Page 80 of Guardian of Exile

“What are you doing?” Tristen asked.

“Going back for the night. We can come back in the morning. Now that I’ve been here, it’ll be a straight shot to portal from there to here.” She just needed to pick something around her to Hide to serve as an anchor.

“I told you—I’m not leaving until I find out who my mother is waiting for.”

Nyx blinked. “I thought you meant you weren’t leaving the planet. There’s no reason to stay here tonight. The Drahls’ home is safe and infinitely more comfortable than any accommodations we’re likely to find here.”

“I’m not going and risking that you won’t bring me back.”

Nyx pinched the bridge of her nose. “You are not a prisoner, Tristen. I am not going to hold you hostage in the Drahls’ house. We have an agreement.”

Tristen’s mutinous stare said he didn’t give a single damn. “I’m not leaving.”

Movement in Amelia’s receiving room caught her eye and Kaden walked up to the portal. He was sweaty, his Earth t-shirt clinging to his flat stomach and dirt streaking his forearms. He had a twig in his hair and a leaf was plastered to his right bicep.

Huh. Apparently Amelia did have a garden somewhere. Nyx had been convinced Amelia had only claimed to need help with one to keep Kaden at home.

Nyx’s face must have expressed her irritation, because Kaden took one look at it and said, “What’s wrong?”

She smiled. It wasn’t a polite smile and it made Kaden’s eyebrows lift. “It seems that Tristen and I will be spending the night here. Possibly the next several nights. I don’t suppose you’re familiar with the area and could point us toward the inn where we are least likely to be robbed, knifed, or otherwise accosted?”

He didn’t look happy, but where Morgen and Evra would have asked a million questions and then probably argued with her over it until they turned blue in the face, Kaden just said, “Wait for me.”

He came back two minutes later wearing a desert cloak with the hood and mask up, everything obscured except his eyes. He stepped through the portal and Nyx let it close. Once it had, she dropped the Hiding over her and Tristen. Easier to drop it here than to appear out of thin air in front of whatever inn they found. And since Kaden’s mere presence had a way of making strangers keep a minimum ten-foot distance at all times, the Hiding didn’t really serve a purpose anymore.

Kaden walked out of the alley and back toward the main streets, Nyx and Tristen trailing him at a distance because Tristen was walking with intentional slowness.

“We couldn’t have gotten someone other than the silent wonder to help?” he whispered.

Anger, hot and quick, sparked through Nyx and she stopped walking.

Tristen stopped too. “What?” he asked at her glare.

“Don’t talk about him like that.”

“I know you dated him and all, but even you have to admit he’s weird.”

“No, I don’t.” Kaden’s spareness with words often drove her to the brink of madness, it was impossible to ever know what he was thinking, and he frequently made decisions she disagreed with and might never forgive him for, but it pissed her off when people relegated him to the classification of “weird psycho” just because he was large and not a talker.

She knew a little bit about what it was like to have everyone think you were strange. She’d never had Seth’s effortless chameleon ability to slide into any crowd and be instantly adored. Any time they had gone into Dead Earth as kids, he’d been the one people gravitated to and she’d been the odd human-like creature tagging along who was tolerated because Seth made people tolerate her.

She might have been a chatterbox with Seth—and later at the Station because she hadn’t remembered how awkward her childhood had been then—but in her youth, when she and Seth were around normal Dead Earthers? She hadn’t said much then either.

“The guy doesn’t talk,” Tristen said. “He glowers. Constantly.”

“Just because he doesn’t open his mouth every five seconds to prove he’s an ass, unlike some people I know, it doesn’t mean he’s weird.” She shook her head. “I’d have thought you, of all people, would know better than to judge people off appearances.”

His eyes darkened. “Why? Because I’m not normal either?” He lifted the leg with his prosthetic foot.

“No. Because you’re a Shaman who’s had to carry the personalities of enough people that I’d think you’d understand you don’t always know a person by what you think you see on the surface.”

Tristen arched an eyebrow. “You really so sure that ‘ship has sailed’ with him?”

Nyx tried to have grace. She tried to remember that Tristen was currently undergoing a stressful time in his life. He’d been reintroduced to the wider universe and was soon to confront his mother over his traumatic childhood. But he didn’t get to push that stress off onto her just because she was there.

“Fuck you. I am here because this is where you wanted to be, and we are staying in this unsafe town because you’re too stubborn to go back to Amelia’s. Kaden dropped everything to come find us a relatively safe place to stay. If you can’t bring yourself to be grateful, the least you could do is keep your mouth shut.”

She stalked after Kaden, who was patiently waiting at the end of the alley, and stars she really fucking hoped he hadn’t heard any of that. She stopped next to him, waiting for Tristen to decide to unlock his clenched jaw and come join them. She took a deep breath and blew it out in a long sigh.