Page 126 of Demon's Bane

“I want to be here.”

Halla is unmoved. “No, you don’t.”

“I came back for a reason, and that hasn’t changed. It’s my responsibility to—”

“I sincerely hope you don’t pull that nonsense with Joan, because I’d bet she’s even better than me at seeing right through it.”

“It’s not nonsense,” I mutter, a flush of shame rising on the back of my neck. “You know why I came back.”

“Who asked you to be here?”

Said in a different tone, the question would be a damning accusation. A kick in the ass with a reminder to not let the door hit me on the way out.

But the way my sister says it? Her tone so soft and understanding?

It sounds like absolution.

“No one. I just thought—”

“That’s the thing, though,” she interrupts, every bit as gently. “You weren’t thinking. You were grieving.”

The lump in my throat prevents me from responding.

“Ma and I were more than glad to have you back, but we’ve always known you weren’t meant to be here forever.” A small, sad smile turns up the corners of her lips. “Da knew it, too, and even though he might have had some more complicated feelings about it, he knew you were always meant for a life away from here.”

“He had a funny way of showing it,” I say gruffly.

“He had a funny way of handling any kind of emotion. Be it grief or joy or disappointment. I don’t know if any of us ever really understood him, or if he understood himself.”

We both fall silent for a few moments, remembering him. How much we loved him, how much he frustrated us at times.

“He always asked me to read him the letters you sent me,” Halla confesses, a thread of laughter in her voice. “I skipped the parts where you complained about him, but left in all the good bits about the cities you visited and the work you were doing.”

My throat tightens again. There are more questions I could ask—why he never asked me to tell him those stories, why he couldn’t have gotten over his own damn stubbornness before it was too late—but they’re not questions Halla or I or anyone alive could answer. It’s a fresh stab of sorrow in my gut to realize I’ll never know. However my father truly felt, however he mighthave one day come to reconcile himself to my choices, I’ll never know.

I slump back into my chair, letting all the uncertainties that have been swirling in my mind for days break over me again.

All my guilt and my belief I could make amends for something that might never have been mine to atone for. The new life stretching before me—one with Joan, with peace, with some new purpose we’ll find together.

Shaking my head, I cling to the last few scraps of resistance and doubt still holding me back. “But if something happened to you, to ma, to—”

“It might,” Halla says. “It always might. But why should that mean you don’t live your life in the meantime?”

I let out a long, shaky breath, something in my chest releasing in a way it hasn’t since the day my father died. “When did you get to be so smart?”

“I’ve always been smart. Good of you to finally notice.”

I laugh, albeit reluctantly—I’d be a terribly remiss older brother to admit she’s right—and run a hand over the back of my neck.

“I barely know anything about the human realm, or whether there will even be a place for me in it.”

“You’ll make a place,” Halla says with all the optimism I love her for. “You and Joan. I have no doubt about it.”

Just as she finishes speaking, the front door swings open and our mother steps inside with a wide smile on her face to see us both sitting there.

The tender press of emotion in my throat grows all that much heavier, but there’s a joy in it, too. In being here, with both of them. In having their approval of Joan and our path forward together, even if it leads me away from here.

Halla and I both fill ma in on our conversation, on what happens now, and there’s nothing but warm approval on her face as she leans over and presses a kiss to my temple.