Chapter 22

22

I t takes her a good extra half an hour to get the car back up to running, and Killian bullies her into getting fast food and eating before they hit the highway, but the car pulls alongside the pristine train tracks, the sun bright and cold, and the same fear settles into Chloe’s bones.

It’s different than Toronto. It’s different than the prisons she was held in, it’s different than the cloying bases she had to pass through, time after time again

It’s smaller, for one. Less protected from human influence. Less likely to be hit by someone like her, someone with so much back up. Less likely to be directly attacked by a demon trying to break in, as opposed to one trying to break out.

In short, it’s the perfect target for this. Maximum reward, little risk for a fully manned base.

But the guards are trained to deal with demons.

The rickety car pulls up to the town right before the base, and it practically glowers with wealth. The roads are smooth, the sidewalks glitter with perfectly curated frost, and even the bare trees have glimmers of leaves already started, out of season and gaudy.

Killian wrinkles his nose at them.

“They support a winery here?” Chloe asks, skeptical, staring at the bare branches of the grapevines completely untouched by snow and ice. “That has got to be a waste of energy.”

“It is,” he says, and there’s an underlying tension in his voice. “Though not every magician is talented at practical things.”

“Better than blowing stuff up, I guess,” Chloe says, staring hard at the grapevines. Spells are woven into the base of each one, spells to resist the cold, spells to warm the soil and the leaves, spells to need less sunshine, all carefully sewn together and stitched to further propel their usefulness.

If the town just twenty miles away hadn’t been so impoverished, it’d be beautiful. A good use of energy. something creative instead of destructive, for once.

But the potholes and broken sidewalk stick in her mind.

The base sits on the hill above, nestled into the stone, and Killian shifts in his seat as it does, a frown pulling down his lips.

“I’ve never seen it in the daylight,” he murmurs. “Just outlined in spells against the dark of their cargo trains.”

If Chloe squints, she can see the barest hint of a tunnel opening up underneath the hill, tracks almost shimmering with enough magic to keep them clear of frost.

Must’ve been terrifying for him.

Must’ve been terrifying for the spirit fox, too.

“And Ambra’s been in here, too,” Chloe murmurs, idling the car at a parking spot. Enough of Ambra’s story had been told to her that the very idea of supporting the college turns her stomach even more than it used to, warping her gut and turning her mouth sour.

When Gurlien had brought her to them, shot so critically, when Alette and Axel were stabilizing her, he had wept on Chloe’s shoulder about all of the horrors he had indirectly seen, at the possible guilt he may have had by association.

Killian nods, almost absentmindedly responding to her, still staring up at the building, his eyes glimmering red.

“Do you think we should park here and walk up?”

The plan hinges on them walking in before a train, before the guards come down to the loading area, before the platform crawls with extra hands. In between the trains, only two guards stand at the mouth of the tunnel and one at the elevator.

He tilts his head, his power flexing in the rickety car, so much that Chloe breathes hard out her nose, leaning her head against the cracked plastic of the steering wheel.

“There’s a flat spot in the trees closer,” he says, voice carefully neutral. “Still outside their shields, but only a five-minute walk instead of this.”

“Got it, good, thanks,” Chloe says, the moment his power seeps away from the car, leaving her head swimming, but she pulls the car out of the parking space anyway.

A pedestrian gives her an odd glance, like he too could tell what Killian just sensed.

Killian eyes him as they drive past, but the pedestrian doesn’t seem to notice.

“Probably just noticing how bad this car is,” Chloe says, forcing brightness into her tone. “Everyone else was driving something pretty and this car is not.”

He makes a discomfited noise in the back of his throat, tapping his fingers against his thigh, but gives her the directions she needs, pulling them off the highway, onto gravel roads that grumble into dirt, before she pulls in between two trees on a relatively flat pad of ground, killing her headlights.

Snow lays in grimy piles, which means she’s far from the only person who uses this spot.

“Nobody’s parked here in three days,” Killian supplies, as she opens her mouth to say it. “A magician, one of the scientists, parks here to hike on his breaks, I can feel it.”

It’s perfectly cleared of snow and ice, like the winter didn’t exist out here, and when Chloe cracks the door of the shitty sedan open, the air is warm against her face.

Just outside of the little flat surface, however, snow starts to fall, fluffy in the quickly dimming light. Chloe watches as a snowflake brushes against whatever invisible barrier the magician had placed on the parking spot, and it melts immediately, dripping down to the forest floor.

There’s a small line of ice at the border, too precise to be anything natural.

“Ever think about how many problems we could solve for the world, if only we thought about things besides this?” Chloe murmurs, and Killian arches an eyebrow at her. “How much hunger we could solve, how many people we could defend.”

“They’ve tried that in the past,” Killian replies neutrally, and he’s just in a normal Henley and pants, the cold not bothering him one bit. “It didn’t turn out well.”

“Still,” Chloe says, eyeing the perfect line of ice. “I hate it.”

His other eyebrow raises to match its mate. “So in addition to being insane, you’re also a bleeding heart,” he declares, like it’s fitting more pieces of her into place.

“Hey,” Chloe replies mildly.

“You asked someone to kill you to make your life easier, you don’t get to argue that label,” he says, then grins at her, sudden and wild. “Let's get our next trail and tear this place down.”

His hands flex, and even outside of the car, even outside of any enclosed space, his power floods through her, bolstering her, raising the hair on the back of her neck.

When Chloe had been young, she once broke into a barn two miles off the road, the sort of barn that’s barely visible above the fields of wheat, and found a room full of rusted ammunition. The kind of ammunition only seen in the video games she watched boys play in the rec center, the kind of ammunition she saw in the grim war documentaries her dad watched while drunk.

And in the middle of it was a land mine from some world war or another, spiky, the joints rusted, but something in Chloe’s gut had told her that with the right nudge, the right bit of pressure, it would take out the barn and the wheat field and everything else around them.

The hair on the back of her neck had risen then, just like it does now.

She shifts her weight between her feet, not quite wanting to move but not able to stand still, to watch the bomb go off without her knowledge.

He catches something in her face, stepping closer and tilting his head at her.

“I’m okay,” Chloe breathes, even though her heart pounds. “Just. A thought got me.”

He inclines his head at her, the motion so familiar from both Ambra and Melekai. “You weren’t kept here, correct?”

“Correct,” she says, and her voice is breathy.

“We can always go and destroy those ones after.”

And she realizes it’s an offer. A fulfillment of a favor. That she’s aiding him in this, he can aid her in hers.

That he could offer that power to her whim.

“The main one was Toronto, but thanks,” she says, then nods up at the squat building, barely visible amongst the winter-dead trees.

Towards the tunnel, black in the fading light.

He grins in the dusk, and even behind that grin, even behind the bomb and the whirlwind of power, there’s nerves there. Nerves he’s desperately trying not to show her.

“They’ve stopped nearly all of the wild magic from this entire area,” he says, bouncing lightly on his toes, like that’ll help the energy. “How many Wights and spirits will flood this forest the moment we drop it?”

“Well, Alette told me of the time she dropped all the protections around her compound,” Chloe says, tightening the straps on her backpack so it lays tight against her spine, then dips down and scoops up some gravel for her pocket.

He watches with a sort of half smile.

“Apparently it was dramatic,” Chloe says, then nods back at him. “Let’s do this.”

The walk there took less than five minutes, but they remain in silence. Chloe camouflages her jacket to fit the forest around them, keeps the orange scarf tucked into the pocket of her overalls, and Killian scans the entire way, microbursts of power into the woods, as if trying to catch someone off guard.

But the black tunnel for the railway shows no more scrutiny than the reports say it should, despite the other attacks on bases.

“Foolish,” Killian mutters, after they watch a guard make a round, completely oblivious.

“Yeah,” Chloe whispers, though the wind rustling the branches is enough to disguise her words and steps, before she nudges at a line in the forest floor.

There, barely visible to even her, is a defense ward, tied into the packed dirt around the railway. To stop bad actors, anyone who may mean them harm who’s not under their control.

The sort of basic defense that one writes into the ground. She's seen this at people’s houses, painted on the underside of welcome mats and embedded into lawns.

Easy work. No alarm attached—alarms are more difficult and would be more draining on resources—and stuff she’s made for.

She crouches amongst the dirty ice, teasing her fingers into the line of the ward, ignoring Killian’s inhale.

They trained her to take down these sort of wards when she was barely fourteen, and this one takes less than ten seconds for her to nullify.

The released power ripples through the forest around them, the needles of the evergreens trembling as if in a strong wind. Tendrils of Chloe’s hair escape from her bun, flicking around her face.

“Oh, you are good at that,” Killian murmurs appreciatively when she stands, brushing the dirty frost off her fingertips.

“What, like you couldn’t destroy that easily,” Chloe challenges, and her hand doesn’t even tingle with it.

He shrugs, one shouldered, though some of the anxiety’s eased away from his face. “Not that silently.”

They have three layers of wards before the tunnel, and that’s just the simplest.

The next one’s meant for dampening unless you carried a counter spell crafted by the rune maker, the sort of ward found in a lot of schools when children are still learning control. The teachers could have it written on the back of their badges, and the kids wouldn’t be able to blow things up.

Also good for stopping prison breaks.

It’s reinforced from the inside so that someone couldn’t break out of it from within, layers of overlapping magic that can’t be pressed out from. Meant to contain, not defend.

Chloe broke one of these when she was sixteen, on a dare.

Killian watches her as she sits, cross legged on the ground, all but looming.

“Everyone without a badge will feel this immediately,” Chloe warns, “what do we think the chances are someone will alert their guards?”

He bares his teeth at her. “Why would someone tell their captors they have more power now?”

“I dunno, to brag?” Chloe says, then focuses on the ward.

It’s written deep into the ground, many years ago, reinforced several times, but the original writing is deep beneath a few inches of pine needles and frozen dirt.

“Think of a perfect glass dome,” Chloe murmurs. “No matter how much you push out, you can’t defeat the structural integrity.”

But from the outside…

This one takes more effort, scraping at the frozen ground, before Chloe can grasp it in the palm of her hand and rip it apart.

This one clatters out with a snap, unraveling, ripping up from the frozen ground in a perfect circle around the entirety of the base.

“Someone will notice that,” Killian murmurs.

“If they know what they’re looking at,” Chloe says, standing again. The next ward is the alarm system, the most tricky one to release without them noticing, the most complicated out of the three.

The one after that is in the tunnel, under the mountain itself, buried deep between the foundation and the tracks.

And that’s the one that will unleash Killian.

And whatever else is in the cages.

Alette’s packet didn’t contain a roster of creatures currently there, and Chloe has to believe that at least one of them would be hostile to her, if only for the fact that she’s a human in a facility run by humans hurting others.

Chloe stills herself, but any wind disguises any words of alarm they might be able to catch.

With a soft hand to her elbow, Killian guides her forward, like he’s worried she’ll stand there forever.

Before they’re right in front of the tunnel, hewn smoothly from dark stone, and a voice calls out.

The ward is written into the stone before the tunnel, solidified by the very structure they’re built into, and Chloe presses her palm against the cold rock.

“Who’s there?”

Chloe freezes, but Killian smiles.

“How long will it take you to break this one?” he murmurs softly, like he’s confessing love instead of battle plans.

“Without anyone knowing?” Chloe breathes, and he nods. “Ten minutes.”

“Did you hear anything?” the voice says from inside the tunnel, echoing slightly, and Chloe flattens herself against the stone, as if that would do anything to stop someone from spotting her if they poked their head out.

“Dude, I think it was the wind,” a second voice says, slow and deeply uninterested.

“Start,” Killian says, low, even though Chloe’s instincts are to run, to hide into the forest until the danger has passed.

There’s a beep of a walkie talkie, closer to the mouth of the tunnel, and Chloe squeezes her eyes shut.

Before she reaches with her palm to the ward and starts piecing it apart.

It’s a complicated one, one created by several people all at once, etched into the very crystalline nature of the stone, and all at once Chloe knows why they chose to build the base here.

The stone, Quartzite buried deep into Granite, lays in the same pattern as the wards, reinforcing and buttressing it.

Chloe would bet that all further wards are tied into the same structure.

Her eyes pop open, staring up at the giant mountain of granite, at the structure ahead of her.

The entire thing was built to contain.

Killian watches her, his eyes reflecting back the dimming light at her. “Chloe…” he trails off, tilting his head at her.

She nods instead, twisting her mind deeper into the structure.

There are alarms built into it if the stones crack. There are alarms built in if someone removes a piece of the ward, even an animal carrying it away. Even the smallest of pebbles would be noticed if it disappeared.

It’s a redundancy of a redundancy.

It also means they would be used to false alarms. Of the alarms going off because of small natural occurrences. The guards would be tired of it, be annoyed to go check it.

Chloe flicks her eyes to Killian, then to the trees, jerking her chin. “Make the trees rustle,” she whispers, barely audible. “Make them think it’s the wind.”

He smiles at her, slow, before his power floods around her, shaking the limbs of the trees, creaking the branches, flicking her hair into her eyes.

The footsteps in the tunnel turn back, echoing away.

“Told you,” the second voice says, smug.

“Don’t be an ass,” the first rebuts. “It was a weird wind.”

And as the footsteps fade, Chloe shuts her eyes, stretching her awareness of the stone further away, racing through impurities and rebar hammered into place and chunks of sandstone left behind from years of sediment, to the other side of the alarm ward.

Somewhere, remote, she hears Killian inhale.

Then, far away, where the ward ties back on the opposite side of the base, Chloe fixes her mind to the stones. To the cellular structure of the quartzite, of the granite around it.

And…shifts it.

Just slightly, switching from quartzite to pure quartz, but it’s enough. The alarm ward breaks, shattering apart from that spot so far away, and sirens peal through the air.

Killian jumps, gripping Chloe’s arm, and she opens her eyes to stare up at him before returning the stone back to quartzite.

The alarms still blare.

“Jesus Christ!” the first voice yells from inside. “It’s a goddamn rock alarm from the goddamn other side of this goddamn mountain.”

“Shut it off!” the second calls, and just like that, the rune ward evaporates, the sirens cutting off.

The footsteps disappear deeper down the hallway, both of them muttering.

Chloe removes her palm from the wall and wobbles.

“Did you just change the stone of the mountain itself?” Killian murmurs, catching her by the elbow and stabilizing her as she blinks through it.

“Yeah, a bit,” Chloe mumbles, and Killian’s already pulling her backpack off of her, unzipping it.

And there, in the middle of the forest, with him all but gaping at her, she cracks a smile at him.

His brows flash up.

“Yeah, I’m impressive sometimes,” she says, and his face creases into a smile, like he can’t believe her.

And suddenly, as fast as if it hit her, she wants to see that smile again.

She’s already a bit delirious, already a bit lightheaded, but this, with the breeze and the crunchy dirty snow and the stones against her hands, suddenly she’s alive.

She wants to see him smile. She wants to see him look at her, with a wild joy and amazement in his eyes, all the time.

It’s a rush, brilliant, and it takes her breath away.

And she’s only realizing it now, when they stand at the door of an enemy base, faced with more danger and enemies than she cares to admit.

Hell of a time to get a crush. Hell of a time to suddenly decide to latch herself onto a mystical being who could eliminate her with barely a thought. Hell of a time to look at this person next to her, this demon so enraptured with fear that he’s breaking in someplace violent to gain more power, and decide that yes, this is what she wants.

And he turns the smile on her again, his eyes alight, like her small action has given him hope.

She wants to be that person who brings him hope.

“I was just going to kill them,” he says, pulling out a Five Hour Energy shot and passing it to her. “You just made them take down the entire alarm because of annoyance.”

Chloe twists open the shot and downs it in one go, then coughs at the taste. “They built it into stone,” she says, pulling out a fruit leather and biting into it. “Stone that’s exposed to the elements. A bird drops a seed on it and chips off a sand is gonna set it off.”

The fruit leather is flavorless in her mouth, which means that she really needs it.

“They must have a dozen false alarms a week,” Chloe continues, after pulling a glug of water from her canteen. “The ward must constantly be going down, then flipping up, then going down.”

He watches her, a funny expression on his face, something halfway between a smile and a blank face.

“It’ll be down until they get over there and put it back,” Chloe says, finishing the fruit leather, then jerks her head towards the door to the tunnel. “Let’s go?”

The expression doesn’t leave him, but his eyes crease into a smile.