Chapter 30

30

T he next base is, for a lack of a better term, not the most impressive thing in the world from the outside.

Chloe’s found herself in many small shacks, many places that the snobs of the world would wrinkle their nose at, many tiny tombs and mausoleums that dot the world with their grim show of grief, but this…this is just somewhat sad.

Sure, not every place can be a shining base of magic with an infrastructure to run a small city and traps bleeding out every pore, but as she peers at the rather afterthought of a protection ward carved over the door of a wooden lean-to, she begins to doubt her research.

Next to her, Killian shifts from foot to foot, an odd little physical quirk, and she can't quite remember if he did it before the body change.

The guard had shifted like that while pointing the gun at her.

There's no other trace of magic, no flutters of power, no dark twists of demon abilities, just a shack against a dirty rock cliff.

And yet, her compass points directly into that little door.

"Can you sense anything deeper than just this?" Chloe asks, and though it feels like they haven’t spoken in hours, he raises his eyebrows at her. She's sweating, underneath her lightest rain slick, the humidity plastering her hair against her face.

He's unaffected, the water not even settling in his curls. They’re somewhere vaguely tropical, somewhere that grows vines thick and mist flows freely between the trees. Chloe didn’t recognize the name of the city closest to the spot delineated by the map, but Killian had been able to get them there pretty easily, only about a two hour tromp through mud and a twilight that never ends.

Killian tilts his head at the door, his eyes focusing on the demon ward hastily painted on the wood tucked under the meager excuse for a roofing.

"Not terribly," he says, crossing his arms, still staring at the ward. "Can you take that down without reaching it?"

She scoffs, drawing a smile from his lips. "It's a zone of effect. Of course I can." The writing's just a marker, not the totality of it. There were harsher wards on the cabin when they first got to it, more complicated traps fucking embroidered into the throw pillows.

It's almost pathetic.

Killian shoots her a grin, something small that makes her stomach turn over on itself, just that she’s able to see that. That he reserved it for her. That he’s smiling with all of him, not just the human skin on top, but the slightly sinister under-self as well.

That she cares about seeing it.

Chloe lets her eyes flutter shut, teasing her fingertips under the door frame, until they rest against the wooden door—they hadn't even bothered to sand down the splinters—and breathes out.

All it takes is a twist of her fingertips, embedding her mind in the sloppy work, and tugging it like a needle through a thread, and it dissolves into a pile of fragments, barely tingling in the palm of her hand.

"That was easy," Killian says, guarded, before stepping up until he's shoulder to shoulder with her, resting his hand next to hers on the door, his palm flattening. Their pinky fingers touch, barely, and Chloe represses the urge to shiver at such a little contact.

There's a few scars along the knuckles, like the guard had gotten into fistfights.

“Two locks, one vault, a small room encased in metal and one cage, very small,” he says, brow furrowing. “Too small.”

Chloe shifts, and he narrows his eyes at her.

“You’re not going to like this,” he warns. “It’s bordering on cruel.”

Like the experimentation and the prison cells before weren’t.

“I’ll like opening a vault,” Chloe says, and that gets a twitch of a smile as she digs out her lock picks, casting a critical eye at the single lock on the front door. “How long do you think this’ll take me?

It even looks like a standard four pin doorknob.

“Under a minute,” Killian says, almost smug.

“That’s insultingly unspecific,” she says, and she doesn’t even have to crouch down to pick it, barely paying any attention before it turns easily in her palm. “Easily under fifteen seconds, am I right?”

“And without any magic,” Killian says, and there’s a soft smile on his face, almost catching her off guard as she swings the door open.

And faces another, even more run down door, the wood splintering around the locking system, a dusty remnant of a decayed ward spray painted on the uneven surface.

“Is it just three doors back-to-back?” Chloe asks, poking at the decayed ward.

It’s no more magical than the rocks of the cliff behind her.

If she wanted to, if she really wanted to, she could just tap against the rusted metal of the lock and transform it into something else, something that would swing open the door, but Killian shifts behind her, like his impatience almost physically pains him.

So instead, she just pushes into the wood, and it creaks with the barest hint of pressure, before crumbling in her hand.

“That’s…” Killian starts, then falls silent, frustratingly so. “Why would this place exist?”

“Good question,” Chloe murmurs, the hair on the back of her neck prickling, as she kicks the door open, the lock system rendered useless. “I’ve seen high schools with more security than this.”

He hmms in the back of his throat, his hand coming down to rest on the curve in the small of her back, and this time she shivers at his touch. “This couldn’t have been more than a halfway spot,” he whispers, twisting something resembling power into his hand on her. “Some place in between travel, before the next one.”

When Chloe had been transported between locations, she had been handcuffed, blindfolded, and given a sedative that wasn’t strong enough to knock her out, just render her useless, and they always dumped her on a hotel bed when they did stop.

The spirit fox would’ve required even less work, when basically a large bespelled pet carrier could work in a pinch.

That’s how they met, as she remembers with a pang. With her drugged out of her mind, handcuffed unceremoniously on a bed, and an all-metal cage all but dropped on a cheap motel quilt next to her. She couldn’t do much, just blink over, and was immediately entranced by the sheen of magic on the fur on the creature next to her, at the scared intelligence in the eyes that stared back inky black. The fox had curled in the corner of the cage, as far away from their captors as possible, which was so close to Chloe that if she had her hands at her disposal she would’ve been able to touch the tip of her tail.

Even then, power flickers from its tail, nestling into the quilt and skittering across the pillow towards Chloe.

Chloe couldn’t react, couldn’t flinch away or embrace it, but it still tingled along her skin and felt like home.

“That makes even less sense,” Chloe says, clearing her throat of the memories.

“A staging area?” Killian suggests. “A place for a few days before something more permanent?”

With a final kick from her boot, she clears the second door, and it’s a few steps to, finally, a large sheet of metal with a single keyhole and no discernible opening method.

“Finally,” Chloe says, tossing him a smile in hopes that he wouldn’t have seen her momentary wallow, but he raises a carefully manicured eyebrow down at her. “You know, a challenge.”

“I’d be okay with a few less challenges,” he says dryly, but his hand remains on the curve of her hip, like her very presence is soothing.

“Finally, something interesting,” she shoots back, and he makes a face at her. “Something that doesn’t make me think it’s a trap.”

“There is nobody I’d rather be trapped with, at this point,” Killian says, too gravely, startling in its sincerity. “Any trap you’re in, you’d blast right out.”

“If only that was true for my entire life,” Chloe says, then steps away from him, his hand falling away, so she can kneel and peer at the keyhole.

It’s not a traditional one, that’s for sure, and when she pokes her finger around it, the entire area tingles with warning.

But it doesn’t extend through the entire door.

It doesn’t extend through the entire locking mechanism, stopping only a few inches around the keyhole itself.

Which is just enough to be a little complicated. The pins are out of reach, but some of the springs and turners aren’t. Enough that most—most—people would find it completely impossible to hack with spell weaving or alchemy.

It’s better protection than she usually finds.

She bites her lip, puzzling at the door, and Killian makes a small noise in the back of his throat, something between curiosity and impatience.

“So this one I’m gonna use magic,” she warns him, tilting her head up at him, and he shifts closer to him, so the fabric of his pants brushes against her shoulder. “They fell prey to the classic trap.”

He quirks an eyebrow down at her.

“They protected the keyhole but not, you know, the rest of the door,” Chloe tells him, and his face splits into a smile, immediately raising a blush to her face. “They expected someone to come here and believe they had a key.”

“What, are you going to transform it into clay again?” he asks, and it’s almost teasing. “Turn it into silly putty?”

“I mean, I could,” Chloe says, poking at the seam where the metal door meets the wall, where it sockets into the frame. There’s no protections there, no alarms, no traps, just cool steel of someone who obviously never thought outside the box.

Until her finger grazes the edge of the frame, and a small static shock snaps out.

Chloe jerks back, immediately shaking her hand out, sparks flickering over her fingertip.

They don’t disappear.

Chloe stills, then, staring down at her hand, at the small spark nestling in the callus of the pad of her finger, sparkling around like it’s a part of her.

It doesn’t hurt, not exactly, but Killian grabs her wrist, peering down at it, faster than she saw him move.

“I’m okay,” she says quickly, but he doesn’t look up at her.

“You shouldn’t be able to see that,” he mutters, disgruntled, before he carefully, ever so carefully, rests a finger on top of the spark.

It doesn’t react to him at all, just continues to flutter around Chloe’s skin.

“Tracker or side effect?” Chloe breathes, and it’s something between static electricity and when her hand would fall asleep.

He’s silent, before his hand gentles, and he rests his fingertips against her wrist, like he’s checking her heart rate.

“Wait,” Killian says, placing his own hand against the door frame.

It sparks around him, but he teases out something glimmering.

“Let me guess, same one,” Chloe says, half exasperated. “Same guy, same magical trace.”

“Not entirely convinced they’re male, but yes,” Killian grumbles. “Sealed the door behind them, left this to track down who opens it next.”

“Great, someone’s gonna track me,” Chloe says, shaking out her hand.

The sparks stay there, clinging to her skin like static.

She can almost tell that Killian narrows his eyes before she looks back up to him.

“I’ll protect you,” he says, disgruntled.

Chloe considers retorting about not needing protection, but she’s non-combat for a reason.

“I’m sure it’ll be no problem for you, too,” Chloe says, and he gives her a smirk.

“Impossible to tell,” he murmurs, and his eyes aren’t worried, aren’t panicked, but instead a more analytical light in them. “Can you still transform the door?”

Her grip, her innate ability to touch the magic around her and know things, hasn’t faded, not in the way that it does with drugs or sleep deprivation, but before she can open her mouth to answer, he tugs her in, placing a quick kiss against her lips, lighting fast.

“Of course you can,” he says, like it was a silly question for him to ask.

“One day, I want to know what you can tell,” Chloe says, and she should go back to inspect the door, figure out what else she can tell, but instead she just blinks up to Killian.

If she concentrates, she can ignore the human face, instead just see the handsome demon one underneath it.

“That’s easy,” Killian says, still gentle on her wrist. “When there’s a block put on magic, it’s obvious here.” With his other hand, he taps against her sternum. “When you’re tired, when you’re at burnout…it’s all visible there.”

“Okay, wild,” Chloe says, and he smirks at her. “So that’s how demons utterly ignore normal people?”

“Ignore is the wrong term,” he says, and they’re still standing so close. “But yes.”

She tries to suppress a smile, but like always, it worms its way out anyways. “Crazy,” she remarks, then glances back at the table, and if her head leans against his shoulder for a brief second, she’s not going to do anything about that. “I think I can open it without turning the entire thing into putty.”

She feels rather than hears a chuckle from him. “Of course you can.”

It’s strange to buffer her up so much, but she rests her hand against the cold steel anyways, avoiding the sparking door frame.

If the door frame is warded, more things will be, and somehow it makes her feel better. Somehow, if they took the pains to make it more difficult, then it’s not just a trap looking for easy pickings. Of course it could be worse, it could always be worse, but she’d rather go headfirst into something she can at least anticipate.

So she settles her mind into the locking mechanism she can sense.

The pins seem to rest on a complicated set of springs, one that doesn’t only release a deadbolt but also reaches down further into the door, clasping around a series of latches and blocks. It would be hell to pick, way harder than most vault doors, for all that it appears to be a completely normal keyhole. Would take way more strength, way more finesse, way longer tools than easily available. Sure, she could make them, but even then, it would take a few attempts to make sure she got the rake just right.

Or she can attempt to mess with the latches underneath the ward.

She pokes her power out at the latches, fussing with them a bit, elongating the teeth of metal they sit upon just enough to shift them, listening to the clicks. They’re a bit rusted, which means that water got in at some point, but they clack easily in the door.

Next to her, Killian raises an eyebrow.

She raises one back, then pokes a bit harder at the door. Testing, she raises one, and the locking mechanism closer to the key responds.

So if she turns the ones below, the linking pins would turn the top.

It’s a risk, not all locks do that, but carefully, ever so carefully, she manipulates the metal around the latches to raise, until all of them are in a row, listening to the tiny clicks of the pins lifting into place at the lock.

Success.

Slowly breathing out, she manipulates the metal latches until they turn, until the deadbolt slides rusty out of the frame, and a quick push of her fingertips swings the door open.

Before she can even ask, Killian twists his hand, and the space illuminates with bright magic.

And it’s…

Too small.

There’s a cage, the size you would fit a cat into, plastic and grungy and half melted, and a charred cot shoved into the corner. No running water, no electricity, no blankets in the bottom of the cage, nothing.

And the walls are entirely burnt, like something exploded in the small space.

Chloe moves to take a step forward, but Killian twists his finger in her belt loop, holding her back.

“Look,” he murmurs, lifting his other hand with the light

A charred skeleton lays crumpled in the corner, the bony arms huddled over the skull, the rest of the bones twisted among themselves.

Underneath the blast marks and soot, there’s the faintest hint of paint markers, spells upon spells hastily scrawled on the wood and rock. Amateur wards, barely legible, high above where someone could normally write comfortably.

Definitely the same hand that wrote the flimsy demon ward on the outside.

And they’re all useless, all completely blown apart by whatever charred the walls and melted the plastic of the cage.

“The fire must’ve burned for only a few seconds,” Killian muses, completely unaffected by the blackened skeleton. “Everything burnt, nothing burned up.”

There’s no clothing on the skeleton, no hint of flesh, but the cage is still recognizable in its melts shape.

Chloe swallows. “If this is after the Minnesota base…this is less than a year old.” There’s no moss or mold on the skeleton, and Chloe’s lived enough in humid locals and seen enough random bones to know it grows fast.

“Few weeks,” Killian says, scuffing the toe of his boot against the soot on the floor. “Maybe.”

That’s…astoundingly close in terms of time, so Chloe digs up her phone and, before she can feel bad, snaps a picture of the skeleton.

“I know two Necromancers,” she informs him as he raises an eyebrow, sending the picture immediately. “Barring one of them actively being here, they might be able to tell us more.”

She’d have her money on Lyra before Delina, with a lifetime of experience with the grossness of death and more than a year of active, steady training, but Delina’s a fast learner.

“Not a bad idea,” he says, almost begrudging, before he twists his power around himself, taking a step into the room.

The same sort of spark that still buzzes around Chloe’s hand shifts at his feet, but beyond a quick glance he pays them no attention.

He tilts his head up to the remaining wards, his chin lifted, and his eyes gleam in the dim light. “The person knew she was in a trap.”

A broken pair of handcuffs sit slagged against the wall.

The ground looks safe for Chloe to step on, but she stills her feet at the entrance.

“She couldn’t get out, she was trying to protect herself,” he says, gesturing to the metal door Chloe stands at.

Scratches in the metal, deep and shiny, adorn the area where a doorknob would be.

“Knew that something in here would explode, that one—” he points up at a rune, barely legible “—is to quell fire. That one is to fireproof skin. That one is to disarm a trap.”

“The reason there is no trap is because it’s already been set off,” Chloe finishes, and if she imagines hard enough, she can see the terror in the curve of the neck, protecting the skull. “Can I step in?”

He waves her in, nonchalant, and she swallows before all but stumbling to the small plastic carrier.

“Some trap, some big sudden propulsion of energy in a small space, with someone in it with enough time to attempt to prepare,” Killian says, before turning towards her, his eyes reflecting the light back at her. “This was a murder.”

“Oh, I hate fire spells,” Chloe murmurs, the terror still echoing inside her.

“Gonna burn off your eyebrows?” Killian asks, and she shoots him a glance and he gives her a cheeky grin.

It doesn’t quite break the tension, but Chloe rolls her eyes before carefully unrolling her scrolls before the cage.

So far, her scrolls have gotten readings off of things rusted, off of well sterilized metal, but never something cleansed with fire.

The ash of the floor flutters around them, as she prods at the melted plastic and imagines the warmth that has long since dissipated.

“The fox wasn’t there,” Killian says, almost gently, from behind her, and shuffles around the small room, peering up at the walls. “That explosion would’ve been felt on the Richter scale.”

“Okay,” Chloe replies unsteadily. “Thanks.”

She smoothes the scroll the best she can over the plastic, with all its lumps and jagged edges, and the sands of magic attempt to vibrate, getting caught in the creases. But the ground is dirty in ash, magic sparkling around their feet, and the cage itself has fused to the concrete.

Without a word, Killian crouches next to her, sweeping his hand over the ash, not making contact, but shoving it all aside with a small flick of power before sitting on his haunches and watching her.

“Any idea who this is?” Chloe asks, as the magic begins to settle in place, as it twists into the paper, her eyes straying back to the huddled skeleton. “Any idea who died?”

“It would take your Necromancer to find out,” he murmurs. “Just that she was very afraid.”

Chloe would be too.

“If you call her my Necromancer, there’s a Half Demon who would fight you,” Chloe replies jokingly, but the words are flat amongst all the horror of the room, of the soot on every surface, on the bones still aching with fear.

“I’d win,” he immediately says, then, “I don’t want your Necromancer.”

“We wouldn’t be talking if you did,” Chloe murmurs, staring hard down at her scroll, forcing her eyes to stay on the familiar paper, not at the walls, at the meager amount of protection someone scrabbled to give themselves.

She’s not sure what she would do to protect herself, not without seeing the trap in its entirety, but this would be something close to her worst nightmare.

“Can you get a sample of whatever it is that set this trap?” Chloe asks, and his brows shoot up. “Any idea of who set it, what the trap was, anything like that. I…”

He’s already standing again, the sparks swirling around his feet, and with a few quick motions, utterly destroys any magical trace of the trap, pulling it towards him with a fluency that makes her mouth dry.

It’s far beyond anything she’s seen Maison do, far beyond the intrinsically protective magic Ambra tends to do when she thinks nobody’s watching, and far beyond all the wild power Terese sometimes lets loose.

And he thinks nothing of it, tucking the remnants of it into a pocket in the guard’s pants, before returning to his crouch next to her.

Once, early after they took down the Toronto base, Chloe attempted to make friends, trying so hard to get along with Lyra, and heard her wax briefly poetic of how Melekai was in his prime. It was near incomprehensible in fluency, unimaginably powerful, that Chloe thought Lyra was exaggerating for her benefit.

With this little glimpse of casual motion, Chloe believes it.

And Killian had chosen her.

It takes short work to tie in the trace into the scroll, the magic cheerily cooperating—why wouldn’t it, it couldn’t be burned out with something so mundane as fire—and even less time for Chloe to connect the compass to it.

All the while Killian stares at her, like she’s the mystery of the room.

“You’re beautiful, you know that, right?” he murmurs, and all of the hair on her arms raise. “When you do this, I can’t believe that anyone would be so blind to see it.”

She’s fairly sure there’s soot smudged across her cheeks.

“Not everyone likes competency,” Chloe attempts the joke again, but he just raises an eyebrow at that.

“Then those people are foolish,” he says softly, helping her roll up the scroll and fit it back into her backpack, before gently offering her a hand to standing. “The fact that I was unaware of you for so long…”

The scars and callouses on this hand do nothing to make his touch harsh, and he cradles her palm like she’s something precious.

The Necromancers respond later, when they’re back to Killian’s little house and Chloe’s washed off all of the remnants of soot and horror.

LYRA (8:42 PM): Dead two weeks, I think.

DELINA (8:43 PM): How can you even tell?

LYRA (8:44 PM): Soot falls off bone fast.

Chloe slumps against the bed, with the scratchy blanket, staring at her phone.

LYRA (8:45 PM): Not a good death.