Page 102 of Demon's Bane

When life gets back to the way it was?

What am I even saying? The thought of returning to the life I led before I went to the human realm, the life I led beforeJoan, is unfathomable.

“You’re committed to staying here, then? You wouldn’t ever want to… try somewhere else?”

Her question is offered innocently, searchingly, like all she wants is to understand.

At the same time, it cuts at a wound that’s only barely stopped bleeding.

It’s a wound I’m usually able to keep bandaged and buried, but that feels closer to the surface these last few days than it has in the past year. The walls I keep around it are battered and cracked, and I speak before I can think better of it.

“I already tried somewhere else.” Guilt creeps up the back of my throat in a bitter, cloying wave. “A lot of somewhere elses, and none of them where I should have been.”

“When you left here before, you mean?”

“Yes. When I was young and an idiot, careless and irresponsible.”

“Everyone spends time trying to figure out who they want to be when they’re young,” Joan murmurs, and my guilt only doubles as I press on.

I need her to understand. I need her to know the full nature of my transgression, the depth of my selfish carelessness.

“It’s no excuse. My father was here, my sister, my mother. All of them contributing and working to support each other and this community. To do something that mattered. And where was I? In dance halls in Gales Harbor, bouncing from city to city, wasting my life on what pleased me.”

“That’s what you think it was?” she asks, brow furrowed. “A waste?”

I nod once, stiff and jerky, glad she’s finally coming to understand. “Yes, all of it a waste. And for what? To miss the last years of my father’s life? To live without him now, knowing how disappointed in me he was?”

Joan sucks in a breath. “He told you that?”

“He didn’t have to. It was clear enough anytime I came home to visit, every time the letters I sent him went unanswered.”

We’re near the edge of the village now, alone as dusk falls over the mountain. Joan stops walking in the middle of the path and turns to face me.

“I’m sorry,” she says, and the pain in her voice feels like an acknowledgment of my own. “I really am, Rhett. I’m sorry things between you and your dad never got resolved, and I’m sorry you’re still dealing with that now. I know that can’t be easy.”

But even in that understanding, there’s something else lingering on the edge of her words, something that prickles uncomfortably and makes me prod further.

“Why do I feel like there’s a ‘but’ at the end of your sentence?”

Joan swallows hard, and a momentary flash of indecision breaks across her face before she decides to tell me whatever it is she’s thinking.

“But… is all of that guilt going to dictate the way you live the rest of your life?” She reaches out to take my hand in hers.“We’re not always meant to stay in the places where we grew up. Even when leaving feels impossible and even when we’ll never quite sort out our complicated feelings about it.”

Her voice is still soft, still laced with so much sympathy, and I know she’s thinking of her own life, of her coven, of her shop and the place she’s made for herself in the world.

It makes a flare of bitter, unwelcome irritation spring up right alongside all my other tangled emotions, mingled with something that feels almost like… envy. Envy, for the way she’s made herself a life and a purpose outside the community she was born into, the certainty she has it was the right choice for her.

“It’s not the same thing. Our lives. Our circumstances. They are not the same.”

Joan shakes her head, thinking. “I mean, yeah. I know our lives haven’t been exactly the same, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t similarities that—”

“They’re just different,” I protest, hardly knowing what I’m saying, lost in my grief and guilt and exhaustion. I drop her hand and take a few steps away, but my mate isn’t going to let me retreat that easily.

“How?” Joan presses, staying right with me. “How are we different?”

“It’s different because I’m trying to do my best, to stay here, to do right by my family and community. And you—”

All at once, the reality of what I’m saying, what I’m implying, catches up to me.