Chapter 365: The World Calls Back
Stan let his mind, finally, drift toward the small ordinary business of being home.
The messages waiting on his phone. The voicemails he had not returned. The missed calls he could already guess the origin of. The classes he had missed which he was due Zack had covered up for him...
The people who would want to know where he had been. The small, ordinary, unglamorous logistics of resuming a life that he had left behind several days ago on very short notice.
And, underneath all of that, the larger and less ordinary logistics of having brought home a Royal Blood vampire and now needing to figure out what, exactly, to do with her in a modern coastal city that had strong opinions about visas.
He glanced sideways at Camilla again.
She caught the glance and raised one dark eyebrow.
"Something on your mind, human?"
"Just wondering what kind of trouble I’ve walked back into."
"Ah."
"And what kind of trouble I’ve brought back with me."
Her red eyes glinted as she smiled slightly. "That, human, is entirely up to you."
Stan sighed. Deep down, past the good food and the warm afternoon light and the small satisfied quiet of a long journey nearly ended, he already knew the answer.
The inheritance beneath the ice was going to make its demands eventually. The pact with the Void Sovereign was going to make its demands. The world he had left behind several days ago was going to make its demands within the hour, as soon as he took his phone off silent.
But of all the storms currently gathering on the small crowded horizon of his life, the one he suspected was going to prove most consistently, most unpredictably, and most spectacularly troublesome,
was the elegant vampire walking beside him, watching the modern world scroll past for the first time, and quietly deciding what she thought of it.
He almost laughed. Instead, he tucked his hands in his pockets, matched her unhurried pace, and let the promenade carry them forward into the softening afternoon light.
Home, at last. Whatever home was going to mean now.
Waiting nearby, exactly where the airport staff had promised it would be, was the VIP sedan that had brought them here earlier that afternoon.
The sedan rolled up to the curb at the edge of the promenade with the near-silent glide of a well-maintained electric drivetrain, dark paint reflecting the coastal light in long liquid streaks along its flanks.
The driver stepped out. Opened the rear door. Said nothing.
Stan appreciated that.
Camilla settled into the leather seat with the same fluid grace she seemed to bring to every physical motion. She did not comment on the car. She did not comment on the driver. She simply arranged herself against the seat with the small unhurried dignity of a Royal Blood who had, by now, decided that surprise was undignified and refused to give the modern world the satisfaction of producing it in her.
Stan slid in beside her.
The door closed with the soft muted thump of a sealed cabin.
The sedan pulled smoothly away from the promenade and turned inland.
Inksea in the late afternoon was, Stan had always thought, at its best.
The coastal light lay across the island in long warm slants. The traffic thinned as the tourist crowds began their unhurried drift back toward hotels and rentals. The palms along the wider avenues stirred in the breeze with the small patient rhythm of well-watered trees on a well-planned island. The advertising screens on the taller buildings scrolled through their patient loops without the aggressive brightness they took on after dark.
Camilla watched all of it through the window.
She was, once again, very quiet.
But it was a different quiet than the one she had carried on the ride from the airport. Then, she had been cataloguing, building a first inventory of a world she did not know. Now, several hours and one long meal later, she was simply looking. The observation had softened into something closer to attention. She was letting the afternoon roll past her the way a person let a piece of music play through, not analysing every note, just permitting the whole to arrive.
Stan let her look. He took his phone out of his pocket.
He had silenced it back on the plane, when the satellite system had first reconnected to the global network and the small cheerful chime had been followed by the immediate cascade of notifications that the world had accumulated in his absence. He had not looked at it since. He had told himself, with the practical honesty of a man who knew his own tolerances, that he would deal with the world only after he had eaten.
He had eaten.
He unlocked the phone.
The notification stack was, if anything, worse than it had been on the plane. The satellite handoff had been the first wave. In the several hours since, the network had continued to catch up with itself, and the small red badge at the corner of the messaging app had climbed into a three-digit number that Stan chose not to look at too closely.
He scrolled to the top.
The list was in the usual rough order, missed calls at the top, then voicemails, then text threads sorted by most recent activity, then the various app notifications underneath. Snapchat. News. Two emails from the university. Something from the bank that was probably a fraud alert on the two-hundred-thousand-dollar hangar charge. A blocked-number voicemail he could already guess the origin of and did not intend to open.
His eyes moved down the list.
They stopped.
At the top of the text threads, above Maya, above Sarah, Sophie and the rest of his girls messages and calls to inquire about his well-being, above the university group chat, above every other name that had accumulated messages during his absence, was Sacha his sister...
Fourteen messages. Three missed calls. One voicemail.
Stan’s thumb hovered over the thread for a moment.