She came in August, for a weekend, with her mother's blessing and the Baron's awareness and the specific quality of someone who had been hearing about a place for sixteen years and was finally seeing it.
He met her at the barrier — the same place he had met his parents, the same place Theron had met him eleven years ago. She walked through the shimmer of the camp's divine perimeter and stopped on the other side and took a breath and said: 'Oh.'
'Yes,' he said.
'It's different from New Orleans.' She was processing the shimmer, reading it with the practitioner's attention she had been developing all year. 'Older. More concentrated. More — Greek.'
'It's been here for a very long time,' he said. 'And it's very specifically one tradition's energy, concentrated by two thousand years of demigod activity. New Orleans is older but wider — more traditions, more layered, less concentrated.'
She looked at the camp and he let her look, without narrating or guiding, because the first look deserved its own time.
He showed her the camp. Not the orientation tour — the real one, the one that showed the places that had shaped the past five years of his life. The eastern woods, the Hecate cabin, Thalia's Pine. The medical room. The dining pavilion's hearth.
She stopped at the hearth.
She stood in front of it for a long time, not speaking. He stood a few feet away and did not interrupt. The fire was Hestia's fire — the hearth that had never gone cold — and he had been sitting near it on solstice nights for five years and had long since become accustomed to the specific quality of its divine presence.
Cece was not accustomed to it. She was encountering it for the first time.
She said, very quietly: 'She's different from the Loa.'
'Very different,' he said. 'Hestia is — she is the hearth. Not a fire you light and tend. The fire that has never gone out. The center that everything else orbits.' He paused. 'The Loa are presences you negotiate with. Hestia is a state of being.'
'I can feel both,' Cece said. She turned to look at him. 'I can feel the Greek divine structure here and I can still feel Baron Samedi's domain running underneath it, the way the New Orleans roots run under the street shimmer in Manhattan.' She was processing something as she spoke. 'They don't conflict. They're on different layers. Like harmonics.'
'Yes,' he said. He thought: she is using the musical metaphor because her Vodou training has given her a framework for the coexistence of multiple divine presences. The Loa tradition routinely works with that coexistence; the Greek tradition was built on a more singular framework. She is reading the situation with better tools than the tradition she's standing in.
Chiron met her that afternoon in the Big House library. The meeting was, as Chiron's meetings with significant people tended to be, direct and thorough. He did not soften what he knew or pretend to know what he didn't. He asked Cece what her tradition knew about the threshold space and the right archway. She told him — more than Kael had expected, because her six months of formal practice had given her access to the Moreau family's specific transmission of knowledge that she had not previously been able to fully access.
The right archway, she said, opened to the place where the Ghede — the Loa of the dead, the crossroads between the living and the dead — held their domain. Baron Samedi was the chief Ghede. The archway had been latent in the threshold space since Céline Moreau made the key in 1889, built into the space because Céline was both a Vodou practitioner and a daughter of Hecate and had understood, at the level of practical magical craft, that the two traditions needed a connection point.
'She built it in,' Kael said slowly.
'She built it in,' Cece confirmed. 'One hundred and thirty-seven years ago. She was waiting for someone to come along who stood in both traditions.'
The three of them — Kael, Cece, Chiron — sat in the Big House library in the August afternoon with this information.
Chiron said: 'She was not wrong to wait. The person she was waiting for has arrived.'
Cece looked at Kael. He looked at her. He thought: of course. Of course the sixteen years were both lives building toward this specific moment. Of course the two traditions, the crossroads deity and the crossroads Loa, were never meant to be separate. Of course it was always going to be the two of them, standing in both, making the bridge.
He thought: I did not see this coming. And that is exactly right. Phase 2 work is not planned against prophecy. It is found.