Chapter 486

“You were ignored because you predict robes will be catastrophically inappropriate for every climate, including indoors,” Aeron said.

“Indoors has drafts. Drafts are a climate.”

Fin exhaled. Slow. Controlled. The exhale of a man whose instincts were already tingling because he recognized the way Serena’s body was angling toward the edge and the angling was producing a dread in his chest that was pre-verbal and post-rational.

Clouds stretched beneath the volcano in a thick white sprawl, a canopy so dense it looked solid from above, as if you could walk on it, which you absolutely could not, and the could-not was the kind of lesson this sky would teach with enthusiasm and zero mercy.

The air was hot. Sulfuric. Carrying the specific warmth of a place that existed near active magma and had opinions about visitors.

Serena was already at the edge. Pink eyes blazing. Hair lifted. Body oriented toward the drop with the calm, directional certainty of a woman whose ancestors were driving and whose GPS was ancient and whose destination was somewhere at the bottom of a cliff they could not see the bottom of.

“Serena, wait,” Fin said, already tensing.

Pointless.

She was already gone.

She launched.

Possessed Serena went off the cliff at Alpha speed. One second she was standing at the ledge, and the next second she was airborne, her body cutting through the steam at a velocity that erased her from visibility in under a second. Pink light trailed behind her like a comet’s tail, burning through the white void, and then the void swallowed the pink and she was gone.

Fin didn’t hesitate. He had been three feet away and the three feet became zero and the zero became airborne in the span of a single heartbeat. His body punched through the steam wall after her, jaw locked, his trajectory a line drawn between himself and the woman he was following off a cliff for the third goddamn time.

The steam swallowed him.

A pink parachute detonated at that moment.

Dex and Gavriel stood at the edge.

They looked at each other.

The look lasted one second. One second that contained an entire conversation conducted between two men who had been jumping into stupid odds together since they were fourteen and whose fourteen had produced a friendship built on the specific foundation of mutual enthusiasm for terrible decisions.

Dex’s mouth twitched. The twitch was the twitch of a man who was about to jump off a volcanic cliff and whose about-to was producing something adjacent to excitement and whose excitement was being mirrored by the man standing beside him.

Gavriel grinned. The grin was the grin. Full wattage. Unfiltered. The specific expression of a Gamma who was standing next to his prince on the edge of a cliff above a boiling void on a continent they couldn’t identify and whose standing was producing the exact same feeling it had produced every time they had been in over their heads since they were teenagers.

Without a word, they ran.

Both of them. Together. Side by side. The same stride, the same launch point, the same full-speed trajectory off the cliff edge, two men leaving solid ground simultaneously with the synchronized enthusiasm of best friends whose friendship had been forged in exactly this kind of beautiful, reckless, deeply inadvisable shit.

They hit the steam wall together and disappeared.

Pink parachutes appeared around both of them at the same time.

Three mages stood on the edge of a volcanic cliff looking at the space where four people had been and a fifth had never intended to stay.

Maelor blinked. Twice. “Four. Four people have now jumped off this cliff. Two of them were grinning. The grinning concerns me more than the jumping.”

“No. Absolutely not,” Hyran said flatly.

It was at that moment that pink parachutes erupted into existence around each mage.

A hard gust caught all three parachutes before any of the mages could get a word out.

Bye bye.

Maelor’s dignity departed his body somewhere between the cliff edge and the first ten feet of descent. His robes billowed upward, his body swung in the harness, and a sound escaped his throat that was half shriek and half linguistic protest, a vocalization that contained at least four Nightspire curse words and the specific frequency of a man being dragged off a cliff by magic that was several pay grades above his objection capacity.

Aeron’s descent was more controlled and significantly less verbal. The Master Mage of Shadowclaw gripped the parachute’s edge with both hands and rode the drop with the focused calm of a man whose military training included “arriving in hostile environments without screaming” and whose training was paying dividends.

Hyran’s voice came shrieking down through the steam above all of them.

“SERENA, YOU ABSOLUTE MENACE!”

The parachute carried him down anyway. The carrying was indifferent to his objections. The objections echoed off the cliff walls and faded into the steam like the complaints of a man whose professional authority had been overruled by ancient spirits and whose overruling was becoming a routine.

Far below, invisible in the steam, Fin’s boots hit the jungle floor first.

She was in his arms. Pink eyes still blazing, still possessed, still locked onto whatever destination the ancestors had programmed into her.

“Hang on, baby,” he said, arms tight around her.

Her possessed head turned to him, irritated. He didn’t budge.

Dex and Gavriel landed three seconds later, breaking through the canopy together.

Both upright, landing on their feet. Both grinning. Both wearing the specific expression of two men who had just jumped off a cliff side by side and whose adrenaline was converting the near-death experience into something that felt disturbingly like fun.

The grinning stopped when Dex saw Fin holding Serena. The stopping was instant. The fun evaporated. The adrenaline redirected from “this was amazing” to “I want to hold her now” with the speed of an Alpha whose priorities could reorganize themselves between heartbeats.