Chapter 119 119
Kaelen's POV:
We couldn't stay there.
As much as part of me wanted to watch the ruins burn until there was nothing left, we had to move. Marcus said there could be backup teams, other Order cells that might respond to a distress signal, and none of us were in any shape for another fight.
The walk back to Marcus's car took forever. We moved slow, partly because everyone was exhausted and partly because my parents could barely walk after five years in a cell. My dad leaned on my mom, and my mom leaned on me, and it was this weird shuffling procession through the Kansas countryside while the sun came up behind us.
Nobody talked much. We were all too tired, I guess. Or maybe just too much to say and no idea where to start.
Marcus drove. Annabeth sat in the front with him, with her head against the window, and I could feel through the bond that she was hovering somewhere between awake and asleep. The rest of us crammed into the back, which, seven people in a car meant for five is not comfortable. Lucian ended up half on Marlen's lap and she kept elbowing him every time he moved.
"Get your knee out of my ribs."
"I can't, there's nowhere else to put it."
"Figure it out."
My parents watched them bicker with this expression I couldn't read. They'd missed five years of this, of the stupid arguments and the inside jokes and all the small stuff that makes up a life, of us. Marlen had been eight when they disappeared. Lucian was ten. Now she was thirteen with a temper like a forest fire and he was fifteen and taller than Mom.
We stopped at a motel about two hours from the facility, some place off the highway that looked like it hadn't been updated since the eighties. Marcus paid cash for three rooms and nobody asked questions, probably because we looked like we'd just crawled out of a warzone. Which, I mean, we had.
The shower was the best thing I'd felt in days. Hot water, actual soap, washing off the blood and smoke and dirt until the water ran clear. My chest still hurt where the harpoon had gone through, this deep ache that probably wasn't going away anytime soon, but I was alive. We were all alive.
Someone had bought clothes at a gas station, I didn't ask who. Generic stuff, plain shirts and jeans that didn't fit great but were clean and didn't smell like burning buildings. Good enough.
We ate vending machine food in one of the rooms. Chips, candy bars, those little packets of cookies that taste weird. My mom kept looking at me like she wanted to say something but didn't know how, and my dad just sat there holding her hand with his eyes closed.
"We should go," Marcus said after maybe an hour. "Long drive ahead."
The drive back to Emberdale took most of the day. We switched drivers a couple times, stopped for gas and bad coffee at rest stops where nobody looked twice at a group of tired people with bad posture. Annabeth slept a lot, curled up against me in the backseat, and I let her because I knew she needed it. I could feel her exhaustion through the bond, this bone-deep tiredness that went beyond physical.
My parents asked questions sometimes. Careful ones, like they were afraid of the answers. How had I been taking care of Marlen and Lucian. Where had we lived. Had we been safe.
I told them the truth, mostly. Moved around a lot. Did what I had to. Kept them fed and in school and out of the Order's reach for five years.
My mom cried when I said that. Just quietly, looking out the window, and I didn't know what to do so I just put my hand on her shoulder and left it there.
We dropped Annabeth off first. Her aunt's house, empty because Sarah was still staying with Helen, but Annabeth said she needed to be home. Needed to call her aunt and tell her it was over.
I walked her to the door and kissed her, slow and soft, and through the bond I felt her trying to hold herself together.
"I'll come by tomorrow," I said.
"Okay."
"Call me if you need anything. Anything at all."
"I know." She touched my face, just for a second. "Go be with your family, Kaelen. They need you more than I do now."
I watched her go inside and close the door, and then I got back in the car.
"Where now?" Marcus asked from the driver's seat.
Right. Our house. We'd only been gone like ten days, maybe twelve or fifteen, I'd lost track somewhere between almost dying and rescuing Annabeth and my parents from an underground prison. The rent was paid until the end of the year, I'd made sure of that a couple of months ago. One less thing to worry about while running for our lives.
"To our house," I said. "It's not much but it's paid for a little longer and what is left of our things is still there."
The house was exactly how we'd left it. Dishes in the sink from the day we ran, Lucian's notebooks from school spread on the couch, the blanket Marlen always used crumpled in a pile. Small, yeah. Two bedrooms, one bathroom, the kind of place where you could hear the neighbors fighting through the walls. But it was home.
My parents stood in the doorway and looked around. Five years in a cell and now they were standing in the house their kids had been living in without them. Mom's hand found Dad's and squeezed.
"It's small," Marlen said, almost apologetic. "I mean, rent is expensive and we had to save money and—"
"It's perfect," Mom said. Her voice cracked on the word. "It's perfect, sweetheart."
We'd figure out the sleeping situation later. We'd figure out everything, how to fit two more people into a space that barely fit three, how to start being a family again after five years of thinking they were dead. Marcus had already mentioned he'd help with money, something about accounts he'd been saving for decades, but that was a conversation for another day.
Right now, none of that mattered.
For the first time in five years, we were all together.
I just had to figure out what that meant now.