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“Okay, you hold a curse inside you, but what does that mean for you?”
“I am still a man. I eat, sleep, and . . . make love. I have basic needs, but I also have needs that come from the Curse. It creates something we call a Pull.”
“Hold on.” I held up a hand. “We? There are more of you?”
“About 150, give or take.” He dragged a hand through his hair. “I'm drawn to potential heartbreak, pulled to fractures in relationships. Dying marriages, secrets on the verge of surfacing, things of that nature. Sometimes the Curse speeds up what was already coming. Sometimes, it magnifies what's there. But always, I must bear witness.”
This was unlike anything I expected. And so horrible. “Can you resist the Pull?”
“Not for long.” Tristan's expression shifted to something both grateful and surprised. “The longer I resist it, the stronger it gets until I'm forced to give in.”
I looked around the room again, seeing it all with a fresh perspective. The shelves didn't hold his treasures. Each item bore a label with names, a date, and an outcome on it. Anna and William Lambert, Reconciled, 1958. Vanessa and Robert Chang, Separated, remarried happily, 1975. Jabari Diallo and Abena Moyo, Never recovered. These were the victims of Heartbreak. But Tristan hadn't just documented the damage the Curse had wrought. He'd also celebrated the survivors.
“Did you know all of them?” I whispered.
“No.” He stepped up beside me and stared at the tributes to love that he'd preserved. “Most were strangers. But some were my friends. Some, my lovers.” He touched the glass over a small portrait of a beautiful woman in Victorian clothing. “But I remember them all. It's the least I can do for them.”
“And what about you?”
“What about me?”
“Are these portraits your only tribute to yourself?”
“Tribute? Those aren't vanity portraits. They're proof for people like you who wouldn't otherwise believe me. For me, they're a way of keeping track of the years. This is a room of remembering.”
“How long have you been alive, Tristan?”
“Approximately seventeen hundred years. I don't actually remember when I was—”
I swayed.
“Destiny!” Tristan steadied me and helped me to the chair. “Are you all right?”
His voice sounded far away, a backdrop to my spinning thoughts. Seventeen. Hundred. Years. He was older than the reliquary. My mind came back online and questions popped into my head. “Where were you born?”
“Norway, my family was part of a Germanic tribe.”
“Holy crap! The Vikings are descended from your people.”
He chuckled. “Yes. You're taking this remarkably well.”
“Am I? It doesn't feel like it.”
Tristan cupped my cheek and looked into my eyes. “You might be in shock. How about a cup of tea? Or coffee?”
“A coffee sounds like heaven.”
“Okay.” He held his hand down to me. “Come on, you can ask me more questions while it brews.”
“Anything?”
“You can ask anything, but I don't guarantee I'll answer everything.”
“Fair enough.”
Chapter Five
A week feels like forever when you spend it waiting for the phone to ring.
