Chapter 12 #3
She sighed and gave him the briefest version she could come up with.
She hadn’t been looking at her watch, so she wasn’t sure how many of her fifteen minutes were gone, but she was guessing most of them.
It would be better if she could get an answer from him before the others came up.
She had a feeling he would only get more guarded once they were here.
“Souls,” Tristen said when she was finished. “Of planets. Stitched to other planets and tied to Avatars.”
“I know it sounds impossible, but—”
“Oh no, we are quite a few steps past impossible. Even granting you the existence of planetary souls—which I will do because I know that some souls do exist—I don’t think they just linger after death.
Shamanic souls go to the Congregation. It makes sense that other souls would go somewhere too.
They wouldn’t just sit around waiting to be Frankensteined onto something else. ”
“And they didn’t. I gave you the condensed version. There’s a lot more to it, and a lot of it I’m not willing to tell you unless I know you’re in.”
She could tell, by the look on his face, that she was losing him.
“Look,” he said, in the kind of pacifying voice you’d use when someone had asked you on a date and you liked them but you weren’t into them like that. “Talking with you has been…illuminating, but this is?” He shook his head. “I don’t know what this is.”
What could she say to convince him? Would talking to Alihana do it? She brushed her fingers lightly against the hilt.
No, they said immediately.
Why the fuck not? You want them to agree to this too.
As I have said before, I am not entirely unhappy with my current state. I am accompanying you in the interests of my kin. And no Shaman will be touching me again until I have complete faith in what they will be doing with me. This one does not yet inspire trust.
Great. She was on her own, and she didn’t know what else to say.
If she could convince him to just come to the Station, he could feel with his own magic the truth of what she was telling him.
But he wasn’t going to go with them until he was convinced, and it wasn’t like he could reach the Station from here.
Even if she could open a portal in Dead Earth that could reach the borders of the Station—and she didn’t know if she could, given how difficult holding on to the magic in Dead Earth had been so far—he would have to walk through it to test what she’d said, because she couldn’t open the portal into the Station. There wouldn’t be a direct link and—
Oh. A direct link. Of course. “If a life was intertwined with another, could you feel it across a distance?”
He frowned. “What do you mean intertwined?”
“I mean, to use your terminology, Frankensteined together the way the original Shaman did the Stations and Avatars. If I could give you someone here whose life is tied to Earth’s Station and its Avatar, could you feel that with your magic?”
“I should be able to,” he said cautiously. “Where is this person?”
“Standing right in front of you.” The chaos thorns in her cheek were always Hidden—not because they bothered her, but because if anyone ever recognized them for what they were, it wouldn’t be good for her. She dropped that Hiding now.
Tristen swore and took two steps back. That was the moment she realized that, despite being quite magical himself, Tristen wasn’t really comfortable with magic.
At least, not other people’s. He likely hadn’t seen anyone else use it since he’d been a child, and she was guessing the misdirection spell had been something his deceased captor had purchased off the same people he’d bought Tristen from.
“It’s the same magic I used to keep us from sight before,” she explained.
He swallowed, his gaze fixated on the thorns that had appeared on her skin, and not looking calmed by the explanation. “I didn’t feel them.”
Oh, so that was the problem. It didn’t bother him that he hadn’t seen them, it bothered him that he’d touched her face and hadn’t felt them.
“I didn’t think”—he paused, clearly searching his memory for something—“Illusionists could do that?”
She flinched. “I’m not an Illusionist.”
“Sorry, is that considered a derogatory term for it?”
She shook her head. “No, I’m just not one.” She closed her eyes briefly. She had to be able to talk about him at some point. “Seth was.”
“I didn’t mean—”
She waved him off. “You couldn’t have known. Anyway, my abilities do extend to touch.”
“And those abilities are…?”
“Need to know.” She couldn’t get around the fact that to help them Tristen was going to know a great many things about her and her friends that it was dangerous to have him know.
But that didn’t mean she had to tell him she was one of three remaining members of a race that had been hunted to near-extinction.
He looked like he was going to argue with her, but ultimately didn’t. “Okay. So what are those?” He pointed to the thorns.
“I’m honestly not sure. I got them by accident, and they’re now tied into my life.
If I remove one, it pulls some of that out.
I pulled two of them out. One is now in the Station in Earth Between, the other in its Avatar.
That’s something you can follow, right? My life here connected to what’s in the thorns in the Station? ”
“I…don’t know. I can try.” He stepped forward, touching his fingertips to the swirl of thorns.
His magic brushed over her. She’d expected it to feel like Tobi’s.
When the young Shaman had searched her mind for a way to heal it from the effects of breaking Elena’s Hiding, his magic had been a cool, calming presence.
Like soft mist in the summer. Tristen’s magic was a violent thing, storm-tossed waves that crashed against her.
But as wild as his magic felt, it didn’t hurt. Another wave crashed over her and his hand gripped her jaw, as if he was trying to hold something about the magic still by holding her face immobile.
Footsteps sounded outside the door. “Nyx?!”
“I’m fine, Evra.” She held her hand out in a gesture to halt. She could only just see the , Morgen and Kaden behind her, out of the corner of her eye.
Tristen didn’t seem to have noticed the others’ approach at all.
His eyes were closed, his magic relentless, like the tide lapping at the shore.
It poured around the thorns, in between them, drowned them.
And then something struck, like a spark catching flame, and she knew the moment his magic recognized the bits of her trapped in the chaos thorns and followed them.
She couldn’t see the Station or Griff, but she felt them, felt the tie that bound them all together.
Felt Tristen tug on it and the Station and Griff pause in response, as if they’d felt it too.
His magic stayed a while longer, mapping the contours of the thorns, before it finally withdrew. His eyes flicked open. “What on Earth possessed you to do that?”
“They were going to die. And it would have been my fault.”
He looked at her incredulously. “Do you know what these are?” He tapped his index finger against one of the thorns, but didn’t wait for her to answer. “They’re the messy end ties of the last Shaman’s job.”
“They—what?”
“What is going on?” Evra demanded.
Tristen’s hand finally dropped from Nyx’s face, only for him to point it at her.
“She’s crazy is what’s going on.” He finally looked over at the others, Morgen’s and Evra’s eyes widening as they saw his face full-on.
Looking annoyed, he said, “Yeah, I know, I look like the dead guy.” He shook his head.
“Jesus Christ, there are too many people in my house.” He started walking, Morgen and Evra stepping out of the doorway to let him stalk past. He pulled his phone from his pocket, looked at the screen and started muttering again.
“It’s two o’clock in the fucking morning, who wants coffee? ”
When Nyx would have followed, Evra held her back. “Are you okay?”
Nyx didn’t misunderstand what she was asking. She nodded. “I’m all right. It sucker-punched me at first, but…they’re very different people. It’s only when Tristen stops talking and I catch him out of the corner of my eye that I forget and think of Seth.”
Evra looked like she wanted to say more, but Nyx nodded her head in the direction Tristen and the others had gone. “Come on. He’s touchy, prone to rash decisions of a life-ending nature, and you guys pissed him off by showing up. We shouldn’t leave him alone with them.”
Evra sighed. As she walked with Nyx to the kitchen, her nose wrinkled. “Why do you smell like ashes?”
Nyx declined to answer.