Chapter 6
Upon seeing the library, Nyx promptly forgave New York City for being a densely populated urban area.
The New York Public Library’s flagship location, the Stephen A.
Schwarzman Building, was an architectural beauty surrounded by a sea of skyscrapers.
It should have been dwarfed by them, but the opposite felt true—as if the massive modern buildings had come to pay homage to one that had been there long before them, and which reigned in their midst with quiet power.
As she and Evra walked up the stone steps, Nyx had trouble remembering what she was there for.
The columns at the entrance were dragging her mind from the present to the past, to the weight of history that lay in the craftsmanship.
That sense of history wasn’t something that had existed in Arizona—at least, not where she’d been.
Everything there had felt new and generic in a way that lacked soul, while the pockets of the land’s true history—its true people—had all been outside of the geographic bounds she could travel to.
This building had a presence. From the marble that comprised it to the detail with which it had been designed, every inch of it seemed to proclaim that it had withstood the test of time and had every intention of continuing to do so.
For a moment after they walked in she found a spot on the wall, out of the way, and simply took it in. Even Evra, who was not much prone to waxing poetic about architecture, stood silently and looked around, which Nyx figured to mean she was at least partially impressed.
Nyx fully wandered for nearly half an hour, just taking in the architecture and the books, and she figured it was a testament to Evra’s concern over her general well-being that the didn’t complain about it.
But despite Morgen’s admonishment to engage in more cultural exploration, she was here to do a job, and she could only be distracted from the fact for so long.
Since Hidden magic made it ridiculously easy to rifle through someone’s purse without them knowing—and yes, her life in Dead Earth could have been significantly more manageable if she’d been willing to steal from people—she and Evra found themselves the temporary proud possessors of library cards, which caused Evra to look at her judgmentally.
“What?” Nyx demanded.
“You would never have done this before.”
“I’m not stealing them, I’m borrowing them. We’ll turn them in on the way out. They’re library cards, not grocery money.”
Sometime thereafter they were each seated at a microfilm reader in the Rose Main Reading Room with newspaper selections from fifteen years ago.
Evra grumbled about it, looking comically out of place in the library’s studious atmosphere, but dutifully began looking through her assigned selection of microfilm.
They’d narrowed it down to winter, based on what little the Congregation had been able to tell them, but that still left a whole lot of daily news to search through.
While Nyx was still looking for any headlines on miraculous healings, she was also looking for any on odd deaths, or murders committed by children.
It had occurred to her that she had no idea how Tristen had killed whoever he had killed, so it was possible the death had been tied to him.
If he was in a prison or a psychiatric facility, it was going to make things significantly more complicated.
After hours of scanning, and reading a few articles that looked promising but ultimately weren’t, the words were starting to blur together in her vision when a photo of a boy of maybe nine or ten caught her eye, beneath the headline: Real Estate Tycoon Offers $1 Million Dollar Reward for Missing Boy.
She could think of one reason someone would offer that much money to find a child that a quick scan of the article confirmed was not his own.
She read the article and then searched through the following days and weeks as the story unfolded.
There were a lot of articles because the story itself was sensational, but she quickly gained a timeline of events.
The man offering the reward was Howard Gales, a business associate of one Edward Caruthers, who had been found dead in his home, along with three of his employees. There had been no evidence of foul play, and even after autopsy, the cause of death remained unknown.
After the death was announced, Howard Gales had turned up at the police station, demanding to know where “the boy” was.
Howard—and the expensive, high-powered attorney with him—claimed Caruthers had been involved in a ring of child trafficking, and that he and the attorney had been building a case with the FBI against him.
Howard claimed Edward had been keeping a young boy and maiming him for sport.
The police said there was no evidence of a child in the home, and that was when Gales had offered the public reward, and the city had promptly lost its mind in an attempt to locate the missing boy.
By the time he was found he was terrified and malnourished.
He was also missing two fingers on his right hand, and his left foot had been amputated.
The budding hope Nyx had been carrying as she read died.
Kalvar had once told her he’d seen Tobi reattach a severed finger with no sign of scarring or impeded mobility, and Shamans were capable of healing themselves.
Still, there was something about the boy in the pictures that made her keep reading.
The rest of her hope died soon after. The boy—Clay—had been in the foster care system since he was two, and his experience in it had not been great.
He’d run away at ten and had the bad luck to end up with Caruthers, after whose death the FBI had uncovered a wealth of evidence showing a lengthy history of child trafficking.
Since Clay had no living family, when Howard Gales wanted to adopt the boy and give him a charmed life, the adoption went through in record time.
That was how the boy became Clay Howard Gales, rescued orphan and heir to a substantial fortune.
The press had done a few followup pieces after that—Clay attending private school, going to charity events with Howard—but they petered out within a year.
Happiness didn’t sell nearly so many papers as tragedy did.
Nyx closed the last article and went back to one taken soon after Clay had been adopted.
He stood next Howard, looking withdrawn but defiant.
She sighed. He wasn’t Tristen. Yes, he was the right age, and yes, someone in his life who had hurt him had died, but he’d been in the US foster care system nearly the entirety of his life.
He had an identity paper trail and now a legal adoption he had, by all news accounts, been thrilled about.
If Clay Gales had actually been Tristen Veld, Shaman from another world, wouldn’t he have said something during all of this media attention?
Maybe not about the whole alien Shaman thing—he would have been on Earth long enough by then to realize that wasn’t a good idea—but something to prevent him from ending up with Howard, who in this scenario was likely less Good Samaritan and more scheming-to-acquire-his-own-personal-Shaman?
Next to her, Evra shoved away from her microfilm reader. “I have found nothing,” she said in disgust. “You?”
Nyx hesitated. Everything she’d read suggested Clay Gales was nothing more than an ordinary Earth boy.
The irreparable physical damage to his body indicated clearly that he was not a Shaman.
And yet…there was something that kept drawing her back.
She looked at his picture again, and it finally hit her: black hair, dark brown eyes, light brown skin. He could have been Seth, as a child.
She closed her eyes. There was nothing to find in these articles. No clues. Just her heart making connections to what she missed most.
She shook her head. “No, I didn’t find anything.”
“Then let us go.” Evra stood and stretched, her back giving a sharp crack. “Tomorrow we will canvas the streets.”
“Oh, goody,” Nyx mumbled.
“What was that?”
“Nothing.” Canvassing the streets was not in Nyx’s wheelhouse.
It involved talking to people in such a way that those people trusted you and wanted to give you information.
Nyx hadn’t been able to talk normally to people in Dead Earth when making friends had been all she desperately wanted out of life.
She didn’t think she was going to be able to converse with strangers in any way that was likely to make them give her good intelligence now, just because she suddenly needed it.
Outside, Nyx plugged their dinner destination into her phone’s maps app.
“Do you really require that thing to tell you where to go?” Evra asked. “The building is right there.” She pointed. “It is quite distinctive and should be simple to navigate to.”
“I like to be prepared. Besides, this tells me the travel distance and the estimated time to walk there.” A little over half a mile, and twelve minutes on foot.
“What do you need that for? It will take the time and distance it takes to get there, no matter what your device says.”
Nyx clicked the screen off and shoved the phone into her pocket. “Fine, you’re right.” She held her arm out in invitation. “Lead on.”
Evra started walking, her brow furrowing. “Why are you angry? I am merely relaying the facts of the situation.”
Nyx blew out a breath. “I don’t know.” Evra wasn’t trying to be a smartass. She was just Evra being Evra. Serious and literal to a fault.
They walked a block in silence before Evra said, “Understand that I am not trying to push you in any direction.”
“Uh-huh,” Nyx said skeptically, as that sounded precisely like the sort of thing one said before trying to push someone else in a specific direction.
“And I am not trying to tell you what you need.”
“Uh-huh.”
“But have you considered that you may need to—what is that phrase Morgen taught me—blow off steam?”
“I blow off steam all the time.”