Chapter 914: Goddess’s Involvement in Phei’s Parents’ Death
Just as his thoughts threatened to circle the emptiness again — that small pressing absence where another certain someone should have been, sitting on his heart with all the quiet weight of a mountain — something cool and familiar wrapped around him from behind.
Eira.
She shrank herself down to her smaller size and settled across his shoulders like a living shawl, legs dangling idly against the side of his stomach, her little hands lacing around his neck.
She buried her face against the side of his throat and breathed him in — long, deep, unashamedly hungry, the way she always greeted him after even the briefest separation, as though the scent of him were a thing she’d been rationing.
"I missed you," she murmured against his skin, and he felt her smile form there. Then, lower, the smile fading into something else:
"Master. Did you talk to Cassiopeia?" A pause. She had seen everything and him too but she asked anyway "She seemed out of it. In the other car. I don’t like it."
For all her chaos, for all the ancient menace coiled inside that small frame, Eira worried about the Cassiopeia.
It was one of the better-kept secrets about her.
"Don’t fret over her," Phei said quietly, lifting a hand to rest over the small ones at his throat. "Cassiopeia will be fine. She’s just learning where she stands. That takes time."
Then, because she’d been gone and he’d felt the gap of it: "Where did you run off to?"
"Oh."
She said it like a woman who’d walked into a room and forgotten entirely why — except Eira never forgot anything, and the little theatrical oh was simply how she enjoyed delivering things that mattered.
She uncoiled from his shoulders and flowed down into his lap, arranging herself on the side Amber wasn’t occupying before curling in against his chest so she could keep her voice low and meant only for him.
"Master," she said, all the play gone out of it now. "The Maxtons are moving."
He went still.
"Just as we thought." Her ancient eyes held his. "They’re going to eliminate Danny. Any night the moment the Goddess of Night works up the courage to wrest the sky back from the sun — the instant it’s properly dark — they might do it. Anyday."
Phei’s eyes very nearly widened. He felt the impulse, the old human reflex of shock rising up to meet the sheer obscenity of it — a family arranging the quiet murder of its own son, a boy raised at their own table, marked for deletion on a schedule like a delivery.
And then he remembered who he was dealing with.
The Maxtons. The house that had looked at a newborn infant girl, decided she was inconvenient, and swapped her out of existence like a defective component to make room for their planted progenitor bastard:
Against a family that had done that — that had murdered a cradle to balance a ledger of ambition — the prospect of them tidying away a grown Danny was not a shock.
It barely qualified as news; with the Maxtons, any surprise a man let cross his face was pure theatre, like a performed courtesy extended to one’s own vanishing humanity.
He had shared the dream with Eira. Not a dream, truly — more a hand reaching back through the years and dragging him bodily into the moment his parents had died, the accident that hadn’t been an accident, the ravine, the lie of it all.
He’d given that vision to his Elemental Fairy and the two of them had begun, quietly, methodically, to pull at the threads of it.
Which brought him to the thing that had been sitting at the back of his mouth:
"What about Pemberton?"
Eira shook her head slowly, and a small frown creased the smoothness of her brow.
"Gone." She let the word sit. "I searched every Heavenchild residence on the face of the Earth, Master. Every estate, every safe house, every forgotten corner where a butler of forty years’ service might have left so much as a smudge of himself."
Eira’s fingers tightened a fraction against his shirt. "Nothing. No trace. And you know what my power much less my senses can do — I can lift a footprint laid down five years ago, read the ghost of a hand on a door long after the hand is dust. I do not miss people. I went back in time; literally went back in time!"
"And Pemberton?"
"Pemberton is not there to be missed." Her voice dropped, and for once even Eira sounded unsettled by the thing she was describing. "No trace. No echo. No residue at any depth I can reach. It’s not that he left, Master. It’s as if he was never—"
"His existence has been completely erased," Phei finished, soft.
She nodded against his chest.
He sat with that. No traces, no echo, no smudge of a man to have existed to begin with.
And then — because the question had been waiting all this while, crouched and patient and dreadful — he made himself ask the one he least wanted answered.
He looked across the dim cabin to his goddess, deep in some low, laughing exchange with Sierra, lit gold and serene and entirely unaware. He looked at her for a long moment. At the curve of her cheek, the dark hair he loved, a happiness he had built with his own hands and did not want, under any circumstance, to be the one to dismantle.
Then he looked back down at Eira, and his voice came out quieter than he’d meant it to. Reluctant. The voice of a man asking a doctor for a result he’d already half-read in their face.
"And the other one," he said. "The Ashford Estate butler. What did you find?"
He was hoping. Against hope, against sense, against fate itself — that ancient malicious thing that had never once granted him a single clean break — he was hoping the old man had nothing to do with it: that the figure he’d seen in the truck cab, riding alongside the now-erased Pemberton and the soon-to-be-erased Danny, had been there by some innocent coincidence the universe would, just this once, deign to explain away kindly.
Because if the Ashford butler was involved, the arithmetic ran somewhere he could not bear for it to run.
It would mean the Ashford household — her household — had had a hand in the death of his parents.
And it was worse than that, so much worse.
Because the old butler was not some faceless servant from Ashfords.
He was in fact so precious to the goddess.
’He is her blood. Her uncle.’
A man she loved, woven into the warm fabric of the only family she had left — and if his hands were dirty with Seiryū’s and Mei Lin’s death, then there was a fault line running straight through the center of everything Phei had with her, and no power he possessed, in this realm or any other, could will it not to be there.
Eira felt it before he said another word.
She felt the grief gathering at the rim of his heart like water at the edge of a glass, trembling, about to spill.
And the ancient thing in his lap — who had watched empires rot and gods go to dust and had long ago stopped expecting fairness from anything — she cursed fate, silently and with great specificity, for the particular cruelty of this.
Because the reality felt inevitable. And the reality stood squarely, mercilessly, against everything Phei had managed to build with the woman laughing in the gold light across the car.
The truth was that—
