Page 11 of Into Ember

Who has been behind me.

Who was behind me fifteen minutes ago, and half a step behind my shoulder for hours before that, and I would swear to that in court. I have been ignoring him specifically the entire way, you can’t ignore someone that hard without knowing exactly where they are —

“Dinner’s ready,” he says.

I turn my head, just to check. He is most definitely not behind me.

“Okay,” I say. “What the fuck.”

Chapter 4

Brock

I stay by the stairs, where I can see the whole room.

Old habit. In most rooms I do it so I can read the exits. In this one I do it because this room is where I learned to read at all.

We’ve been coming here since before any of us could shift. Before the Legion, before the unit, before anyone called Leif anything but his name. We learned what we were in this house. We got stitched back together on that table more times than I want to count. We hid from the Vestry here twice, buried a friend from the ridge out back, and celebrated things in this room that the rest of Teth never found out happened. Every memory I have that matters has all five of us in it, and most of them have these walls around them.

And now she walks in.

Flip-flops in one hand, hair a war she’s lost, three hours of complaints behind her, and she crosses the threshold of the most guarded place five dragons have ever loved like it’s nothing. Like it’s easy.

She stops in the middle of the room and turns in a slow circle.

“Okay,” she says. “This is aggressively cozy. This looks like Pinterest had a baby with a lumberjack.”

I don’t know what a Pinterest is.

Neither does anyone else, going by the room. Rayner looks at Leif to check whether he should laugh. Leif looks as confused as Rayner. Erik huffs at the stove — one strangled breath — because Erik is the only one in this room with any idea what she just said.

Three years on Earth. She has a whole language, and he’s the only one of us who speaks it.

The best part of the joke didn’t need translating, though. It was that face of hers while she made it. So expressive, and I can’t read a word of it correctly most of the time.

We’re all here thinking about the fifteen minutes of Elara talking without a filter in our heads. Words that we’re not supposed to have. While she’s standing in the middle of our childhood, and she has no idea.

About any of it.

She doesn’t know what here is or what it means, and all I can think about is the fact that she belongs here.

Nobody in this room is handling that well. They’re all trying to act normal and failing miserably. I want to laugh because she doesn’t even know what normal looks like.

When she drifts over near Erik, he hands her a mug of something hot before she can ask.

I count the mugs on the shelf behind him.

Six.

There have been five mugs on that shelf for longer than the country she lives in has existed. I look at the sixth one, and then at the man who got here first, and I do the only math there is. He lit the fire, started dinner, and made the cabin hers before any of us walked in the door.

Of course he did.

I don’t say anything. Neither does he. She wraps both hands around the mug like it’s the first good thing that’s happened all day and says thank you to the room in general. Erik tips his head an inch and goes back to the stove.

She looks up, catches me watching, and smiles like we’re in on something together.

I have no idea what she thinks we’re in on.