Chapter 361: A Casual Miracle
’I guess she doesn’t understand technology and money transfer...’ Seeing that Camilla didn’t get his joke, he shook his head and brought the Bombardier down through the cloud layer.
The polar mastery of the earlier takeoff was not needed here. Inksea’s private strip was a properly surfaced runway that ran along the north edge of the island, edged by low dune grass and the pale blue of the shallow coastal water. Stan set the aircraft on final approach with the calm, methodical grace of a pilot whose installed skill treated a paved runway as a courtesy the world had extended to him.
The landing gear touched down with a soft double chirp.
The airframe settled.
The reverse thrust engaged with a controlled roar, bled off the excess speed, and released. Stan taxied the aircraft off the active runway and onto the taxi line that ran parallel to the terminal.
A marshaller in a high-visibility vest was already waiting at the parking apron. He waved the illuminated batons in the practiced choreography of a professional guiding thirty tons of private aviation into a designated slot, nose forward, nose forward, gentle left, gentle right, hold. Stan followed the signals with the precise, unhurried attention of a man whose muscle memory had been paying attention to marshallers for years he had never actually lived.
The batons crossed above the marshaller’s head.
Stan set the parking brake.
He ran the shutdown sequence. Engines to idle. Fuel cutoff. Avionics to standby. The twin turbines wound down through a long descending hum until the cabin fell into the soft, high-altitude quiet of an aircraft that had, for the moment, finished being an aircraft.
He unbuckled. "We’re down."
Camilla unbuckled beside him with the same careful precision she had used to fasten the belt. She followed him back through the cabin to the door.
Stan pressed the small illuminated button on the interior bulkhead.
The cabin door unsealed with a soft hydraulic sigh. The boarding stairs unfolded outward and down, articulating on their servo joints with the smooth mechanical grace of a well-maintained system, and locked into place against the tarmac.
Camilla’s eyes tracked the entire motion. Her face did not change.
But Stan, who had by now spent enough time in her company to read the small shifts in the set of her mouth, caught the flicker of quiet appreciation that passed behind her red eyes. A door that opened itself. A stair that unfolded itself. A press of a single unlabeled button that caused thirty tons of engineered aircraft to arrange itself for its passengers.
She said nothing. He appreciated that.
They started down the stairs.
"Remember the deal," he said quietly.
She rolled her eyes. "Of course I will keep to the deal. I signed a blood contract, human. I am serious about this comradeship thing."
Stan smiled. "Good. And by the way, don’t worry about going back. I can return you to the realm whenever you feel like it."
Camilla’s eyes widened.
She stopped one step behind him. "...Really?"
Stan nodded, casually, as if he had just offered her a lift to a corner store.
Camilla did not move for a full second.
The blood contract they had sealed in the cave carried, among its several terms, one clause that could not be circumvented, neither party could lie to the other. There was no punishment for the attempt. There was only the sensation. A small, distinct pressure at the base of the skull that flared the instant a false statement was made, unmistakable to the bound party, impossible to fake and impossible to suppress.
She had felt nothing.
Which meant Stan was telling the truth.
Which meant that this man, this human, this cultivator whose apparent rank meant less and less each time she witnessed the impossible, could apparently traverse the boundary between realms as casually as he had just landed a metal bird on a stretch of paved ground.
A slow, considering glint appeared in her red eyes.
’Just as I thought. He truly is a hidden master. To move between realms so casually... what could a being of such standing possibly gain from concealing his strength?’
She followed him down the stairs without a word.
Stan, entirely unaware of the reappraisal happening behind him, reached the tarmac and turned to greet the small welcoming party waiting at the base of the airstair.
The VIP protocol officer stepped forward.
He was a neatly dressed man in his early forties, the pressed navy of Inksea’s private aviation authority uniform crisp against the sea breeze, a slim tablet tucked under one arm. His smile was the professional smile of a man whose job was to be pleasant to people who could afford to buy the terminal.
"Sir. Welcome to Inksea." He inclined his head. "Quite the skilled pilot, if I may say so. Based on your flight vector and the origin signal we picked up on approach, the aircraft appears to have come out of the Antarctic corridor. Flying through that region is not an easy thing."
Stan laughed it off with a small, dismissive wave. "Autopilot did most of the work."
The officer smiled the smile of a man who did not believe that for a second and was too professional to say so.
Beside Stan, Camilla’s mouth pulled into the faintest of pouts.
It was a small, almost imperceptible expression, the kind of thing that would have gone entirely unnoticed on a woman of ordinary presence. On Camilla Dragomir, it registered on the tarmac like a shift in the wind.
She wondered, briefly and with the small offended dignity of a nine-hundred-year-old Royal Blood, why the weak human in front of her had not for a single moment considered the possibility that she had flown the aircraft. Then she remembered that in this era women apparently did not fly metal birds by default, and she filed the observation away for later inspection of the era’s various assumptions.
The officer’s eyes flickered toward her once. Only once. He did not look again.
Whatever quality Camilla Dragomir carried in her presence, the quiet, unhurried authority of a being who had lived through years, vampires the man had only read and watch as fiction, the man didn’t know that this being in front of him was a vampire...
As a vampire cultivator, she isn’t affected by the sun as one would think...