Chapter 26

26

C hloe staggers away from him, all but collapsing onto the same bed she woke up from only a few days earlier.

Just a few days earlier.

Too many things had happened.

She’s grimy, she’s covered in blood and dust—not a small bit her own—and too much sweat for the winter.

And she had killed another demon.

Chloe has just a moment of despair, while still staring up at Killian’s new face, before the door to the room slams open and a small form all but throws herself into Killian for a hug.

Killian only barely reacts, like he’s still stunned by something she can’t see, just half turning and getting his arms above her grip.

“You’re back!” the small voice—too small, too young—says, high pitched and excited and…happy? “Gracie and Johnathan moved away, and they said I can visit them and that they are going to California! And Mrs. J said that people can bring their pets to school on Friday, and—”

“Slow down?” Killian asks, and it must be the weary tone in his voice, but the child pulls away, eyes suddenly shuttering to caution.

“You changed bodies again,” the kid says, immediately all joy seeping out of her tone as she pulls further away, giving him a critical glance. “You changed bodies and…”

Her eyes, a normal human blue, trail over to Chloe, who’s sitting half slumped on the bed, black and red blood all over her and dust on top of that.

Chloe is not supposed to see her, that’s for sure, with how much Killian protected her last time, but Killian didn’t immediately teleport away when she burst into the room.

“Hi,” Chloe says warily.

Gently pulling away, Killian nods to Chloe. “Chloe, this is Seanna.”

There’s an odd weight to the trust, there, and Seanna blinks wildly at Killian, before letting her gaze sit on Chloe, less than friendly.

“I’m not telling you my last name,” she says, almost accusatory.

“That’s fair.”

“Did you make him change bodies?” the girl asks, but it’s not accusatory, not quite, more of a testing for answers. It shows an interesting understanding of demons, but an even different understanding of interpersonal relationships.

“It was an injury,” Killian says, shaking himself loose and running a hand through the curls, shaking out dust. “Had to take another one at short notice.”

The girl looks over to Chloe again, and she’s a young looking twelve-year-old, too young to know about demons and powers of destruction.

“It wasn’t her,” Killian says, almost exasperated.

“She’s the one that shot you?” the girl shoots back, too fast.

“Sorry,” Chloe says, the exhaustion bleeding into amusement. “But not this time.” Tentatively, she stretches out her legs, trying to evaluate how much she could stand in a shower to get all the grime off of her.

Probably.

“This time she helped me,” Killian says, then shoots Chloe a coded look, one that’s hilariously different in the new body but still readable.

A somewhat calculating expression crosses the girl’s face, and she tentatively reaches her hand out to Chloe.

Only for Killian to make a harsh noise in the back of his throat, and Seanna snatches her hand back.

“I wasn’t gonna do anything bad,” she protests, as Chloe raises an eyebrow.

So Chloe stands, only wobbling a bit, then nods to the shower, and the girl scowls at her until she awkwardly stumbles out of the room, closing the door behind her.

The shower does little to combat the overall feeling of grime, even when her skin is scrubbed free from all the blood and she’s disinfected her hands, but Chloe takes a few extra moments to comb her hair out of her face until the hurried whispers outside the door calm down.

Once again, she’s an intrusion. After all the small bits of affection, after the battle and the brutality and the tying of the magic, she’s an intrusion.

It hurts a bit more than it should.

But she takes a deep breath, squeezes her eyes shut, before opening the door back up.

It’s just Killian, all but slouched in the armchair by the bed, and even in the new body there are lines of exhaustion around his eyes.

He takes one glance at her, before he nods to the little table. “Eat.”

Somehow, there’s a box of pizza, steaming, and unless the kid knows how to order pizza, then Killian left while she was in the shower and stole it.

Chloe’s not entirely sure which one is worse.

Her scrolls are spread out on the bed, the fabric of the nylon bag carefully cleaned, like he studied them while she was just in the other room.

“I couldn’t make them work,” he says, almost gentle, “don’t worry.”

“Right,” Chloe says, still unsteady, then grabs the plate from the meager kitchen.

The kid stands in the doorway of her room, watching her cautiously, her mouth hard, before sliding back and closing the door with a click.

“Is she okay?” Chloe asks, and thankfully there are already a few pieces of pizza missing, so the kid already got to eat.

“She gets upset when I’m injured,” he says casually, like it’s the most obvious and normal thing. “Worries she’ll be left here with just her mother.”

Makes sense.

“I made sure she’ll never want for money, she has a bank account that’ll get five thousand dollars deposited every month, and the protections here will stay when I’m dead,” he says, like it’s almost an accusation. “But she gets scared.”

“She’s twelve, of course she would,” Chloe says, plopping the pizza—pineapple and pepperoni, by the look of it—onto her plate and then sitting cross legged on the bed, staring blankly at the scrolls.

The lines blur with each blink.

“Your hands are still hurting,” Killian says, softer still. “And I missed a bruise to your ribs, I don’t know when.”

Chloe touches her hand to her side. It’s tender, of course, and it could’ve happened at any point in the last day.

There’s something awful across Killian’s face, something she can’t quite read, something beyond her.

And now she has to process the last day, over the slice of pizza with the demon staring at her, something between dread and anger in his eyes.

Numb, she pulls her cell phone out of its protected pouch on the backpack.

“I should probably…”

“Warn your friends?” he finishes for her. “Let them know you’re still alive? Tell them not to worry about the base falling? Tell them another abomination is out there, and we don’t know his mental stability?”

“Yeah,” Chloe says, then rubs her eyes, forcing herself to take a bite of the pizza. “All of that.”

He sighs, and that’s a different sound in the new body.

“Are you okay?” she asks, instead, setting her phone next to the scrolls, and his brow twitches. “You had way more—”

“I’m fine,” he interrupts, and that’s almost certainly a lie, she can instantly tell, with a sudden drop of knowledge in her gut.

“Okay, no,” Chloe says, and she barely has energy to eat, but she points at him anyway. “If I can’t hide my injuries from you, you don’t get to lie that everything’s peachy.”

His eyebrow twitches, which she can’t remember his previous body doing at all, and there must be a new quirk in the new one. “Why?”

Which is rude.

“Because there has to be some sort of balance in this,” Chloe says, pointing in between them. “You don’t get to be all knowing and leave me in the dark, I hate that.”

There’s a long moment of him staring at her, the pizza going cool in her hand.

“She tried to compress my chest, to force me into injury from this body,” he says finally. “It’s a rude tactic, like she thought I was stupid to fall from it.”

“She knew you?” Chloe says, already knowing the answer. “She knew about…” She points towards the other room, and Killin’s scowl deepens. “And knew you wouldn’t want to go back there.”

“And now she’s dead,” he says, almost a snarl behind his voice. “She was kept there the same as me, in the same row of prison cells, and she stayed there and helped.”

It’s not something Chloe had heard of, of other demons helping the college, but it shouldn’t surprise her.

Ambra would’ve eviscerated them. Tore them apart, made them suffer.

“If it’s any consolation, I’ve been told that the gunshot wounds are rather painful,” Chloe says, and that breaks the fury on his face, just enough for a bit of incredulousness to cross the new features. “Ambra got shot by it, it nearly killed her.”

“I had to get another body from it,” he replies, indignant, like she forgot that she also shot him across the arm. “Yes, they are rather painful!”

“So it wasn’t a good death,” she finishes, and the expression calms, just a bit. “She caused so much pain, she died in pain.”

This mollifies him, his gaze going inwards, and she uses the silence to eat more of the pizza, even though each swallow hurts her throat.

“I’ll recover,” he says, slowly, and she nods at him. “In about a day I’ll be fine. It’s not that difficult for me to heal.”

“Good,” Chloe replies, and a knot she didn’t know existed unravels inside her chest, even as he stares at her, visibly disquieted in the small room.

It’s a wholly complex amalgam of emotions hanging in the air, and she knows, she just knows, that she’ll have to untangle it somehow, but with the exhaustion she can’t.

It’s dark outside, wherever they are, and the moment she sets the plate onto the meager side table, her eyes drag.

“She also hurt you,” Killian says, finally, after a long silence. “She got around my shields and almost killed you and all the humans in the room.”

Chloe nods, unable to piece out the emotions, but her gut tells her that she should be far more careful than she actually is.

“I cannot fully take away your pain,” he murmurs into the dark, “but I might be able to help.”

Chloe breathes out, blinking. “Do you mean taking my soul? Like…Necromancers?”

“Yes,” he whispers, and she shivers. “Just enough to grant you relief.”

Chloe stills herself, and his hand is hot against her ribs.

“You won’t be in danger of dying,” he says, low, “only Necromancers truly tempt us to that point. This…” he hesitates, like weighing his words, “would only take a small part of your soul, easy to grow back. You wouldn’t miss it.”

“You know what, I don’t think I’m there yet,” Chloe says frankly, and he huffs out a small laugh at the sudden break in tension, his hand gentling. “I can deal with some discomfort, I’ve had far worse.”

“Fair,” he says, humor coating his voice. “You’re the one who broke out of Toronto, shame on me to think you couldn’t handle some bruises.”

“Thanks,” Chloe says, then sighs, her eyes gritty.

“You need sleep,” he whispers, when she doesn’t respond beyond that, before he shifts from his chair, rolling up the nearest scroll to him.

“Don’t knock me out,” Chloe attempts as a joke, but it falls flat.

He doesn’t smile.