Chapter 12

12

T his time, when Chloe blinks her eyes open and sees a blank popcorn ceiling, she’s pissed.

She seethes, staring up at the shadows the texture casts, long in the afternoon sun, and she has no way of knowing which afternoon it could be.

Her mouth tastes foul, like something crawled into it and died, and the pit in her stomach tells her it’s been far too long since the breakfast back at the hotel with that strange man. Her limbs weigh heavily against her, like even moving would take too much effort.

He did it again. The demon fucking knocked her out, the moment she was a bit too inconvenient.

Someone had, at some point, thrown a blanket over her, and it’s scratchy to the point of oversensitizing against her arms and the bandages on her wrist.

Bandages.

She lifts her hand, inspecting it. The gouges ache, some sort of distant sort of itch of new healing, but the bandages are clean and pristine white.

Which means not only was she bandaged while unconscious, she was almost certainly re-bandaged.

“That fucker,” Chloe says aloud. She’s not the most prone to swearing, but some situations call for it.

There’s a shift of movement in the room, and she flops her head over, despite her vision swimming.

It’s a different room than he knocked her out in, it’s not the hotel room back in Jerome Arizona, and the bright white snow outside the window tells her she’s probably hundreds if not thousands of miles away from where she last was.

There’s demon magic everywhere, red and black twisted into protections, as if written on the walls in one continuous motion. Every spare bit of clean white wall is covered in it in small, cramped writing, tying in safety and calm and comfort.

It’s a bit excessive.

And her backpack leans neatly against the side table, also meticulously cleaned.

Instead, the room gives the overall impression of frugal neatness. The carpet is cleaned, if ratty, and the furniture is a few decades out of date, and she can barely catch a glimpse of a kitchenette through the hallway. A pair of bright purple shoes are off to one side, too big to be child sized but too small to belong to an adult, like someone kicked them off and left them where they fell. The skull from before—she thinks it’s the skull from before—sits on top of a few papers on the counter, like a morbid paperweight.

And Killian the demon stands, leaning casually against a bare wall, arms crossed and head tilted to watch into the other room.

“Where are we?” Chloe demands, and her head pounds with the words.

“Northwestern Canada,” he responds idly, like the information doesn’t cost anything. “A safe house.”

Ambra’s talked at length about her safe spots, the places that she—and all demons— instinctively run to in times of need or in times of rest, so the concept is not entirely lost on Chloe.

She’s never taken Chloe to any of them and got downright weird when Chloe asked, but she gets the idea.

There are neat strips of magic laid out on the desk, sealed neatly in a shimmering case of power.

Chloe peers at them from the bed. She’s not someone who’s an expert at magical traces, even with her new ability to see demon traces, but something thrums in her gut to say that these are from humans.

Who, she couldn’t even begin to tell.

“How long did you knock me out?” Chloe asks, pushing herself up, but her arms wobble all the same. She shifts so she can lean against the wall, shoving the rest of the blanket off of her.

“You slept,” he emphasizes, “for an additional ten hours longer than I knocked you out.”

“That doesn’t answer my question,” Chloe says, trying and failing to be cheerful about it.

“I aimed for five hours, you shrugged off the compulsive sleep after three and a half.” He’s still watching outside the room, like there’s something out there that takes up more of his attention, and that might be more interesting than anything else. “You must be very powerful.”

“Don’t say that,” Chloe murmurs. “I once burned off my eyebrows because I added one too many molecules to gasoline.”

“That’s a story,” he grumbles.

Instead of trying to say anything else, Chloe pokes at the edge of the bandage, peeling it up. It’s a great job, far better than she would’ve done herself, and she absolutely does not want to give him that credit.

“I have to check in with people,” Chloe says, finally, after he continues to watch the other room like a hawk. “They’d not exactly be happy with me dropping off the face of the earth for thirteen hours.”

“Your electronics are plugged in the bathroom,” he responds idly, like he’s merely reporting normal information. “It was making noise, but I turned it off.”

Chloe didn’t even know demons could do that, but she refuses to feel grateful.

“Fine,” she says, swinging her leaden legs around to the side of the bed and wobbling, which snaps Killian’s attention to her. “Gotcha, thanks for the sleep, don’t do that again.”

“Unless your biology is different from other humans, you’re going to need food and water soon,” he says, and once again, there’s the trace of fear, and Chloe’s not usually one to poke at people’s phobias but she’s real tempted here. “I want to decode my scan today and head out tomorrow, and a completely burned-out alchemist would be useless to me.”

“Thanks,” she shoots at him, then rubs her face again, grabbing at her research bag.

All the scrolls are still there, neatly rolled up, the anti-grime protections she put on it still in place, no trace of human or demon blood whatsoever.

She refuses to feel grateful for that.

“Any food in this safe house?” she asks dryly, letting her fingertips trail on the papery edges of the scrolls. They thrum under her touch, warm and familiar.

“Some,” he replies neutrally. “It’s stocked for someone else’s tastes.”

“What, Demons don’t like peanut butter?” Chloe asks, then rakes her hand through her hair. It’s thoroughly messed up, completely out of its bun, black strands hanging everywhere.

And she’s getting nowhere exchanging barbs with him, so she stands, clutching the backpack to her chest, and stumbles into the bathroom.

It’s tiny, the light yellow and somewhat flickery, but the blue plastic countertop is pristinely clean, the mirror spotless.

Even in the bathroom, along the edge of the mirror, more protections are written in the same cramped hand. Spelling out safety, how people can’t scry in—those ones are new—and how only two people are allowed in through the protections without some sort of modification from him.

So he had to modify it to bring in Chloe.

Chloe leans close to the edge of the mirror, so close she can see her own pores. More of the writing disappears behind the mirror, like he took it off the wall to bespell protections, and within the letters are…something for self-esteem? Something for confidence? That those who look in the mirror will feel good about themselves?

Can demons even see their own reflections?

Chloe studies herself, and she definitely doesn’t get any additional boost to her emotions about the wreck of her appearance.

Sure enough, her phone is off and plugged in next to the sink, her compass sitting right next to it, still pointing south.

Her compass. It had been in her pocket, and he had dug it out.

“Gross,” Chloe mutters, then splashes some water on her face, which doesn’t help at all, while her phone boots up.

The beeps fill the room as she attempts to wrangle her hair into another bun, but she’s in obvious dire need of a shower. There’s still some dried blood—both hers and demon—and sandstone grit underneath her fingernails.

But her stomach pangs, and despite the sleeping she would guess she probably is at nowhere resembling enough power, so she grabs her phone and flops into the other room, ignoring the demon standing stock still against the wall.

DELINA (3:45 AM): I can tell you’re still alive but nothing else. Check in so people stop freaking out?

AMbrA (4:04 AM): Where are you?

MAISON (4:56 AM): Do you need us to come rescue you? We will figure it out.

Chloe flips the phone back to its main screen. It’s been about ten hours since the last text.

CHLOE (3:02 PM): Hi, guys, I’m fine, working with a demon who briefly knocked me out. Just woke up in a safe house of his in Canada.

It’s not gonna help the panicking, but her phone won’t give her any more details on where exactly she could point them to, all location tracking completely on the fritz.

Then, after a moment of thought.

CHLOE (3:03 PM): Gurlien, I’m really okay.

Of course, the phone fills up with beeps again, and she gets a side eyed glance from Killian when she tucks it into her pocket.

“You said food?” she asks, again attempting to be cheerful, but utterly failing.

He nods, then lifts up a hand. “Go in your room and shut the door!” he calls down the hallway, and there’s a resulting shuffle and a slamming of a door. “In the kitchen.”

“Wait, someone else is here?” Chloe asks, perking up. Someone else means information, company, and more people to talk to than just the taciturn demon in front of her. “Who?”

He crosses his arms again, remaining silent.

“Another human? Another demon? A Wight—I can see those too now—or a spirit? Who?”

“You’re in no danger from them,” he says, and the panic is more pronounced, almost wavering in his voice. “Don’t go past the kitchen doorway into that hallway.”

“Uh, no,” Chloe replies brightly, not having to fake it this time. “I’m super curious, just so you know, that’s why I break into things.”

He sighs, then disappears, startling her, but reappears in the open doorway of the other side of the kitchen, blocking her line of sight down the hallway.

“Or you could do that, I guess,” Chloe says, then pokes her way into the kitchen.

There’s an olive-green fridge, stocked with way too much chocolate milk and applesauce. A neat stack of pocky boxes sit next to it on the brown and yellow tile counter with a bag of dried strawberries, a few bags of the spicy chips that Ambra seems to enjoy, and a truly alarming amount of cup of noodles spread in cleanly organized lines.

“Huh,” Chloe replies, tilting her head at it. “Alright, not what I thought.”

Killian shifts, like he doesn’t like whatever conclusions she’s coming to.

“I take it you’re not a demon trapped and forced to consume human food, right?” Chloe asks, gesturing at the spicy chips. “I take it this is for someone else?”

“So you’ve met one of the abominations,” he replies, which is rude. “No, not for me.”

“Careful, she’s my friend,” Chloe says cheerfully, and, unless she’s imagining things, Killian…relaxes.

His shoulders drop, the lines of fear disappearing from his forehead, his face smoothing out.

But he doesn’t say anything, no matter how much she squints at him, so she fills the bright orange kettle up with water, sitting it on the stove, because of course the microwave in this kitchen looks ancient and that it would take forever to boil water.

The handle of the kettle sparks at her, additional runes to stop someone from burning their hand on it.

Opening a box of the pocky, she crunches on it as she pulls her phone out again, ignoring all the messages and going straight to Ambra’s contact.

CHLOE (3:07 PM): Do you know another demon named Killian?

AMbrA (3:08 PM): Do you think I exchanged names with other demons frequently?

CHLOE (3:08 PM): Fair.

AMbrA (3:09 PM): I know the names of about three other demons, tops. Solitary creatures, remember?

Of course, now that she’s without the control of the college, Ambra is one of the most social people Chloe knows, always preferring to at least be in the same room with one other person when Gurlien isn’t around, but she’s not going to point that out

“You have a demon’s phone number?” Killian asks, skeptical, like he can read over her shoulder from that far away.

“A few, actually,” Chloe says, blinking up at him and deciding to count Melekai, who has never texted her or called her once. He mostly skulks in the background, anyway.

Again, more miniscule relaxation, this time around his eyes.

“And they let you go on this chase alone?”

“Rude,” Chloe says, chomping on a piece of pocky and hoisting herself to sit on the tile counter, since the counter doesn’t have any runes preventing it. The bandage on her wrist protests the motion, pulling at her skin, but she ignores it.

“I’m not someone that has people willing to come along,” Chloe says, and his brow furrows. “They’ll text, they’re not going to come along.”

Gurlien’s not even texting right now, and she pulled him out of the cult mindset.

“Hmm,” he says.

“Neither of them wants to go to places where the college might be lurking.”

“And they have phones,” he mutters, almost like he’s jealous.

“Turns out there are advantages to being an abomination,” Chloe snips back, even though she’s one hundred percent sure that Ambra would not approve of the statement. “Where’s the next scan leading to?”

In an instant, the relaxation is gone, his shoulders stiffening and the lines appearing back in his forehead, and despite the fact that he’s in a different body than the first time she met him, the expression is the same.

“I can’t decipher,” he says, his voice clipped. “I know it’s somewhere in North America, somewhere east and south of here, but the fox wasn’t held in that cage long enough to give me a proper trail.”

Chloe swallows, the pocky suddenly dust in her mouth. “She should never have been held there,” she says, and her voice wobbles to the point he raises an eyebrow at her. “It’s too small, too claustrophobic, the air circulation was bad.”

He tilts his head at her, like he’s figuring something out, but he definitely doesn’t share it.

“So give me the scan,” Chloe says, and his face twitches. “We have my research, let me find it.”

He nods to the kettle, which is barely starting to steam. “You’d break one trap and fall over.”

“Rude,” Chloe repeats, “do you have any coffee in this weird collection of food?”

“She’s not allowed coffee,” he immediately protests, like that’s unreasonable, before blinking at her like he divulged it to her under duress. “There’s green tea.”

So whoever it is is a she and also someone he can ban from having coffee, which goes with the bright purple smaller shoes in the hallway.

So, not an adult.

“I’ll take a tea,” Chloe replies impishly, and he twists his face at her in a surprisingly human move.

“You can cook without singing off your eyebrows?” he asks, and she doesn’t have to be fully awake to get the sarcasm. “What about too many molecules.”

“I only burned my eyebrows the once,” Chloe says, scowling down at the teakettle. “And this is ramen. It’s not rocket science.”

Even after living close to Ambra for a few weeks now, it’s startling.

Her butt half asleep from the cold tile, Chloe hops off the counter, thrifting through the cabinets, her curiosity definitely telling her to go down the hall, but her common sense stopping her.

There’s just one mug, brightly colored pink and covered in neon green cats next to a single plate and bowl. So the kid is the only human in this space.

A muted conversation filters to her, muffled through a door down the hall, and she busies herself with making obvious noises in the kitchen, slamming the cupboard doors and clinking the spoon to the counter.

It’s not a great thought, that a demon may be the sole caretaker of a human child, though…

Though the existence of Maison suggests that the child might not be wholly human.

And if she finds another Half Demon, she’s gonna have to tell Maison.

The kettle finally screeching, she fumbles with it to pull it off the stove, filling the cup of noodles and the mug.

AMbrA (3:41 PM): I think we have a relative lock on your location, do you need a rescue?

CHLOE (3:42 PM): No! Tell Gurlien it’s like the time in Bellevue.

AMbrA (3:43 PM): He said “fuck you” and walked off.

Again, fair.

CHLOE (3:45 PM): Any tips on how to get a demon to share secrets?

AMbrA (3:45 PM): Don’t!

CHLOE (3:46 PM): Thanks!

She wanders out of the kitchen, her heart still in her throat, as the noodles sit for the prerequisite few minutes.

There are a dizzying array of wards on the door, and Chloe recoils away from where her hand wants to reach out towards the knob.

More wards than she can ever hope to understand. Protection, containment, ease of existing, all written in a swirling combination that brings her to a giant question mark.

She’ll be a prisoner until she figures those out. There could just as easily be one to kill, to immobilize anyone who touches without permission, and while she can bring them down…she has to identify first.

She swallows, sudden, her heart pounding, forcing her eyes to blink at them. She can’t leave, she can’t pick the lock and disappear forever, she can’t…

She backs up, her hand shaking, and flees back into the kitchen.

After an entirely standard cup of noodles and box of pocky and an unenthusiastic cup of green tea, Chloe unrolls her research onto the spare dinner table tucked in the corner, using the bright purple saltshaker to pin down one side.

The spells and enchantments are still intact, though every single one of them has a thin veneer of demon power painted over, like he tried to brute force them into making sense for him.

It doesn’t affect the underlying spells, but it does bring a smile to her lips. Even someone so strong as a demon couldn’t undo what is hers.

Good.

She lays the compass next to it, the needle buzzing in proximity to it.

The small table has some wards written in, spells to provide clarity of thought and attention to detail, which is nice. Chloe had experimented some long ago, back before she got kicked out of the college, thinking it could help her ADHD and general manic sensations, but either she wasn’t strong enough in that style of magic or she had looked at it the wrong way.

All this does is tell her that the demon took so much time in making this place habitable and safe for the other human in it. Had made a place specifically for homework, which suggests a normal school, which is just…fascinating.

The idea of a demon caring for someone so wonderfully makes her smile, despite the lingering irritation.

“When did the college put you in prison?” Behind her, Killian speaks, and she jumps. “What year?”

“Uh…” Chloe says, pressing her hand to her chest to calm her beating heart. “I was twenty three? So eight years ago? Around there?”

“Hmm,” he says, then strides forward, tugging another scroll of paper out of her research bag, ignoring her bristling. “I tried to tie the scan to this one.”

It’s her general decoding scroll, the sort she lays maps upon for direction, one of her more rudimentary creations. Meant more for finding hidden spots, she mostly used it for finding random graveyards with underground crypts more than anything else.

It was also one of the ones she recreated from memory after getting out of prison, using it for finding small hidden vaults in the Washington forest to keep her skills sharp.

“This won’t help you without an actual map,” she warns him, and he leans away, the curl of his brown hair shifting in the movement. “It doesn’t create out of nothing, just shows existing spots on a view.”

Instead of scoffing, he raises his eyebrows at it. “Could be useful.”

“It’s super useful if you have a small area to check,” Chloe says, as brightly as she can, as if she can cheerfully brute force her heart rate into feeling normal. “A continent, not so much. Here.”

She tugs out another scroll, this one her basic map of the United States, all the coordinates cleanly mapped out, and spreads it over the first.

At first, nothing happens, then sand sifts up from below the map, shaking and rattling into place, dotting the states over and over with spots of something hidden.

“See,” Chloe says. “Too much.”

He watches it, like he can catch something she can’t, before nodding at her, begrudging. “How the hell have I not heard of you before?”

It’s worded like a compliment.

“I mean, the college tried very hard so that the world forgot I existed,” she responds, pushing one of the grains of sand and watching as it rattles back into place. “They didn’t like the idea of people knowing that they let someone like me escape.”

“And now you’re friends with abominations and Necromancers alike,” he murmurs, before resting his hand on the map, pulling up a twist of demon magic like its strands of hair. “Then which scroll?”

“Is that the scan?” Chloe asks, peering at the fistful of magic. “Just like that?”

“I do not need to tie it to things,” he says, like he’s protesting something, like he’s proving himself. “I’m not a child.”

“Speaking of which, is that child yours?” Chloe asks, then stares at him, unblinking, as he visibly falters, both the human face and the second face beneath blanching. “I know a few Half Demons.”

Few is a misnomer, but she has no problem with the little lie.

“There are only seventeen Half Demons in the world,” he protests, like that’s the important part here. “How the hell did you happen to meet a ‘few’ of them.”

“I thought there were only five,” she replies cheekily.

He gives her a flat look, and it’s the same flat look most people give her when they think she’s mocking them. Which to be fair, she kinda is at the moment.

“No, the child is not my biological offspring,” he says stiffly, the grooves in his forehead deepening. “But she has my entire protection, and I will kill anyone who threatens her.”

“Noted,” Chloe responds, then turns back to the scroll. “So this entire place, all this protection, for her?”

He sighs, an entirely human sound. “She’s twelve,” he complains. “She’s twelve and has almost the entirety of the college wanting to put her under their control and she has no idea, just because her father was powerful.”

Chloe’s heard that story before.

“She has some beginnings of talent,” he gestures at Chloe, to which she supposes he means human magic talent as opposed to anything else, “and it does not fall neatly into any of the established schools, which means they will take her, and they will study her, and they will control her if they get a chance.”

“I understand that,” Chloe replies, and he studies her for a long second, like he’s trying to discover if she’s telling the truth. “Remember, I know a Necromancer.”

There’s a brief flash of hunger over his face, quickly smoothed away, but startling all the same.

Right. She’s dealing with a predator.

“I am one hundred percent certain the college would like to study her,” Chloe continues, though her arm prickles. “Hell, my alchemy is just a little different than the norm and they studied me.”

“Believe me when I say her magic is rarer,” Killian says, almost severe, and it prickles at the back of her neck. “If they fully knew…they’d stop at nothing.”

“I get that,” Chloe murmurs.

“You don’t,” he says wearily, “not really. She’ll need training, she’ll need to be careful, she needs to not be taken advantage of. And if they find her…they’d just lock her up and use her.”

Chloe’s often had that thought about Delina and, more recently, about Lyra. That it’s almost incomprehensible that someone wouldn’t just kidnap them, force them to bring back soldiers, assassins, politicians. That they’d be pushed beyond burnout, and whoever controlled them wouldn’t care.

“I won’t say anything to anyone,” Chloe says, and gets a miniscule bit of relaxation from his shoulders. “Hell, I can’t even get my phone to pick up a location, as long as you teleport me out, I won’t even know where this is.”

Another long inspection before he nods.

“Her mother lives nearby, but she would sell her kidney if it meant she could have more intoxicants. I’ve known this child since she was three, I would not leave her to deal with that world without some place she can walk to for safety.”

“That’s noble,” Chloe says, and means it. “She can be left alone while you search?”

“If someone follows her here and tries to step foot through that door, they will instantly forget what they were looking for and leave,” he says, like she challenged him. “Her mother’s house is warded so anyone who attempts to lay a hand on her will immediately face more pain than they’ve ever experienced. If they touch her on the street then the very ground will break.” He hesitates. “And she’s twelve and knows how to feed herself.”

“Gotcha,” Chloe responds, and even though curiosity burrows deep inside her until she’s practically vibrating with the want to know more, she taps her finger on the scroll, the sand scattering then resettling. “Well, while we’re out, if you want to give her my cell phone number I’ll transcribe texts to her.”

His brows flash up, fast, before he hides it, but she can tell she dangled something valuable in front of him.

Ambra has said, many times, to find what’s important to a demon and leverage it. That despite their reputation for extreme violence and utter power, most demons had a few things—or people—that they would do anything for, do anything to protect.

Chloe gets the suspicion she just stumbled upon Killian’s.

There’s a muffled thump from the other room, similar to someone throwing a pillow across the hall, and they both turn to glance, but there’s no other sound.

After a lull, Chloe stares hard down at her research, the question bothering her. “Why’d you put me in the cabin?”

“What cabin?” he asks.

Chloe blinks down hard at the papers, then leans back to stare at him. “The cabin you left me? After knocking me out underground?”

“You mean after you shot me?” he drawls idly. “I had to find a new body, that hurt.”

Chloe briefly considers asking what that involves, then quickly decides she doesn’t want to know. “Yes, after that.”

His eyes flicker to hers, then back out the window. “I reached into your mind, identified home, then took you there,” he says casually, like home is an easy concept for her. “The place smelled of you, I figured I got it right.”

“Okay, creepy,” Chloe says, wrinkling her nose, and he surprises her by giving her a wide grin. “We abandoned that home a few months ago. We were run out.”

A flicker of interest. “Why?”

“Because we had a Necromancer,” she points out, and he shrugs, giving her that. “And a Half Demon. College wanted both of those in their possession.”

“Fair enough,” he says, then smiles again, like he’s amused by her. “I take it that being back there caused you issues?”

“I had to flash bang a few twenty-year-olds and run into the forest,” she informs him. “Only reason I’m not arrested is because I found a few Wights who also don’t like the college being there.”

He seems to weigh her statement. “And you shot me. I think we’re even.”

“You stole—” she cuts herself off, rubbing her face. “That wasn’t my home.”

“It is in your mind,” he says. “At least, no other place was pulling your desire like that.”

“I hadn’t been there in a few months,” she repeats.

“And yet, you certainly don’t feel like your current residence is a home, no matter how you protest,” he says, still idly, like this conversation is downright simple for him. “Guess you haven’t figured that out yet.”

She hasn’t, but she just glares at him, before returning to the maps.

“Scan?” Chloe says, instead of continuing on the frankly interesting conversation around demon protectiveness and their technological disadvantages of it in the modern age. “If we want to head out tomorrow, then we should at least attempt to find a trace.”