Chapter 10
EVERLY
We spend three days lost in New Mexico, and I’m starting to think the desert is doing it on purpose.
Not metaphorically. Actually, literally on purpose.
Felix says Cyrus Veck hides himself with chaos magic, manipulating the odds in a way that makes you miss the turn, take the wrong road, suddenly need gas at exactly the wrong moment.
Your eye slides off the thing you’re looking for.
Your brain tells you to go left when the answer is right.
It’s not a spell. It’s a nudge. The universe gently, persistently steering you away from a man who doesn’t want to be found.
The desert is beautiful. I didn’t expect that.
I’ve been a Northeast girl my whole life—winters and brick buildings and trees that turn colors in October.
This is different. Wide. Brown and gold and rust, the sky so big it looks fake, like someone painted it and went overboard.
The mesas in the distance are flat-topped and ancient and they make me feel like a very small person in a very large space, which is either peaceful or terrifying depending on whether I think about it too hard.
We’ve been staying at a motel in a town so small it doesn’t appear on Felix’s road atlas.
The town has a gas station, a post office, a diner called Rosie’s that serves green chile on everything including the pie, and a population of roughly forty-seven people who seem unbothered by five strangers driving aimlessly through the surrounding desert every day.
“Maybe he doesn’t exist,” Callum says on day three.
He’s in the passenger seat with a map spread across his knees—an actual paper map, bought at the gas station, because none of us have navigation and Felix’s chaos magic keeps leading us in circles.
“Maybe your mentor’s mentor invented him.
A cautionary tale. ‘Don’t leave Nyxhaven or you’ll end up alone in a trailer in New Mexico. ’”
“He exists,” Felix says. But his voice is thinner than it was two days ago.
The circles under his eyes are deep enough to park in.
He’s been trying to find Cyrus with his own chaos magic, nudging probability back against Cyrus’s nudges, and it’s like watching two people arm-wrestle through the fabric of reality.
Neither of them is winning. Felix is just getting tired.
I’m watching the road. We’re on a dirt track east of town, heading toward a mesa Felix swears he can feel something near.
The air is dry and bright and smells like dust and sage, and through the bond I can feel all four of them—Atlas’s frustration, Felix’s exhaustion, Ren’s quiet pain, Callum’s skepticism—and underneath all of that, a low persistent pull I’ve been ignoring for two days.
It started when we crossed into New Mexico. This tug in my chest, right behind my sternum, like a fish hook someone set and keeps giving little jerks. Not painful. Just present. Pulling me—not in a direction I can point to. More like a frequency I can almost hear.
“Stop the car,” I say.
Atlas stops. Looks at me.
“Let me drive.”
“You drove into a cactus yesterday.”
“The cactus was in the wrong place. Let me drive.”
He gets out. I get in. Adjust the seat, the mirror, grip the wheel.
The others are watching me. I can feel it—Felix’s curiosity sharp and focused, Callum’s doubt, Ren’s careful attention, Atlas settling into the passenger seat with his conductor in his lap and his eyebrows up.
I close my eyes.
“That’s not how driving works,” Callum says from the back.
“Shut up.”
The pull is there. Behind my sternum. I reach for it—not with my hands, not with any specific magic, just with the part of me that absorbs things. The grimoire part. The part that swallowed an inhibitor spell at El Paso and ate it like breakfast.
I reach for the probability threads Felix talks about.
The ones he says look like paths, like possible roads the world could take.
I’ve never tried this before. Maybe I can’t.
But I’m a grimoire—four disciplines running through my blood, chaos among them—and Felix has been trying to out-chaos a chaos mage for three days and losing.
Maybe the answer isn’t out-nudging Cyrus. Maybe it’s pulling instead of pushing.
I pull.
Something shifts. Not the road. Not the car. Something underneath—something in the texture of the air, the quality of the light, the way the desert feels against my skin. Like a veil being drawn back. Like turning a radio dial and suddenly the static resolves into a voice.
I open my eyes.
The road ahead shimmers. Not heat-shimmer—something else. The dirt track bends where it didn’t bend before, curving left around a stand of scrub brush, and beyond it—
A trailer. Silver, old, the kind from the ’70s with the rounded top and the oxidized skin.
It sits in a clearing surrounded by juniper and sage, hooked to nothing, solar panels on the roof catching the afternoon sun.
There’s a water tank on a wooden platform.
A clothesline with a flannel shirt and a pair of jeans.
A pickup truck with rust on the fenders and a bumper sticker that says DON’T FOLLOW ME, I’M LOST TOO.
Felix makes a sound. A small, choked laugh, half relief and half disbelief. “How did you—”
“I don’t know.”
“You just pulled the—”
“I don’t know, Felix.”
The trailer door opens.
The man who comes out is not what I expected.
I’m not sure what I expected—maybe someone imposing, mysterious, someone who looks like he could bend the odds with his eyes.
Cyrus Veck is maybe sixty-five, sun-weathered, wearing a faded denim shirt and work boots.
His hair is white and thin and needs cutting.
His face is deeply lined and deeply tanned and the kind of face that suggests he hasn’t smiled at anyone in a long time, not because he can’t but because he hasn’t met anyone worth the effort.
He’s carrying a shotgun. Not pointed at us. Just held. Casually. The way someone who lives alone in the desert holds a shotgun when a car full of strangers appears out of nowhere on a road that shouldn’t exist.
He looks at the 4Runner. Looks at us—five people, road-worn, dusty, bleeding, held together by magic and stubbornness and a bond none of us fully understand. His eyes settle on me.
They’re strange, his eyes. Pale grey, almost colorless, and they do something when they land on me—a flicker, a refocusing, like he’s seeing me on two levels at once. The normal level and the probability level. Felix does the same thing sometimes.
“Well,” he says. His voice is dry and flat and completely unsurprised. “Took you long enough.”