Page 47 of Guardian of Exile

“Only that you killed someone under your care, and that they understood why you did. Beyond that, they wouldn’t say. They believed it was your story to share, if you wanted to.”

He snorted. “So nice of them to care about my privacy. Do you know how I came to this planet?”

“Not explicitly, no.” She followed him through an industrial sized chef’s kitchen. “But I think I can guess.”

“My mother sold me.”

Nyx had been hoping for kidnapping. Because as terrible as that was, it was better than what he had just said.

“And someone here bought me.”

I’m sorry didn’t seem like an adequate response to that—she didn’t know what would be—so she trailed him in silence through a laundry room, a gym, a home theater, a library, and down a short gallery before he finally came to a halt outside of a closed door.

“His name was Edward Caruthers. Sometimes, I wonder what he paid for me. What he’d had to trade that could possibly have been worth it to the people who sold me. How he even found out about Shamans and other worlds.” He shrugged. “At least, I wondered all that later. At the time, I didn’t really understand what was happening. I just knew that I wanted it to stop. And then I killed him, and it did.”

He paused, almost expectantly.

“If you’re waiting for me to be horrified, I already knew you killed him, remember?”

“Then I guess you won’t be horrified by this, either.” He grasped the door handle and pushed.

Nyx braced herself as the door swung inward, preparing herself for something unimaginable. What she was greeted with was a man in a hospital bed.

It was so jarring that for a moment she almost didn’t understand what she was seeing. Hospital beds and IV drips and the like were for actual hospitals. They fit in with the decor there, were things a person was supposed to find in those places. Here, in what was obviously a bedroom with all the comforts of home in place, the only difference the presence of an adjustable bed with railings as opposed to the bed that would have fit this room, the sight was jarring. Wrong.

A monitor beeped softly on the far side of the bed, tubes ferrying various liquids in and out of the man’s body. He wasn’t awake, and Nyx didn’t think he was just sleeping. He was too still, his face too expressionless.

“Comatose,” Tristen said, though she hadn’t asked.

“Who is he?” She knew the answer—thought she knew it—but she also thought it might be better if Tristen didn’t realize she’d read some things about him. He seemed as if he preferred anonymity. The comatose man wasn’t old—probably no more than forty-five—and that disturbed her for some reason. It felt like an obviously comatose man should also be on the verge of a natural death, but maybe that was just the mind’s way of lessening the horror of seeing someone trapped inside their own body.

“Howard Gales the Second. My dearly beloved adoptive father.” The sarcasm in “dearly beloved” was thick enough to slice. “Sadly indisposed for the last six years.”

“And I take it he isn’t waking up any time soon?”

“Not without a miracle.” Tristen’s tone made it clear he didn’t intend to provide one.

“Are you the reason he’s like this?”

“Yes.”

“And is that what you brought me here to tell me?” He stood there for a long while, watching the rise and fall of Howard’s chest, as if something in it could decide for him whether he still wanted to tell her anything.

“He’s part of it,” he said finally. “It’s a long story. I don’t supposed you’d prefer to hear it over coffee rather than a slowly dying millionaire?”

“I would.” He closed the door on Howard Gales and led her back to the elevator, through the gallery and into the upstairs living room she only recognized because she spied her shoes by the terrace door. They trekked through another living room, a formal dining room, and finally into a sleek, ultramodern kitchen that, while still large, looked practically ordinary in comparison to the industrial one downstairs. As he passed by a decorative bowl sitting on the kitchen island Tristen paused, emptying the contents of his pockets into the bowl. It was a methodical process, the kind of thing someone did every day without thought—come home, drop the keys and wallet into the bowl, move on.

He was ingrained here, and that put another dent in her hopes. She had more or less expected to find Tristen Veld eking out an ordinary existence in a world he didn’t feel he belonged in, hopefully desperate to return to the world he’d come from. She’d been prepared to offer him anything he wanted. Money, because Jevryn would pay whatever the Shaman wanted if it freed Griff. Access to the Congregation, because they wanted to speak to him. A chance to find the family he’d been taken from.

She’d already worried that the lure of the Congregation wouldn’t matter to him, given how bitter she would have felt about them in his place. She’d just learned his family had sold him. And she was surrounded by a multitude of evidence that he didn’t have the slightest need of money.

The only hope she had was that, as far as she’d seen, Tristen wasn’t happy. He had people like Valerie, who were devoted to him for curing whatever incurable problem they’d had, but they didn’t know him, and she thought that was because he didn’t let them. Because he didn’t trust them.

He dropped the last two items from his pocket into the bowl and Nyx blinked, staring at the lighter and pack of cigarettes. “You’re a Shaman and you smoke?”

“Why not? I can’t get lung cancer, emphysema, or any of the other myriad problems it causes. Don’t be surprised if the Shaman you know has some hidden vices. From what I remember through the Congregation, it’s a common problem for us, given the lack of physical repercussions.”

“Yeah,” Nyx said drily, taking a seat on one of the island’s barstools, “I don’t think Tobi’s smoking and trying illicit drugs on the weekends.”