Chapter 10 #3
“I can’t. You’re the only one who can do what I need.”
“And why would that be?” His voice was low and dangerous, and she knew he’d already guessed what her answer would be.
“Because you’re the only Shaman who has survived separation from the Congregation.”
His expression went flat. “I’m not killing anyone for you. And I don’t know why you’d need me to. You reek of death. What are you?”
“A person,” she said caustically. “And I don’t want you to kill anyone. I want you to help someone. A lot of someones, actually.”
“I have a hard time believing someone who feels like death simply wants me to help people.”
“Stop trying to kill me, and I’ll stop feeling like this.” The offer was impulsive and far from a smart decision, but she had to gain his trust somehow, and she didn’t know how else to do it.
The expression in his eyes, and the slight laxness of his grip on her wrist, said he was considering it.
More, she thought, out of curiosity than anything else.
He couldn’t have met many—possibly any—people with a significant amount of magic since coming here.
She’d been counting on that—on his seeing her as a bridge to the world he’d been taken from.
“Okay,” he said.
She hesitated. The kind of death an A-Morridahn could swallow without issue was the kind that came directly from A-Queltr, from another Salyrian.
If she ascended from A-Queltr and he tried to kill her again, he would succeed.
Her fear must have shown on her face, because a sardonic smile spread across his.
“What’s the matter? Don’t trust me?”
“Not even a little.” She centered herself on the ledge in A-Queltr.
Before she stepped off it, she added, “My best friend is terrifying and she has a Hound with your scent at her disposal. Kill me, and they will track you down and return the favor.” If he didn’t kill her and Evra ever found out about this, she’d throttle Nyx to within an inch of her life for being so reckless.
But life was about taking risks, wasn’t it?
She stepped off the ledge and started walking.
The ascent from A-Queltr had never felt more like stripping herself bare.
Tristen’s power washed over her with each step, no longer hostile, but still raw and wild somehow, like it—or he—was never at peace.
It tasted her with each pass, and she wondered if he had any idea how invasive and intimate it felt.
Like he was seeing her down to her bones.
That was what Shamanic magic did—she knew that—but her own past experiences with it had never felt like this.
There was something about the Congregation in Tobi that had kept his magic from ever feeling so…
personal. As if what he learned about her swept through him and into the Congregation without leaving much behind.
Tristen didn’t have that. Everything his magic took from her went into him, with no outlet.
She understood, suddenly, why Maruca had been willing to die rather than let a Shaman touch her.
She was a woman who kept herself behind impenetrable walls, and she would die within them before she let someone breach them.
Nyx took the last step out of A-Queltr. The door closed behind her. She masked the feeling of vulnerability by asking, “Do I feel all better now?”
He frowned, either missing or ignoring her sarcasm. “No. It’s off the surface, but you have death in your core.” He sounded repulsed.
“I can’t help the way I was born any more than you can, so maybe don’t be a dick.”
He gave a short bark of laughter.
“What?” she snapped.
“You need my help and you know what I’m capable of, and that’s how you’re going to talk to me?” He finally let go of her wrist.
“Was I supposed to fall at your feet in awe and flatter you?”
“Most people do.” It came out with more than a hint of bitterness, and she remembered Mary Turner saying that Tristen’s people viewed him as a saint.
Unless he was a narcissist, that couldn’t be a pleasant reaction.
If people were fanatically devoted to someone, it meant they never actually saw that person.
Nyx crossed her arms. “Then you don’t need one more sycophant.”
“No, I really don’t.” He shook his head. The little mirth that had come into his face died.“Who told you where to find me?”
She knew, by the way he asked the question, that he already knew the answer. “The Congregation.”
A flurry of emotions passed through his eyes, but the one that lingered was a combination of grief and rage. “Why?”
“I needed a solution to a problem, and they gave me you. Gave me what they knew, because they hoped I could find you.”
“Why?” he asked again. His voice was hoarse, and thick with either longing or regret, or some mixture of both.
“Because they miss you. And because there might be a way for you to rejoin them. If you want.”
Suspicion edged out all his other emotions. “Let me guess—that way is helping you? I do what you want and all of my sins are forgiven? I’m welcomed back into the fold with open arms?”
She winced. “I know how it sounds.”
“I don’t think you do. They cast me out, expecting me to die. And if they wanted me back, they could have come for me before now.”
There was something in his voice of the lost child he must have been at the moment of his exile, and it tore at something in her.
She thought of Tobi, so young and trusting despite all he’d been through, with a Shaman’s instinct to help, to heal, and pictured him in Tristen’s place.
At least for all Tobi had endured, he had never truly been alone.
He had always had the Congregation, and then Kaden, and now Ankira and Diana.
He had been taken, but he had also been saved.
Tristen had had no recourse but to save himself, and it had cost him the only link he’d had to those who understood him.
“They never came for you,” Nyx said softly, “because who would they send?
No Shaman could make the journey unnoticed, and if you were found, what then?
The Congregation may link you all, but they do not control you.
What if the Shaman they sent talked? How long do you think you would live, if someone outside your ranks knew a Shaman had killed with his power and survived?
That he could do it again, without repercussions?
“You’re alive because they didn’t try to find you.
Because no one knew that you still existed.
And they told me because they understand that I need you, and that because of that need there is no force that could coerce me into telling anyone else about you.
And because I have the resources and the connections to keep you safe.
“I can’t force you to help me, and I wouldn’t even if I could, because that’s not who I am. But I desperately need that help. So I am begging you to please just listen to why before you tell me no.”
He stared at her. For someone who had told her it was rude, he seemed to be doing it to her an awful lot. “You think you know who I am. But you don’t. You have no idea who you’re asking for help.”
He cracked for a moment and she saw through him, to all of his insecurities. To someone who had spent most of his life on a planet where no one could ever truly know him.
“You’ve tried to kill me three times since we met,” she pointed out.
“And I know what it takes to get exiled from the Congregation. I know exactly who I’m asking for help.
” Uncertainty flickered across his face and she stepped closer, her voice soft.
“But if you think I don’t, tell me. I’m a good listener.
” Because she thought that was what he wanted.
What he needed. To finally tell someone everything he’d done, and have them not run away or think he was crazy.
He opened his mouth, closed it and shook his head. Her hopes crashed. She’d read him wrong, had taken the wrong approach, and now he was going to walk away.
But then he said, “Not here.”
“Where?”
“My place.” Wariness crept back into his face. “Leave your phone, your weapons, and your friends here. If they follow us, I won’t help you.”
“The weapons stay with me. If I wanted to kill you, I would have tried it by now. The dagger has sentimental value, and the sword is an asshole who refuses to be left behind despite not actually enjoying my company.”
He held up his hands. “Honestly, I don’t even want to know. Fine, keep the weapons.” He held out his hand. “Phone.”
“I need to call my friends, if you don’t want them to follow us.”
He shook his head. “You can send one text. And only if I can read it.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes, seriously. If you were me, you’d be paranoid too.”
“So I’m allowed to send a text with supervision, and if they follow us, I’m fucked?”
“Pretty much.”
“Okay, but the problem with that is they’re going to follow us. One of my friends is a Hound, he will find us.”
Tristen appeared unsympathetic to her predicament. “Then I guess you’d better hope they’re good enough friends to stay put when you ask them to.”
A frustrated growl rose in her throat. She shoved it down and pulled out her cell.
“Where I can see,” he demanded.
“Oh for stars’ sake.”
He snorted. “Haven’t heard that one in a while.”
Yes, well, the stars were much nicer to curse by than most Earth things, and it let her reserve “For fuck’s sake” for special occasions. She stood next to him, holding her phone where he could see the screen, and started typing a text to Evra.
Going to talk with Tristen. As she typed his name, she realized he probably hadn’t gone by that for quite some time.
“Do you have a different name you go by here? Should I call you something else?” Clay Gales would be his name here, but she didn’t want to give away the fact that she’d read the public version of his life’s story in a newspaper.