Chapter 10

10

G etting to the mine is the easiest part of all of this. Chloe drives the rickety jeep onto the rocky dry riverbed, following the only set of tire marks embedded in long dried mud. It leads them to a rickety wooden door over a dark damp cave, a few piles of unused mining equipment off to the side, long rusted and abraded away by the wind.

Chloe squints at the entrance, jerking on the parking break with way more effort than it should take, and the very appearance wavers.

“Illusion spell, right?” Chloe asks, and the Wight nods, absolutely impassive in the face of dust. “Human made, looks like a year out from any maintenance, security standard, all that jazz?”

“Is there a security standard?”

“Almost all from the college have the same three components,” Chloe says, throwing her elbow into the door and all but tumbling out onto the pebbles that made up the impromptu parking lot. “Like…see.”

She reaches into the edge of the spell, testing it, and it’s hilariously weak, as if made from a light cotton webbing rather than anything actually secure.

Easy to break.

So she twists her hand in it, shattering the spell, and it unspools outward, transforming the doorstep into a fallout shelter style vault door, complete with a circular locking mechanism.

“So it’s that easy for you?” The Wight scorns, scuffing her toe at the edge of the clean concrete step. “Just grab spells and break them?”

“The standard ones,” Chloe says, wiping off her hands on the pair of alchemied pants. “That,” she jerks her chin at the door, “is gonna be the fun part.”

The Wight glances at the door. “This door has been impassive to us for three decades. You don’t know what you’re going to find beyond that.”

“Excellent,” Chloe replies, then approaches the vault door. “What do you think, 24 bolts? Glass lock protector?”

“What?” the Wight asks, and Chloe’s really good at telling when she’s being annoying, but so close to the next clue and so close to her research makes her heart pound.

“How many people do you think held those keys?”

Chloe approaches. Despite the illusion spell and all the environmental protections those usually allow, there’s a fine layer of dust on the mechanisms, with only a few fingerprints to mar it.

So it’s not commonly used.

And a demon would be able to just teleport inside of it without any issue.

“Eight,” the Wight answers simply. “College lead, three project managers, four assistants.”

“That is far too many,” Chloe murmurs, splaying out her fingers above the metal of the vault door, millimeters from touching it. It buzzes against her skin.

Protected against brute forcing it, any impact energy would reflect back onto the importer in a focalized point, impaling most.

That’s a neat one.

“Doors like this, there should be only one key. Maybe two,” Chloe continues, letting her skin skim along the metal, sun-warmed despite the winter. “It’s almost cruel to have more than that.”

“I know of five Wights who disappeared beyond those doors, kicking and screaming,” the Wight says, and a chill goes up Chloe’s arms. “I know they’re no longer alive, but I don’t know what’s past that door.”

And her research is right behind it.

Chloe has two ways to go about this, two methods of breaking into doors like this.

The easy conventional way is to alchemy a key. Doors like this generally have keys that set off interlocking pins that control the rods, and a millimeter off of what it’s supposed to be would ruin the door and ruin the possibility of opening it.

Chloe would put money that they have protections against that. Almost any alchemist could make that, and if they had training they could consistently get close, if nothing else. It would be the first option most people would go to, and the most easy to guard against.

The other way would be to change the very matter of the locking bolts.

It’s fundamentally risky, of course. Changing matter—especially thousands of pounds of matter that these doors usually are—tends to drain the caster, burn them out, rendering them useless. Most can’t handle massive amounts of metal or inert materials, preferring to pick something at least a little bit malleable if they have to, finding themselves intimidated by the rigid molecular structure.

Chloe’s not most.

“See, this is one of the places the college went wrong with me,” Chloe says, and she rarely gets a chance to monologue like this to someone new, so she takes it with glee. “They made me into a tomb breaker, then left all these secure tombs all over the world.”

“Get out of this alive, and I will have many more for you to break into,” the Wight mutters, dark. “More bases where my kind is kept, more imprisonments. Survive this trap, and you will be useful.”

“Okay?” Chloe replies, nervy.

“That is what I ask for you in repayment,” the Wight continues, and Chloe stills. She really hasn’t had enough interactions with Wights to know the weight of that sentence. “I got you here, I got you that paper, you finish with this quest and I will have more.”

Chloe shivers, and the Wight tosses a glare at the door, then…disappears. Leaving Chloe alone.

“Ooookay,” Chloe whispers, but she rests her palm against the metal and lets her eyes flutter shut.

The molecular structure of metal always appealed to her instead. She can count on it, impurities are more rare, the crystalline straight lines easier for her mind to comprehend. No need to worry about a spare oxygen molecule or random bit of cellular organism left in it like someone would for wood or fossils.

This one is a stainless-steel alloy, tied in with a trace of gold, most likely to foil a spellweaver. Piston bolts are socketed into their locks, each one roughly two pounds, resting against a weight sensor.

So she needs something heavy, something to balance, but malleable. And all at the same time—if one moves when the others do not, then the entire thing collapses.

She lets her hand flutter to her pocket, where the compass lays still, before she dives her mind into the metal structure and…changes it.

Immediately, the door wavers in front of her, wheezing like a bagpipe being tossed around. It deflates, as if she could push it inwards, before the pistons snap up, soft as clay but twice as heavy.

The handle spins, then clicks open, the hinges creaking outwards, and Chloe tugs it the rest of the way until it props open, the bolts limp in the open air.

“And that’s why they call me tomb breaker,” she whispers to the empty desert.

Chloe peers over the doorway, but there’s no warded traps. As if the creators of the place honestly thought a big door was going to be enough for them.

Tapping the battery into another pen light, she flashes it up at the ceiling, then at the floor and walls around.

No magical wards, no protections, nothing.

There’s the door that could swing shut, could trap her inside without any light or air, but she nudges the hinges with her toe, freezing it open, transforming the hinge into a static object, a manual physical block from it closing.

A less creative—less paranoid—magician would just magic it open. Put a spell or a ward to prevent it from swinging shut. Something obvious and something that would show the entire world someone had been there.

Always better to give something a physical barrier rather than magical. Magical could be twisted away, reversed with just a touch.

A stick in a door hinge will keep it open until removed.

And then, almost out of the corner of her eye, there’s the faint hint of demon magic, twisting in the air, footsteps faint in the dust of the floor.

And four paces in, on Chloe’s neon orange scarf, is her gun.

No other piece of equipment—her bag must be beyond the twist and turn in the mine wall —just the gun and her scarf. The scarf is neatly folded, creases pressed, and the gun shines in the beam of her flashlight.

That. That’s a trap.

She steps over the threshold, sticking to the edge of the antechamber, keeping her eyes on the gun.

It’s her scarf, the one she kept on her after all those years, obviously cleaned of any dust and blood.

And there has to be a trap on it. Has to. Some lure, some way of tracking her, something that’ll happen if she grapples for it. It’s too neat, it’s too convenient, it’s too useful.

Even from afar, she can tell her enchantments are still in place, untouched. It would still shoot through demons, shoot through shields, everything.

And it has to be a trap.

Swallowing hard, Chloe pulls out her phone, and even where she had signal just a few steps outside, there’s nothing.

Her friends would tell her it’s a trap as well.

So Chloe skirts around the gun, the weapon, towards the back wall, swinging the penlight over it.

It’s perfectly flattened sandstone rock, sleekly carved to a sheen with such precision that a spellweaver must’ve labored over it for ages, but a thin seam collects dust, like they couldn’t get everything to perfection.

A power tool and some time could’ve gotten it there.

Instead of scoffing, she just grips her pocketknife, running her fingers down the seam in the wall. Sandstone isn’t meant to be this polished, it damages the structural integrity of the crystals, but the college isn’t known for sacrificing beauty for function.

She presses into the seam, flakes of sand crumble against her fingertip, pattering onto the floor. Sure, if given enough inspiration, Chloe could probably do something with the grains, but stuff that small is rarely terribly useful.

In between one moment and the next, gold blooms across the surface, as her knife digs into something critical, fanning it out before the door, where it glimmers before settling into a handprint shape of gold dust to the side of the seam, two thirds up the wall.

Chloe wouldn’t have been able to see that before.

Her mind shies away from it, ever so slightly, of thinking of it head on.

But it’s human magic, obviously so, some alert spell left there by the creator of the place, showing where things have been touched.

“And it’s not our demon buddy,” Chloe mutters, then presses her hand in the exact same place, reaching up well over her head to do so. Her palm is much smaller than the handprint there, but a bare trace of a tingle sparks up against her skin, before the door groans, twisting on its axis.

Chloe takes a step back, the door completing its turn, but the pen light doesn’t pierce the darkness behind it.

Chloe thumps the penlight on her leg and increases the brightness, but it still doesn’t shine beyond the doorway.

Which means it’s hiding something, some sort of concealment.

Another illusion spell.

Chloe bends over and grabs a handful of the flaking sandstone, then tosses it into the room.

It vanishes the moment it crosses the threshold, but no sound of it hitting the ground meets their ears.

So. Another trap.

Chloe tosses a glance back to the gun, then shines the penlight onto the piece of paper. The demon’s coordinates are still thousands of kilometers away, unmoving.

Which means she just needs to take down this spell and go inside.

It’s the same sort of danger that she felt staring at Alette, right before she died. It’s the same sort of danger she felt, peering over the edge of the platform in the locking pits, about to knowingly descend back into her worst nightmare.

And Chloe’s dealt with danger before.

With another deep breath that tastes like dust, Chloe grabs the edge of the spell, and it sparks up against her hand, vicious and angry, and before she can stop herself, she pulls.

With a sharp crack, the darkness in front of them peels apart, the beam of her penlight penetrating into the shadows, hitting the floor made of the same hewn stone as the one they’re currently standing on.

And deep in that darkness is a low rumble.

It’s barely on the edge of her hearing, sending shivers up her back and raising the hair on her arms into goosebumps. It’s not dissimilar to the far away rumble of traffic on a freeway, or a distant machinery barely chugging to life, except…

It’s wrong. It feels wrong.

It sinks into her teeth, jarring, and with every breath Chloe pulls more of it into her lungs and less air.

Chloe tilts her head towards the room, as if she can hear more clearly just by that iota of movement.

“Great,” Chloe whispers, all her instincts telling her to run.

Instead, she flicks the beam of light to and fro, and it lands on a rusted cage, the metal decayed and flaking apart.

A splotch of black blood seeps from underneath it, and inside…

Inside is…something.

It’s not a demon, at least not a demon in a body, and Chloe’s eyes desperately try to look anywhere but at the cage, at a hunched figure huddling in the corner. At the mouth pulled tight, at the glowing eyes watching her, reflecting the light from her hand.

Chloe swallows, then flicks the light to the other side of the room. There’s a splash of black blood, like a demon was struck and almost bled out—if demons could bleed out—and more traces of demon movement, an almost distinct pacing path of footsteps, the exact same length that she saw the other demon pace before.

The thing in the cage shifts again, snapping Chloe’s eyes back, and behind it, a flash of color catches her attention.

Her backpack. The research.

It’s tucked behind the cage, black blood smeared on it, like the person who had grabbed it had bloody hands, pulled tight against the cage.

Like whatever it is that is in the cage grabbed it and took it from him.

“Okay,” Chloe murmurs, forcing herself to do her basic security scan of the room. There’s no traps on the floor, no snares on the ceiling, nothing.

Besides the monster in the cage.

“Can you hear me?” Chloe asks, and the monster blinks at her, darkness covering the reflective eyes for a split second. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

“That’s what your friend Killian said, too,” the monster—maybe demon?—rumbles in response, with a nod to Chloe’s hand. “I hurt him back.”

Chloe swings the light to the splash of black blood on the wall, her spine crawling. So the other demon has a name. Maybe.

“Well, I just want my backpack, nothing else,” Chloe replies, falsely keeping her voice light, glancing back at the gun.

So his trap is really involved, if he’s dangling the tool needed right in front of her.

“You’re trying to take the cage?” the thing without a body, the demon with ever shifting features, says. “Killian wanted my home. Said it belonged to someone before.”

As if accentuating the words, it rattles the cage, and flakes of rust peel off.

And underneath the rust, Chloe catches a glimpse of a demon trap, so similar to what Lyra had spray painted to protect herself and Delina before raising her from the dead, embedded into the metal itself.

The backpack is within the protections.

Ah. That’s why the other demon—maybe Killian—left it. And probably why he left the gun, so she could get it back for him.

It’s almost a letdown of a puzzle.

“Do you want out?” Chloe asks, back at the other being. “Or do you want to stay in there?”

The rumbling goes silent, like they’re holding their breath.

“I don’t need the cage—I might do a scan on it to help track my friend—but I can leave the cage as it is,” Chloe babbles on, the silence deeply unnerving. “And then I can let you out or leave you alone or whatever you want, I have no problem doing either.”

She’s not about to kill something in a cage, after being in a prison herself.

“Bring me a human and leave me the body,” they command, “and maybe I’ll let you live.”

“Okay, that’s a no,” Chloe says, her heart pounding. “Not gonna do that, sorry, not my style.”

The creature—Chloe’s about ninety percent sure it’s a demon after that comment—sinks further back in the cage, next to the backpack.

Wordless, Chloe thumps the light against her thigh, transforming it into a lamp, and the entire room glows with sudden brightness.

The demon inside cringes away from the sudden light, and now that she can see more, even without a body for them to inhabit there are deep gashes, deep grooves in their form, scabs of some sort. Old, horrid injuries healed wrong.

She sets the lamp down on the ground, and the cage bars cast shadows across the walls, reaching up to the ceiling.

Chloe takes a few steps back, and even though it’s a trap, even though it’s the wrong thing to do, she grabs her gun.

It’s pleasantly cool against the palm of her hand, and a quick check of the magazine shows it’s still loaded.

“Is there a reason you want the backpack?” Chloe asks, after a long stretch of sullen silence, before she steps into the room.

It’s warm, surprisingly so, a puff of temperate air hitting Chloe’s face and ruffling her hair, and the cage only takes up one corner.

“Were you locked up here by the college?” Chloe asks. “I can recognize the traps, I’m not working with them.”

The demon shakes his head, furiously so, his eyes tracking Chloe’s every motion deeper inside the room.

“They were here,” the demon says, “then they abandoned it. One of the assistants shot the other in the head, then burned the body so I couldn’t take it.”

“How long ago did they abandon it?” Chloe asks, scuffing her feet on the floor, desperately hoping to appear idle.

For such an elaborate bunker, there must be other rooms, but Chloe’s not terribly interested in finding the other secret doors. Not when her research—and possibly another trail to her friend—is in the room with her.

She tugs the compass out of her pocket, pacing to the other side of the room, and sure enough the needle points towards the cage, staying locked in on that one point.

Chloe avoids the corner that the other demon—Killian—must’ve been standing in when he got struck.

“Three weeks ago,” the demon answers, and it’s right around when Gurlien came back, when another base had fallen, so it tracks. “They won’t get this place back.”

“If you give me the backpack we will leave you alone,” Chloe says, as calmly and as authoritatively as she can. Which isn’t much, her voice is notoriously wobbly when she tries. “We will leave you alone and lock the door behind us if you want.”

“Killian said that,” the demon says surly, “then he tried to take my home.”

Chloe’s woefully out of her depth, the logic of the monster completely content in his rusted cage sitting poorly with her.

“Did this Killian scan it?” Chloe asks. “Your home?”

A surly nod from the demon.

So the key to the next step in the search lies with him. Of course.

“Killian was locked up,” the demon whispers, as if they weren’t the only two people in the dusty room. “He’s been locked up for experimentation for years, he’s insane.”

“You sure about that?” Chloe asks skeptically. “Look, I won’t hurt you, I’ll just —” She reaches towards the backpack, skirting along the edges of the cage, outside the trap.

The demon snaps out a hand, and they’re not physical, but claws dig into Chloe’s skin.

Bright red blood wells up, slicing into her wrist, and Chloe barely has time to gasp before the demon slams her back into the wall, rattling her skull and jarring her vision.

Four things happen in fast succession.

One, Chloe screams, the sound ripped from her throat before she can squash it down.

Two, the demon whispers something, low and scratchy, that Chloe can’t quite understand. A language she never learned, a spell she’s never heard, a code that makes no sense. They laugh, throaty, and tighten their claws into her skin, in the exact place the other demon had gently held her.

Three, even though she can’t see into the other room, even though blood drips from the wounds in her wrist, vivid and red, Chloe knows, just knows, that the other demon is out there, tantalizingly close. Like he was just waiting for this to happen, waiting for the injury, waiting for the sudden act of violence.

Four, Chloe remembers she has a gun.

She twists, and the claws tighten deeper into her arm, but she grapples with her off hand and flashes the barrel over, pulling the trigger.

The crack slams into her, almost physical with the sound, and another scream almost wrenches itself from Chloe’s throat.

The demon jerks, claws snapping tight, before slacking.

And then, silence.

Chloe gasps again, then twists her hand out of the claws, all but flinging herself across the room to be away from it.

The gun smokes, ever so slightly.

Panting, Chloe holds herself up on the wall, clutching her wrist to her chest. It bleeds, thick in the way that will need medical attention, but in the other room…Someone moves in there, outside of her view, but the shadow trails behind it.

Chloe blinks back over to the demon in the cage. It lays there, inert, and the horrid ness of it crawls into her throat, like she’s gonna puke.

Her skin crawls, at the sudden lack of power that had been there just moments before, almost as gapingly painful as the bleeding gouge marks on her wrist.

And the still thrumming power just in the foyer, almost so distinct she can taste it, just out of view.

“Oh my god,” Chloe breathes.

The power in the next room shifts, and Chloe rushes back to the cage, grabbing her backpack before scrambling back away, catching a bare glimpse of the figure watching from beyond the door. The fabric is sticky, like the blood embedded itself into the material itself, cold.

And she’s effectively trapped. Between the death in front of her and the looming figure right outside the door.

The looming figure that almost certainly baited her to be able to get the bag instead of venture into a trap himself.

Shaking, Chloe raises the gun again, and her hand trembles like a leaf.

“Don’t bother,” the demon says, voice low, before he brushes past the door, staring intently at the dead demon in the cage. He’s in a different body this time, taller, with broader shoulders and short brown hair barely curling over his ears.

Chloe jerks back, clutching the backpack to her chest.

The demon cants his eyes towards her, then back over at the demon, appraising, and she fists her hands into the straps of the backpack, her heart thudding.

His eyes, reflecting the light, watch the dead demon for a long second, and in that moment, she catches a hint of fear, a hint of panic, and a hint of calculation.

“Leave me alone,” Chloe breathes out, when his eyes flicker obviously to the backpack in her arms, finally away from the corpse. “I won’t—”

He straightens, and the body is so tall, before some decision filters over his face.

“I don’t—” Chloe starts, before he’s suddenly in front of her, suddenly right there, his hand closing over her injured wrist and—