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Of course it does. This isn’t Halsten, all knowing, trying to trick me.

He just did what I said. He just takes things at face value. He is face value—no hidden messages, no secret knife concealed just out of sight. What you see is what you get, and god, I just do not know how to act around that. I don’t know how to respond to it, in any way at all.

Am I supposed to just always believe in it?

To think it’s okay to trust in the things he does?

I’ve never even done that for men who aren’t Halsten. The last guy I tried to date turned out to be a spy for our old corrupt mayor. Almost every man in town that I’ve ever investigated turns out to be worse, somehow, than whatever my reasons for investigating suggested. One of them was embezzling money, and I then found out he was a fucking serial killer. I was on the news. The local police department tried to give me a medal. Someone from The New Yorker attempted to hire me.

It’s a whole fucking thing.

So what the fuck do I do here?

How am I supposed to operate without the bulwark of my own suspicion?

It’s gonna have to be constant pretending that I’m not thrown. “Let me just turn around. For your privacy,” I eventually tell him. But Christ, I stutter and stumble when I do it. I sound like I’m sixteen years old, green as fuck and frighteningly clumsy. I even stagger a little as I put my back to him.

And god, my face is red. Everything is red.

It feels like the room is three thousand degrees.

Though apparently he is intent on getting that number higher.

“I don’t need any privacy from you, Sorceress,” he says.

“Okay, first of all, yes, you do. And second: my name is Marley.”

“Yes, I know. I observed it on the testament of your accomplishments upon your wall.” He gestures to my degree in journalism, on the drawers just beyond the bathroom. “I simply use your title as a sign of my respect and admiration.”

“Well, you can stop now. You’ve made the respect and admiration clear enough. I don’t need massive amounts of it. In fact, even small amounts are a lot for me to process. You know?”

“I do. When you are conditioned to cruelty, anything softer cuts like a knife.”

Jesus fucking Christ, I think. But I manage to get myself under control before I actually answer him. “Man, your Viking village must have had a hell of a mental wellness center,” I say. But he doesn’t laugh. Of course he doesn’t.

“I do not know what that is,” he says.

“Somewhere you go to talk about your feelings.”

He considers. Then makes a face that very obviously conveys, aha. “This is called a þing. A place of meeting and discussion. And often reassuring each other that our hairs are well dressed and our feasts delicious.”

“A very hair- and feast-based culture, then.”

“Yes, you could say that.”

“You must be pretty pissed about the current side part and diet, then.”

I point at said side part in the mirror, where I can see his reflection over my own shoulder. Even though it’s not really one anymore. This good Halsten clearly doesn’t have access to whatever hair products evil Halsten did, because his hair is now all tousled and soft looking, underneath the hint of soot.

Not that this seems to matter to him.

“If by side part you mean the murder of my long hair, and by diet you mean the complete lack of interest in eating anything I used to love, and by pissed you mean I want to murder the old me with my bare hands, then I would say that was a fair comment,” he says, lip curled, tone so contemptuous I almost expect him to spit after he’s said it.

Though that’s not what really stuns me to silence for a second.

Or makes my voice come out just a little hushed.

“It almost sounds like you think of him as a different person.”