“Have you ever told anyone?”
“No humans. Not once.” He glanced at Idris then to me. “It was cool at first, y’know? Like being accepted to Hogwarts. I was special.” He snorted. ?
??But imagine going to Hogwarts and being the only student there. Oh, and you still have to go to regular school but can’t tell a soul about this other cooler shit.”
Idris kept his eyes on his food, but I didn’t miss that he had yet to take a bite from the bacon in his hand.
“Idris, you learned from a neighbor, didn’t you?” I asked.
He blinked, dropped the piece of bacon back onto his plate. “Um. Yeah.”
I waited to see if he had more to say, but he remained silent. He wasn’t going to make this easy, but at least he hadn’t stormed out. “You were what, fourteen?” I asked. “Fifteen?”
“Fourteen,” he said with obvious reluctance then blew out a breath as if accepting my refusal to give up. “I’d been with the Palatinos three months when this dude moved in across the street. A week or so later I started seeing strange glimmers around his house. He noticed me gawking.” Idris jerked his shoulders up in a shrug. “Started training as a summoner not long after that.”
Did Pellini know Idris was adopted? Probably so, I decided. He would have researched everything he could find on anyone related to the Amber Palatino Gavin case. Idris had been adopted twice, once as a baby, and then by the Palatinos when he was fourteen after the first couple died in an automobile accident.
Pellini tugged at his mustache. “I swear to god I’m not trying to stir shit,” he said, “but doesn’t it strike you as awfully convenient that a summoner moved in across the street right when you started seeing all the woowoo crap?”
For an instant I thought Idris would respond with a snarl, but instead he picked up his fork and jammed it into his bacon. “Yeah,” he said, jaw tight. “My convenient neighbor and mentor for the first year was Anton Beck—one of Katashi’s inner circle summoners.”
A chill shuddered through me. “That explains how you ended up training under Katashi so young,” I murmured. Truths I’d avoided up to this point clarified into a lump of ice in my gut. “If my dad hadn’t conveniently been killed by a drunk driver, Tessa wouldn’t have raised me, and I wouldn’t have become a summoner.”
“It sounds premeditated,” Pellini said with dark suspicion. “Who orchestrated it and why?”
Idris shoved a mangled piece of bacon into his mouth. I rubbed the back of my neck, rankled that I didn’t have a satisfactory answer for Pellini. “We’ve each been molded and exploited to suit the goals of others,” I said. “And none of us know why, though at least Idris and I had context for most of it.”
Idris glanced at Pellini then dropped his gaze to his plate. Good. Harder for him to paint Pellini as the devil incarnate when he had something in common with him.
“I’m going to take a walk with Sammy,” Pellini announced before heading outside to cope with the shit in his own manner. I dried my hands, refreshed my coffee then took a seat at the table. My horrific exploitation pissed me right the fuck off but, until I scraped up more info, further brooding was a waste of time and energy. Besides, my focus needed to remain on my current goal—a cease fire in the Pellini-Idris war.
“Don’t say it,” Idris said as he slathered jelly on toast.
“Don’t say what?” I asked.
“Don’t say whatever you’re planning to say about how awful it must have been for him never being able to tell anyone.”
I shrugged and took a sip of my coffee. “Okay, I won’t say it.”
He gave me a withering look and took a savage bite of toast and jelly.
“What?” I asked innocently. “You told me not to say it, so I didn’t say it.”
“You might as well have. You do that thing with your eyes.” He licked jelly off his fingers.
“What thing with my eyes?”
“You do this sort of narrow-eyed smug disapproval thing,” he said.
“You’re insane.”
“And now you’re doing it again.”
I threw my hands up in defeat. Bryce unwisely chose that moment to step through the back door. “Bryce, Idris says I do a weird narrow-eyed smug disapproval thing with my eyes,” I said. “Tell him he’s imagining it.”
Bryce stopped, frowned, looked from me to Idris and then back to me. “Sorry. No can do.” He continued to the sink to wash grime from his hands.
“Afraid Idris will turn you into a newt?” I asked with a lift of my eyebrow.