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“Chris was just being stupid, but I made you go after him, and now we don’t have somewhere to live. I’m the one—it’s my—”
“Hunter. Stop.”
“If we’d stayed at the house, we could have stopped it. They were after us. It’s our fault, and then—”
“All right, stop.” Michael set the coffee down. “You didn’t start those fires. And I have no idea what happened in the woods last night, but it wasn’t just Chris, and you didn’t start that either. No one is making you go back to live with your mom and your grandparents. If you want to go back, I won’t stop you. If you want to stay here, that’s fine, too. This was not your fault.”
“What if I’d never come here? What if—”
“Then Becca’s dad would have killed us. What if my parents had never made a deal with the other Elementals in town? What if we’d never been born? Jesus, we can play what-ifs all day, Hunter. Things happen, and we deal with them.”
Hunter still looked tense. Michael could read the warring emotions on his face.
“I don’t want to go home,” he finally said.
“Done.”
Hunter sat there for a long minute, until the silence began to wrap around them. Michael listened to his brothers outside and told himself that Nick would sense danger before it could draw close—and Gabriel would sense anything to do with fire. They needed this time to burn off energy. Part of Michael was tempted to join them.
A bigger part of him was ashamed his family was in this situation.
He didn’t move.
“I wish my dad was here.”
Hunter’s words came out of nowhere, and Michael was surprised when longing for his own father caught him around the neck and made it hard to breathe for a moment. His voice was rough and every bit as quiet. “Me too.” He took his own shuddering breath. “God. Me too.”
Hunter was looking at him again, and Michael realized Hunter was looking for reassurance, and here he was commiserating.
He smoothed a hand over the table and forced the emotion out of his voice. “When I was younger, I used to hate the music my dad played in the truck. The presets were all country and classic rock. But he said it was his truck and his rules, and when I had my own truck, I could pick my own stations.”
Hunter studied him. “But that’s what you listen to when you drive.”
“It’s still his truck.”
They sat in silence for the longest time. Hunter finally said, “Is that your way of telling me we’re supposed to do what we think they’d do?”
Michael shrugged. “I don’t know. I spend more time wondering what he’d expect me to do. But maybe that’s the same thing.”
“Maybe.”
It wasn’t the same thing at all. Michael knew it. He had a pretty good sense that Hunter knew it, too. Michael’s father had always been pretty clear about his expectations.
Hunter’s father had never been clear about anything. At all. When Hunter had first moved here, he’d done it as an act of vengeance. His father and uncle had been killed when a rock slide crushed their car—while they were traveling to eliminate the Merricks. Hunter had been the only one to survive the wreck, and he’d assumed Michael and his brothers had been responsible.
They hadn’t been. Calla had.
Michael wondered if some of Hunter’s guilt was wrapped up in the fact that he’d once had an opportunity to kill Calla, and he hadn’t been able to pull the trigger.
“I don’t think you’d be a disappointment to your father,” he said carefully.
Hunter didn’t look at him. “When he was getting ready to come here, I wanted to come with him. He said I wasn’t ready. He asked if I’d be able to do what needed to be done if you all turned out to be a danger to the community.” He paused. “I had a chance to stop Calla once. I didn’t do it.”
“Hunter—”
Hunter looked at him, and anger was in his eyes. “You know, every time I see her, I’m reminded of that. I have to think about the fact that she admitted to killing them, and now we’re letting her run around, harming innocent people—”
“We don’t know that she’s responsible for last night.”
