Chapter 23 #2
Oh, right. The last time he'd seen her had likely been when she was busy passing out in this very room. “Terrible. I just discovered my fathers think they're funny.”
“My condolences.”
“Appreciated. So what happened after I sent you guys outside?” She wasn’t worried about anyone, because Griff wouldn’t have been cracking jokes if someone had been seriously injured.
“We fought,” Kaden said, in that succinct way he had that most people took for sarcasm of an asshole nature, but just meant he didn’t think it warranted further elaboration. “Then everyone bad died. Your doing?”
“In a roundabout way, I guess.” She ground the espresso to fill two portafilters, tamped the grounds in both, slid them into place, and started the shots pulling.
“Loclyn reached for them after I stabbed him.” She hesitated, not sure if she wanted the answer to the question on her mind.
“The rest of his Devoted. Did he kill them all?” Alihana had said he was tied to them.
Kaden was quiet for a moment, thinking. “How long did Loclyn live, after you stabbed him?”
“I don't know, exactly.” She dumped two of the shots into a mug and filled it with hot water, then poured milk into a pitcher and started it steaming. “A couple minutes, maybe? I wasn’t very lucid.”
“I can’t say for certain.”
“But you think they’re all dead,” she said flatly. She dumped the other two shots into a new mug and poured the steamed milk over them.
“Most likely.”
She’d suspected. There had been so much energy pulsing into Loclyn at the end. But she hadn’t had much experience with energy mages, so she hadn’t really known.
“Can Maruca…?” She didn’t finish the question. She and Maruca had a turbulent history, and she didn’t want him to think she was asking because she didn’t like her.
“One or two people? Possibly. It depends on the situation and the people. That many? No. They were called his Devoted for a reason. They don’t fight him when he pulls from them. Even unto death.”
Nyx chewed on that as she handed him the Americano she’d made and took her latte to the counter.
She was grateful he didn't tell her it wasn't her fault.
There was a time, she was certain, when he would have.
A time he would have thought she needed to be, if not coddled, exactly, then at least reassured.
She didn’t. She didn’t blame herself for the deaths of Loclyn’s people.
But she didn’t feel easy about it either.
She hoped she never would. Because death wasn’t easy, even when it was deserved.
No matter how terrible a person was, their absence created a ripple effect in the world.
And this one might end up being a net positive, but it didn’t mean the negatives weren’t there too.
It didn’t mean that people hadn’t been hurt.
“What are you thinking?” Kaden had taken the seat one down from her, his hands wrapped around his mug.
“I’m thinking,” she said slowly, “that if Tristen agrees to help us and everything goes the way we need it to, there will be a lot more moments like this. And in the end it won't matter to most people whether what I've done is right or not. I will be a person that most people hate.”
Pathbreaker, the being from the pocket of Earth Between whispered in her memory. She didn’t like the title any better now than she had then.
“But you’re going to do it anyway.” He said it as a statement, not a question.
“I am.” Because it was the right thing to do. Because she had made a promise. Because no one should wield as much power as the councilors did, and that included her father.
“Do you want my help?”
She thought about it. Thought back to the conversation they’d had on his boat on Raveras.
Knew that if she told him no, he would go.
There was something freeing in that. Something that made her feel like he finally saw her as an equal and not simply some naive girl he’d used once and now needed to protect from the universe because she couldn’t be expected to understand its dangers on her own.
She thought Kaden Moor might finally being seeing her, and not the person he’d thought she was. “I do, actually. If you don’t mind giving it.”
He shrugged. “I don’t have anywhere better to be.”
She snorted. “Given what’s coming? I think you could argue that anywhere is better to be than with me.”
“Yeah.” He took a drink of his Americano. “You could argue that.”
But he didn’t.
Five hours later, everyone except Tristen was awake and gathered in the library over coffee.
“Finally,” Nyx said, feeling vindicated by his absence. “I’m not the only late riser around here.”
“You are awake now,” Evra pointed out.
“Only because my sleep schedule is off and apparently sixteen hours is my limit. I won’t be awake at five in the morning tomorrow unless a crisis is occurring.” She glared at everyone in turn. “No one have a crisis.”
“Can you not simply wake him?” Jevryn demanded.
He and Griff had not followed her downstairs when she’d left them. Apparently, they’d been asleep when Kaliaris had woken Griff to tell him that Nyx was awake. After her fathers had verified she was all right, they had gone back to sleep.
Jevryn wasn’t in nearly as good of a humor as he’d been earlier, so either too much sleep made him cranky or—more likely—he was champing at the bit to have Griff freed from the Station.
Nyx was honestly surprised he hadn’t just gone to Tristen’s room and banged on the door until the Shaman woke up.
She was guessing the only reason he hadn’t was because Griff was acting like this was the most ordinary of ordinary days, which meant he was nervous, and Jevryn was trying to avoid making him more nervous.
“Not unless you want him cranky and unrested before he performs the very delicate, never-before-attempted surgery of untangling the love of your nine-hundred-years-long life from two other living beings, one of whom happens to be your daughter. Let him sleep as long as he wants.”
Okay, so maybe Nyx was nervous too. This was a no-turning-back moment. Either this worked, or it didn’t. And if it did, her entire life was going to change. She wouldn’t have the Station anymore. Wouldn’t be tied to its senses. Would not have the friend she had begun to think of Kaliaris as.
She wouldn’t have her home. She had found this place—had found Kaliaris—when she’d had nothing. They had sheltered her and protected her and made her feel like she had somewhere to belong. The thought of them sucked into the Harvester, even if only for a temporary span, made her stomach clench.
She didn’t know what worried her more—that Tristen couldn’t do this, or that he could.
She didn’t think he had ever managed to cut Loclyn’s tie to the Station before Nyx had killed the councilor, and she was starting to wonder if the Congregation had been wrong and what had been done in the past could not be undone.
Given her fears, she would happily wait as long as it took for Tristen to wake up on his own schedule.
It gave her plenty of time to worry about everything else.
Like whether or not Loclyn had told anyone he was coming to Earth.
The councilors knew whenever one of them died, because they felt that councilor’s tether die at the Stations.
They did not, fortunately, have any supernatural way of knowing how or where he’d died, so the only thing that would point to Nyx would be if Loclyn had told anyone where he was going prior to his departure.
She didn’t think he would have. The matter had been personal to him, and Nyx—being a councilor’s daughter—would be a high profile target to any other councilor.
Even if the others didn’t want to kill her, they would want to control her, because controlling her would give them leverage over Jevryn.
So the odds were good that Loclyn wouldn’t have told anyone else about her, because he wouldn’t have wanted them interfering.
Unfortunately, the odds were not good that Jevryn wouldn’t be implicated for Loclyn’s murder.
The lack of a body in Koral’s death had thrown immediate suspicion on Jevryn or Kiev, and while Jevryn had—apparently—planted evidence in Kiev’s home to implicate his brother for that death, there would be very little doubt in anyone’s mind that Jevryn had been the one to kill Kiev.
And if two councilors had been killed by an A-Morridahn and a third suddenly wound up dead—body once again conveniently missing—what were the odds the other councilors wouldn’t think Jevryn had done this one too?
She’d asked him point blank about it this morning, and he’d told her not to worry about it.
She didn’t want to be told not to worry about it, she wanted him to be honest with her.
Because what she and Tristen were going to do would have very real consequences, and suddenly those consequences were moving from nebulous to concrete much sooner than she’d anticipated.
He didn’t get to brush her off. Not this time. “Jevryn, could I—”
Griff bolted upright, “He is awake.”
Nyx sighed, tapping into Kaliaris’s senses to find Tristen had indeed exited his room.
He had the worst timing. “Let me talk to him,” Nyx said, rising to cut off Jevryn.
Her father had already talked to Tristen once while she’d been asleep, and while Evra had informed her it hadn’t gone horribly, it hadn’t gone well, either.
Tristen had said he wasn’t doing anything without Nyx, so she was going to go get him.
She exited the library, slamming the doors firmly behind her to prevent Jevryn from following, and met Tristen in the cafe. “Hey,” she said, aiming for casual.
It must not have worked, because he grimaced. “Am I even going to get to have coffee before everyone demands I perform miracles?"
“Yes!” she said, her voice sounding too bright even to her own ears. “Have coffee. Have breakfast. We need to talk first anyway.”