Chapter 19 #2
She heard the sound of running footsteps and then Kaden barreled out of the portal.
She didn’t waste any time on greetings. “Someone’s watching us.
At least one person, maybe more. We can’t afford to let them get away and I can’t leave Tristen.
” If someone left this alley with what they’d seen, every opportunistic person without scruples in this town—which was apparently most of them—would be looking for Tristen.
“Alihana’s over there.” Nyx nodded to where the sword lay ten feet away.
Kaden scooped it up, but rather than keep it, he tossed it to her.
Magic pulsed out from him. His gaze shot up and he leapt at the wall, finding hand and toe-holds she hadn’t known were there.
He scaled it swiftly and disappeared over the lip of the roof.
Nyx’s hand clenched on Alihana’s hilt. As much of a jerk as the sword could be, she was grateful to have them back. She tried a Hiding again and this time it took, magic weaving around them with Kaden as its only exception.
Tristen finally sucked in a normal breath and Nyx eased the pressure on the cloak she had pressed to his neck.
He took another normal breath and she pulled it away to find his skin scarred but healed, the gash closed over.
She heard a series of pops as something shifted in his chest, and a sound like a whine left his throat.
It passed and he rasped out, “Leg.”
“What?”
“It’s broken.” His voice had lost the rasp.
She glanced back. His right leg was bent at an impossible angle.
“I can’t keep it from healing much longer.” His voice was fully normal now, if strained, and the scarring on his throat was fading. “You have to straighten it before it does or it’ll have to be broken again.”
She moved to crouch by his right foot. Constance slid down her arm and morphed into a knife Nyx used to cut Tristen’s pants leg open. She pulled the fabric away, exposing his leg, and nearly vomited. His shin bone jutted out of his skin.
She clocked movement in her peripheral and looked up, relaxing when she saw it was only Kaden returning, scaling down the wall.
She looked back at Tristen’s leg. “I don’t know how to do this.”
“Just pull it straight. It doesn’t need to be a perfect set like an Earth doctor would need. But I need you to do it in the next thirty seconds.”
Constance melted back into a bracer and Nyx reached for his ankle, unsure where to hold or grab, her gorge rising again. “I really don’t think I can—”
Kaden appeared beside her. “Hold his shoulders down.”
Relieved, Nyx abdicated her position by the broken leg and grabbed Tristen’s shoulders, pinning him. Kaden put one hand on Tristen’s thigh, grasped his ankle with the other, and jerked his leg back into place in one quick, fluid movement.
Tristen screamed. He bucked beneath her hands, his head lifting up, but she held his torso firmly down.
She felt him slip the leash on his magic, a wave of it punching through him.
Something snapped and crunched. Blood poured from his leg, as if being flushed from the inside out, bits of bone debris and dirt pushed out, and then his skin was knitting back together, growing and fusing until it was a seamless whole.
Tristen’s head thunked back onto the ground. His breath came in labored, audible pulls.
“Are you good?” Kaden asked.
After a brief hesitation, Tristen nodded.
He rolled to a sitting position and then pulled his intact pant leg up to his knee and fussed with his prosthetic, which presumably wasn’t intended to stand up to the stress it had just taken.
After a minute he made a face and pulled it off, then rose, standing on his right foot.
Nyx opened a portal to their room at the inn.
They’d been walking home each night mostly because Tristen didn’t like portals and didn’t want to use them if he didn’t have to, and because walking was another thing that took up time before they ended up back in their room crowded together with their frustration.
Right now, Tristen went through the portal without complaint, waving Nyx off when she tried to help him. He hopped the five steps through the portal to his bed, dragged his bag from beneath it, and began rummaging through the contents.
Nyx and Kaden followed him into the room, the portal closing behind them.
“Do you want me to mention this to anyone?” Kaden asked Nyx.
“Everyone’s out again?” She’d sort of expected someone would have been around to hear her yell for Kaden.
He gave her a dry smile. “Morgen is social. Like our mother.”
“How is Evra handling that?”
Kaden shrugged. “Not my problem.”
Fair response, given how the two of them weren’t getting along at the moment. She sighed. “Don’t mention anything happened. I’ll tell them when we get back.”
“Any idea when that will be?”
She glanced at Tristen, who had pulled the prosthetic he’d worn in Dead Earth out of his bag and was fitting it on. He’d no doubt heard Kaden’s question, but he chose to ignore it.
“No,” Nyx said. “Thanks for coming.” She realized that in the chaos of everything happening, she hadn’t even asked what Kaden had done. “Did you find who was up there?”
He nodded. “Two people. They won’t be a problem.”
Translation: they were dead. Just like the two people she had killed, and the one Tristen had.
“You okay?” Kaden asked.
She started to say she was fine, but she wasn’t. “Five people are dead for no reason. That woman? Tristen healed her, and she turned around and tried to kill me, presumably so she could take him. And now she’s dead, and so are the people she called.”
“That isn’t no reason,” Kaden said softly. “They’re dead because of what they tried to do.”
She knew that, but: “I just don’t understand why.
” It was such a pointless waste of life that had never needed to happen.
“What makes a person wake up one day and decide they want to make their living hurting other people? What makes so many people not care how much damage they cause as long as it benefits them?”
“I don’t know. I wish I did.”
There wasn’t much more to say, so she blew out a breath and opened a portal back to Amelia’s. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to keep you here.”
He shrugged. “I wasn’t doing anything important.” He stepped back into Amelia’s and walked away. She let the portal close, because there was no point in keeping it open, even though she really wanted to walk through it and collapse in the guest bedroom at Amelia’s.
She made a couple attempts to talk to Tristen, but he shut each one down. She turned the lights off and tried to sleep, but between her own cycling thoughts and the way Tristen kept tossing and turning, she didn’t succeed.
“You awake?” she asked softly.
“Yeah.”
“You okay?” she asked, echoing the question Kaden had asked her earlier.
She didn’t think he was going to answer, but after several breaths of silence he said, “Not really.”
“Want company?” After a second of realizing how that probably sounded, she clarified, “Platonic company?”
“Yeah.”
She swung out of her bed and crossed the room to his. He was lying on his side, facing away from her. She got under the covers and lay on her side facing the opposite direction, pressing her back against his. Slowly, both of their breathing evened out.
“You wanna talk about it?” she asked.
She felt him shrug against her. Then: “It’s not like I haven’t almost died before.”
“As someone who’s been there a time or two myself, I don’t think it’s an experience that improves with repeated exposure,” she said drily.
He let out a short huff of laughter. “Yeah, guess not.”
She was finally getting drowsy when he spoke again.
“What you asked Kaden earlier? I don’t know why people are that way.
But I’ve seen enough of them to know you can’t change them.
Maybe some are born that way. Maybe some turn to it out of desperation.
I don’t know. But I know that once they start, they don’t go back.
Because to go back, they’d have to face that all the terrible things they’ve done really are that terrible.
And I don’t know how a person could admit that and still live with themself.
“I’ve killed people because they would have killed me or hurt me or used me.
I used to be conflicted about it. I’m not anymore.
I didn’t think I was conflicted about what I came here to do.
But then I saw her, and I remembered, and I can’t—I don’t want to believe she’s as terrible as all of the other people who have been in my life.
I don’t want to believe she’s just like the person I killed tonight.
“I know that being here is dangerous. I know it’s frustrating to you. I know that what happened tonight is my fault, and I am sorry. But I need to know who my mother is waiting for. I need to understand. Please.”
The irritation Nyx had been holding onto for days finally dissipated. She couldn’t blame him for any of that. “Then we’ll wait.”