Chapter 13

13

T he scan points towards Minnesota, neatly crossing with a minor base, one that specializes in the study of magical anomalies.

Chloe ties her compass back to it, and he watches her, unabashedly interested, and it’s a bit more scrutiny than she’s used to.

Gurlien usually understood what she was doing and generally left her to her own devices. There had been the brief period with Delina, where Delina had been attempting to learn a bunch of different aspects of magic, but even then, Maison had done the lion share of her training. Delina had definitely not been the sort of learner who was solely educated by example, so Chloe had done little practical magic that was observed so closely.

And before that…she had usually been alone.

“Yes?” she asks brightly, when his gaze lingers on the needle of the compass, like he can read from it.

All at once, his face spasms as he glances at the map, panic overtaking his expression, and he gulps in a breath of air.

She swivels in her chair, raising an eyebrow at him.

All he does is blink, staring blankly at the paper, watching the grains of sand settle into place, all gathering in the same small divot of the scroll. “You know the place?” Chloe asks, and the skin on his knuckles is white where he grips his arm, as if hugging himself will help.

He hesitates, his jaw working, before he visibly shakes himself. “It’s another human base,” he says, his voice so carefully neutral it practically vibrates on the high wire of tension. “Another place they put into the ground to do their grasps at power, before leaving it behind once it served its use.”

“Poetic, but probably,” Chloe says, and everything in her body tells her to back the fuck off, that going down this line of questioning won’t end well.

He takes another big breath, like it could give him peace, before settling his eyes on the compass itself.

“It’s not a brand of alchemy I’m familiar with,” he says. “Usually, the experimental magicians tend to be spellweavers. More flexibility.”

“Experimental that you know of,” she says, tapping the side of the compass, watching as the needle spins again, focusing back towards Minnesota. “I know a guy who changed his entire appearance through Alchemy many times over.”

He shakes his head, and somehow the demon double face is almost more skeptical than his human face.

“The kid, can she see you easily?” Chloe asks, and he narrows his eyes at her. “I can modify glasses to see demons.”

“She can see me just fine,” he replies, voice once more neutral, like he had to drop back into the tone to protect her. “Always has.”

“Oh, that is rare,” Chloe says brightly, before tapping the compass again, watching it spin back, unerringly accurate. “This is the simplest bit of alchemy, it’s just taking the needle and rewriting the magnetic pole to be the direction you want it.”

He settles back, sitting on the single brown floral couch that adorns the room.

It’s an odd piece of furniture, and it’s even odder with a demon lounging on it. All the furniture looks better suited for a few decades ago, and the demon addition is…

Instead, he just tips his head back, as if the ceiling vexes him, resting his neck against the back of the couch and stretching his legs out long.

Even with Ambra, Chloe rarely sees such a pose of relaxation. Ambra’s usually wound too tight, preferring to curl up and make herself small. She’s never seen Melekai in a position of relaxation, the elusive demon usually ramrod straight in the body, except for small moments of tenderness he shows his girlfriend.

That, more than anything, gives Chloe the feeling that she’s intruding on the space.

“So most of my demon communications are with an abomination,” she starts, turning the chair so it faces him. It squeaks along the tile. “But do you sleep?”

“Yes,” he replies, still staring up at the ceiling. “Not how humans do, but yes.” His eyes slate over to her, evaluating. “Do the abominations?”

“About as much as humans do,” she answers, figuring it’s neutral enough. “As much as they try to protest otherwise.”

“There’s only four, right?” he asks, and once more there’s the undercurrent of fear. “Just four abominations?”

“Depends on how you would define it,” Chloe says, leaning back against the chair, though her alarm bells ring. Ambra’s spoken about how terrified she is about facing another demon head on, Chloe doesn’t want to betray that. “But I know two. Maybe three, depending how you look at it.”

So there was at least one that nobody knew about. One demon tied into a human body, one demon of questionable sanity that may or may not be a danger, may or may not be in captivity.

Chloe’s heart hurts, a little, at that.

He blinks at her, almost lazily behind the glowing eyes. “Humans should have never attempted to tie them together.”

“Yeah, it doesn’t seem to work out well for anyone,” Chloe agrees.

“The one who died, who tried to destroy the world…I knew them before,” he says, and Chloe doesn’t know why he’s divulging this. “Terese, they called themselves. Young, intelligent, bright eyed, angry, and excitable.”

Chloe’s skin crawls. Terese-the-person is scared, terrified of everything, and terribly powerful, and to hear about the demon side of that equation…

“It made them insane,” Killian continues, like he didn’t notice her sudden fear. “Any sense of their mind, gone. The intelligence, their way of weighing reason, gone. It’s a nightmare.”

“I’ve heard that,” Chloe says, and he lifts his head to squint at her, as if her voice betrayed her.

“And then they died,” he says, and there’s almost a hint of mourning in his words. “Ripped apart by a Necromancer, fully embroiled in petty human dramas and experiments.”

Chloe doesn’t have a response to that, other than that it’s most likely accurate from his point of view. That he wouldn’t see the wake of destruction, the humans left dead in the furious path.

“Which abomination do you know?” he asks, once more eyeing her, like it’s a test.

Chloe folds her hand on the maps to hide her unease. “I’m not sure she’d like me to tell you.”

The corners of his mouth tilt upwards. “I mean the living ones no harm.”

“That’s not been the case with everyone,” Chloe responds, and the sun is setting outside the grand windows, the snow catching in the light of the safe house. “I’m not going to betray trust.”

There’s another miniscule relaxation, like she answered correctly.

“I asked her, she didn’t know your name,” Chloe volunteers, and the hard plastic chair isn’t exactly comfortable, but the crawling up her arms definitely tells her to not go closer.

“It’s not like we share names often,” he replies dryly. Then, with a narrowing of his eyes, he asks, “Why are you a tomb breaker?”

She scoots the chair back a bit.

“It’s not a normal area for young Alchemists to go towards,” he continues, waving his hand back and forth almost lazily, some sort of gestural equivocation. “Spellweavers, sure, if they think that way, but I saw that vault door.”

“Natural proclivity,” Chloe answers, and she knows she had just been almost grilling him, but now the turn of attention has her wrong footed. “Didn’t get discovered by the college until late in life, pre-teens or so.” She shrugs. By then, she had already learned how to lockpick most doors out of sheer boredom in her small drive through town, including the back door to McDonalds and the gas station safe. People had found it utterly adorable when she did it as a tiny black-haired child, less so when she hit the beginnings of puberty and people thought she might be doing it with the intent to actually do some harm.

At that point, discovering her alchemy almost felt like a letdown. That the reason she was so good at something so fun was some innate talent, not her trying hard and working hard to get better.

He wrinkles his nose at her, and it’s so similar to some of Ambra’s expressions that Chloe mentally files it away into an “apparently demon expressions” folder.

“Then they found out I could pick locks and the rest is history,” Chloe continues, when he does the staring thing that both Ambra and Melekai do when they’re waiting for more information and annoyed they’re not getting it. “Bam, immediate classes in breaking locks and traps, super fun for being thirteen when everyone else is learning neat stuff like battle magic and glamours and illusions.”

Killian nods, like the answer satisfies him somewhat, before the door down the hall creaks open.

Immediately, he sits bolt upright, flashing a shield in the doorway to the spartan living room, opaque and warping, before giving her a slightly apologetic wince and teleporting away.

Leaving Chloe sitting there, adrenaline from the conversation still in her hands, completely unable to see into the other room.

Right. Still doesn’t want her to see the other person.

Slowly, she breathes out, letting her palm settle on the scrolls still spread on top of the tiny table.

Muffled sounds of conversation, barely audible, reach past the shield, then the telltale sound of someone bumbling around the kitchen, of the kettle getting filled, of someone rattling in the silverware drawer, and Killian’s low voice underneath it.

And Chloe’s desperately curious.

But if they’re supposed to work together now, if she’s supposed to rely on him for safety and firepower and he’s supposed to trust her for her ability to break out of things and unroll traps and find the spirit fox, then…

Then she has to sit where she is and not intrude.

She had to sit and not intrude on Gurlien when they first moved into the same cabin, during his first few attempts to try to do something to win his way back into favor of the College. She had to not intrude in the obvious drama filled conversations between Delina and Maison, back when Maison obviously had to apologize and didn’t yet realize it and Delina had to think for herself and not what all her instincts were saying. She had to not intrude on all the necromancy lessons between Delina and Lyra, she had to not intrude on Axel to teach her new things when he was helping Terese with some new fear, and she had to not intrude on Ambra when she was healing and spitting mad, back when she got shot by the bespelled gun.

Sitting and not intruding is the worst.

Gingerly, she sets her cell phone on the scrolls, and the grains of sand buzz around the new item.

Immediately, the screen lights up, the magic seeping into the electronics, and Chloe begins to push the innards of the phone in a certain direction, twisting the sparks of battery life into her will, making it react to more than just the signal in the air.

Suddenly, Killian appears beside the table, his brow furrowed down at her, and Chloe barely lifts her head to glance up at him before he nods, disappearing again.

Apparently, he could tell she is doing something, either from the trace of her power or the protections he has tied into the very walls of the house.

A young voice, just out of the high-pitched tone of childhood, peppers through the barrier, and Chloe raises an eyebrow at the phone, before setting up an additional subroutine.

As much as living basically under the watchful eye of Axel and Alette had chafed against Chloe’s innate sense of paranoia, Axel had great tips and tricks on manipulating technology, having set up the majority of internet connection on the base, tied it into the magic of the land, and set up all sorts of alerts to be sent directly to his phone, all before he lost his magic. It had been an amazing thing to learn, an amazing skill to flex, and study that Chloe vowed to find uses outside of the stuffy base.

And here, with just a bit of thought and a bit of effort, she sets up notification alerts to send out to Delina, Maison, Ambra, and Gurlien whenever her location changes drastically in the space of a few seconds, whenever the phone—or Chloe—drops suddenly, whenever the phone detects a sudden heartbeat change outside of the normal levels of exercise. She had set up similar before, on her old phone, but adds the additional layers, before thumbing over to the group text Delina had started ages ago.

CHLOE (7:03 PM): I am absolutely putting those annoying notifications back on this phone, including one when I get teleported.

Three people immediately start typing, and Chloe smiles at the screen.

MAISON (7:04 PM): If you’re traveling via demon, will you be teleporting a lot?

CHLOE (7:04 PM): I assume so, but who knows. You should get my coordinates if my phone is able to pick them up.

DELINA (7:05 PM): That should be a fun way to track you.

AMbrA (7:06 PM): I am going to judge the teleportation.

MAISON (7:06 PM): Will it be accounting for short distances?

AMbrA (7:07 PM): Depends on the sensitivity of the phone, not on the teleport.

MAISON (7:07 PM): But phones have a natural GPS drift, the spell would have to account for some of that or else we’d be spammed.

AMbrA (7:08 PM): And some teleportations are more precise than others, and some demons can only teleport to places they’ve been or seen, not theoretical coordinates.

Maison continues typing, and Chloe smiles even harder at the phone, before she thumbs through the replies.

Gurlien hasn’t responded. Hasn’t even read the original text.

For a few seconds she debates taking him off the chat but she stays her hand. If he truly wants to ignore it, he knows how to do so.

CHLOE (7:14 PM): I also included a text for dropping the phone (or if I drop) so I will clarify the moment I can if it’s just literally a dropped phone.

DELINA (7:15 PM): Oh you better. Two-minute leeway before we try to track you.

CHLOE (7:15 PM): Deal.

Chloe would bet money that Ambra’s in the same room as Gurlien, and that she would update him if truly needed, and he can come around to forgiving her when he wants.

It still hurts, a bit, so she thumbs over to his text message instead.

CHLOE (7:19 PM): How’s Ambra been with T and Mel?

Last time she checked, Ambra’s been alternatively skittish around them and treating them like old friends, and it’s something Gurlien had talked extensively with Chloe, when trying to help her adapt.

Nothing. No response.

So Chloe sighs, then attempts to push the magic into solidifying the materials of the phone, making it resistant to cracking and to damage from any falls.

The air itself flickers around her, and she lifts her head, only to find Killian leaning against the warping shield, arms crossed, raising an eyebrow down at her.

“Do you need me to show you what I’m doing?” Chloe asks, picking up the phone and brushing off the remnants of the grains of sand. “I totally can, it’s nifty.”

“No,” he replies, but there’s something to read into his voice. “How much data do you need to read from the phone to set that up?”

From her understanding of Ambra, that’s a surprisingly astute way of looking at technology for a demon.

“I don’t need to know anything about it,” she answers, leaning on the scrolls, the sand buzzing around her elbows. “I’d just have to touch it, the notifications could be automatically sent to any number the user wishes.”

It doesn’t take a genius to read between the lines on what he’s talking about.

“It does put on a tracker,” she warns, “that, once fallen into the wrong hands, could be manipulated and used to other…ends.”

His lips thin. “Noted.”

“And I don’t know who all your kid would want to notify,” she says, once again venturing to read between the lines, but by his expression she’s not wrong. “But anyone else with alchemy would be able to tell it’s been changed the moment they touch it. I’m not good at being sneaky like that.”

Apparently, Axel had at one point, but Chloe’s gifts don’t fall into subtlety as easily with electronics.

“I appreciate that answer,” he says, and she doesn’t know how he leans against the magical barrier he can freely move through, but she doesn’t think right now is the time to ask theory questions like that. “She wants your number, to text me if needed. Will you track her through that?”

“I couldn’t, others might.”

He sighs, and it’s a very human reaction, one that’s almost out of place with the double features.

“But they’d need to either get her phone number or their hands on my phone to do so,” Chloe says. “So there might be some security through that.”

He nods, curt, then disappears again.

Chloe stares at the spot on the opaque shield, squinting to see if she can find a break in it, before turning back to her phone.

CHLOE (7:32 PM): This demon teleports a lot. Like, between rooms a lot. Instead of walking.

AMbrA (7:33 PM): Jealous.

MAISON (7:34 PM): Inefficient.

AMbrA (7:35 PM): Not if you’re not disadvantaged with power regeneration.

She misses that, just a bit.

DELINA (7:37 PM): So Chloe, besides all that, what’s your plan? Let yourself be carted all over the world by a mysterious demon until you find your friend?

Chloe stares at it, then turns off the phone, shoving it into her pocket.