Chapter 2
FELIX
Here's the thing about luck: it doesn't give a shit about your feelings.
The universe deals everyone a hand. Most people play it straight: call, check, fold, no surprises.
I learned at fourteen that I could see the other players' cards and nudge the deck in my direction.
My grandmother showed me a card trick, one that involved a little bit of chaos, and I've been playing with a stacked house ever since.
Right now, sitting in the back of a stolen Toyota—borrowed, technically, though the distinction feels academic when you're fleeing a five-generation murder conspiracy—here's what I'm holding in my hand:
Making it to New Mexico without getting caught will be a coin flip, maybe slightly worse.
Cyrus Veck being where I think he is has better odds, about one in four, maybe even one in three if we're lucky, and I'm always lucky.
Cyrus being able to fix the bond is more of a long shot, one of those Hail Mary one-in-a-hundred type of deals. The kind of hand you'd fold if you had any other option. We don't.
All five of us alive at the end of summer is coming in as a long shot. Not unplayable, but bad.
Everly Grey ever trusting me... well, that one keeps getting worse.
That last one's been sliding since January, when I stacked the deck on her class schedule so Catalina could watch her better.
It dropped again when she found out about the nudges—the "coincidences" I'd been dealing her that kept making her life just a little bit awful.
It cratered the night of the amphitheater, when she looked at me with those grey eyes and said, "You knew what I was the whole time," and I couldn't say no because I'd never lied to her directly and I wasn't going to start when everything else was already burning.
Shit hand. But I've won on worse.
Ohio is flat and grey and endless, the kind of landscape that makes you understand why people invented alcohol.
We crossed the Pennsylvania border at dawn.
Everly drove for four hours, then Ren took over because the bond broadcasts her exhaustion to everyone and nobody could fake sleep through it.
She's in the back seat now, wedged between me and the door, her head against the window, grey eyes closed.
She's not asleep. I can tell because of how still she is, how carefully she's holding her body. She does this when something terrible is settling in—goes quiet, goes internal, lets it pass through her like weather.
She'll be fine. She's always fine. That's the maddening thing about Everly Grey—she takes the hit and keeps standing, and I still can't tell if she's tougher than everyone else or just better at bleeding where nobody can see.
Atlas is in the passenger seat grinding his teeth so hard I can almost hear it. The bond keeps cycling his feelings through all of us—anger, guilt, shame, anger, guilt, shame—and it's like being stuck at a table with a player who keeps going all in on a pair of twos.
"We should go north," Callum says from behind Ren. He hasn't looked up from his phone in forty minutes. "Cut through Michigan. Avoid the major interstates."
His phone. Right. That.
I made everyone dump their devices in a gas station dumpster before we hit the highway—tracking spells, administrative backdoors, the whole deck stacked against us.
Callum ditched his. I watched him do it.
And then somewhere between Scranton and the Ohio border, a second phone appeared in his hand.
Backup, he claims. A personal device, not registered through Nyxhaven, probably bought with cash through some Bolingbroke back channel I don't want to think about.
I noticed immediately. Didn't say anything, waited for him to mutter something about it being clean.
Here's the thing: the phone is a liability.
Every call is a thread someone could pull.
Mother dearest has resources I can't even fully predict, and that phone is a blinking light saying here we are, come find us. It hurts our odds. Meaningfully.
But Callum hasn't called her back. I've been watching.
Forty minutes of staring at the screen, at the missed calls from a number he won't save under any name, and he hasn't picked up once.
The phone isn't how she finds us. It's how she keeps her hooks in him.
And the fact that he's staring at it instead of answering—that he's choosing to sit with the guilt of not answering instead of giving her what she wants—that tells me something about which way he's leaning that's worth more than the risk.
So the phone stays. For now. I'm watching, though. And playing the odds.
"North adds twelve hours," I say. "I-80 West through Indiana—"
"Faster doesn't matter if they're waiting on I-80."
"They're not. I checked."
"You checked." His voice could strip varnish. "The way you checked Vermont?"
"It's not a crystal ball, it's a read on the room—"
"It's a fancy word for guessing."
"I'm guessing with better cards than you've got, which is more than—"
"Both of you." Atlas. His conductor sparks once. The air in the car tastes like the moment before a storm breaks. "Shut up or I'm opening a window and you can both deal with the crosswind."
Callum goes back to his phone. I go back to my cards.
The cards aren't magic, aren't my typical Tumult deck.
I lost a couple of those back in Nyxhaven, and I'll make more, but for now I need more odds than I can play with a deck that small.
So at the gas station I grabbed the standard Bicycle deck, red backs, warped from humidity.
But shuffling them is how I think—bridge, fan, cut, bridge—the way some people pace or crack their knuckles.
Keeps my hands honest while my head works.
Right now my hands are telling me we need gas. And food. And about fourteen hours of sleep none of us are going to get.
I've been nudging since Scranton. Small pushes, nothing too big: green lights, clear lanes, a construction zone that wrapped up five minutes before we hit it.
Each one costs something—chaos magic runs on the same fuel as everything else in your body.
Calories, adrenaline, whatever it is that keeps you upright.
I've been sprinting since midnight and the tank is dry.
The first sign is always my fingers going cold. Then the hollow feeling behind my eyes. Then the brittle feeling in my joints, which creak with every movement, like I'm made of something that could snap. By the time the charm goes, I'm already running on fumes.
The charm is going now.
I feel it leaving—the easy smile, the quick mouth, the version of Felix Ferrix who makes you laugh so you don't look too close at his winning hand. It's not a spell. Just a bluff I've been working so long it feels like a real hand.
But I'm tapped out now. And when you're tapped, the bluff shows. What's left underneath is the man, and in this case, the man knows the odds aren't changing in his favor.
"We need to stop." My voice comes out flat. Wrong. Like a card played face-down. "Gas and food."
Everly opens her eyes. She heard it—the thing that's missing, the charm that's depleted.
She looks at me and I watch her take me in, her eyes narrowing, her head tilting the way it does when she's deciding what she's looking at.
Her black hair fans across her face, casting her rich brown skin in shadow, her expression making those plush red lips thin just a little.
I look away. I always look away when she sees me for real.
---
The diner is called the Silver Spoon, which is either charmingly retro or the setup for a health code violation. We take a booth in the back because Atlas won't sit by the windows and Callum won't sit next to Atlas and Everly won't let anyone be difficult without saying something about it.
"You're like five-year-olds," she says, sliding in next to Ren. "Territorial five-year-olds."
"Five-year-olds don't have lightning," Atlas says.
"Five-year-olds don't have shadow magic that makes the waitress think our booth doesn't exist," I add, glancing at Callum, who has done exactly that—shadows curled around us like a curtain, redirecting attention. The waitress has walked past three times without looking.
"You're welcome," Callum says.
I order coffee when the shadows peel back.
Black, two sugars, the kind that tastes like it was brewed sometime last Tuesday and has been sitting on the burner since, getting meaner.
It's perfect. The sugar hits and the edges of the world sharpen back up—colors settling, the overexposed blur pulling into focus.
The others eat. Everly gets pancakes and demolishes them, which seems like a good sign. Not that long ago she was screaming as all the magical power on campus went inside her—then we were screaming as she pulled it all back. Eating is an improvement.
Atlas gets nothing and glares at his water glass.
Ren orders soup and eats it one slow spoonful at a time, his movements careful, like he's performing surgery.
No one says a thing about the blood-crusted bandage he hasn't changed yet.
Callum gets a salad and pushes it around his plate with the look of a man who has just discovered that iceberg lettuce exists and would very much like to undiscover it.
After, I drift toward the claw machine by the door. Old-school. Glass box, metal claw, a heap of stuffed animals crammed together by someone who didn't care. The claw tension's rigged—standard carnival hustle, one win per fifteen plays.
I feed it a quarter. Nudge. Not the claw itself—the odds. Just a tap, barely anything. The toys shift. The claw drops at exactly the right angle.
A purple stuffed cat falls into the prize slot. Ugly. Lopsided. One eye bigger than the other.
Everly is behind me. I didn't hear her come up, which means I'm more burned out than I thought, or she's learning to move through the bond without announcing herself. Neither option makes me comfortable.
"For you," I say, and hold out the cat.
She looks at it. Looks at me. Her face does something I don't know her well enough to see through.
"You cheated."
"Obviously."
"Chaos magic on a claw machine."
"Rigged game. I just rigged it back."
She takes the cat. Holds it in both hands. Her thumbs press into its plush belly, testing.
"Why?" she asks.
Fuck if I know. Really. The honest answer is somewhere in the territory of because I ruined your life and a stuffed cat won't fix it but it was this or nothing and I can't do nothing, can't just sit around and wait for the world to arrange itself around me, I have to be the one who's in charge even if nobody sees it when they look at me.
The honest answer is that I keep trying to deal her good cards even though I'm the reason her hand is shit.
"This whole semester was rigged against you," I say. "Thought you deserved a win."
She doesn't smile. But she puts the cat in her bag, and something in my chest loosens by a fraction.
That's enough. I'll take it.
---
We drive until dark. Ren takes the first shift, then Everly, then me. Atlas offers but nobody lets him near the wheel—the nightmares are coming faster and they tend to manifest, and nobody wants to explain to a state trooper why our car just got hit by lightning out of a clear blue sky.
By nine PM we're somewhere in Indiana and I've been nudging all day. Every green light. Every clear lane. Every patrol car that turned left when we went right. My fingers are ice. My vision's going soft at the edges, headlights of oncoming cars blooming into white smears.
Everly's watching me from the passenger seat. Through the bond I feel her worry—warm, specific, pointed right at me. Annoying and inevitable with a girl like this.
"You look terrible," she says.
"I always look terrible. Part of the charm."
"Your charm bailed somewhere around Columbus."
Fair. The cocky bastard is gone. What's sitting in the driver's seat is what's left after the bluff folds—somebody thinner, sharper, hollowed out. Someone who's looked at the cards we're holding and doesn't like a single one.
"Pull over," she says. "I'll drive."
"I'm fine."
"You're not. And if you pass out at the wheel, Atlas will fry the engine trying to catch us, Callum will shadow us into a ditch, and Ren will have to restart four hearts at once. Pull over."
I pull over.
She takes the wheel. I lean my head against the cold window and close my eyes. The cards are in my pocket. I don't shuffle them. Don't have the grip.
That cat. The way she took it. The way she said you look terrible like it bothered her. Like it was a problem she wanted to solve and not a weapon she wanted to throw my way. She hasn't even tried to get revenge.
I'm still in the game. Barely. But still.
We find a Comfort Inn outside Indianapolis at midnight. One room. Two beds. Callum claims the bathtub before anyone can argue, which at this point feels less like a power move and more like a stubborn attempt to keep some semblance of control over his life.
I take the floor. The carpet's marginally better than Shady Pines.
The cards go under my pillow. I sleep with one hand on them.
Don't tell anyone.