Chapter 373: Incoming Wave
"You are shameless, human."
"I’ve been told."
Camilla let out a small, quiet, genuinely amused breath, the first fully unguarded laugh he had heard from her since the polar wind.
"For the record," Stan added, gesturing at the wide low sofa in the corner of the bedroom, "there’s a perfectly usable couch right there. I’ll take it. You keep the, the floating jade slab. I don’t want to accidentally drain it of qi or break some ancestral heirloom by rolling over funny."
Camilla considered him. Then, in the small unhurried tone of a woman offering an entirely reasonable observation:
"It is large enough for two, cultivator. Comfortably. The jade will not object. Neither will I."
Seeing her hold his gaze, Stan knew at once that she was trying to get back at him. He wasn’t going to fall for it. He could already imagine what would happen afterward.
He shook his head, "I’ll pass..."
Camilla gritted her teeth, seeing her didn’t fall for her trap, she had a good joke that’ll really hit Stan hard, had he fell for it...
"Whatever I am not, in general, in the habit of sharing a resting place with mortals. Consider it a courtesy extended in light of our comradeship."
Stan looked at the platform. He looked at Camilla. He looked at the couch.
’You’re still playing at that huh?’
He considered, briefly, the small logistical question of what it was going to look like to wake up in his own penthouse next to a Royal Blood vampire the morning after having sworn to five different women, over five separate phone calls, that he had come home to shower and sleep.
He decided, on balance, that the version of this evening in which he refuses that ’offer’ was the version his future self was going to thank him for. The offer hadn’t made much sense to begin with. The fact that Camilla hadn’t immediately withdrawn it after he refused only made him more suspicious.
"My bed is still good and comfortable..."
"How unfortunate. It is your loss, then." Camilla sighed, even though her heart was a bit bitter that Stan didn’t fall to the trap that’ll allow her to use her own joke on him, he wasn’t the only one who should be allowed to joke around like that.
"Very well. As you like." Her eyes glittered again. "But if you change your mind in the night, the jade is patient."
"Noted."
"And I do not snore."
"Also noted."
She inclined her head in mock gravity and stepped past him toward the hallway, apparently in search of the bathroom whose steady, endless flow of water had, some minutes earlier, so nearly undone her composure.
Stan watched her go.
He looked at the floating slab of jade in the middle of his bedroom.
He looked at the couch.
He rubbed a hand slowly down his face.
Then, quietly, to himself, in the small tired amused tone of a man who had returned from Antarctica in one piece and was, apparently, going to sleep on his own bed while a Royal Blood vampire settled into a levitating heirloom in his master bedroom:
’I really do want to crack her, but even with high favourability she’s still a hard nut to crack...’
He kept the towel before settling on his bed...
Meanwhile, Camilla turned toward the bathroom.
She had been thinking, for some minutes now, about the sound. About the mechanism behind the wall. About the small satisfying prospect of stepping into the space, closing the door behind her, and permitting herself the private, uninterrupted study of whatever small clever artifact these New Age humans had built to move water on demand.
She did not, strictly speaking, need to bathe. A vampire of her lineage could remove dust and impurity from her body with a single passing exhalation of Qi, a small automatic maintenance that most Royal Bloods did once or twice a day without conscious thought, in the same way a human might straighten a sleeve.
But she had heard the sound, and she was curious, and curiosity, in her admittedly considered opinion, was one of the few pleasures that survived a long life intact.
She reached the doorway and her hand touched the frame, but then a voice came from the other side of the bedroom...
"Camilla."
She paused to Stan’s voice and turned her head.
Stan was still on bed where she had left him, the towel over the back cushion, his hair still damp at the ends, one hand resting lightly on his knee. He was not looking at her. He was looking, somewhere past her, at the middle distance.
His expression had changed. The small tired ease that had settled into him under the shower had, in the last minute, been replaced by something quieter and more careful.
"How long," he said, "do you think it will take for the Qi to spread out from that frozen region, from the Frost region, as you called it, across the rest of the Earth."
Camilla’s hand dropped from the doorframe.
She stepped, slowly, back into the room. She considered the question.
"I do not know precisely how large this Earth is," she said, after a moment. "The maps I was taught from are, I imagine, no longer accurate. But Qi travels quickly, cultivator. Once a source has begun to release, it does not creep. It spreads." A small pause. "Tens of thousands of kilometers in a single day is not an unusual figure."
Stan’s eyes closed for a moment.
He drew a slow, deep breath. He held it then let it out.
Camilla watched him, the small, precise attention of a woman who had been, over the past several hours, quietly cataloguing the small tells of a man she did not yet fully understand.
He opened his eyes.
"And when it reaches inhabited land," he said, quietly. "What does it do."
Camilla did not answer immediately.
She considered how to phrase it.
Then she said, gently, and it was, he thought, the gentlest tone he had yet heard her use:
"Beasts will change first. The larger and older ones especially. Any creature carrying even a distant trace of beast-kin bloodline will begin to mutate. Slowly at first. Then quickly. The polar bear you killed at the pool, the one whose head you removed with a single strike, that beast had been in Qi-saturated air for perhaps two days. No more. Its strength was already twice that of an unmutated cousin of the same size."