Chapter 500 | Spite is Renewable

Chapter 500: 500 | Spite is Renewable

"Your legs are fine. You’re being dramatic."

"I’m being accurate. There’s a difference. He broke me. I’m suing."

Aurora hauled Addison upright and wrapped one arm around her waist, supporting Addison’s weight while Addison pretended to resist and actually leaned into it. They crossed the living room together, Aurora’s orange hair catching the lamplight and Addison’s black and purple disaster contrasting against it.

And then all five of us were standing in the kitchen in various states of undress and ruin, and Aurora said, "Get in here, you disaster," and pulled me forward by the arm, and Belle pressed against my left and Naomi pressed against my right and Aurora wrapped around my front with Addison sandwiched between us protesting loudly and profanely and not pulling away.

The graft sang. All four rings resonated at once, each a different frequency, each a different color on a crystal plate I’d never see but could feel in the space between my ribs. Silver-pink for Naomi, amber for Belle, green for Aurora, dark purple for Addison. And beyond them, fainter but present, the rings for Misato and Hikaru and the flickering signal of Blair Davenport’s three question marks.

Addison broke the silence first. "I hate all of you and this is disgusting and someone’s elbow is in my spleen."

"That’s my elbow," Naomi said. "Sorry."

"Don’t apologize. It gives him ideas."

"Too late," I said.

"I will kill you."

"After coffee jellies."

"Before. During. Concurrently."

Belle extracted herself from the pile with the composure of someone who had just invested forty-seven minutes in a penthouse and considered the returns satisfactory. She returned to the kitchen stool, picked up her phone, and began typing with both thumbs at a speed that suggested a legal document.

"I’m updating the roster," she said. "Addison Baxter. Status: property of Jace Monroe. Notes: hostile, lactose-productive, requires regular maintenance."

"I will end you, Fox."

"You can’t end me. You can’t even stand."

Addison lunged sideways and Aurora caught her before she fell. Belle did not look up from her phone.

Naomi tugged on my hand and led me to the couch, where she curled into my side and pulled a throw blanket over both of us. Her shell necklace pressed cool against my ribs. Her hair smelled like salt and jasmine from the beach that I’d built from her memories.

"Hey," she said quietly.

"Hey."

"Eighteen days."

"Eighteen days."

She turned her face into my shoulder and breathed. "That’s almost three weeks. We could go to Auntie’s boba on Sunday and you wouldn’t have to think about anything."

"I’d think about you."

"That’s different."

"Is it?"

"Shut up." But she pressed closer and her thumb traced the scar on my chest, the one the leopard left, the one that proved I’d jumped off a cliff for someone I didn’t like and survived anyway. The old man in his library would have appreciated the poetry. The practical part of my brain appreciated the eighteen days more.

Aurora settled into the armchair across from us, pulling Addison down into her lap despite protests that grew weaker with each repetition. Aurora ran her fingers through Addison’s tangled hair, picking out a bobby pin that had survived four hours of dimensional abuse, and Addison gradually stopped fighting and went still against Aurora’s chest.

"Jace," Aurora said.

I looked at her. Orange hair catching the lamplight. Green eyes that held a kind of knowing that went deeper than any System or graft or divine patron could measure. She’d built this evening from nothing. Positioned every piece. Waited for the exact right moment and then handed the wheel to someone she trusted to drive.

"Saturday," she said. "Tablecloths. Real menu. You promised."

"I promised."

"Wear the boots I bought you."

"I will."

She smiled, and the smile reached her eyes, and for once there was nothing behind it except the woman who’d spent nine thousand credits on clothes and organized a farm-themed party and said I love you on a desk in a fake classroom that smelled like chalk dust and heartbreak.

Belle finished typing and held up her phone to display a spreadsheet with four names, color-coded cells, and a column labeled SATISFACTION RATING (OUT OF 10). Each cell read 10. Except Belle’s, which read 11, with a footnote that said "Adjusted for emotional damages and penthouse quality."

"For the record," Belle said.

"There is no record."

"Jace, there is always a record. The record is the only thing between you and chaos. I am the record."

Addison spoke from Aurora’s lap, her voice muffled by orange hair. "Someone get me a lollipop or I’m summoning a scythe."

"You don’t have the mana for a scythe."

"I have the spite. Spite is renewable."

Naomi reached into her pocket and produced a cherry lollipop she’d apparently been carrying for exactly this emergency. She tossed it across the room. Addison caught it without lifting her head from Aurora’s chest, unwrapped it by touch alone, and stuck it in her mouth.

"Better," Addison mumbled around the candy. "Marginally."

I sat on the couch with the taste of four different women on my tongue, each one distinct, each one permanent. Vanilla and caramel for Naomi, butterscotch for Belle, strawberries and champagne for Aurora, dark chocolate and cayenne for Addison. The System could catalog these flavors as Silver-tier essence with point values and extraction rates. The old man in his impossible library could frame them as dimensional frequencies in a resonance field.

I just knew what they tasted like when they were happy.

The lamplight softened everything. The cow-print banner above the door read HAPPY YOU DIDN’T DIE, and beneath it four women who had started as targets and become something the System couldn’t quantify sat in various stages of exhaustion and contentment, and the death timer in my vision ticked over to eighteen days and seven hours, and outside the window the Pacific caught the last light of an ending that felt more like the beginning of something I didn’t have a name for yet.

Belle’s phone buzzed. She checked it.

"Misato says training at six." Belle looked at me over the screen. "She also says, and I quote, ’Tell Monroe I know what he’s doing and his cardio better not suffer.’"

"Tell Misato my cardio has never been better."

"I’m telling her you said that. She’s going to double your laps."

"Worth it."

Addison pulled the lollipop out of her mouth and pointed it at me like a weapon. "Bring me my coffee jellies."

"I know."

She put the candy back in her mouth and settled deeper against Aurora’s chest, and something soft moved behind those brown eyes before the violet contacts shifted back into place and the armor reassembled itself one piece at a time.

I closed my eyes. The graft hummed. Eighteen days stretched ahead like a road I could actually see the end of for once, and at the end of it stood a weapon being built in Santa Barbara by a copper-haired scientist who kept dead birds in jars, and a professor who drove a car named Consequence, and a world full of gates pushing harder every year against a line that fewer and fewer people could hold.

But that was tomorrow’s problem. Tonight I had four rings and a full vault and a party that tasted like champagne and survival and the specific sound Addison Baxter made when you told her she was beautiful and she believed you for the first time.

Naomi’s hand found mine under the blanket. She squeezed once. The shell necklace pressed against my ribs like a signature on a contract neither of us had ever written down.

"Hey, Jace?"

"Yeah?"

"Don’t snore."

"I’ll do my best."