Chapter 15
Fortunately, the endless supply of portal magic available to Nyx via Alihana, combined with her anchor outside the Station, meant Nyx could portal them home from Tristen’s penthouse and skip the unpleasantness of driving.
The second they arrived outside the Station’s boundary, an excited whinny split the air.
Hoofbeats thundered across the ground, and Griff must have decided it was safe to let Temerex greet them, because she galloped across the boundary, shrilling another ecstatic whinny.
It was only as the images flashed into Nyx’s mind that she realized the mistake Temerex had made.
“What the fuck is that?” Tristen asked.
At the sound of his unfamiliar voice, Temerex came to an abrupt halt, a flurry of confused images popping into Nyx’s head. Seth and Nyx, and Seth and Temerex, and Seth next to this person before her now, the two images merging together.
Nyx’s heart turned itself inside out with a painful squeeze. She tried to think of some mental image to convey to Temerex that this was a new person, but she didn’t know what that would be. “No, baby,” she said softly. “I’m sorry.”
Temerex let out a bare trace of a nicker and stretched her neck out, until her nose was in Tristen’s face, nostrils flaring wide as she took deep breaths, catching his scent.
“Uh, guys?” Tristen said nervously.
“She thinks you’re Seth,” Nyx managed. Temerex couldn’t communicate smells in an image, but the image of a dark gray sky she sent Nyx, combined with the way her head dropped away from Tristen with a deep sigh, made it clear what she’d learned.
The equine nose was as sensitive as a bloodhound’s. “She thought you were.”
Nyx hugged Temerex’s neck, burying her face carefully against the soft scales.
“I’m so sorry, girl,” she whispered. “I don’t know how else to tell you he’s gone.
” She had tried. She had worked through her own pain and shown Temerex her own memories of what had happened.
But something was lost in the translation, because Tem just kept asking for him.
If she’d been able to bring herself to tell the unicorn-dragon the truth before Jevryn had left the Station, her father could have made it clear.
His communication with Tem far surpassed Nyx’s own, since Tem had been designed tailored to his genetics.
But Nyx hadn’t been able to tell her before, and now she had no idea when Jevryn was coming back.
Tem’s head dropped heavily onto Nyx’s shoulder. Nyx should have asked Griff keep Tem away from Tristen until she could try to explain it, so it wouldn’t be a surprise. But she’d been so focused on what they needed to do in order to get to Raveras, that she hadn’t thought of it.
Shit. She hadn’t thought of it. Not just for Temerex, but for Griff, too. And Griff was likely heading their way now. She patted Temerex on the neck and stepped back. Everyone looked vaguely uncomfortable, and Tristen still looked weirded out by Tem.
“Hang on a second.” Nyx crossed the boundary, searching for Griff. She’d worried she would find him almost to them, but a quick check through Kaliaris’s senses showed he was seeing a small Arrival through. She breathed a sigh of relief and stepped back to the others.
She forced herself to smile, like Tem hadn’t just cracked her heart open again. “Tristen, this is Temerex, she’s a specialty breed.”
Tristen looked at Nyx like she’d lost most of the screws holding her brain in place. “She’s a scaled unicorn and—why is her tail on fire?”
Way to show off. Nyx sent Tem an image of her tail not on fire, and the flames died. “She’s a magical specialty breed, and she’s very sweet. Basically an overgrown puppy.”
“Her horn looks sharp enough to gore.”
“She doesn’t gore friends. Hold your hand out and make friends.”
He shook his head. “I have already lost two perfectly good fingers. If she bites off a third and a fourth, I can’t reattach them if they’re in her stomach.”
Nyx must have accidentally envisioned Tristen’s explanation and sent it to Tem, because the unicorn-dragon’s head went up and she gave an indignant snort. Nyx rubbed her neck and sent her soothing images. “Don’t listen to a word he says. I know you’re perfect.”
“She can understand you?” Tristen asked.
“Not exactly. But sometimes kind of.” She was not explaining telepathic image communication since she had no idea how it worked.
Having soothed Temerex, Nyx got back to the business at hand.
“I don’t mean to be rude,” she said to Tristen, “but would you be terribly offended if I hid you in a Station room until I can tell Griff to expect your appearance? He was also close with Seth.” It hurt a little less, every time she said his name.
Saying it—like it was normal, like it was okay to remember him—felt better than avoiding it.
Tristen shook his head. “I’ve felt how you’re bonded to that thing, so I know exactly what you can do in there. It’s not that I don’t trust you, but it would be pretty dumb of me to trust you that much. I’m not going into the Station until I’ve found my mother.”
“Okay, do you want to go into Earth Between?” She could always grab a bottle illusion and send Morgen with him.
He shook his head again.
“Do you want to stand right here until I come back?”
“Yes.”
Okay, then. “I might be a while.” She needed to talk to Griff and Kaliaris.
“We’ll keep him company,” Morgen offered, indicating himself and Kaden. He flashed a wide smile at Evra. “Good luck, babe.”
Evra glowered at him. “I am going to murder you.” She had been threatening this ever since they’d determined that Evra was going to need to travel to Raveras first, alone.
Which meant her meeting Morgen’s mother first. Alone.
The had explained to Nyx only yesterday that she’d never had a significant other’s mother fail to dislike her, and her jaw was now set in a line of grim determination.
“Though I of course understand the loving sentiment underlying your seemingly hostile words, Mother won’t, so maybe don’t mention that to her.”
“Murder you,” she repeated, before stalking across the Station boundary.
“I love you too!” Morgen called after her.
Tristen shook his head. “You two have an odd relationship.”
Morgen grinned. “I know. I’m going to marry her.”
“She agreed to that?” Tristen asked skeptically.
“Oh, stars no, but I do ask frequently. Some day she’ll say yes just to be contrary.”
“Nyx, are you coming?” Evra yelled.
“Yep!” Nyx called back. To the others, she said, “No one disappear while I’m gone.
” She broke into a jog and ran after Evra.
Kaliaris’s senses washed over her, a kaleidoscope of sensations that all felt like one thing: coming home.
A wave of sorrow washed over her, sharp and poignant.
She was going to lose this. This place that had become her haven, her home, was going to be gone.
Her connection to Kaliaris, the certainty of them and Griff always being here.
Griff would remain, but Kaliaris would be gone. Once they were separated from her, once they were reabsorbed by the Harvester, she would never again be able to talk to them. It was yet another thing that hadn’t felt real until she’d found Tristen. Until she’d left him standing outside her Station.
She shoved the sense of pending loss down deep and entered the Station building, catching up to Evra as Griff rounded the corner ahead. Having just taken an Arrival, he was wearing a bottle illusion and looked like Nyx.
Evra stopped short on seeing him and shook her head.
“That never fails to deeply disturb me.” She focused on him intently, and the lines of his body wavered.
He typically only took a small dose to last an hour or so, and when Nyx joined Evra in trying to see through the illusion, they hastened the magical use rate until it shattered, leaving Griff standing as himself.
Nyx hugged him. “I missed you.”
His wings folded around her. “I missed you too.”
She released him. “The others are outside,” she said at his questioning look. “I’ll explain in a minute, but we have a lot to talk about, so maybe we could see Evra off first?”
“Of course. The passage is already booked, and I took the liberty of pre-filling out the Departure paperwork.”
“Thanks,” Nyx said. As they walked to the portal room, Nyx searched the Station with Kaliaris’s senses, then pulled an item out of storage—nothing special, just a glass figurine of a chimera, small enough to fit in Evra’s pocket—and worked a Hiding over it.
She didn’t need it to be Hidden from any one person specifically, she only needed her magic to be attached to it so it would become an anchor for her portal magic.
The two easiest Hidings to make were either blanket Hidings—ones that Hid an object from everyone—or single person Hidings, which Hid an object from a specific person only.
In between those were Hidings with various numbers of exceptions worked in, which gained complexity depending on the number of exceptions required.
Normally she made her anchors from blanket hidings, but normally she put them places no one was likely to run into them and cause a drain to her magic when it had to work triple-time to convince a person they weren’t seeing or feeling what they were.
In this case, the anchor was going to need to be in a specific room, and she needed the person that room belonged to to know what it looked like and not throw it out.
For that reason, she went with a single person Hiding, and she chose someone from Earth Between at random—the baker from Cain’s Confections—to Hide it from, because the unlikelihood of them ever coming into contact with the object meant it cost her almost no magical resources to create and maintain.
Finished, she handed the figurine to Evra, who dutifully tucked it into her pocket. “I still cannot believe it has come to this,” the said, with the kind of gravitas one usually reserved for profound but unpleasant realizations about the nature of existence.