Chapter 913: The Whole Crew
The sun hung high and imperious over Hell’s Paradise Island, bullying the perpetual chill out of the place and conjuring, in its stead, something almost obscenely summer-warm. The Infinity Chaos Hotel’s black glass drank the afternoon down in dark, ravenous gulps, every pane swallowing the light like a thing starved for centuries and only now permitted to feed.
The golden rays came down arrogant; there was no other word fit for the angle of them — divine, insufferable, swaggering across the island as though the celestial body above had personally arranged the weather to remind every lesser shadow precisely where it stood in the order of things.
The places that drank the gold gleamed while the places that didn’t were simply, pointedly, beneath notice.
Phei stood at the hotel’s entrance with Elena tucked against one side and his goddess at the other and looked out past it all.
The forest looked back.
Endless. Patient. Its primordial trees stood there in their green-black ranks, magnificently unbothered by the celestial showboating overhead, declining to surrender a single one of their hidden secrets to anything so young and loud as the sun.
He smiled at them; Phei had reason to.
Twice now that brooding green had helped him so much:
The first time, Eira had taken him beneath its canopy precisely so the things he intended to do to Kyle would go unwitnessed by the world above and the forest’s shroud had extended is courtesy to a god in the making, a place to work where no one watched.
The second time he’d gone of his own accord, to train, and the forest had repaid him in bruises: battered half to ruin by its titans, broken down and rebuilt, hammered against the anvil of the place until the whole of his Void-Ice element had finally cracked open inside him; it held him even more as he destroyed it when the Infinity Control unfurled, and with it the new element he’d torn loose from the soul of the vampire Progenitor he’d marked.
’In a single night and a single afternoon.’
That was all it had taken, beneath that shroud, to walk in a battered boy and walk out something the mortal realm now had a title for. Master of the Mortal Realm.
The forest had asked for pain and given back power, which was, in his experience, the only honest exchange rate the universe had ever once offered him.
He smiled again, turned from the green, and led the two women down toward the waiting cars.
Nobody else, it seemed, shared his fondness for divine heat...
The whole crew had already fled the sun’s swaggering for the cool dark of the convoy of the cars.
He reached his own car — a Rolls limousine, long and black and patient as the forest itself — and opened the door himself, handing Elena in first, then his goddess, gathering the gossamer of her gown out of the way with the unthinking care of a man who’d done it a hundred times, before folding himself in last and pulling the door shut on the heat.
Inside, it was another world. Vast, long, gloriously over-engineered, the interior was built around a clever central table that doubled as cold-storage for drinks and a small armory of fast food, because of course it did and arranged around it, in varying states of repose and mischief, was a sizeable fraction of everything he held in this world.
Maddie, already mid-anecdote about something that had clearly never happened. Patricia, quiet and luminous and somewhere half a room away inside her own head, the way she always seemed to be. Valentina, devoted and watchful, brightening by a measurable degree the instant he ducked inside. Sierra, composed and cool and pretending with great dignity not to have been watching the door. Delilah. Victoria and Emily, sharing a drink and some private commentary that died politely as he entered.
And Amber’s eyes were shut, blonde and still, folded into the very last seat at the back.
By the simple geometry of the thing, that was the only seat left for him, which suited him fine.
He settled in beside her, careful, and let the door’s heavy hush close around the cabin.
A few strands of pale gold hair had fallen across her face. He reached over and smoothed them back, gently, tucking them behind her ear; her eyes cracked open a sliver at the touch, surfacing slow from wherever she’d been.
"You didn’t sleep well last night?" he asked, low, just for her.
She smiled, small and drowsy, and shook her head. "Didn’t get to bed early enough."
He drew her in, guiding her head down into the curve of his shoulder, settling her there against him. "Want me to take you back up? Get you a proper few hour?"
Amber’s eyes drifted shut again. "And miss this?" she murmured, the words half-swallowed by sleep, her cheek warm against his shoulder.
"Not a chance."
He huffed a quiet laugh into her hair. "Fair enough."
For a moment he simply let himself sit in it; the cool dark of the cabin, the weight of her against him, the low hum of his women talking among themselves like a tide that had finally, mercifully, decided to come in.
Then he let his attention drift outward, casting that quiet sense of his through the convoy the way another man might glance down a guest list.
Catrina wasn’t in her room and she wasn’t in this car either.
But there she was, unmistakable, in the second vehicle, her presence as distinct to him now as a face across a room. He didn’t have to ask. That was the thing about the Sense thingy; it had stopped being a trick and started being a limb, and somewhere along the way he’d quit noticing he was using it at all.
Catrina, in the second car, with Nastya, Lydia. And — there — with Cassiopeia.
He let that one sit a beat longer.
Cassiopeia had clearly arrived ahead of him.
But after the previous exchange and yesterday, she hadn’t felt confident enough to claim a seat in the main car.
She’d taken the second instead tucked among the others while keeping her careful distance from the center of his world until she’d earned the right to occupy it.
He understood how she thought as wrong as it was since that wasn’t his intention.
Yuki rode with them too, that quiet steady warmth of hers anchoring the car like ballast.
The third vehicle carried the boys and their women — David among them, that particular signature easy to pick out of the bunch.
And so, it was all here. The whole improbable, dangerous, beloved circus of it, distributed across three cars and rolling out beneath a sun too arrogant to know what it was escorting.
Everyone accounted for.
’Everyone but Melissa.’
His aunt wasn’t in any of the three cars or the hotel behind him, either — she simply wasn’t in the reach of him at all.
Which was fine; she and Roxanne were still back in Paradise, still bonding and needing their time — the entire crew was present, and the single absence was the one absence he’d been told to anticipate, and that knowledge sat clean and reasonable in the front of his mind.
So everything was fine. Everyone was here. The whole crew, minus the one he already knew to be elsewhere.
Or so that’s what everything felt like.
