Chapter 18
It took four days for Amelia Drahl to locate Tristen’s mother.
Four days in which Tristen’s magic kept needing to be bled off.
Though it hadn’t regenerated as quickly as it had when they’d first crossed the boundary to Earth Between, he was still producing magic at a rapidly accelerated rate.
Morgen said his system should slowly acclimate to being in a magic-based world again and continue to slow until he reached a new baseline, but he would likely always generate magic more quickly than ordinary Shamans.
The same way Seth had regenerated illusion magic more quickly than other Illusionists.
She wondered if her own magical regeneration was faster than was ordinary.
She didn’t have a frame of reference for herself.
She didn’t generate portal magic or death magic, only channeled them, and she only knew two other Hidden, so she didn’t know whether her magic generation on that front was normal.
Her mother would never answer the question if asked, and Serenity didn’t have any more of a frame of reference for it than Nyx did.
She thought about it, though, as she watched the way Tristen’s abilities reacted to the change of planet.
The day after he had gone temporarily catatonic, he’d spent an hour with Nyx draining off magic through A-Queltr.
It had taken enough of the edge off for him to make it to the next day, but Nyx quickly saw he’d been right when he’d said it wouldn’t have helped the first day.
Draining into A-Queltr had done nothing for his jittery, near-manic energy, like he was in withdrawal and there was nothing to help with it save the drug itself.
He might be able to use Shamanic magic to kill—what he was essentially doing when he bled it off through A-Queltr—but it wasn’t what his magic wanted to do. It wasn’t what he needed.
It was good he’d been able to refrain from healing the second day, because after thirty people with severe burn injuries from a building fire had gone home with miraculously perfect skin, and six elderly people who had needed assisted living suddenly no longer did, the locals had started asking a lot of questions.
They didn’t know the mysterious healer was tied to the Drahl household—Maruca had hidden her own identity when she’d taken Tristen to the wards—but Amelia seemed to be the person everyone in town came to for information.
After the first half a dozen callers, Amelia announced that they were going out.
By “they” she meant, Morgen, Evra, and Maruca.
Though it was clear Evra wanted Nyx to go with them, it was also clear that it wouldn’t be a good idea.
Morgen and his girlfriend coming home to visit and going out with his mother and his sister to meet his friends made perfect sense.
Evra’s best friend tagging along on the visit to be introduced to his family made less sense and would only lead to suspicion.
Kaden couldn’t go because he couldn’t be seen in public.
As much as much as Amelia, Morgen, and Maruca were entrenched in the community here, no one was willing to trust that the entire city would keep quiet if they knew Kaden was on the planet.
Morgen might be well-liked enough that everyone would lie and claim he’d never left Raveras if questions were asked, but Kaden wasn’t.
If they knew he was here, it would only be a matter of time before someone turned him in.
Tristen also couldn’t go out, both for the same reasons Nyx shouldn’t, and because in his current condition, all it would take was someone with a headache and he’d lose what tenuous control he had over his magic and fix it.
By the third day, he was bouncing off the walls, and Nyx had to Hide him and Morgen and line-of-sight portal them to the nearest neighboring city so he could clear out what amounted to the local ICU.
It took two hours and Nyx was afraid they would be caught during every minute of it, despite precautions.
All three of them had dressed in the hooded desert cloaks that came with masks that covered the nose and mouth to filter out desert sand and dust, so their faces at least wouldn’t be recognized.
Morgen had Sirened the hospital staff into not worrying over their presence.
He couldn’t stop anyone from remembering they had been there—and Nyx was not about to go rummaging around with her Hidden magic in the minds of people who had done nothing to deserve it—so they would be remembered, but there wouldn’t be much to identify them by.
She couldn’t believe how easy it had been for Morgen to slip them past everyone, until he had finally reminded her that this was not a top-secret facility or a Council base.
It was a rural hospital, and no one was expecting people to sneak in to anonymously cure all the patients.
She relaxed somewhat after that, but she didn’t breath easily until they were back at Amelia’s home.
It was a relief when, the next morning, Amelia received a reply to one of the inquiries she’d sent out.
One of her acquaintances knew of the woman—Belas Veld—that they were searching for.
He said she worked at the Lost Road Tavern in the Last Outpost, and she’d lost a son years ago.
He also couldn’t help but wonder if this sudden interest, by chance, had anything to do with the rumors flying around that an unknown Shaman had swept through two hospitals in the northern towns?
It made Nyx uneasy that he had put so much together off a single inquiry, but her brain latched on to two things in the letter.
One, that everyone must have known Belas Veld’s son was a Shaman before Tristen was taken, and two, that Amelia’s acquaintance referred to Belas’s son as being “lost”.
It could mean nothing. She supposed if you’d sold your son to child traffickers, you probably wouldn’t advertise the fact.
You might claim he’d been kidnapped. But Nyx thought it would have been far easier to simply pretend he’d gone to the Council.
Tristen wanted to leave the second the news came through, which led to an immediate argument amongst everyone over who would be going.
Nyx feared the argument would take all day, even though the answer was obvious: Evra, Morgen, and Maruca couldn’t go because Morgen and Evra were ostensibly here to introduce Evra to his family, and he didn’t have any extended family elsewhere that he could pretend to be visiting.
Not to mention, if he left for a few days and Shamanic healings cropped up in another town, it would be patently obvious he was connected to them.
Despite Kaden’s infamy, taking him was a possibility Nyx seriously considered.
The desert cloaks would obscure his face enough to keep him from easy recognition, and they wouldn’t be the oddity in the Last Outpost that they were here, since the southern part of the continent was true desert.
And, if worse came to worst, Nyx could Hide him.
He’d offered to go along, which didn’t surprise her since he had to be tired of being cooped up in the house, but both Amelia and Tristen immediately put an end to the idea.
Tristen, by saying, “I said Nyx could come with me to find her. I didn’t say anyone else could.
” Kaden probably would have argued with that, but Amelia, who clearly didn’t like the idea of her wanted-fugitive son gallivanting across the planet, quietly said, “You promised to help me with the gardens the last time you were here.” Nyx had not seen evidence that Amelia had any gardens, but Kaden hadn’t argued after that.
No one liked it. The Last Outpost didn’t have the best reputation or, as Morgen put it, “Don’t turn your back on anything you own or it’ll be gone before you can blink.” Then, he’d fixed Tristen with a look and said, bluntly, “They’re going to think you’re an easy target.”
Tristen had replied, “People have thought that before.” To which Morgen had said that Tristen’s typical method of not being an easy target wouldn’t go unnoticed.
They might have kept debating, in cloaked language, the merits and pitfalls of Tristen killing people with Shamanic magic, had Nyx not reminded them that no one was going to see her or Tristen until she wanted them to, so they had plenty of time to get used to the city and figure things out before they were in any real danger.
Besides, they knew where to find Tristen’s mother, so it wasn’t as if they would have to spend days searching for her.
The entire affair was a simple matter of line-of-sight portaling them to the Last Outpost, talking to his mother, then portaling them back to the anchor in Amelia’s receiving room.
They wouldn’t even need to stay the night.
Nyx was sick of portaling by the time they made it to their destination.
It was just over seventy-five miles away, and while it was mostly flat with good visibility, it still took twenty-eight portals to get them there.
She hadn’t portaled that repetitively since Jevryn had first taught her the line-of-sight ability on Amentia Furor, and despite the unlimited supply of portal magic from Alihana, she was tired by the time they arrived.
Perhaps especially because Alihana had kept up a stream of berating commentary during the journey about how foolish Nyx was being in choosing to take Tristen on this quest.
She’d finally paused midway through the journey to mentally yell at Alihana that unless they wanted to have a conversation with Tristen and convince him he didn’t need to see his mother, they could shut up.
They’d shut up, but then they’d added a slight resistance against her ability to pull portal magic from them, and the journey had become twice as difficult.