There wasn’t much to look at.

  Most of the southern end of the Cathedral Ward was just grassland. It wasn’t the flattest terrain, but after a while of looking out the window, it all looked the same.

  The 13-hour drive by RV took us right past the Desolation of Gar. Seeing the destroyed wall and skeletons of buildings took on a new meaning now that I knew that the place that had been my prison almost two months ago had belonged to my mother.

  I took a little solace in the fact that the city wasn’t going to stay destroyed for long. Celia Taray, one of the other teachers of the first years at the Cathedral where I was enrolled, had set up an outpost there. Her construction team was already working on getting the walls fixed and then they would bring in some families to help run the city.

  I had plans to go into the Dungeon there and look for my mother’s Mantle, but that was going to have to wait until after I graduated. While I knew that there were other Gods who had taken a Mantle of the Gods and hadn’t been found out yet, it was only a matter of time before Arlo Heema was found out, and then if he wasn’t able to protect his city, one of the other Gods would remove him.

  I wondered how Celia was keeping the fact that there were multiple Dungeon Portals in what had been Wurn under wraps. I had tried to bring it up with Trent when we’d left the island, but he’d simply told me that I didn’t need to worry about it until after I graduated.

  Ether Vowler poked me in the arm. “Thinking about your mom?”

  I wrapped my milky white arm around her. Our skin tones and hair color matched, though there was something purer about her color. I often thought that I looked ashy, but that was probably due to the black blood that ran through my veins instead of the shrinking amount of sleep I seemed to be getting lately. I knew that blood types displayed visual colors, which made it easy to know who could give a transfusion to someone else, but I wasn’t sure what properties the different types of blood held beyond that. Ether’s blood matched her skin and hair, which was probably why her skin looked so pure.

  I ran my fingers through her short, white hair and played with the soft curve on the top of her ear as I looked into her red eyes. Her lips parted in a smile, revealing jagged, shark-like teeth.

  I shrugged. “Yeah, and about other things.” I turned and looked out the window. We were sitting at the booth on the passenger side of the RV behind the side door. There weren’t many other places to sit. I looked around the RV at the rest of our crew.

  Ether’s mother, Miel Warray, was an older image of my wife. She was also the daughter of one of the Goddesses in the Ward and her level was in the seventies. She’d climbed on top of the RV and had been sitting up there since we’d left the Cathedral hours ago.

  Across the booth from us was Fray Harror. She’d recently learned that she was part of the Alard family, though she hadn’t tried to claim their name. Those who were Mundane born, which meant they were the child of someone without a Mantle and someone with a Mantle, took the name of the city they were from as their last name. I’d also learned that those, who one of the Noble families didn’t want to recognize or didn’t want to be a part of the line of succession for their companies or teams, were also given city names as a means to keep their leaders ‘strong’. In Fray’s case, she had the green skin that the Alards coveted, but couldn’t get into any of their heirs. Her father had been forced to leave her mother and ignore the family until recently, not that the attention had been very positive.

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  Fray absentmindedly twirled her finger through her long, brown hair. Her brown eyes scanned the screen in front of her as she read about the monsters in the Dungeons of Iver. While we had a short stop at Jyscor, Iver was the first place that we were going to have a longer stay, and she wanted to be ready for the monsters our teacher was going to have us fight there.

  Our teacher was on the other side of the RV laying down on the couch behind the driver. The man who was pretending to be my father was heralded as one of the best teachers in the world and the only Adventurer who was level seventy that wasn’t part of some Gods personal guard. We assumed that my father was the God Nevah, who was actually Trent’s grandfather, which was why I shared so many characteristics with him. Claiming me as his son afforded me a lot more protection than the God I’d never met. The Primus, the group of God killers, tried to keep the number of godsired down so that there weren’t large-scale wars all over the world. While there was usually a war going on somewhere, with the sheer number of Gods and their children, hundreds of new godsired were born each year, and there weren’t that many cities for them to rule. So once one of the godsired left the protection of their parent’s city, more often than not, the Primus would find them and kill them so that they wouldn’t start a war somewhere to try to take a city from one of the established Gods.

  In theory, it sounded like the Primus were doing the world a faver, but considering I was one of the people that they would hunt and that the Primus had killed Trent’s wife, I couldn’t bring myself to view them in a positive light. There had to be a better way; I just wasn’t sure what it was.

  The bubbly blonde driving the RV was like a little sister to me. Aelin Aurox was also in a relationship with Justia Publian, who had been bound to me as my High Priestess. Justia was also Fray’s cousin and other than her blue eyes and pointed ears, it was easy to recognize now that the two were related. Even without the green skin and brown hair, I’d wondered if they might have been half sisters before we learned who Fray’s father was.

  “Is it about Gesai and the others?” Ether prompted.

  I thought about Gesai, Oz, and Ren. We’d been so busy lately that I’d not had a chance to say goodbye to the other members of my harem before we’d left on this trip. I’d thought about typing out a message to them a couple times, but I couldn’t decide what I wanted it to say.

  “Yeah, them too.” I sighed. “And I haven’t heard from Rix either.”

  The whole reason we were on this trip was because Pixie Warray, Ether’s aunt who was our age, had touched a portal that had zapped her and Rix Aurox into a different Ward. Now they were on the run from the Primus and to try to keep the other Gods of the Fane Ward from catching on to what the two of them were, we were packaging this as a school trip, which was just a convenient way for two Tier Sevens to travel without having to do a lot of the paperwork needed for people that high level to travel between cities.

  “I’m sure everything is fine. You know how Rix is.” Ether pulled her feet onto the booth so she could snuggle up closer to me. “No news is probably good news.”

  I glanced over at my father. I knew he knew something. He kept tabs on too many things not to. I just hoped that Ether was right, because I had a feeling this trip wasn’t going to go the way we were expecting.

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