Chapter 11 #4
“And then in a blink they were gone. There was no goodbye, no chance of them coming back. I couldn’t chase after them and beg them to change their mind. I was just alone and half of me was gone and it fucking hurt.” He met her gaze. “Do you have any idea what that’s like?”
Nyx’s chest constricted. “Yes,” she said hoarsely. “I know exactly what that’s like.”
He must have caught the strain in her voice because understanding lit his eyes. “You lost someone.”
“Yes.”
“Is that what your uncle took from you?”
She didn’t want to answer him—it still felt too personal, too raw, like Seth was something too hers to share—but she made herself respond. “Yes.”
“Who?”
Her throat constricted. She never said his name anymore, and no one else did either.
At the Station, that had felt like a kindness.
An unspoken rule they all observed not to invoke his memory, to remind them all of what they had lost. Now…
now it felt wrong, that they’d refused for so long to reference him aloud.
“His name was Seth. Seth Connor Hawthorne.”
“Boyfriend?” he asked.
She nodded. And because she wanted him to understand—felt like she owed it to him to understand—that her horror when she’d first seen him had had nothing to do with his physical condition, she pulled her necklace chain from beneath her shirt.
The Harvester and Jevryn’s ring were Hidden, but the third item on the chain was not—an archive stone she’d added to it after returning to the Station.
It only contained only one thing: a picture that she couldn’t actually bring herself to look at anymore.
She pulled that picture up now showing it to Tristen. “And this is what he looked like.
Tristen stopped with his latte halfway to his mouth. “Shit.” He set the mug back down, staring at the photo. “Then when we met, that’s why you…?”
“Yeah.” She tucked the archive stone back behind her shirt and took a fortifying drink of her breve.
“Turns out you’re a dead ringer for my dead boyfriend.
” He looked like he had no idea what to say, which she understood, because there wasn’t really much to say to that. “Anyway, you were telling me a story.”
He’d told her how much losing the Congregation had hurt. He hadn’t told her how he’d survived.
“Right.” He took a long drink of his own breve.
When he didn’t grimace, she found it comforting.
Seth had never liked breves, and the difference between them helped.
“So the Congregation cut me off, and I knew what was supposed to happen. I was supposed to be so distraught I’d kill myself, or otherwise fade away.
Maybe it was being here, or maybe it was something else, I don’t know, but I didn’t do either.
And when I didn’t, I got pissed off. That they could just throw me away like that, like I meant nothing.
“I know they didn’t have a choice. In theory, I know that.
But they knew everything I went through.
They were horrified for me while it was happening.
They comforted me when I was in pain. They offered me solace.
But when I couldn’t take it anymore and I finally made it all stop?
They didn’t even try to keep me. They just threw me out. ”
She reached across the counter and briefly squeezed his wrist. “I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “Anyway, when I didn’t die, I didn’t know what to do.
” He hesitated, looking at where she’d squeezed his wrist before looking at her.
“I was twelve. I’d been here for three years, and while I hadn’t learned too much about this world, I knew the police would show up eventually, and that I probably didn’t want to be there when they did.
“I took as much cash as I could find in the house and ran. Which is really hard to do, by the way, when you haven’t had a lot of time to grow accustomed to the prosthetic foot your abuser generously purchased for you before his death to prove he could be ‘reasonable’.
It also made me an easy mark. I got mugged two days later and lost everything I had, which was the last time I thought twice about defending myself in a permanent manner.
“Still, I learned pretty quick that if you want to survive on the streets at that age, you have to be turning some kind of trick. So I decided to turn the magic kind. Didn’t make hardly anything at first, because no one believes a twelve-year-old street kid who says he can cure your arthritis or make your migraines go away.
“Eventually I fell in with this woman—Ellie—who ran cons on people selling miracle cures. She realized it was a whole lot easier to con them if you had the real deal. She started finding me clients and letting me sleep on her couch in return for a ‘small cut’ of what people paid. I knew she was pocketing most of it, but I didn’t know what else to do.
“Anyway, she said I was going after the wrong crowd by trying to help people with actual problems. Had me cure some rich kid’s hangover, and suddenly I was doing that for a hundred bucks a pop.
“If I’d been less unstable, I might have realized it was a bad idea. But I wasn’t used to not having the Congregation when I healed.” He paused for a minute. “You grew up here. How much do you know about Shamans and the Congregation?”
She frowned. “Not much, I guess. Just that they’re a kind of guide?”
“They keep us sane. To heal a person, you have to know them. More than you want to. It can make a Shaman confused about who they are. The Congregation takes our sense of the people we heal from us so we don’t have to keep it.
“Without that—and with Ellie pushing me to heal more and more people—I was having trouble keeping a grip on who I was.” He shook his head.
“I’m still not sure how much of me is me.
Anyway, I was fixing spoiled rich kids until one day Ellie tells me I have a very special client.
The next thing I know I’m in the backseat of Gales’ towncar, and I recognize him.
I’d seen him before, with Caruthers. He knew exactly what I was.
“He gave me this big speech about how terrible it was what Caruthers did to me, and he didn’t blame me for doing what I’d had to, and how he could make it all go away.
I didn’t really read the news back then, so I didn’t know he’d been looking for me since the moment I disappeared.
Or that Ellie turned me over for a reward she never got.
I found her obituary later—she died the same day I met Gales.
“Anyway, he knew what I could do and he wanted it, so he fed the cops and the media some sob story about me being this child-trafficked abuse victim.” He paused, and let out a little huh.
“Guess he wasn’t really lying about that.
He had all this ‘evidence’ of my mistreatment ready to go, told the cops he’d been building a case to try and help me.
He probably even had been. Stealing me from Caruthers would have been hard, and even if he’d managed it, Caruthers would have tried to get me back.
But paying off the right cops and people in child services to yank me away from him at the same time the trafficking story hits the papers and public sympathy is behind him? That probably would have worked.
“Me killing Caruthers worked out even better for Gales, because Caruthers wasn’t around to retaliate.
At that point, since the autopsies didn’t turn up anything in their systems to indicate the heart attacks Caruthers and his people had died from were anything other than natural, it got classified as some weird unexplainable event.
Maybe it was something they ate that didn’t show up on a tox screen.
Maybe it was some kind of mass suicide, caused by guilt over what they’d all done to me.
“That was how Gales framed everything. Someone in Caruthers’ employ had been so overcome with guilt that he killed them all and committed suicide, and that when I saw my chance to be free, I took off.
And here Gales had been, tirelessly searching for me.
He’d uncovered my ‘true’ identity as a foster kid, and after learning I had no family all he wanted was to drag me up from the gutter and give me the kind of charmed life every kid dreams of having. ”
Tristen grinned a wolf’s grin. “Legally adopting me was the biggest mistake he ever made. He thought he was being clever. Gave me two options. Either I played along with the story he’d set up—-publicly grateful to be rescued, more grateful to be adopted, and privately doing whatever he told me to—or evidence might turn up that showed I had killed Caruthers.
“He thought the adoption was his insurance. Once I was publicly tied to him, if he turned up dead just like Caruthers, the suspicion would come down on me. If I tried to run away again, he’d have legal recourse to have me found and dragged back.
He never considered I might be smarter the second time around.
“I let him think he had me. For six years I did everything that disgusting son of a bitch wanted. And since he’d figured out by then that what the people who’d sold me to Caruthers had told him about me not being able to hurt people wasn’t strictly true? I hurt a lot of people.”
Shadows darkened his eyes, and he blinked them away.
“He got what he wanted while I was a minor. But after I turned eighteen? Suddenly dear old Howard Gales the Second fell into a coma. He never considered that I could grow a decades’ worth of disease in a couple of hours.
When I made him sick enough that I could force him to the hospital, they figured he was just another one of those people who feels a pain and thinks they’re just getting older, or avoids the doctor because they don’t want to face the truth of what’s happening to them.
“And there I was, his legally adopted son and only heir. He’s got some distant relatives overseas, but since he isn’t actually dead, they can’t come out of the woodwork to demand his money, and I have charge of his entire estate.”