10. Torin
TEN
TORIN
When I’m well enough to walk, half the sleuth helps me back to my cabin.
The door keeps opening without a knock. I’ve stopped locking it—partly because the sleuth checks on me constantly, partly because there’s only one person whose visits I actually want, and she doesn’t believe in waiting for permission.
Sakura appears in my doorway carrying a pot larger than her head.
“You’re awake.” She kicks the door closed and marches toward my kitchen. “Good. I made soup.”
“I don’t need—”
“You need to eat. Anouk said your bear is burning through calories to heal the burns.” She sets the pot on my stove with a decisive clang.
“Soup has calories. Therefore, soup. Also—” She doesn’t look at me.
“Anouk confirmed the Registry device discharged completely in the backlash. It’s gone. The second siphon is destroyed.”
I exhale slowly. One less thing threatening this town.
“Soup,” she says again, firmly, before I can respond.
“That’s not how healing works.”
“It’s exactly how healing works. I’m an energy healer. I have expertise.” She starts opening my cabinets. “Where do you keep your—why is everything organized by color?”
“It’s efficient.”
“It’s chaos. The spices are next to the plates. The bowls are with the coffee mugs.” She finds a bowl. “There’s a system here, but it was designed by someone with very unique priorities.”
“Bears have unique priorities.”
“Bears have questionable organizational skills.” She ladles soup with aggressive efficiency. “Sit up. Eat.”
I sit up. The movement pulls at the healing skin. I hide the wince, but she sees it anyway—her eyes narrowing with concern she immediately masks with irritation.
“Slowly.” She crosses the room and hands me the bowl. “The burns are still healing.”
“I’m fine.”
“You absorbed a magical explosion. You’re not fine.” She curls into my reading chair—the one that’s molded perfectly to my shape over fifteen years. She looks small in it. Determined. Beautiful.
“Eat.” She points at the bowl. “Before it gets cold.”
I eat.
The soup is excellent. Rich, savory, herbs I don’t recognize and a warmth that spreads through my chest like comfort made tangible. She watches me eat with the focused attention of someone who’s decided my well-being is her personal responsibility.
She’s taking care of us. Tell her.
I’m eating soup. Give me a minute.
“This is good.” I scrape the bowl. “Where did you learn to cook?”
“My grandmother. Before she died.” Sakura pulls her knees to her chest, making herself smaller in my oversized chair. “She was the only one in my family who understood my magic. Used to say cooking and elemental work had the same foundation—combining ingredients to create transformation.”
“She sounds wise.”
“She was. She was also the only one who didn’t treat me like a problem.” A shadow crosses her face. “When she died, the rest of my family didn’t know what to do with me. I was thirteen and already creating localized thunderstorms when I got upset about homework.”
“Thirteen is young for that level of power.”
“It was terrifying for everyone involved. Including me.” She manages a small smile.
“Grandmother used to say that big feelings needed big spaces to land. She taught me to direct storms at the ocean when I needed to release pressure. After she was gone, there was no one to teach me how to hold them.”
“So you held them alone.”
“For a long time.” The admission comes out quieter than she intends. “Until I got tired of it.”
“Mistvale isn’t going to ask you to leave.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know this town. I know these people.” I set down the empty bowl.
“They rallied around Leire when she was struggling. They’ll rally around you too.
They already are—Sunny sending stress pastries, Berry recommending comfort books, the vampires documenting your weather patterns with genuine interest rather than fear. ”
“The vampires are documenting my weather patterns?”
“Thalia has a journal. Marcus provides commentary. They find your atmospheric moods ‘romantically compelling.’”
“That’s...” She blinks. “Actually kind of sweet? In a very strange way.”
“Mistvale is sweet in strange ways. It’s part of the charm.”
“More soup?”
“Please.”
The day passes in comfortable chaos.
She reorganizes my bookshelves with the intensity of someone who’s found a personal mission.
“Why do you have romance novels shelved with legal texts?” She holds up a Milly Taiden paperback and a volume on territorial property disputes.
“They both involve contracts.”
“That’s...” She stares at me. “That’s the most unromantic description of romance I’ve ever heard.”
“The romance novel features a binding agreement between parties with competing interests who must negotiate terms of mutual benefit.”
“It features a dragon shifter and a librarian falling in love.”
“Through negotiation.”
“Through romance.”
“Same outcome. Different methodology.” I shift against my pillows. “The protagonists reach a mutually satisfactory arrangement by the conclusion.”
She shoves both books onto a new shelf—labeled, reorganized, categorized by whatever system makes sense in her head. “I’m creating a romance section. It will be separate from the legal texts. This is non-negotiable.”
“I defer to your expertise.”
“Smart.”
She moves to the next shelf, making horrified noises at my choice to organize poetry by cover color (“That’s not a system, Torin, that’s aesthetics”) and my decision to intermingle fiction with non-fiction based on publication year (“You can’t sort Keats next to a treatise on salmon migration just because they came out in the same decade”). I let her work.
“Why do you have four copies of the same book on territorial disputes?”
“Different editions. Different commentaries.”
“You need four different opinions on where bears can legally fish?”
“Fishing rights are contentious. The nuances matter.”
“The nuances of salmon?”
“You’d be surprised.”
A knock at the door interrupts her critique.
“You filed poetry collections under ‘Emergency Resources.’” She doesn’t look up from the shelf. “That’s not a category.”
“Poetry emergencies are real.”
“Tell me about your childhood.” She cradles a mug of tea I don’t remember making. “The sleuth. What was it like, growing up with bears?”
“Loud. Competitive. A lot of wrestling.” I shift against my pillows. “My mother died when I was young—complications from a shifting injury. My father raised me, but the whole sleuth helped. Bears raise cubs communally.”
“That sounds overwhelming.”
“Sometimes. But also safe. I was never lonely.”
“But?”
She sees too much.
“But I was often solitary.” I stare at the fire. “Even surrounded by family, I felt apart. I was always the calm one. The one who settled disputes. I did it so well that people stopped asking if I had disputes of my own.”
“You became what they needed.”
“Exactly.” Something in her voice hits somewhere I wasn’t expecting. “I learned early that showing emotion made people uncomfortable. They wanted me to be the rock. So I became the rock.”
“And buried everything else.”
“In notebooks. Where no one would find it.” I meet her gaze. “My father discovered my first journal when I was sixteen.”
“What did he say?”
“He said writing was a valid outlet but I should hide the journals better.” A faint smile. “Then he never mentioned it again. Bears aren’t comfortable with emotional conversations.”
“But he understood.”
“He understood I needed an outlet. He just couldn’t be that outlet himself.”
She’s quiet for a moment. “My family never wanted me to feel anything. Emotions created weather. Weather created problems. The solution was to feel less.”
“That’s impossible.”
“They didn’t care about possible. They cared about convenient.” She sips her tea. “I spent years trying to shrink myself. Trying to take up less space.”
“Did it work?”
“The storms always came anyway. Then they blamed me for not trying hard enough.” She sets down her mug. “When I left, my mother said she was relieved. She didn’t mean it cruelly—she was just honest. My presence was exhausting. My absence was easier.”
The anger rises before I can stop it. “That’s not relief. That’s failure.”
“It’s complicated.”
I reach for her hand. “Their loss. Not yours.”
She stares at me. “No one has ever said that before.”
“Then everyone else got it wrong.”
The fire crackles. The cabin is warm. And Sakura looks at me like I’ve given her a gift she didn’t know she needed.
“You really mean that.”
“I mean everything I say to you.” I squeeze her hand gently. “Your family didn’t know what they had. Their inability to handle your power says nothing about you.”
“I’m a lot.”
“You’re exactly right.”
Her eyes shine.
“Torin—”
“You don’t have to say anything.” I hold her gaze. “Just know. I see you. All of you. The storms and the sunshine. And I’m not going anywhere.”
She squeezes my hand. Doesn’t let go. And for a long moment, we just sit there—her in my reading chair, me propped against pillows and the fire crackling between us.
“Grandmother Peach would be unbearable if she could see this.”
“Grandmother Peach can probably see this. Her information network is terrifying.”
“Do you think she’s really three hundred years old?”
“I think the mist knows things that predate most records in Mistvale. And she’s connected to the mist in ways no one fully understands.” I consider. “Three hundred seems conservative, honestly.”
“That’s unsettling.”
“Most things about Grandmother Peach are unsettling. But she’s also never been wrong about a matching. Not once in living memory.”
Sakura is quiet for a moment. “Does that mean... has she said anything about us?”
“She delivered cobbler and told me to stop emotionally constipating myself.”
“That’s not romantic advice.”
“For Grandmother Peach, it is.”
She laughs—a real laugh, warm and surprised—and the sound sinks into my bones like comfort.
She finds the journal while I’m dozing.
I drift off against my pillows, lulled by the fire’s warmth and her presence. When I wake, she’s holding a leather-bound notebook.
My stomach drops.