Chapter 37

37

T hey drive through the night, and in the middle of the night they stop at a single pump gas station.

Snow falls softly in the lone sodium light, and Delina hasn't seen the passing of headlamps in roughly an hour.

At some point, Gurlien had fallen asleep, the cat safely tucked inside his jacket, leaving Delina to her thoughts, so by the time they actually stop, her mind has well and truly soured on itself.

It's almost remarkable that it took so long for her mind to do so.

A small part of her had thought, had hoped, that since it had been so long, that the reason her mind would turn on itself was because she knew she was supposed to be powerful and it had been locked away.

But instead, as the hours inched along, the pit of despair in her gut just…widens.

The stop is just a single pump, a vending machine, and a single restroom.

"This is grim," Delina says aloud, as she parks the ratty little sedan under the light, as Chloe sketches her fingertips over the gas meter.

Gurlien jerks awake, and Chance gives a pitiful mew at the motion as Delina kicks the door open, standing up and stretching her back. Stretching, moving, anything to see if it'll knock loose the pit of awfulness inside of her.

Outside the tiny sedan, the world is…quiet. All sound muffled by the snow, no wind, no city noises.

No trees to rustle their branches, nothing but grass as far as she can see, now buried in the snow. No mountains, not even a rolling hill.

Just a barren emptiness.

"Eh, not that bad," Chloe says, somehow cheerful despite the still stinging cat scratches on her shoulder.

Maison steps out of the car, stretching his shoulders, face pale, before he narrows his eyes at Delina.

"What's wrong?" he asks, voice guarded, but still he bounces on his toes, as if he can move the inactivity out of himself.

He's not in any pain, according to the quick scan she throws at him.

"Nothing's wrong, I'm just wiring it to give us free gas," Chloe replies absentmindedly, tapping a fingertip against the screen.

"That can't be legal," Delina says, skirting around Maison's question as the snowflakes powder in her blonde hair, melting against her scalp.

"Oh, it's not," Chloe says brightly. "But there's no security camera here and I'm tricking the machine into thinking we're paying anyways."

Maison crosses his arms, leaning against the other car, raising an eyebrow at Delina.

Gurlien, by all accounts, just adjusts the cat in his arms, resting his head back against the headrest and falling back asleep.

Delina stretches again, pacing towards the vending machines, and Maison immediately stalks over to her.

"What's wrong?" he repeats, as she stares at the truly dire selection of chips available at an unmanned gas station in northern Minnesota.

She shrugs, one shoulder. She's talked to him at length about this, he knows how to help, but…

…she had hoped that this reaction of hers would be done with after getting access to the biotrap.

And after they just reconnected, after just earlier that day, she doesn't want to show him that.

"Was Gurlien just an asshole?" Maison asks, throwing a glance at the obviously asleep Gurlien in the car. "What did he say, I'll talk to him."

Delina just gestures to her head, like that could explain everything. "Eh, he's been asleep for a few hours."

Maison narrows his eyes further, leaning against the vending machine, before his gaze clears with understanding, which is almost worse.

"I'm fine," she preempts.

"Delly," he starts, and she bites back a snap at that, "we'll switch cars, you'll drive with me."

"What, Chloe has to do her passport making and Gurlien is…definitely asleep again," Delina says, before sighing. "It's just my brain being mean, it's no big deal."

"Sure," he says, "it isn't. But that doesn't mean we can't make it easier on you."

In the single yellow light, with the snowflakes settling in his soft brown hair, she finds herself a little bit without words. Like the silence has stolen them from her, like the chill and the flatness of the world robbed her.

He shifts, staring out at the blank black nothingness around them, as Chloe starts the pump working and begins to fill the two cars.

"I thought this would go away," Delina says, hushing her voice to match the falling snow. "That I wouldn't be this way now."

"What, depression?" he asks, almost skeptical. "You've had that for what, since you were twelve?"

"Yeah," Delina says, staring again at the vending machine, before feeding a dollar bill to get a singular bag of chips. "Thought, with the biotrap and actually, you know, knowing more about myself that it'd go away."

She can feel his eyes on her, heavy.

"Plenty of magicians are depressed," he says, rubbing the scruff that still hasn't materialized into a full beard yet. "Magic has…very little to do with brain chemistry, near as they can tell."

It's logical, but it still smarts against her hope. "I just thought…"

Her voice breaks, and she screws her face up.

"Hey," Maison says, resting an arm around her lower back and tugging her in so that her head rests against him. "It's fine."

She sighs.

"You didn't know, you couldn't have known, it's okay to be disappointed," he says, tucking his chin over her hair. "But you don't have to be alone."

The vending machine clunks out the bag of chips, and in the snow and the silence, she wrestles with her heart to believe him.

"You would think, with all the weird advancements you guys have, with the changing faces and the free gas and the bringing people back from the dead, that there'd be something already solved." Her voice sounds whiny, even to her own ears, and she shuts her eyes against the snow. "I think I've been too busy since this happened to actually be depressed."

He says nothing, just leaning his cheek against her hair, like he always did back in their condo in Prescott, and she buries her face into his shoulder, for that brief little bit of comfort.

Comfort she's allowed to have.

"Wait," she says, pulling away just enough to read his expression. "Was the weird bond thing how you were able to know when I was like this?"

He opens his mouth to answer, then closes it.

"And here I thought you were just a good boyfriend," she says dryly, and he has the gall to roll his eyes.

"I can't, you know, pick out ‘oh this one is depression' and ‘this mood is pissed about the weather' and ‘this one's because she forgot coffee,'" he says, and she squints at him. "Just general moods. I thought Gurlien was picking a fight with you the entire drive."

"Nope, just my brain," Delina replies, then breaks the contact long enough to grab the bag of chips. "I'm okay."

He huffs out something halfway between a sigh and a laugh, then follows her back to the car.