Idris slammed up from the basement as I scrubbed cookware that couldn’t go into the dishwasher. “There’s bacon if you’re hungry,” I told him. “Or, if you want eggs or toast, that’s no trouble.”
I expected him to head straight through the kitchen and out the back again, but apparently his need for sustenance overpowered his dislike of Pellini’s presence.
“Yeah. Thanks,” he muttered. “Bacon sounds good.”
“The plate’s on the stove,” I said. I rinsed the frying pan and handed it to Pellini for drying. Idris stuck bread into the toaster and did his best to pretend Pellini didn’t exist. Pellini slid a look toward him, mustache twitching as though he held back a comment with effort.
This shit needed to stop here and now. I’d allowed a similar veiled antipathy between Ryan and Eilahn to fester for too long before I put my foot down. Learned my lesson. I was sorely tempted to let my snark-monster out and say, “Now, boys, play nice and shake hands,” but decided that might be counterproductive.
“We’re living and working in the same house,” I said instead. “My house, though I like to think of it as our house. You two are going to indulge me with a civil conversation if it kills you.” I nailed both with a steely glare. Common ground, here we come.
Idris frowned as he settled at the table with bacon, toast, and juice. I ignored the frown and turned to Pellini. “I’ve been thinking over what you told me,” I said and passed him another pan to dry. “I can’t imagine how hard it was for you to see the arcane and not have anyone you could share it with. I mean, I had my aunt from the very beginning to tell me what the deal was.”
Pellini hesitated, face bunching into a scowl as he decided whether or not he’d play my game. “It sucked. Not going to lie.” He dried the pan with harsh swipes of the towel.
“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.