Chapter 11

11

E ven though Chloe’s been teleported a few times thanks to Ambra, the shock of being suddenly somewhere else hits her like a slap across the face, and she staggers, her knees buckling.

The demon’s grip on her wrist is the only thing keeping her upright.

“Were you tracking the gun or the bag?” he demands, and Chloe’s head spins.

He took her to some small nook, some abandoned cabin where hot air blows through the cracks in the window and light streams across the white walls, and it’s so much brighter than the cave with the blood and the cave and…

He sighs, an incredibly human action, before gently releasing her wrist.

Chloe scrambles backwards, and she’s still clutching the bag to her chest, the weight of it some sort of strange comfort, as her mind spins off.

The door to the single room cabin hangs off its hinges, swinging open in the wind, and outside there’s nothing but white sand and scrub brush and pebbles. No road, no thrum of cars or airplanes, nothing. A sink sits in one corner, and a cot is pushed into the other, a single hot pad on a table.

All in all, a very easy prison to break out of, but the lack of infrastructure outside makes Chloe shiver.

It’s a prison all the same.

The demon in front of her crosses his arms, expectant.

“I’m not telling you,” Chloe answers honestly, then, “is your name Killian?”

A frown line appears on his forehead, but he nods.

“I was trying to negotiate with that demon, I was trying to convince them, I didn’t want to kill them, I swear,” Chloe babbles, and he raises an eyebrow. “They grabbed me and I panicked. No murder intended.”

“If I could have operated the gun, I would have shot them myself,” Killian says, voice neutral. “But they protected themselves in that circle and nothing I could do could get through that.”

Chloe hadn’t known that the alchemy they put on the gun had done that, but it’s not the most surprising thing about her day.

“Was that cage where they kept…her?” she asks, and her voice lilts upwards, outside her control. “It was horrible, why—”

“Yes,” Killian cuts her off.

“Okay,” Chloe says, then takes a big, gulping breath of air, her stomach souring at the thought of the spirit fox being behind the rusted metal bars.

And she has to get out, somehow. Her current situation is just as important, and if she can’t get herself under her control then she can’t help her friend at all.

“Okay,” Chloe repeats, after another big breath, then tilts her wrist so she can stare at it, at the blood that’s still dripping down onto the dull gray tile. She’s gonna need some first aid, some antibacterial, maybe another tetanus shot, some bandages…

“Did you sleep?” the demon says, completely derailing her thoughts. “It’s been over thirty hours since the Wight scried me, did you sleep at all for that?”

“That’s not important,” Chloe replies automatically, and if she could be sure the demon wouldn’t grab the bag out of her hands, she would set it down, transform the meager first aid kit into something she can use, but she can’t trust that he wouldn’t take the opportunity and leave her there. “I should get back, take me back, I’m not going to get in your way.”

“Give me your cipher for the research and I will,” Killian says, a tremor so faint in his voice that she might’ve missed it.

“So you couldn’t read it,” Chloe ventures, and even though she knows her work, even though she’s the one that tied all the pieces together, it’s a little validation. “No. My research stays with me.”

He regards her, standing back, and it’s almost comical how much taller this body is than Chloe, she has to tilt her head up to keep an eye on him.

“You don’t know the next place to go,” he says, and the same confidence she’s starting to get back makes its way into his voice as well, as he lifts his chin. “You don’t know the next place to go, unless you scan the cage—”

Chloe shudders at the memory of the blood seeping from it.

“—then you are at the same dead end I am.” His brows raise, like he’s somehow got something on her.

Still, the nagging feeling that he’s terrified somehow worms its way back into her thoughts.

She can’t get back, not easily, not without knowing where they are and not without some form of transportation, and he can’t go forward.

“If I die then the research will crumble,” Chloe says quickly. “All way of tracking, everything, gone.”

“Noted,” he says with a nod.

“And you can’t find it anywhere with the college, this is all me,” she says. “They put me in prison for this, you can’t steal it from them either.”

He very obviously weighs her words, finally letting his gaze go to other things in the room, as if observing for the first time where he brought them.

“Someone else had done a reading on the cage, somehow around the demon,” Killian says, and there’s a restless sort of energy to him, like he doesn’t quite fit into the body fully. “The demon told me to mock me. Said they let him.”

“Of course,” Chloe mutters, and his brow twitches.

Chloe eases back, and now that the immediate pressure is gone, the immediate life and death terror, the cuts on her wrist ache, a deep angry throb, and she’s gonna have more scars if she’s not careful.

She takes another step backwards—he’s in between the door and her so she can’t just run out—and kneels down, still gripping the backpack.

This snaps his attention back to her. “What are you doing?”

Not stopping her movement, even though every fiber in her body screams out to, she loops her injured arm through the straps, then slowly unzips the backpack. “Just getting out my first aid kit,” she murmurs, though her heart hammers. “I didn’t know demons without a body could grab someone.”

The focus of his attention drops to her wrist, to the bloody gashes. “They can’t, most people.” It’s a surprising bit of information given without asking for something in return, and Chloe’s been around Ambra long enough to know that she should be wary of unprompted gifts. “I doubt they’ve seen enough Necromancer risen people in their life to know otherwise.”

“Yeah, we’re probably pretty rare,” Chloe babbles, pulling out the neon orange zippered pouch, then with trembling fingers pulling out the sterile wipes. “Any specialty bacteria that could cause infections? Any prion disease or something weird I need to worry about, cause—”

“You’re the second Necromancer risen person I’ve ever encountered,” he interrupts, “and I didn’t injure the other one.”

“Oh, who was it?” Chloe runs with the distraction, tearing open the plastic packaging and flicking the wipe, stretching it and adding to it until it’s large enough for what she needs. “I think I know most of them, they’re my buddies, and—”

“Four hundred years ago,” he says, and she shuts her mouth with a click. “So no, there’s no established care for unfiltered demon flesh injuries.”

There’s almost a hint of sarcasm behind the ever-present stoic fear in his words.

So Chloe just ducks her head, roughly wiping the cuts on her wrist, hissing between her teeth when they sting. Her stomach’s still sour, her head hurts, and her heart pounds unpleasantly through her veins, like she’s moments away from a caffeine crash.

The other demon—Killian, names are important to demons, she’s got to remember that—tilts his head at her, a rather familiar bit of body language from both Ambra and Maison. Even with the terrifying double face behind it, the familiarity is almost reassuring.

But the silence is long, far longer than either of those two would have let it go.

“So we can work together, right?” Chloe babbles, gingerly dabbing at the edge of the worst wound. The edges of her skin are ragged, tinged in black, but the black smears off with the antiseptic wipe.

Almost like the other demon bled into her wounds.

“I’m not gonna be separated from this, you’re not gonna drop me off with the Wights again without the ciphers, I don’t have the scans, you do.” It’s a terrible idea, of course, and he blinks his reflective eyes at her. “I don’t much care who I’m working with, my goal’s the same, and…”

“You’re volunteering?” he asks, voice dipping low, and Chloe shivers, before she straightens her spine, getting the unconscious response out of her system.

“If we’re going in the same direction, might as well travel together,” she says, as brightly as she can. She’s said the same thing to so many people, convinced so many people to help her out—or receive help—that way. “I can get in and out of demon traps, and unless I’m wrong, there’s gonna be a lot on this hunt. You have a bit more…firepower…than I do.” She waves a hand at him, and to her horror, her fingertips are trembling.

He crosses his arms, still a healthy distance back, so Chloe gingerly pries open the first aid kit, her hand shaking as she pulls out the singular Band-Aid.

It’s hilariously small, meant for a paper cut, so she flicks it to expand it, feeding a bit of power into it, focusing on making it larger, stretching it to fit over the wounds, at least keep them clean until she can have someone look at them, and…

The Band-Aid blurs, but then doesn’t change.

She gapes at it while he just watches her, as she tries again, sinking her mind into the fibers and the plastic.

The air above it blurs feebly, but it doesn’t react.

With a sigh, Killian crouches near her, and she leans back on her heels at the suddenness of his closeness.

“Like I asked,” Killian starts, “did you sleep?”

Chloe opens her mouth to speak, then closes it, blinking rapidly at the Band-Aid, then at the glowing eyes and shifting double image in front of her.

He obviously doesn’t feel the same need to fill the conversation as she does.

“You knocked me out for like thirteen hours,” Chloe replies, and it’s weaker than she would want. “I can do a lot on twelve hours of sleep.”

His eyes narrow, and Chloe tries to shake out the bandage again, but it doesn’t react.

“I saw the vault door,” he says, and somehow, his voice is dangerously quiet, dangerous in the way that sends all of Chloe’s alarm bells ringing. “I know the structure of those, that would have taken an extraordinary amount of power, and then breaking the traps would take out most magicians, and there are rings under your eyes. Have you slept?”

“Locks are my specialty,” Chloe protests, “and traps are easy.”

He raises an eyebrow at her, like he’s still expecting an answer.

“Apparently, when you’re raised from the dead, it’s hard to sleep for a while.”

His brows flash up for a split second, the terror evident on his double features, before he sighs, rolling his eyes.

“That’s what I thought,” he mutters, then reaches out and presses his thumb into her forehead.

Chloe recoils back, her shoulder blades hitting the wall, before black rushes into her vision.

Sure, she fights it, gritting her teeth, digging into the wall with her fingers. He’s knocked her out before, it’s a familiar sensation, but…

He wins again.