Page 51 of Guardian of Exile

“Right.” He took a long drink of his own breve. When he didn’t grimace, she found it comforting. Seth had never liked breves, and the difference between them helped. “So the Congregation cut me off, and I knew what was supposed to happen. I was supposed to be so distraught I’d kill myself, or otherwise fade away. Maybe it was being here, or maybe it was something else, I don’t know, but I didn’t do either. And when I didn’t, I got pissed off. That they could just throw me away like that, like I meant nothing.

“I know they didn’t have a choice. In theory, I know that. But they knew everything I went through. They were horrified for me while it was happening. They comforted me when I was in pain. They offered me solace. But when I couldn’t take it anymore and I finally made it all stop? They didn’t even try to keep me. They just threw me out.”

She reached across the counter and briefly squeezed his wrist. “I’m sorry.”

He shrugged. “Anyway, when I didn’t die, I didn’t know what to do.” He hesitated, looking at where she’d squeezed his wrist before looking at her. “I was twelve. I’d been here for three years, and while I hadn’t learned too much about this world, I knew the police would show up eventually, and that I probably didn’t want to be there when they did.

“I took as much cash as I could find in the house and ran. Which is really hard to do, by the way, when you haven’t had a lot of time to grow accustomed to the prosthetic foot your abuser generously purchased for you before his death to prove he could be ‘reasonable’. It also made me an easy mark. I got mugged two days later and lost everything I had, which was the last time I thought twice about defending myself in a permanent manner.

“Still, I learned pretty quick that if you want to survive on the streets at that age, you have to be turning some kind of trick. So I decided to turn the magic kind. Didn’t make hardly anything at first, because no one believes a twelve-year-old street kid who says he can cure your arthritis or make your migraines go away.

“Eventually I fell in with this woman—Ellie—who ran cons on people selling miracle cures. She realized it was a whole lot easier to con them if you had the real deal. She started finding me clients and letting me sleep on her couch in return for a ‘small cut’ of what people paid. I knew she was pocketing most of it, but I didn’t know what else to do.

“Anyway, she said I was going after the wrong crowd by trying to help people with actual problems. Had me cure some rich kid’s hangover, and suddenly I was doing that for a hundred bucks a pop.

“If I’d been less unstable, I might have realized it was a bad idea. But I wasn’t used to not having the Congregation when I healed.” He paused for a minute. “You grew up here. How much do you know about Shamans and the Congregation?”

She frowned. “Not much, I guess. Just that they’re a kind of guide?”

“They keep us sane. To heal a person, you have to know them. More than you want to. It can make a Shaman confused about who they are. The Congregation takes our sense of the people we heal from us so we don’t have to keep it.

“Without that—and with Ellie pushing me to heal more and more people—I was having trouble keeping a grip on who I was.” He shook his head. “I’m still not sure how much of me is me. Anyway, I was fixing spoiled rich kids until one day Ellie tells me I have a very special client. The next thing I know I’m in the backseat of Gales’ towncar, and I recognize him. I’d seen him before, with Caruthers. He knew exactly what I was.

“He gave me this big speech about how terrible it was what Caruthers did to me, and he didn’t blame me for doing what I’d had to, and how he could make it all go away. I didn’t really read the news back then, so I didn’t know he’d been looking for me since the moment I disappeared. Or that Ellie turned me over for a reward she never got. I found her obituary later—she died the same day I met Gales.

“Anyway, he knew what I could do and he wanted it, so he fed the cops and the media some sob story about me being this child-trafficked abuse victim.” He paused, and let out a little huh. “Guess he wasn’t really lying about that. He had all this ‘evidence’ of my mistreatment ready to go, told the cops he’d been building a case to try and help me. He probably even had been. Stealing me from Caruthers would have been hard, and even if he’d managed it, Caruthers would have tried to get me back. But paying off the right cops and people in child services to yank me away from him at the same time the trafficking story hits the papers and public sympathy is behind him? That probably would have worked.

“Me killing Caruthers worked out even better for Gales, because Caruthers wasn’t around to retaliate. At that point, since the autopsies didn’t turn up anything in their systems to indicate the heart attacks Caruthers and his people had died from were anything other than natural, it got classified as some weird unexplainable event. Maybe it was something they ate that didn’t show up on a tox screen. Maybe it was some kind of mass suicide, caused by guilt over what they’d all done to me.

“That was how Gales framed everything. Someone in Caruthers’ employ had been so overcome with guilt that he killed them all and committed suicide, and that when I saw my chance to be free, I took off. And here Gales had been, tirelessly searching for me. He’d uncovered my ‘true’ identity as a foster kid, and after learning I had no family all he wanted was to drag me up from the gutter and give me the kind of charmed life every kid dreams of having.”

Tristen grinned a wolf’s grin. “Legally adopting me was the biggest mistake he ever made. He thought he was being clever. Gave me two options. Either I played along with the story he’d set up—-publicly grateful to be rescued, more grateful to be adopted, and privately doing whatever he told me to—or evidence might turn up that showed I had killed Caruthers.

“He thought the adoption was his insurance. Once I was publicly tied to him, if he turned up dead just like Caruthers, the suspicion would come down on me. If I tried to run away again, he’d have legal recourse to have me found and dragged back. He never considered I might be smarter the second time around.

“I let him think he had me. For six years I did everything that disgusting son of a bitch wanted. And since he’d figured out by then that what the people who’d sold me to Caruthers had told him about me not being able to hurt people wasn’t strictly true? I hurt a lot of people.”

Shadows darkened his eyes, and he blinked them away. “He got what he wanted while I was a minor. But after I turned eighteen? Suddenly dear old Howard Gales the Second fell into a coma. He never considered that I could grow a decades’ worth of disease in a couple of hours. When I made him sick enough that I could force him to the hospital, they figured he was just another one of those people who feels a pain and thinks they’re just getting older, or avoids the doctor because they don’t want to face the truth of what’s happening to them.

“And there I was, his legally adopted son and only heir. He’s got some distant relatives overseas, but since he isn’t actually dead, they can’t come out of the woodwork to demand his money, and I have charge of his entire estate.”

He leaned back, his tone challenging. “I don’t need to be rescued. I’m worth eighty-two million. Here, I have everything that money can buy. Out there, I have nothing waiting for me. So why the hell would I go back to a universe that knows exactly what I am and wants to use me, just to get back into the good graces of an entity whose abandonment would have killed me if I hadn’t been in the one place its magical hold was already deadened?”

Nyx didn’t answer immediately. It was exactly what she’d feared—minus the millionaire part—when the Congregation had first told her about Tristen. That offering him a chance at redemption and reentry into a group that had thrown him out and didn’t even know if it was possible to take him back wasn’t much of an offer at all. But Tristen had to want something. A part of him had to want to go back, otherwise why had he bothered to bring her here?

“And if you can’t answer that,” he said, his tone soft and shaded with disappointment, “then you should go.”

He stood, but he didn’t move away from the island. He’d told her she should go, but he made no move to usher her out. He just looked at her, something suspiciously like longing in his eyes.

She thought of what little she’d learned of him—his childhood experiences, the shelter Valerie and the others had gone to, the healings he did for people who couldn’t afford to offer him anything. How almost determined he’d been to tell her the worst sides of himself and the fact that he didn’t appear to be close to anyone.

He’d made a point to tell her he had everything he could want, but she didn’t think he had anything he truly wanted. He certainly didn’t have anyone.

“You’d go back for two reasons.” She stood and slipped around the counter. She stopped in front of him, tilting her head up to meet his gaze. “One, you’re clearly looking for some kind of redemption. You go out into the streets and risk your life to heal, for free, people nobody cares about.”

Yes, he probably had to heal to burn off his magic, but he didn’t have to do it for free. He didn’t have to do it for people this world wouldn’t miss. “You run a shelter and a free health clinic it appears you self-fund even though you’re listed as a non-profit. And you wanted to tell me about the people you’ve killed because you hoped that I could understand it.

“And two?” She drew her finger in a circle, indicating the house. “There is no one here. You live alone on two floors of a luxury penthouse and you have no one to share it with except a man in a coma, and I don’t think you keep him alive because you don’t want to deal with his relatives bickering over an inheritance. I think you keep him alive because as much as you hate him, he is the only constant in your life, because you don’t trust anyone else.