Chapter 6

6

T he day passes in a haze of information while they wait for the weather to break. Of hearing more about her possible boyfriends, about hearing more and more descriptions of magic. Of learning about all those mythical creatures her mother mentioned in her letter.

Of hearing the massive amounts of crimes her mother committed in the pretense of becoming powerful. It's almost dizzying.

Gurlien takes the letter and the will, examining it with a magnifying glass, and Chloe leafs through the book (and finds two hundred dollar bills that Delina missed) idly, like it's something she's familiar with.

"So this," Gurlien says, pointing at the faded place where the symbol that zapped Delina's thumb was, "is really just a buffer rune."

"You say that like I know what it is," Delina says, petting the cat when the cat deigns to curl up next to her.

The cat's name is Chance, apparently. Chloe claims it because it was chance that brought it to them, Gurlien says because the cabin had been a new chance for him.

Delina's not sure which one to believe, but Chance the cat still wanders everywhere like he owned the place, and considering how Chance was here first, she's not about to evict him.

Chloe says it lived in the cabin and hunted outside, but its glossy fur definitely suggests someone actually taking care of him.

"It's designed to slide between existing protections, nullifying them, providing a way in," Chloe replies, as if it's memorized. "I use them for breaking into things."

"Tombs, she means," Gurlien says, as if that makes it any better. "Chloe breaks into tombs."

"Archeology is fun," Chloe says when Delina raises a manicured eyebrow at her. "So many things we don't know about how people used to do magic, so many dead runes that have juuuust enough spark in them to be bitey."

This time, it's Gurlien and Delina exchanging a glance at how weird the third is.

"So it's just to get in between all the protections on me?" Delina ventures a guess, and they both nod in unison. "Cool."

"It's smart," Gurlien says, begrudging. "For someone who ruined so many lives, your mother was smart."

"Gurlien, she was a genius, no need to dance around it," Chloe says, turning another page in the book. "Just because she was immoral doesn't mean she wasn't the mind of a generation."

Delina, having heard enough stories of her mother's loose definition of morality by this point in the afternoon, weighs stopping being offended.

"She didn't care so much she had a daughter, she wanted a powerful minion," Gurlien says, and it hurts, of course, even though Delina had always heard her mother was disinterested in her. "I'm just surprised she didn't try again after you."

"I definitely touched Maison with this hand, so it's not perfect," Delina says, hoping to save the conversation.

"If he was paying attention he would have noticed," Chloe says, and Gurlien nods along. "Means he was complacent."

The complacency doesn't quite feel right, but Delina just stares up at the wooden beams of the ceiling and pets the cat, who purrs at her touch.

"What are the chances he was actually in love with me?" she asks, and for a few seconds the only sound is the drum of rain against the roof.

"It's possible," Chloe says gingerly.

"I'd say eight percent," Gurlien answers. "None of the three men, if it is one of them, are the type to be frivolous with work assignments."

That still hurts, so she narrows her eyes at the roof and the cat gives a small mrrr sound.

"Then why stay with me after my mom died?" Delina asks, finally, after letting the moment stretch on. "If the danger passed after she died, that makes no sense."

"It makes plenty sense, if you consider you as an actual danger and not just an extension of your mother's will," Gurlien says, and Chloe looks up from the book long enough to roll her eyes at him. "Seriously, whatever you do could be world ending."

"That's not likely," Chloe says, "what's more likely is you're just really strong with flexible morality, which is almost worse."

The idea that she could be powerful still makes Delina smile, even just a bit, though she squashes it down.

"But we won't know until the bio-trap," Gurlien points out, and Delina avoids looking back at the room. "I don't know why you're avoiding it."

"I'm not avoiding, I'm collecting information," Delina says, and Chloe coughs out a laugh into the book. "Wouldn't you want to when faced with life changing information?"

Gurlien gives her a flat look over his glasses. "I wasn't given the option."

By now, Delina's heard all about how he lost his magic, about how much vitriol he has about being kicked out, all that fun stuff. And Chloe feeling stifled, until she couldn't do anything she actually liked, deemed too dangerous or too protected.

"But it could be exciting," Chloe says, almost dreamily. "Finding out what's been missing your entire life."

And Delina has to swallow down that one, letting her head lean back towards the room, fear and hope warring in her heart.

What she's been missing.

"Give us some additional firepower when your boyfriend shows up to collect you," Gurlien says, almost clinically. "If you don't want to be just imprisoned by the College, having some power could be useful."

Right. Imprisonment.

"You don't think they'd train her?" Chloe asks, propping herself up. "I don't think they'd go directly to imprisonment."

"I do," Gurlien says, darkly. "They wanted to for me."

He and Chloe exchange a significant glance, one that leaves Delina wondering how much more she's missing.

"Yours was just an injury," Delina says, halfway to help out and halfway to make sure she's understanding the problem. "Why imprison you if it's just an injury and nothing you did wrong?"

Chloe finally looks up from the book, closing it with a click. "Because that's what the College does," she says, solemn. "Too many people are imprisoned for shit they didn't do, just dangers they present."

Gurlien scowls, then ducks his head. "And I was completely okay with it until it was aimed at me."

There's a lot of self-hate in that statement; self-hate that Delina doesn't have the inclination nor the knowledge to deconstruct, but Chloe reaches out and pats him on the shoulder.

"So avoid going to this College, right, got that," Delina says, breaking the moment. "The whole never letting my bio-mom meet me thing kinda convinced that."

"If I wasn't like this, I could do all sorts of diagnostics," Gurlien says, still full of frustration. "Figure out exactly what things they put on you, probably be able to trace who your boyfriend was by just the magical signature. But no. I'm useless."

"You're still knowledgeable," Chloe points out, "you're still knowledgeable and you're still useful."

Gurlien frowns, but it's obviously not aimed at Chloe. "Do you think Alette over at Frisse's compound would help?"

Delina eyes him. "She had a compound?"

"She had several," Gurlien says, which isn't better. "But Alette was trained by her, she might."

"But she hates you," Chloe reminds, and he rolls his eyes. "You did kinda almost destroy her world."

Gurlien shrugs, but doesn't dispute that. "I still talk to Axel, he could convince her."

"You don't talk to Axel, you two call each other and yell on the top of your lungs for twenty minutes, then you go get drunk," Chloe says, and it's an amusing image. "They're not gonna help."

The rain doesn't so much let up as much as the wind abruptly stops blowing, and both Chloe and Gurlien raise their heads at the same time.

"How long have you two been here?" Delina asks, unnerved.

"A few months," Chloe says, cagey. "Long enough to get the idea when the weather's good enough to go out."

She scrambles up, disappearing into one of the smaller bedrooms in the back of the cabin, and emerges holding two rain jackets.

"Here, yours is not good enough for the rain," Chloe says, and the jacket at least appears to be two sizes too small for Delina. "Here."

With a flick of her wrist, Chloe shakes it, and it grows in size.

Resisting the urge to back away, Delina cocks her head. "Did you just…"

"Yes, clothing is the most basic of alchemy tricks, she's just showing off," Gurlien shrugs on his own neon orange jacket, out of place over his otherwise nice clothing. "If you're an alchemist, she'll teach you how."

That, at least, seems to be the first practical example of magic since this whole thing happened. "Neat."

"It's really not," Gurlien says, before he holds the door open for them.

Outside, rain splashes into every available surface, in the puddles of the driveway and the eaves of the cabin. Leaves and pine needles litter the floor, and bright yellow birch leaves are plastered all over the roof of Delina's sad little sedan. The entire outside glistens with water, a sharp, fresh smell, sending a chill down her back.

She'll have to figure out how to get it back somehow. She only got a ten-day rental.

And here they were, about to go into town to solve one of the main mysteries in her life.

They get all the way to almost the highway before a felled tree stops them in their path.

"Really?" Gurlien says, as he coasts the car to a stop.

Chloe kicks open the door, her hair immediately plastering to her head in the downpour, but she pays it no mind.

"Can you move it?" Gurlien calls after her, definitely not getting out in the rain.

Delina can't blame him. The rain is still coming down in sheets and the temperature is what she would charitably declare as horrid.

"It's a whole ass tree, she can't move it," Delina tells him as they both watch Chloe poke around at the tree branches.

"She might," he responds, distracted. "Depends how long it's been down."

Delina eyes him, then shifts in the car so she can get a better view of Chloe.

The tree is gigantic, branches splayed down everywhere, feathering the road.

"She needs to do the matter shift," Gurlien continues, craning his neck to watch Chloe. "She's been practicing, if she tries, she could do it, but she's too insecure."

"Is this a magic thing?" Delina asks, and he nods, still distracted. "You're telling me that magic could make that tiny person move this tree?"

That gets him to glance at her. "Yes." He sighs, though, and rolls his eyes. "She gets weird with organic material. If it was stone, she could do it, but because it has a different cell structure, she has issues."

She stares at him, flat.

"Some alchemists have no problem with wood or plant matter, it's all in her head," Gurlien continues, like that's the part she's bumping up against. "She has problems with wooden doors sometimes, it's embarrassing."

Outside the car, getting completely soaked, Chloe kneels down on the asphalt, making a complex motion with her hand that's only partially visible in the sheets of rain.

Nothing happens.

Gurlien sighs again, then cranks down the window just enough. "Try shifting it towards petrification, that worked with the cacti," he yells, and Chloe stands long enough to cheerfully flip him off. "It's just a tree."

"I'm going to assume I can't do anything, right?" Delina asks as he rolls up the window, and he glances at her again. "Not without the spray paint in my room?"

"Do you want a lecture on sealed magics right now?" Gurlien asks, face completely serious. "Because to answer that, you'll need the lecture."

"I'll pass," Delina replies.

Outside the warm dryness, Chloe straightens, shifts her weight, and…

The entire air seems to snap around her, blurring and obscuring her, until the branch nearest to her crunches, then shatters into a million stone-like shards.

Delina flinches.

"Okay, good," Gurlien says, sarcastically. "Now she just has to do that for a whole tree. Just managed one branch."

In between one moment and the next, before she can tell herself that this is a bad idea, Delina throws her shoulder into the car door and strides out into the unpleasantness.

Rain immediately soaks through her shoes, squishing in her socks, but she stomps over to the stone branch.

Even despite the chill, Chloe's breathing hard, twin splotches of red on her cheeks.

"You just did that?" Delina asks, stooping down and picking up a chunk of stone.

It even has the same pattern of tree bark as all the spruce up here.

"It shouldn't be this hard," Chloe grumps, which is again, not the point. "I should be able to just transform it and sweep it out of the way."

Delina turns it over in her hand, brushing her thumb against it, and it snaps at her, staticky.

Chloe straightens, blinking through the rain sheeting down on them, her eyes wide. "That's just from the one rune?" she yells, and it's almost difficult to hear her through the weather.

"Yeah," Delina says, staring at the stone. The stone that, completely and inarguably, used to be relatively alive wood.

Chloe sighs, staring at the tree, then back at Delina. "There's no way I can do this entire thing," she says, like it's a moral failing and not incredibly fucking intense that she turned tree into stone right in front of them. "We can try to walk out there, but it's a twenty-minute walk from here to signal."

"Yeah, no," Delina says, peering at the stone.

Dimly, she's aware of Chloe stomping over and repeating the same to Gurlien, but this…this is even stranger. Despite the coffee machine, despite the pager, she's holding something in her hands that used to be something completely fucking different.

And Maison is some flavor of this fucked up too and never told her.

She kicks at one of stones near her foot, sending it skittering along the pavement.

The tree trunk towers above her, even on its side, branches splaying out every which way. It's a pine type tree, the type not common in Arizona but seemingly everywhere here, and even in the pouring rain it's fragrant.

The needles are still vividly green.

She stares at it, at yet another barrier in figuring things out. Yet another thing in the way of her actively figuring out who Maison actually is, what they need to do to prepare, everything.

"Fuck this," she says in the pouring rain, then walks back to the car.

She streams past the rune circle painted on the front porch, unlocking the door with the same key with the red ribbon, throwing her shoulder into the door until it tumbles open.

"How…" Gurlien mutters, before both he and Chloe sidestep it to get in the house.

Delina pays him no attention, instead dumping her uselessly soaked rain jacket on the bench next to the door, shucking off her shoes, before she whirls and faces them.

"I'm going to ask just one question, and I want you two to answer plainly," she says, and they both give her a wide-eyed look. "Am I in any danger if I step in that stupid circle of paint?"

"Bio-traps aren't stupid, they require an insane amount of knowledge and precision," Gurlien starts.

"Maybe," Chloe interrupts. "We don't know what it does, just that it's locked to one person or bloodline. What," she directs that to Gurlien, "that's what she asked."

"Could Lutes, or Fred, or whatever his name actually is lift that tree?" Delina asks, pointing back in the vague direction of that road.

"Devin probably couldn't," Gurlien answers. "It'd be child's play for Frederick, and Lutes could get around it."

"Devin could," Chloe argues. "He had no problems with barriers in school."

"Right," Delina says, ire seeping into her. "You two went to school with all these people."

She glowers at them as Gurlien uses an honest-to-god satellite phone to radio in for road clearing, and Delina's practically vibrating from the frustration of all of it.

Chloe throws herself on the couch, disrupting the cat who skitters under the armchair. She had been silent the entire drive back, her face as stormy as the weather outside.

Instead, Delina sits on the armchair, ignoring the meow of protest from underneath it when she does. "So what's the plan now?" she demands once Gurlien hangs up the clunky satellite phone. "I don't know what prep work you guys can even do, I don't know how to help, I barely know anything."

Gurlien has the gall to look at her as if she's the illogical one. "So we wait. Either the state troopers will clear the road and we can get out, or we wait for the weather to be nice enough to walk into town."

Neither of these sound particularly great at the moment, so Delina squeezes her eyes shut, desperately wishing she could actually affect something for once. Actually do something.

"If I step in that bio-trap," she starts, and both of them in front of her perk up, "what are the chances that I'll be able to do something to that tree?"

"Maybe!" Chloe says enthusiastically.

"About four percent," Gurlien replies, a bit more clinically, but he too is staring at her over his glasses. "Especially without training, it would require natural power of a specific type to do that right off the bat."

Delina glances at the closed door to the bedroom. "And…would Maison be able to tell I did that?"

"Depends on how in depth he was in your wards," Chloe says, only halfway muffled by the couch. "Freddy or Lutes, it would tell them immediately. Devin would get a call from someone else."

"I can't believe his name might be Lutes," Delina says, because her filter seems to have gone the way of her patience. "Lutes is an objectively stupid name."

"If it's Lutes, stepping into it would be a giant road flare," Gurlien continues, "he'd know where you were and how to get to you."

"Freddy, too," Chloe says, and Freddy might be a worse name. "Though that would be from the sleeping with him part, not the bio-trap."

"Frederick might just collect her in a few minutes," Gurlien responds.

With as much power as she can muster, she turns towards the room, and behind her Gurlien hisses out a breath.

"I don't want to just wait for someone to come and collect me," Delina says, and even she doesn't know the reason for her hesitation. Doesn't know the reason she's holding back. "I don't want to face someone who can lift a fucking tree with fucking magic."

"Chloe, get the first aid kit," Gurlien says behind her, his voice far away. "In case this goes bad."

That doesn't help the hesitation, and she can see the paint circle from where she stands, just the corner of it from the door.

"Do you think my mother would hurt me?" she murmurs, but even she doesn't know the answer to that. "She sent me here for a reason."

"Yes, and —"

Outside, a giant thud reverberates through the cabin, and they all flinch.

"What?" Delina asks, turning back towards the door. "How…"

The door shudders, then, with a crash, splinters.