Chapter 121 121
Kaelen's POV:
The smell of actual food woke me up.
Not canned soup, not gas station sandwiches, not whatever Marcus had been making at the cabin that one time that tasted like cardboard soaked in depression. This was real food. Garlic and onions and something with tomatoes, and for a second I didn't know where I was because nothing in the last years had smelled like this.
Then I remembered.
I was in my room. At our house in Emberdale. And my parents were here. My parents were in the kitchen making breakfast like the last five years hadn't happened, like they hadn't been locked in a cell being drained of their blood while I raised their kids and ran from state to state and forgot what it felt like to not be terrified all the time.
I lay there for a minute staring at the ceiling, just like I used to do usually at three AM when I couldn't sleep because I was too busy worrying about everything.
Except that this time, for the first time in so long, I didn’t have anything to be worried about. Was it real or was I still dreaming or something?
The bond hummed warm in my chest. Annabeth was awake too, somewhere across town, and I could feel her contentment bleeding through. She was okay. She was home.
I heard voices from the kitchen. My mom's laugh, bright and startled, like she'd forgotten she could make that sound. My dad saying something I couldn't hear. And then Marlen, her voice sharp the way it always was in the morning before she'd had food.
I should get up. I should go out there and be part of... whatever this was. Family breakfast. Normal morning. The kind of thing other people had all the time and I'd almost forgotten existed.
But I didn't move.
I just lay there listening to them, to the sounds of a family that had been broken for five years and was now trying to figure out how to fit back together. The clatter of dishes. Lucian complaining about something. My mom telling him to set the table, and I thought, she should know he never sets the table right, he always forgets the napkins, but then I realized she didn't know that. She didn't know any of the things I knew about them now. She'd missed five years of napkin-forgetting and bad report cards and growth spurts and all the small stupid stuff that made up a life.
I finally dragged myself out of bed around eight-thirty. Pulled on jeans and a t-shirt that was clean enough and went to the bathroom to splash water on my face. The mirror showed me what it always showed me: tired eyes and hair that needed cutting. I looked older than twenty-two. Felt older too.
The kitchen was chaos when I walked in.
My mom was at the stove with a spatula, flipping something in a pan that was too small for what she was trying to do. My dad was at the counter chopping vegetables with a knife that definitely needed sharpening, and he kept having to use extra force which made the cutting board slide around.
Lucian was setting the small table, badly, forks on the wrong side and no napkins anywhere, and Marlen was sitting at the table with her arms crossed watching everyone with that expression she got when she wanted to help but didn't know how.
"Morning," I said.
My mom turned and smiled at me, and something in my chest did a weird twisting thing because I'd spent five years trying to remember exactly what her smile looked like and here it was, just happening, like it was easy.
"Kaelen. Sit, sit. Breakfast is almost ready."
"It's been almost ready for twenty minutes," Marlen muttered.
"The stove heats unevenly," Mom said. "I'm adjusting."
"You could turn the—"
"I know how to cook, Marlen."
"I didn't say you didn't."
Dad snorted from his spot at the counter. "She's been giving cooking advice since she was four. Used to tell your grandmother the soup needed more salt."
"It did need more salt."
I sat down at my usual spot, except it wasn't my usual spot anymore. I'd been sitting at the head of the table for five years because that's where the parent sits, that's where the person in charge sits, and now my dad was there and I was just... in a chair. On the side. Like a kid.
It felt wrong. It felt right. It felt like I didn't know what anything was supposed to feel like anymore.
Lucian dropped into the chair next to me. He'd gotten taller in the last few months, I kept noticing that, kept being surprised by it even though I'd watched it happen in real time. His shoulders were broader too. He wasn't the scrawny ten-year-old who'd cried himself to sleep for months after our parents disappeared.
"Hey," he said. "Kael, can I go to Danny's house later? He got that new game, the one with the zombies, and he said I could come over and—"
He stopped.
I watched his face as he realized what he'd just done. Asked me. Not Mom, not Dad. Me. Because that's what he'd been doing for years, asking me for permission to go places and do things and exist outside the house.
"I mean." He looked at our parents, then back at me, then at the table. His ears were turning red. "I mean, Mom, can I... or, wait, Dad, I don't know who I'm supposed to..."
"You can ask either of us," Dad said from the counter. He'd stopped chopping and was watching Lucian with an expression I couldn't read. "Or both. However you want to do it."
"Right. Yeah. Obviously." Lucian was picking at a scratch on the table, not looking at anyone. "So can I? Go to Danny's?"
"Who's Danny?" Mom asked.
"He's a guy from school. We have gym together. He's cool, he doesn't ask weird questions about why we left the city and moved here in the middle of nowhere or anything."
Mom and Dad exchanged a look. One of those parent looks that said a whole conversation in half a second, the kind I'd been trying to fake for five years and never quite managed.
"What time would you be back?" Mom asked.
"I don't know. Like, dinner? Or after dinner?"
"How about you're home by seven," Dad said. "We don't know this Danny kid yet."
"He's not a kid, he's fifteen."
"You're fifteen."
"Yeah, but I'm mature for my age."
Marlen laughed, sharp and mean. "You cried during a Disney movie last month."
"It was SAD, Marlen. The dog DIED."
"The dog didn't die, it found its way home at the end."
"I cried from relief!"
Mom was smiling again, that same bright startled smile, and I realized she was watching them argue the way you'd watch a movie you'd been waiting years to see. Taking it in. Memorizing it.
"Seven," Dad said. "And let us know when you get there."
"How am I supposed to do that? Kael lost his phone in the cabin attack, remember? And you don’t have phones yet."
"Then we'll fix that after breakfast."
Lucian nodded, and something in the set of his shoulders relaxed. Like he'd been waiting for someone else to make decisions and hadn't realized how heavy that had been until someone took it from him.
I knew the feeling.
Breakfast was eggs with vegetables, slightly burned on the bottom because Mom really was still figuring out the stove. Toast that Dad had cut into triangles for some reason. Orange juice that Marlen had poured, and she'd actually remembered to put out napkins, which made me wonder if she'd done it on purpose to make up for Lucian.
We ate mostly in silence, but it wasn't a bad silence. Just... new. Everyone figuring out how to be in the same room after so long apart.
"So," Dad said eventually. "The three of you want to tell us what we missed?"
Lucian looked at Marlen. Marlen looked at me. I looked at my eggs.
"That's a big question," I said.
"We have time."
Did we? I wasn't used to having time. I was used to eating fast and packing faster and always having one eye on the door in case we needed to run. I was used to every conversation being interrupted by danger or paranoia or just the basic reality of being hunted.
"There's a lot," Marlen said. "Like, five years of a lot."
"Start somewhere," Mom said. She'd stopped eating, was just watching us with her hands wrapped around her coffee mug. Her fingers were thin, thinner than I remembered, and there were new lines around her eyes.
"Kaelen dropped out of college twice," Lucian offered.
"Thanks, Lu."
"What? You did. Once in Portland and once in that place in Montana, the one with the weird name."
"I didn't drop out, I transferred when we had to move. There's a difference."
"Is there?"
"You were in college?" Dad asked.
I shrugged. "Kind of. On and off. I kept trying to finish my degree but every time we had to run I'd lose credits and have to start over. It wasn't... it didn't seem important after a while."
"What were you studying?"
"Literature. I wanted to be a writer." The words came out flat, like I was talking about someone else's dream. "It's stupid. I don't know why I kept trying."
"It's not stupid," Mom said quietly.
"It kind of is. Studying books while the world is trying to kill you. There was always more important stuff to deal with."
"Like what?"
"Like them." I gestured at Marlen and Lucian. "Making sure they had food and clothes and got to school on time. Making sure we stayed ahead of the Order. Making sure we didn't die."
The kitchen went quiet again, but this time it was a different kind of quiet, definitely not a comfortable one.
"You raised them," Dad said. It wasn't a question.
"Someone had to."
"Kaelen—"
"It's fine. I'm not, I mean, I'm not complaining." I pushed my eggs around my plate. "I just did what I had to do. What you would've done if you'd been here."
"You were seventeen."
"I know how old I was."
Mom put her coffee mug down. Her jaw was doing that thing it did when she was trying not to cry, the tight clenching that I remembered from when I was little and she was upset about something.
"We're sorry," she said. "We're so sorry you had to—"
"Don't." My voice came out sharper than I meant it to. "Please don't apologize. You didn't choose to get captured. You didn't choose to leave us. It just happened and I dealt with it and now you're back and it's fine. It's all fine."