Chapter 33

33

T hey have his mother call three more times that morning, but she never calls him by the name Maison, and they never deviate from Chloe's British accent.

It's awful and Maison's face twists each time hearing her voice, and Gurlien gets more and more frantic. He's packed three bags, all neatly placed by the plastic front door, with a tote bag of books leaning against them.

Chloe's just packed her backpack.

They had all agreed that showing activity in the cabin during the day would be bad, but that hasn't made them any more likely to relax anytime soon, and Gurlien keeps on twitching the floral curtains open to peek out at them.

Instead, all four of them are trapped in there together, and it's not helping anything.

"I still think we should draw up the schematics of where she's hidden," Delina drawls. "There has to be a way in there."

"There's not," Gurlien replies, screwing up his face in frustration at her. "Tell her there's not."

"There's not…that we know of," Maison replies, and Gurlien makes a crude gesture at him, almost upsetting the cat sitting on him. "She's probably not even at the Atlanta base anymore."

"What, do you think they'd take her to LA or to the Toronto location?" Gurlien replies, sarcastic. "Because all of those are so easy to break into."

Chloe makes a noise, a small noise, but it's enough to draw everyone's attention, and the mint box in her hand turns into a blob of plastic once more.

"Yes?" Delina asks, and Chloe blinks up at her, then over at Maison.

"They have a demon center at the Toronto location," she says, small. "A lot of their research is there, a lot of demon defenses are there."

Silence descends over the room, and Delina twists, breathless, to look at Maison.

His expression is as if stone.

"They had stasis holding cells designed to keep full demons at bay," Chloe continues, and she hunches her shoulders in on herself. "And everything in between."

"Yes, that's where Dr. Frisse stole the idea of the Terese project," Gurlien says, as if he's trying to be dismissive but failing. "They have a thousand failed vectors of that experiment in there, it's ghastly."

"If I was trying to keep a Half Demon out of somewhere, I'd go there," Chloe says, but she's frowning at the very idea of it, and Delina starkly remembers the scars on her ribs. "Or trap a necromancer."

Gurlien sits up, jolting the cat from its perch. "Frisse has three condos in that city, they only know about two of them."

Maison's face twitches. "That's a lot of conjecture," he warns, but there's a small light of something approaching hope in his eyes.

"I'm gonna…I'm gonna make something," Chloe declares, then throws a look at Gurlien. "The extra laptop, I need it."

"Are you going to wreck it?" Gurlien asks, but he's standing, already in motion.

"Maison, with your permission, can I make a tracker for the satellite phone?" Chloe asks quietly. "It should just be on our side, but there is a chance they'll be able to tell."

Maison freezes.

"I want to confirm at least the zip code they're calling from," Chloe continues, "that could help us with the location."

Slowly, Maison nods, as Gurlien comes back with the laptop.

"How big of a chance?" Delina asks, standing and stretching her legs. "You said there's a chance, how big of one?"

"If she does this correctly, about point seven percent," Gurlien says, clattering the laptop onto the table. It's an old laptop, bigger than most of Delina's college textbooks, and she'd be shocked if it could actually connect to the internet anymore.

Delina paces into the kitchen, crossing her arms, but Maison's still. Pale.

"How often do you not do this correctly?" Delina asks, if Maison isn't going to.

"Well, I've never done this particular conversion," Chloe replies, turning over the laptop and taking a screwdriver—that was just a mechanical pencil, Delina belatedly notices—to the underside of it. "But electronic conversions are mostly all the same and mostly deal in intent. I just need to figure out exactly how to do it."

She pops the casing off, showcasing the innards of the laptop, and despite occasionally having to function as IT for a group of older coworkers who can't fix printers, it's over Delina's head as well.

"Take your time," Gurlien mutters, staring hard at the laptop as well. "Remember, the closer to use, the better."

"Right," Chloe says, and they both bend their heads over the laptop, and she converts a fork to another screwdriver with just a twist of her fingers.

It takes Delina a few seconds to notice, but somewhere in that mess Maison has lifted his gaze to her, and held it, somehow even more terrified than he was before.

If he hasn't ever had a chance to even allow himself to think about getting his mother out, this must be a thorny knot of emotions and confusion.

"We're going to figure something out," Delina informs him, quietly, pacing to stand next to him. "Even if this isn't it, we'll do something."

Gurlien briefly glances up at them, then back to helping Chloe dissect the old laptop.

Maison rubs his face. "It's a bit hard to believe."

"This is just information gathering," Gurlien says, still bent over the laptop. "This isn't a for sure thing, this isn't even a plan. This is just us getting the info we might need to make one."

It's a surprisingly adept thing to say, and Maison breathes out, closing his eyes just long enough for the cat to jump on his lap and meow loudly.

"This also gives us a way to evaluate if we truly need to split and run," Gurlien continues. "So it's not just helping you, if you're going to be weird about that."

"Thanks," Maison says, probably aiming for sarcasm but missing it completely.

"Can you use parts from that to scour for drones or something?" Delina asks, and they all blink up at her. "It'll help us know if we're truly under surveillance or if it's just the phone."

Chloe sets aside a chunk of plastic that may or may not have been a graphics card at that.

"This will take a few hours," she warns, and there's some tension along her face, tension that's not usually there. "I'm slow with electronics, but I'll get there."

"I don't know why, but that makes sense," Delina says, and gets a wan smile in return. "Did my mother leave behind binoculars?"

Turns out she did, deep in the basement, and Delina's skin crawls at the sensation of the dead bug, but she strides past it, holding her head high, then enlists Maison's help to climb in the attic.

"Even we've never been up there," Gurlien calls out, still working with the laptop. "No guarantee it's at all safe."

By the look of the outside, it'll be small, but a few windows still peek out to the setting sun outside. If the cabin had been normal, Delina would have pegged it as the sort of attic that someone stores Christmas decorations and luggage in.

"You mean they have a tomb breaker and they never tried to go into the attic?" Delina whispers to Maison as they drag a chair over for easier access.

"It's not locked," Maison points out, his face still pale. "No interest if it's not locked, it's not climate sealed so there's no way Dr. Frisse would store research, there's no obvious magical trace of anything."

He stands on the stool, testing the seal of the hole in the ceiling door, exactly like he did the times they helped her dad decorate.

He had always been so excited to do so, and now she knows it's because he didn't have that in his childhood.

The door pops open easily, and a small rain of paint dust falls into Maison's hair, and he blinks at her, at the almost comedy of the moment, before he climbs off the chair and offers her a boost up.

"No, you're not waiting in the sitting room as they try to figure that out," Delina says, and the corners of his lips tip upwards. "Come up here and help me try to spy on any mysterious drones."

"You would be a horrible spy," Maison says, boosting her up so she can push herself into the attic.

It's a tiny room, barely tall enough for her to stand, and even more of the floral curtains hang over the small window. Sheets are thrown over a pile of things, and dust covers those.

It smells fresher than most attics, but that's not difficult to do.

Behind her, Maison climbs up, then blinks wildly at the small room.

"This may be the most normal room in this cabin," Delina says as he pulls himself in.

"Nothing dead under those sheets?" he asks, and she shakes her head. "Though you'd probably have complained about that already if there was."

"Absolutely," Delina replies, before she twitches the curtains aside.

In the attic, they're not quite above the trees, but the vantage point is excellent. With the binoculars, she can see all the way down the winding gravel driveway, to the proper street, and even the spot where the tree had fallen, now fully dusted with snow.

"Neat," Delina says, impressed, before handing the binoculars to Maison. "Take a look."

He doesn't take them, instead frowning at one of the piles of things right next to the window, before he whips off the sheet in another cloud of dust.

Revealing a sniper rifle and a spotting scope, helpfully set up to be pointed directly out the window. The rifle gleams, all sleek metal and hard plastics, and it still smells a bit of oil.

"Of course," Delina comments, out of a lack of anything else to say. "That's logical for my mom to have."

"Congrats, you inherited a sniper's nest," Maison says, and there's a little more color in his face, though his brows are furrowed. "She could literally strike people with magic, why would she need a sniper rifle?"

"Greater distance?" Delina offers, and he shrugs idly, like that doesn't quite make sense in the context. "Maybe it came with the place?"

"Doubt it," Maison says, skirting around the rather impressive rifle and adjusting the scope instead. "That's…illegal in a lot of states. Probably Washington, too. Definitely in Canada." He pokes the edge of the rifle, like he could determine something from it by touch, and his eyes gleam red for a split second. "She maintained it, too. Last touched it about a year and two months ago."

Which would've been right before her mother died. Somewhere in the middle of the Terese disaster, somewhere between apparently running around all of Canada and finding another Necromancer and getting dead, her mother found the time to come up to the cabin and oil the gun.

"Right," Delina replies, casting a critical eye to the rest of the room. The gun definitely adds more questions than it answers.

Below them, in the sitting room, the satellite phone rings again, and Maison flinches, his shoulders locking up.

They don't answer it this time, just letting the number ring out.

"Well, this'll be useful in defending this, I bet," Delina says, forcefully, and his eyes swing up to her face. "If we get, I dunno, ambushed or something."

"If we get ambushed, you're hiding in the basement," he replies automatically.

"I can almost guarantee I'm a better shot than Gurlien," she says, pitching her voice a little louder in case he can hear her, and it gets another hint of a smile from Maison, as the phone finally stops ringing. "We'll figure this out, don't concentrate on the phone."

It's far easier said than done, but he turns his attention back to the scope, pointing it out the window, adjusting it, and she lets him. It's a good distraction, at least something he could do with his hands.

If the kitchen table below wasn't covered in laptop guts, she'd tell him to paint.

"Got it," Maison says, still splayed out with the scope. "Drone, other side of the confusion spell."

The hair on the back of Delina's neck prickles. "Can you shoot it down with this thing?"

He gives her the barest of glances. "I don't think I'm that good of a shot." He fiddles with something on the scope, narrowing it in. "They're definitely watching, we'll have to wait for nighttime to leave."

Instead of reacting, Delina glances to the other small window, facing the back of the property, and the large sheet covered pile in between her and it.

Climbing over it without knowing what it is sounds like a horrific idea, so she tugs off the top of the sheet.

Revealing a crib.

Delina stills, her breath catching in her throat.

It's painted a soft pink, though the paint has peeled and chipped, and her name is carved into the headboard. There's a blanket, color faded by time, with a ribbon edging, neatly folded on the bottom, and a single stuffed animal in the corner.

"What?" Maison asks, glancing up from the scope, then making a small sound at the back of his throat. "Oh."

The crib would only hold a newborn, it's so tiny.

And it's so obviously unused, despite the passage of time.

Delina traces a fingertip over her name. It's carved by hand, with a chisel, with a care and skill that far outpaces any woodworking skill her own father had.

Maison reaches a hand out to her, but she doesn't move.

There's so much care in this little crib, that her heart aches. It's deliberate, there's no way in interpreting it as something to be thrown away as a casual motion.

"Wow," Maison murmurs behind her, his hand settling on the small of her back, gentle, before he too touches the carving of her name. "This wasn't done by magic."

She hadn't even thought that, but her breath hitches again, and with a quickness she didn't know she had in her bones, flips off the rest of the sheet in front of her.

There's a small pink table, carved for a toddler, with flowers painted on the edges. A tiny bookcase, a car seat, and a photo album.

Maison and her glance at each other just long enough for her to glimpse the seriousness in his gaze, before she sits, cross legged on the floor of the attic, pulling the photo album towards her.

The spotting scope forgotten, Maison folds himself next to her, as her hands shake to open it.

It's incongruently frilly, in the way that was popular when Delina was born, with pastel pink fabric and lace on the front, and her name stitched on.

The first picture is of her father, smiling widely, standing next to a largely pregnant woman, who's jawline echoes Delina's own, and who's eyebrows match hers.

Her mother.

She has darker hair than Delina, and the makeup is a couple decades old, but her blue eyes are bright and her cheeks are round from grinning. She holds a hand over the belly, protective, and her other hand holding Delina's father's shoulder.

It's a casual portrait, the type taken by a friend at an event, and the only photo Delina's ever seen of her.

"Oh my god," Delina murmurs, and Maison rubs between her shoulder blades.

The next picture was of the two of them at the same event, laughing, the picture blurry, but her dad's scrunched up face is as familiar as they come.

The next is at a baby shower, pink balloons everywhere, and her mother glowing, a large group of friends crowded behind her, everyone beaming.

In the background, grinning just as proudly, is Korhonen, wearing an outdated suit and having much more hair.

"Oh, I know them," Maison says, pointing at another couple, all decked out in early nineties finery, and their faces are completely unfamiliar. "Two demonologists, they wanted to train me to be an assassin."

"You'd be a terrible assassin," Delina replies automatically, unthinking.

"That was the conclusion they came to," Maison says, then points to another person, younger than the rest, also smiling. "That was my third-grade teacher, I think."

"Oh my god," Delina says, but her eyes keep on straying back to her mother. "These were literally her work friends before…"

Before whatever experiment it was that she had put on Delina. Before whatever sanctions they put on her, before she scared everyone. Before whatever insanity she had gone through.

The man who literally tried to kill Delina attended her baby shower before she was born.

And now he was dead at her hands.

Swallowing another lump, Delina turns the page.

There, a picture of her mother lying on a hospital bed in a medical gown, her hair messed up, holding a sleeping newborn to her chest. Underneath, written in pen, the words ‘Delina Joyanna Frisse, born at 8:49 AM.'

There's a handcuff on her mother's wrist, locking her to the bed.

Baby Delina was tiny, red-faced in her sleep, smaller than she should be.

The oldest photo of her Delina can remember is when she's much bigger, healthy and chubby, in her dad's arms.

Delina rubs her face. After all the emotions of the day, after the phone calls and the breakdown sitting on the floor with Maison, everything is just…wrung out. There should be more feelings, there should be more sensations welling up inside of her, but instead she's just…tired.

"Oh, you were so small," Maison whispers. Somewhere around year three of dating, her father had shown him all of the baby pictures they had just to embarrass her, and all of them were far healthier.

"I guess I really do look like my bio-mom," Delina says, though the words don't seem real. "People keep saying that."

She turns the page, the handcuffs sticking in her mind.

There's a badly scanned copy of Delina's first grade class photo, with Delina circled, then a copy of her Junior High Graduation picture where she's grimacing around braces while shaking her principal's hand. None of them are the original, she must've pulled them from somewhere, been passed them.

There's a cutout newspaper article of high school Delina competing in the Model EU, her frustration of it clear even in the black and white photo. There's a pristine copy of her prom photo, where she went with a bunch of her friends and thought that she looked good in neon orange for a dress.

All little bits of her life, hoarded into this one photo book.

Maison doesn't say anything, just keeps his hand in between her shoulder blades. He's had a hard day too, should be much more emotional, but here he is, quietly supportive, as they sit on the floor of the attic.

"There's no way they knew about this book, did they?" Delina asks, and he shakes his head. "They told me she had no interest in me. My whole life."

He swallows, then gestures down at the picture from her prom. "I'd say she did."

Delina squeezes her eyes shut, briefly, against the muted light of the windows, then to him, half desperate. "Do you want to go downstairs? I can look at this later, I don't need to right now, now when we're trying to save your mother, it's insensitive…"

He tucks a strand of her hair behind her ear, tender. "You mean go downstairs and hear the phone ring over and over again that has my mom telling me in coded language to not come save her when that's exactly what we're trying to do?" he asks, which is fair, though his voice trembles a bit. "And not be able to do anything until Chloe, an alchemist who specializes in ancient equipment and stone locks, tries to create a phone number tracker on a satellite phone from a laptop that hasn't worked in probably five years?"

"That's unfair," Delina protests, but he shakes his head. "At least it's inorganic?"

"I guess," he says, before leaning against her, just a solid pressure against her back, and she takes a brief moment to check his breathing, his lungs working as they should, his heart sending electrical signals to his brain, everything fine. "So I can be up here and possibly uncover more sniper nests and look at embarrassing pictures of your childhood, and that sounds far better."

She huffs out a wet laugh, and she's not crying, not exactly, and he offers her one of his heartbreaking smiles, then turns the page for her.

To three mugshots of young men, one of them Maison, five years ago.

"Um," Delina says, peering at them. Maison's obviously uncomfortable in them, looking away from the camera, and his hair is short, how he kept it for the first month of knowing each other.

Underneath his picture reads ‘Frederick, half-demon.'

The other two young men are similar in type to him, and underneath theirs reads ‘Lutes, forgery specialist' and ‘Devin, trapper.'

Delina raises an eyebrow up at Maison, and the expression he wears now mirrors the one in the pic. "Is this my mom's research on possible boyfriends for me?"

"Looks like it," he replies, shifting. "Really? They wanted to send Lutes to you? You would've hated him, absolutely hated him. He was a snobby asshole."

Lutes does in fact look like he'd sneer at drinking beer in a rural brewery.

"Devin at least is good looking, but he would've bored you inside of a year," Maison continues, like she actually had any say in this, like she was the one considering them. "But Lutes? No way."

"Before you found me, we tried to get into the city for cell connection, so I could pull up my Facebook," Delina tells him, and it's so long ago, after everything else that happened. "So they would know which one you were, because they didn't know your code name and they wanted to know how to defend this cabin." She gestures down at the book. "All they'd have to do is look at this book sometime in the year or so they've been here and they would've known."

He stares at her for a long second, then shakes his head. "Oh my god."

"Literally could've avoided the whole tree thing, and I was about to go into the trap when you got there. You would've missed us completely, we would have come back to find you in the demon trap and my door wrecked."

"I would've been able to tell you weren't there," he protests, but his eyes are crinkling up a bit, like he gets the joke as well. "Good lord, you would've passed me in the car on the street."

"That day would've gone differently," she says, then turns the page.

It's a picture, obviously printed on flimsy paper from her Facebook page years ago, of the two of them. His arms around her, his smile cheesy, and she's pressing a kiss to his cheek for the camera. It was right after they graduated and had gone on a trip to Colorado together, and they had both hiked too much and eaten way too much barbecue before crashing at a hotel and doing nothing but sleep for a few days.

And it's the last page in the book, the rest blank, as if her mother had kept on intending to fill it with more pictures from afar for the rest of Delina's life.

It's so few pictures it's heartbreaking. So many obviously received in secret, hidden in the attic of this cabin, where the sniper's nest would distract.

Delina closes the book as softly as she can, gentle with the pink frilly cloth covering, and sits there.

"Wow," Maison says, voice hushed in the still attic air, and he leans against her side, a solid pressure.

"Yeah," Delina replies, and there are tears, close by, but not quite to her eyes yet. "My dad didn't have any pictures of her."

Teenage Delina had asked for one, in the midst of a depression spiral fueled by school stress and a lack of friends, but her dad had none. Not even one secreted away, like he had the pager.

"I met her, once," Maison starts, and she twists to glance at him. "Before…before I knew you. I was sixteen, and she wanted to survey all the ‘viable demon projects.'" He grimaces, and she gets why he didn't tell her earlier. "She wasn't terribly impressed with me, as a project goes."

"From what I know, that's probably a good thing," Delina replies, but there's still so much emotion, so many things in her chest that she cannot give name to. "What was she like?"

He visibly weighs his words. "Cold," he says, finally, and it's so different from the pictures in the book on her lap. "You could just…tell that she wasn't satisfied with her life, that she wanted to be in control of more."

It's a somber view of someone who died at the hand of one of her experiments.

"At the time, I was…" Maison shrugs, obviously uncomfortable. "Temperamental? Not the best at control?"

"You were sixteen," Delina says flatly.

"And everyone thought that by then I would be teleporting around the globe but my grip on demon magic is faint at best," Maison says, before glancing back up out the window, as if a task would make him feel better. "It wasn't a great time for me to try to impress someone, that's for sure."

"I wasn't impressing anyone at sixteen, I can assure you that," Delina says, before her hand smoothes over the fabric book again. "I can't believe she made this. I can't believe she kept this."

Maison doesn't look at her. Instead, he's looking at the crib, at the side table, at the room at large.

"She…she really wanted me."

There's a moment of quiet, before Maison wraps his arms around her, pulling her into a hug, and she presses her face against his chest.

When this is all over, when everything's figured out and she's settled, she's going to cry. She can feel it, can feel the pressure, detached from herself, in the background. It's not immediate, it might not even be until she fully relaxes again, but it'll happen and it'll be an ugly cry.

After they figure out if they need to hide away, after they rescue Maison's mom, after she figures out some place to live and exist outside of the College's control. After they help out Chloe and Gurlien, after they assure everyone's safety. After the threat to her life, after they figure out how she can get a grasp of her powers without calling someone down on them.

After everything.

"If we have to run from this cabin, I'm going to take this book," she says, and feels him nod against her.

"I wish I could teleport," Maison says, and she pulls back enough to raise an eyebrow at him. "It's…the basics of demon magic, and one that's always been locked to me. But…it'd be damn useful right now."

She cracks a smile at him, at the ridiculousness of the sentence, at how wistful it is and how utterly true that it would be incredibly useful at the moment. "There's still the dead bug in the basement if you really want to," she informs him, and he rolls his eyes.

The emotions recede, somewhere back into manageable levels, until she's able to breathe without the knot in her chest.

Before the phone downstairs rings again.

This time, there's a pop on their end on the phone, and Maison stiffens again, pulling away, his eyes ablaze in red.

"Wha—" Delina starts, before Maison puts a finger up to his lips, gesturing for her to be quiet.

Another click and Maison slowly unfolds himself, silently opening the attic door once more.

Same woman's voice. "Frederick?"

Chloe hisses through her teeth. "Ma'am, do you need us to call the police?" Still, even with her words, there's a note of triumph in her voice. "If they're going to hurt you, I'm sure the police can help."

"They can't get to me," the woman says, and for the first time, something steely enters her voice, like the pitiful pleading is an act. "Tell me where my son is."

"I don't know any Fredericks," Chloe says, and Maison quietly drops himself from the attic, landing lightly on his toes. "Sorry, ma'am."

This time, the line goes dead on their end.

Maison reaches up to help Delina down, just in time to see Chloe leaning back, her eyes alight.

"I got it," she says, then swallows. "Toronto."

Gurlien twists to glance at their packed belongings, then back at the table, at the gutted laptop, then up at Chloe. "See, knew you could do that. The electronics didn't have a chance against you."

Maison exhales, then shakes out his hands, and Delina catches a glimpse of red in his eyes.

Chloe scrubs her hand through her hair, and she's sweaty. "That fucking sucked."

"Any surveillance?" Gurlien asks, and Maison nods his head. "The demon trap still there?"

Delina thinks of the burning, warping trap of red through the white snow. "Still pretty vivid."

"If we're going to leave, it should be tonight," Maison says, and despite the command in his voice, his jaw tightens and he shakes his head, like he can't believe what he's saying. "Are we really thinking about doing this?"

"Yes," Delina interrupts, almost before he's finished talking.

Gurlien and Chloe look at each other, having another one of their long conversations with just glances.

"It'll take more planning," Chloe says, finally, her face twisted. "I know it like the back of my hand, I can get us through most of the traps."

"And I'll be able to identify and explain the ones you don't know," Gurlien says, before he sighs. "Yeah, fuck them. Let's figure out how to do this."