at her rather than the managed version of looking that he had been doing for years, genuinely extraordinary. Not because of anything particular she had done — though she had done things. Because of what fifteen years of paying attention and being paid attention to and choosing well had made her. She was, he thought, the person she had always been going to be, arrived at.
She sat down next to him on the curb at the crossroads and they looked at the intersection together in the May evening.
'Big thing coming,' she said. Not a question.
'Yes.'
'And you're ready.'
'As ready as I'm going to be.' He looked at her. 'You know that I—' He stopped. He was not usually someone who started sentences and stopped them. He was usually precise. But this sentence had several possible endings and he was not entirely sure which one was the right one.
She looked at him. 'I know,' she said. 'I've known for years. You don't have to say it.'
He thought about the letter he had written at age twelve: you are the most real person in either of my lives. He thought about the years since — the letters, the calls, the red bean Mondays at Christmas, the way she had always been the one person for whom he did not have to perform any version of himself because she had always known the real version and wanted it.
'I'm going to come back,' he said.
'I know,' she said. 'I'm not worried about that.' She paused. 'I'm also not worried about the thing you aren't saying. There are some things that are true and that are also not urgent. They can wait until the world has been saved.' She looked at the crossroads. 'The crossroads will still be here.'
He thought: she is, as she always has been, exactly right. He thought: I am lucky in a way that has nothing to do with Tyche's bloodline and everything to do with the specific accident of circumstance that put Cece Moreau at a bus stop on the first day of kindergarten.
'Okay,' he said. 'After.'
'After,' she agreed.
They sat at the crossroads until the stars came out. Madame Moreau called them in for dinner at nine. The gumbo was excellent and the table was full and Baron Samedi's presence at the evening was warm and acknowledged and the city breathed around them in its old specific way.
He left the next morning. He hugged his parents for a long time at the door. He stepped out into the Bywater morning and walked to the bus that would take him north.
He thought: I have everything I need. I came from this place and I carry it wherever I go and it has never once left me.
He thought: now let's go.