Chapter 23 Kaia
Kaia
A few days later
The house looks like a mouth that forgot how to speak.
Even from the sidewalk, I can feel it: quiet pressed into the walls, air too still, curtains open like someone tried to make it cheerful and failed. Harbor’s Edge is bright outside, like it doesn’t know what it cost to get here.
A few days have passed since the hospital. Since the festival. Since the world got loud and then went quiet in the worst way.
In those few days, the Council was busy with cleanup. Council teams moved through Harbor’s Edge with Handlers in plain clothes standing in doorways with that dead-eyed calm, asking people to “repeat after me” until their fear became forgettable.
Eon’s cleanup was different, but just as busy.
Phones got flagged. Live streams vanished.
Fan-cam accounts got hit with takedowns so fast it made the rest of the internet look polite.
Press got fed a clean narrative: power surge, pyrotechnic malfunction, crowd panic, heroic security response.
It's the kind of story that fits in a headline and leaves out the part where a demon tried to eat a town.
Even Blaire made calls. Not the PR kind. The real kind… Eon’s “logistics” team showed up at Evie’s house with boxes, tape, and a woman who kept saying “I’m so sorry” like it was a checklist item. Mr. Bane did a final sweep of the house and left another little hush charm on the window.
And Blaire—Blaire roped Gus into being in charge of the practical stuff with the same sharp efficiency she uses on tour schedules.
The plan is ugly, but it’s a plan.
Gus will keep an eye on the house, collect the mail, and make sure nothing gets broken into while the paperwork moves.
He’ll also be the one meeting with the realtor on Evie’s behalf.
Blaire had the solicitor’s number on speed dial before Evie even stopped shaking.
She handled the “how do you sell a house when you feel like you’re dying” part so Evie didn’t have to.
All because I said, once, finally out loud and completely non-negotiable: She’s coming with us.
Because I’m done pretending distance keeps anyone safe.
I let myself in with the spare key Evie pressed into my hand the other day.
The hush inside is immediate. Not magical. Not the hush charm. Something older than that. The silence left when a person who belonged in a place is suddenly nowhere in it.
There are boxes stacked along the wall of the entryway, each one labeled in Evie’s blunt handwriting. KITCHEN. BOOKS. DONATE. TRASH. A roll of tape sits abandoned on the little side table by the door beside a glass bowl full of loose change and two hair ties.
I close the door quietly behind me and follow the sound of cardboard shifting.
Evie is in the kitchen. She’s standing at the table in a washed-out shirt and old jeans, hair pulled back badly like she did it without looking in a mirror.
The kitchen around her is half-packed and half-still-lived-in.
Cabinets hanging open. A box on one chair.
Another on the floor by her feet. The table is covered in small sorted piles that look impossibly intimate: recipe cards, takeout menus, a chipped mug, rubber-banded pens, batteries, a little ceramic lighthouse salt shaker, prescription bottles, a pair of reading glasses folded on top of a dish towel.
The room smells faintly like cardboard and stale coffee.
Evie has one hand braced on the table and the other wrapped around a mug like she forgot to drink from it.
She looks up when she hears me.
“You’re early,” she says.
Her voice is flat with exhaustion, but there’s still enough edge in it to feel like her. Relief hits me so hard it almost makes me dizzy.
“I know.”
Her gaze drops to the reusable grocery bag in my hand. “What’s that?”
“Just groceries.”
She nods and looks back down at the table instead. At the little piles of a life being divided into keep, donate, throw away. My chest tightens.
I have fought monsters in front of screaming crowds. I have bled under spotlights. I have stood in arenas and pretended not to be afraid.
This feels harder.
“I brought food,” I say, because apparently when I’m terrified my solution is always to state the obvious like it’s tactical.
Evie lets out a breath through her nose. “Kaia.”
“I know.”
“No, I mean—” She rubs at the space between her brows with two fingers. “You didn’t have to.”
“I know that too.”
She finally looks at me properly.
The bruised exhaustion in her face is worse in daylight. The last few days have sanded her down to something sharper and quieter. But she’s still here. Still standing. Still giving me that look like I’m one stupid sentence away from being told to get out of her kitchen forever.
Somehow that steadies me.
I step farther into the room and set the grocery bag on the counter. “Have you eaten?”
Evie glances at the mug in her hand like she’s surprised to find it there. “Coffee.”
“That’s not food.”
“It’s bean soup.”
I huff out a laugh before I can stop myself. Her mouth twitches.
The kitchen falls quiet again.
On the table, next to the reading glasses, there’s a stack of recipe cards tied together with faded blue ribbon. The top card is written in slanted handwriting I don’t recognize, ingredients ineligible, like whoever wrote them assumed they’d always remember the rest.
Evie follows my gaze.
“She wrote everything down,” she says, and her voice changes on the sentence. Not much. Just enough to make something in me go very still. “Not because she needed to. Just because she liked pretending she was more organized than she actually was.”
I step closer to the table carefully. “Sounds familiar.”
That gets me a real look this time. Tired. Suspicious. A little helpless around the edges.
“I am organized. My gran, on the other hand,” she says, with the ghost of a laugh, “was chaos in orthopedic shoes.”
I smile before I can help it. Then I see the mug in her hand.
White ceramic. Blue stripe. The handle repaired once with glue so old it’s gone yellow at the seam.
I remember that mug.
Grandma Calder used it the morning I ate pancakes with them. The memory arrives so sharp it hurts.
Evie must see something change in my face, because she looks down at the mug like it offended her.
“She used this one every morning,” she says. “Even when I bought her nicer ones. Said this one was her favorite.”
My throat tightens.
Evie sets the mug down too carefully. It makes almost no sound against the wood.
“I keep thinking,” she says, still looking at it, “that if I pack the wrong thing first, the rest of the house will get mad at me.”
The sentence is so raw and strange and honest that it cleaves straight through me.
I don’t say I’m sorry. Everyone keeps saying that to her, and I’m starting to think the phrase has been worn smooth from overuse.
Instead I look at the open cabinets, the bare patch of wall where something used to hang, the boxes waiting with their little blank mouths open.
“Can I make you breakfast?” I ask suddenly.
She glances at me like I’ve suggested summoning a dragon into the kitchen. “You can cook?”
I narrow my eyes. “Rude.”
“You’re a celebrity.”
“I’m half-Korean.”
That startles a sound out of her—small, sharp, almost a laugh—and for one reckless second I love myself for being the one to cause it.
Then her eyes go glossy with exhaustion again, and the feeling in my chest changes shape.
“My mom used to make kimchi jeon when the house felt wrong,” I say, pulling out the ingredients out of the bag one by one because it’s easier to focus on my hands than on the look on her face.
“After bad nights. After nightmares. If I came home hoarse from training or crying or being sixteen about something.”
Evie leans one hip against the table, watching me.
I keep my eyes on the counter. On the bowl I’ve found. On the knife in my hand.
“She’d open all the windows and fry pancakes and tell me hot food chased bad spirits out faster.”
Something in the room shifts. Not magically. Not like a ward catching or a sigil flaring. Just grief making space for one strange little story.
Evie’s mouth softens.
“She actually said that?”
I nod. “Very seriously.”
A beat.
Then, quietly, Evie adds, “Pancakes that fight ghosts.”
The memory hits both of us at once. Gran at this table, delighted, declaring it like it was entirely sensible. I see it happen in Evie’s face when she goes still. For one second I think I’ve done something cruel by bringing it back.
Then Evie swallows and says, “Okay.”
Just that.
Okay.
I release a breath I didn’t know I was holding.
“Okay?”
“Okay,” she repeats, rougher now. “Make your ghost-repelling pancakes.”
I move before I can overthink it. The cabinet doors are half-open but I still don’t know this kitchen by instinct, and that hurts in ways I do not have time to name.
“Where’s the flour?”
“Left of the stove,” Evie says automatically. “Behind the tea.”
I find it exactly where she said.
“Mixing bowl?”
“Under the counter by the sink.”
Every answer comes fast. Easy. Worn into her by years of reaching without looking. Each one lands like a tiny proof of all the life that happened here while I was gone.
I whisk batter in a bowl older than I am. Chop kimchi on the cutting board by the window. Slice scallions too thin because my hands are steadier with swords than knives and always have been.
Behind me, cardboard whispers.
I glance over my shoulder.
Evie is sorting again, slower now. She picks up one of the recipe cards, reads half a line, and presses her lips together. Sets it gently in the keep pile. The reading glasses go next. Then the lighthouse shaker, after a moment of hesitation that says everything.
I turn back to the stove because watching her grieve feels too intimate, like seeing bare skin.
Oil goes into the pan. The first hiss when the batter hits it fills the kitchen. Warm, immediate, alive. The smell follows a second later, savory, sharp, familiar enough to make my chest ache.