Page 5 of Guardian of Exile

“Funny,” Evra said unconvincingly. “Consider reconsidering.”

“If the two of you are scared and need to stay behind, I understand,” Nyx said, in an intentionally patronizing voice. “I’ll just go by myself to face the big, bad, exiled Shaman.” She had no interest in going by herself. For one, she needed Kaden’s Hound magic if she was to have any hope of finding her quarry. For another, she didn’t actually want to do this alone. She’d tried that before, and though she hadn’t wanted to admit it at the time, she was glad her friends had come after her and forced their way into her vendetta.

“That is not the issue,” Evra began. She didn’t continue, which made it plain enough where she’d intended to go.

“This isn’t about Jevryn being more capable of countering a threat, is it?” Nyx asked quietly. For Griff, it had been. It was why he’d been persuaded that she could do this. Her friends were not being persuaded. Which told her that in their eyes, this was about Jevryn not being there to protect her from herself.

“You think I can’t be trusted,” she accused. They thought if she was outside the Station—outside of Kaliaris and Griff’s ability to monitor her at all times—she’d fall apart. Apparently, however bad a job she thought she’d been doing of faking normal, she’d been doing an even worse one.

Morgen dropped his chin wearily onto his palm. “Can you blame us?”

“Yes. I’m not fragile.” Everyone thought she was. Poor Nyx, who didn’t know much of anything about the universe, and who apparently needed her daddy to protect her from her own emotions. “I’m not wallowing in the depths of my depression. I’m fine.”

“Nyx,” Evra said, with a gentleness that really didn’t suit her, “your eyes are still blue.”

She stiffened. Who the fuck had decided to tell them what that meant? One of her fathers, or Kaden? She looked at the latter, but though he met her gaze, she couldn’t tell anything from it. He knew what she was looking at him for, but he didn’t feel the need to deny or confirm it. Fucking typical, unflappable Kaden Moor. Sometimes, she wanted to punch him just to see if he would show an actual emotion.

It was an uncharitable thought—she’d been having a lot of those lately—and she didn’t know where it came from. For a long while, when she’d been living in Jevryn’s home, she and Kaden passing each other like ghosts, she’d hated him simply because he was alive and Seth wasn’t. But somewhere along the way, between brushing the surface of how broken Kaden actually was—how much Kiev had broken him, no matter how well he hid it most of the time—and realizing that he was never going to try and push to be in her space again—they spoke words in passing, they were around each other in larger groups, but he never actually tried to talk to her or be alone with her—she’d stopped hating him.

She hadn’t stopped being frustrated by him. Probably because she still didn’t understand him, and she’d always had an inability to leave alone what she couldn’t understand. But she was going to leave this alone if it killed her.

She shifted her interrogative gaze to Griff, who wouldn’t quite meet her eyes. Of course he’d been the one to tell them. She couldn’t entirely blame him. If Evra’s eyes had suddenly changed color, Nyx would have been curious, and if someone important to Evra had just died, maybe she wouldn’t want to ask Evra about it directly. Since neither Evra nor Morgen had asked Nyx about the eye color shift, they’d probably asked Griff. Even if he’d only told them Salyrian eyes changed color with intense emotions, it wouldn’t take supreme powers of deductive reasoning to conclude what emotion blue conveyed.

Nyx returned her attention to Evra. “So they’re blue. I realize it’s a pretty color, but lots of people have blue eyes on Earth. I assure you, it won’t jeopardize the mission.”

“That is not what I⁠—”

“I know what you meant,” Nyx said. “But they’re not turning gray again any time soon.” She didn’t honestly believe they would ever be gray again, and it was a fact she tried not to dwell on. Why the hell had Lethe-Alihana thought creating a species whose eyes always gave away their emotions was a good idea, anyway? She would ask them, but the half of their soul that had been in Kiev’s possession—and was now in hers—was even less talkative than the half belonging to Jevryn. And honestly? Considering all the things that soul had borne witness to in its centuries with Kiev—some of which they had felt the need to show her in vivid detail—Nyx didn’t mind their silence. Or the fact that, so far, they didn’t want to be carried around with her all the time.

Neither Morgen nor Evra said anything. Griff was very carefully staying out of the argument—probably at this juncture because he now felt bad about the whole eye color reveal—and Kaden never bothered to be part of an argument unless he was deciding to end said argument by means of physical violence.

That left Nyx. She held her arms out at her sides. “What? Yes, I’m fucking sad. Am I not allowed to go places because I’m sad? Is sadness a liability I’m unaware of? Am I negative ten strength points because of sadness?” On some level, she felt like she was down those points—in strength, in willpower, in brain function. But no way in hell was she admitting as much.

“Well?” she demanded when neither of them answered. They looked a little dumfounded, like they weren’t sure what to do, or how to respond to her.

Evra finally collected herself. “Very well. What is your plan?”

“We”—she drew a circle with her finger, encompassing all of them—“go to New York, where he”—she pointed at Kaden—“will use magic to figure out if Tristen is still in New York. You know, unless of course my sadness infects him.” She looked at Kaden. “Is the sadness going to be a problem? Are you going to stagger under the weight of my negativity, unable to perform basic tracking magic due to the overwhelmingly blue color of my eyes? Are you⁠—”

“All right, all right, we get the point,” Morgen said with a groan. “Perhaps it was rude of us to…extrapolate your possible actions based on your underlying emotional state.”

Nyx snorted. “That apology isn’t doing you any favors. The appropriate one is: ‘We’re sorry, Nyx, for bringing up the unfortunate fact that your irises are doorways into your inner feelings, which must be horribly uncomfortable for you, and which someone maybe possibly had no business telling us’.”

Griff ducked his head, the equivalent of a wince.

“It was not his fault,” Evra said. “He only confirmed what we already suspected based upon our observations of Jevryn.”

Nyx sighed. “Fine. Whatever. Are we going to New York or not?”

Evra’s brow furrowed. “Your plan, such as you have outlined it, is quite basic.”

“That’s me: Creator of Basic Plans. I’ll sort out the travel logistics, but there isn’t much strategy involved in Kaden executing a grid pattern for tracking.” She was trying not to think about how long it would take Kaden to search a place as densely populated as New York City. She was guessing—based both on the one memory of Tristen’s the Congregation had depicting the city, and the fact that someone would have to be absurdly wealthy to both learn about the universe beyond Dead Earth and manage to illegally procure a Shaman from it—that they would find what they were looking for in Manhattan.

But it was just that—a guess. Even if she was correct that Manhattan was where Tristen had been, it didn’t mean that was where he was now. And with Kaden’s magic blunted in Dead Earth, she didn’t know what his range would be. Could he analyze an entire skyscraper from the street? How old of a trail could he find? If Tristen had left New York years ago, would there be anything to find? These were questions she needed to ask him and so far hadn’t, because she’d been stalling, waiting for Jevryn to come back.

“I was more referring to your plan for if we actually find Veld,” Evra said.

“Oh, that.” Nyx was fully aware that “that” was going to be a problem. She didn’t see any scenario in which Tristen was trusting towards anyone outside of Dead Earth. The Congregation had refused to tell her under precisely what circumstances Tristen had come to Dead Earth, and if Nyx had to guess, the reason for their refusal had everything to do with Tobi being the current go-between she had access to for speaking with them.