12. Brock
Brock
The kitchen is still recovering.
Elara hasn’t moved since the front door shut. She’s staring at the space where Gunnar isn’t, holding her coffee in both hands, wearing the face of a woman rereading the last thing said to her and getting a different answer every time.
Leif pushes off the counter. Squares up. Here it comes — the conversation he’s been trying to start since last night, and I can tell by his jaw that he intends to get through the first sentence this time.
I glance out the window to check on Gunnar. Old habit. He bolts, I count the minutes, he comes back pretending he went for a walk. It’s a system. It’s worked for centuries.
Gunnar is standing at the bottom of the steps with his arms crossed, blocking the path of a tall, silver-haired man in a coat pressed sharp enough to shave with.
“Oh, shit.”
“Language,” Elara says, automatically, from somewhere very far away.
Leif looks over. I tip my head at the window. He takes one look — one — and his jaw does the thing where a conversation dies inside it again. Then he nods.
Go.
I go.
The porch door swings shut behind me and I put on my best morning voice, I’ve had a long time to practice it.
“Vick! Hey. How are—”
“I want to see him.” He doesn’t even look at me.
He’s looking over Gunnar’s shoulder at the cabin like he can see through it, and his voice is the one I remember from every summer of my childhood, the one that made five boys stand up straighter without agreeing to. “Now. And this bozo won’t let me in.”
“The bozo is your son.”
“I’m aware. It’s not the obstacle I expected to find between me and Erik, but it is not a surprising one.”
Gunnar’s face does nothing. That’s how I know how bad it is. Gunnar’s face doing nothing is the loudest thing he owns.
Vick’s eyes move between the two of us — my timing, Gunnar’s shoulders, the minute and a half it took me to follow him out a door. He doesn’t say anything about it. He has never once had to.
“Okay,” I say. “Okay. I know. But I need you to breathe for a second, Vick.”
“What?” And now I have his full attention, which is worse.
The anger climbs a register. “Why? Why would I need to breathe? The wards reached me. Six crossings onto this land, and one of them a reading I have never seen in my life. I have been traveling since. And then my son stands on my own steps and confirms it — Erik is back. Alive. After years. And not one of you sent word to anyone. So no, Brock, I will not breathe. Is he hurt? What did you bring back with him?”
He’s reading us. Wrong book, right skill — I know exactly where Gunnar gets it, and neither of them has ever believed me.
“He’s not hurt. Erik’s fine. It’s—” And here I am again, twice in one morning, standing in front of the only door I can’t find the right words for. “Things in there might not be what you expect.”
Vick looks at me. Then at his son. Then at the cabin, and everything we’re not saying is apparently visible to a father with centuries of practice reading exactly these faces.
“Oh, for all the gods—”
And he goes through us. Both of us. One shoulder each, no ceremony, a man who has been walking through his son’s defenses since before his son could shift — up the steps, across the porch, and the front door swings wide.
Gunnar closes his eyes.
“I tried,” he says.
“You stood in a path.”
“I tried in a path.”
The door slams behind Vick.
This is not good.