Chapter 36

36

S ome ground. The grass is damp and warm, sun touched, and mud smears against Chloe’s face as Killian rolls away from her and heaves.

The world tilts, and Chloe can just turn on her back, staring up at a startling blue sky, not a cloud in sight, stars behind her eyes and a pounding in her head.

There’s no sound.

There’s no sound, not even when she flops her arm to the mud. No squelch, no thud, nothing.

Her heart pounds anew.

“Killian?” she whispers, and her voice isn’t even meeting her ears. “Killian, are you—”

“Here,” he says, startlingly clear. “Here, I…” He coughs, rough, and she turns her head to stare at him.

He’s hunched over the grass, gasping for breath, his chest shaking with the effort.

This, she can hear.

“What…” Chloe starts, and she can’t hear her voice, only feel the air leaving her lips, only feel the vibrations in her throat. She lifts a hand, snaps her fingers.

Nothing.

Gurlien had spoken about something similar when he had stood in the middle of a raging ley line as it broke. That it took him two days before he could hear anything, that everyone at the hospital thought it was a concussion.

That he spoke to a Wight and didn’t know anything was wrong until Alette spoke to him.

Immediately, Chloe grips the battery in her fist, shaking her hand and flashing it over to a penlight. It cooperates, and another vise of fear relaxes in her chest.

Killian hacks out a cough, and absent of any other noise, it’s startling. Each ragged inhale, each catch in his throat, everything.

“Killian?” Chloe asks, pushing herself up from the muck, and his shoulders shudder. “What’s going on, what…”

There’s no trees, no stones, just damp grass and a never-ending blue sky. Wind bends the stalks, teases Chloe’s hair out of place, but no sound. The hilt of the gun digs into her side, awkwardly still in the holster.

Next to her, Killian arches his back, and for a split second the edges of him blur, fragmenting apart, before slamming back into sudden clarity again. Flailing, he grabs her hand, and in his grasp claws prickle at Chloe’s palm.

Chloe stills, and the only sound meeting her ears is his breath.

He blinks up to the blue sky, his eyes blank and reflecting red, as he clings onto her hand for dear life.

And Chloe is many things, but prone to panic isn’t one of them, and she can deal with whatever this sound thing is later.

“Killian, look at me,” she orders, and she doesn’t know if she’s speaking too loud, if she’s yelling, but Killian just shuts his eyes. “No, look at me.”

Squeezing her hand, he slowly turns his head, and his eyes don’t quite focus on her, like he’s concussed. Like he’s taken a blow to the head, something unseen, and it’s taking all of his power to just hold himself in place, hold himself in the body.

“Okay, you’re okay,” Chloe says desperately, not able to hear her own words, not able to know truly what they sound like, but the worry laces her throat like acid. “What happened, talk to me, please.”

He coughs, a wet sound. “I got us out,” he says, unsteady. “We’re out, we need to—” he cuts himself off with another gasp, raspy down his throat, and squeezes his eyes shut again.

Chloe tries to click her fingernails, tries to hear anything, but can’t, then takes another steadying breath, fully sitting up and glancing around.

Chloe was born in the American Prairies, lived her life in Kansas before getting picked up by the college, and the unending grasslands never ceased to dizzy her by their sheer scope.

Whoever he dumped them, it’s remote. She can’t even see a road, can’t see a barn, can’t see any livestock or tractors.

Not someplace she can walk them out of, and the seat of her jeans are getting damp.

Still prone on the ground, Killian coughs, and Chloe evaluates.

It’s sunny, sometime midday, and warmer than the Washington mountains, where they were just past noon. She can’t smell manure, just the healthy deep smell of damp earth and crushed grass, so they’re not somewhere close to a farm, close to somewhere they can beg for help.

The battery is still clutched in her hand, the handkerchief around her neck, and other than the strident lack of sound, nothing hurts. Nothing’s injured, no aches, no bruises beyond what’s leftover.

And her backpack…

Chloe twists in the mud, but there’s no glimmer of bright orange nylon. No familiar straps, no telltale jingle of a zipper, not even a fragment of her scrolls.

Her breath catches in her throat, and Killian lifts his head, blinking blearily.

“The research,” she says, the words falling from her lips. “The research, we have to go…”

“Do you have the compass?” he asks, groggy, and without anything else, he’s almost unbearably loud, but she scrabbles for her pocket until she feels the familiar lump.

Her phone’s gone, too. Dropped somewhere in the strange battle, somewhere in the confrontation.

“We need to get to Seanna,” Killian says, and even his voice sounds like it’s being spoken through a mouthful of meal. “She’s in danger, she’s not safe.”

He squeezes her hand, like he’s about to teleport, but they don’t move from their patch of mud.

Her research.

She gasps, she must’ve but no sound hits her ears, and she blinks back a sudden rush of tears.

It’s almost, almost too much. Killian’s injured, disoriented. She can’t hear, other than things he says, which prickles at her neck. They’re somewhere stuck, somewhere unfamiliar, and her research is gone.

Gone.

She jerks in another breath, then grips Killian’s hand again. She could possibly transform a battery into the phone—it would take hours and there’s no guarantee it’d work—and call for help—text for help—but she can’t go back, not without Killian, and each inhale from him laces with pain.

“Okay,” she says, and she can’t even hear herself in her own mind, “Killian, I can’t hear.”

This jolts him up. “What—”

“I can hear you,” she interrupts, then braces him upright as he almost lists over. “Just you, not myself, not the wind, not this.” She snaps her fingers, and still nothing. “What did you do?”

“I…” Here, he pauses to gasp in a breath again, like the air is still too thin and his lungs are still rebelling, but at least this mind is working once more. “I tore a strip of magic onto myself to break the suppression he had.”

From what Chloe’s gathered from Terese, that’s not comfortable.

“I was holding you, so you weren’t going to die,” he says, and his eyes are back blinking blankly to the sky. “And the moment—the moment—it broke, I teleported.”

“Okay,” Chloe says, and her skin crawls from being unable to hear herself.

“The…too strong of magic, too close, breaking, can do things to humans,” he says, shaking his head then squeezing his eyes shut from what appears to be a spike of nausea. “Temporary,” he adds, helpfully.

Temporary is good. Temporary means she won’t be stuck like this, means she’ll hear her friends’ voices again. Means she’ll hear the click of a lock, the sound of the wind.

“Why can I hear you?” Chloe asks, silent to herself, and her throat closes up on herself.

The research, she needs to get back to it, not sitting in the mud.

“I’m not audible,” he says, almost disgruntled, his eyes still squeezed shut. “Seanna’s at her mother’s. If he broke my defenses, he can…”

There’s too much, and her heart breaks, just a bit, at his obvious pain. At his panic, at his distress.

She knows all too well what it’s like to become suddenly helpless.

Still in the mud, she shifts closer to him, pulling up his head and settling it in her lap, and he curls around her, clutching at Chloe’s middle.

“We need to get her safe,” he says, and tremors run through his shoulders.

“I don’t know for full demons, but abominations are wrecked when they do the death bubble on themselves,” Chloe says, and despite the mud, runs her shaking fingers through his hair.

“Did you just call it a death bubble?” he mumbles.

“I saw one get blood running out of her mouth and eyes with that,” Chloe says, and he squints up at her, like he’s unsure where she’s going with the train of thought. “What do you need to get better?”

“What did she?” he mumbles again. “I assume it’s Ambra?”

“No, she’s too smart to do that,” Chloe says, and he coughs out a laugh. “It stopped another demon from taking her body and then she passed out.”

His shoulders still trembling, his breathing calms down just a bit, and she runs her hand through his hair again, despite the instinct to tell him to get up, to get back to the research, to get back to Seanna.

A gust of wind slams into them, the grass bending over from the force, but Chloe still can’t hear it. Her years in the prairie taught her that wind like that causes a rustle, a dull roar from the accumulation of hundreds of miles of uninterrupted travel.

Without that warning, it takes her breath away.

“Chloe,” he starts, haltingly. “Are you talking about the original Terese?”

Well, there’s that.

“Yeah,” she says, and his face spasms. “She’s nice.”

“Would she and Ambra protect Seanna?”

And in the mud, with the wind stinging at her eyes, Chloe thinks.

“I know she’s vulnerable,” Killian continues, but his eyes flicker to hers and hold. “I know other demons have tried to possess that body. I swear, I swear I will give her protection. I will put a giant line in the sand to forbid anyone from touching her. I will reinforce that base so strongly that Alette can have iron control of who comes in and out. They will have the full force of all my power and all my resources if they take her in until this threat is gone.”

The answer is almost certainly yes. Terese rescued a dog just because she saw it needed help. Alette took everyone in when she didn’t have to. Maison, back when she thought of him only as Freddy and as the aloof and introverted Half Demon, would sit with scared children in silence for hours back at the college.

Ambra would take her in a heartbeat, if only to spite the memory of Seanna’s father.

“I would need a phone,” Chloe says.

It’s another stretch of time, unknowable to Chloe without her phone or watch, before Killian has the strength to push himself up and teleport them out of the muck.

He still sways, in the ramshackle house, but his eyes are sharp, flashing over the protections and shield on instinct.

“She’s at her mother’s,” he mumbles, leaning against Chloe to stand, and Chloe guides him over to sit on the bed, dumping him on the sheets.

His clothes aren’t muddy, after all, and Chloe’s jeans are long ago soaked through.

“Stay here,” Chloe instructs, and he just blinks owlishly at her as she strips, then takes the fastest shower imaginable to get as much mud as possible off of her.

The water striking the tile remains silent, and she gets out as soon as she possibly can, redressing without the sound of fabric rustling over her.

Killian’s flat on his back on the pillow, staring upwards to the ceiling when she returns, tension rolling off of him.

“The trap’s still in place,” he says, an idle hand waving towards the window. “He didn’t come back here, I don’t…”

“Stay here,” Chloe orders. “I’m going to go get her, I’ll use her phone to warn everyone, and we’ll get her to safety.”

He starts to rise on his elbows.

“Stay here and get some power back.”

It’s odd to order a demon, but he settles down, breathing hard out of his nose.

It’s not difficult to figure out which house is the mother’s, with the extremely obvious warping black demon shield and traps written up the wazoo, but they barely flicker when Chloe strides right over them, rippling at her feet and recognizing her.

His magic recognizes her.

The other house is more rundown than not, the door gapping at the frame, one window boarded up, but Chloe knocks on the door regardless.

Still no sound, but light shows underneath the door, then a shadow falling on the other side of it before it swings open, revealing a haggard woman with the same high brow and pinch to her lips as Seanna.

Her mouth moves, but Chloe can’t hear anything.

“Seanna,” Chloe says, probably too loudly, as the woman startles back. “I’m here for Seanna.”

The woman’s chin dips low, still talking at Chloe, and she sways in place, her eyes red.

“Seanna,” Chloe calls around the woman, this time knowing she’s being too loud. “Hey Seanna, we need to go!” When nobody else moves, the woman just scowling at her, Chloe inhales. “I’ll teach you how to pick some locks if you come with me.”

In front of her, the woman clearly mouths, ‘What the fuck.’

Finally, Seanna pokes her head around the corner, and she’s wearing a bright purple sweater that clashes with her complexion, and Chloe can lipread enough to recognize her own name.

Chloe jerks her head, and Seanna stares up at her, clearly untrusting. “We need to go back over there,” Chloe says, enunciating as clearly as she can, and she probably sounds like she has a head injury. “He’s injured back at the house.”

Seanna’s mother wanders away, clearly uninterested, and suddenly, viciously, Chloe judges her. A stranger showed up to her house, talking to her minor daughter, and this was the reaction.

No wonder Killian set up another place.

Seanna nods, a curt quick motion, before disappearing and grabbing a duffle and a frozen dinner, and doesn’t even bother opening her mouth to say goodbye to her mother before striding out the front door.

They’re halfway to the other house, before Seanna abruptly turns to Chloe, speaking far too fast for her to lipread.

“I can’t hear you,” Chloe says, as simply as she can, and Seanna’s brows shoot up in open skepticism. “Magic issue. Killian’s injured but okay. We need to get you somewhere safe.”

Her mouth opens, then closes, and Seanna glances over to the other house that practically glows with magic protections, the wards and walls and shield warping with power.

Even half a block away, they can see Killian standing at the window, watching them.

Seanna makes a complicated hand signal to him, something Chloe’s never seen before, and Killian inclines his head enough to make it out, before he disappears from the window.

Once inside, Killian instructs Seanna to pack a bag for at least a week, which feels optimistic, but Chloe could always tell Alette or Delina to take her shopping, before handing Chloe Seanna’s phone.

And now she has to convince the other group to take care of a twelve-year-old.

The only number she has memorized is Gurlien’s, so she types it in.

UNKNOWN NUMBER (3:11 PM): This is Chloe. Lost my phone. I’m injured but alive. We need a place to keep a twelve-year-old safe.

Three dots immediately start, and she can hear Killian’s muffled voice from beyond the other door, with nothing in response.

GURLIEN (3:12 PM): Tell me the name of our cat.

Chloe’s brow raises. It’s a separate code for them, one where they’re skeptical that the other’s communications have been hacked and their normal code might be compromised.

Because telling the name of the cat is easy, but long ago, back when they first got to the cabin and the cat first appeared, they decided that question must be answered with the why of the name. A second part where someone torturing them or merely impersonating would have issues uncovering.

UNKNOWN (3:13 PM): Chance because it was chance that brought him to the cabin.

Immediately, the phone vibrates in her hand for a video call, and Chloe sighs, before answering it.

“I can’t hear anything, some magical injury that he says should fade,” Chloe says, as soon as Gurlien’s frowning face appears. “I was in too much magic as it broke.”

A spark of alarm flashes over his face.

“I can still do alchemy,” she says, quickly. “But Killian’s…adopted daughter…” she hesitates just a bit at that, “is in danger. She’s…she’s Boltiex’s daughter. From Ambra’s escape.”

Gurlien listens to her, for once not a trace of anger across his face, just the immediate analytical expression he makes when he thinks he’s casually thinking of something, before he mimes texting her and kills the call.

She immediately misses his face. It’s been a month, and this is the most she’s seen him outside of anger.

GURLIEN (3:18 PM): Protection from other people or other demons?

UNKNOWN (3:19 PM): People. Same people who tried to attack Alette’s base. Killian wants to know if you can watch her there, since they were unsuccessful before.

GURLIEN (3:20 PM): Is she being tracked?

Chloe worries her lip.

UNKNOWN (3:21 PM): We don’t think she is. We think Killian’s actions are. We were attacked, it wasn’t good.

And then there’s a wait, which makes sense. Even in a perfect time, a friendly time, Gurlien would have to confer with Alette (which is always fraught) and Ambra about taking in a twelve-year-old girl, never mind a risk.

Chloe sits heavily on the bed, and every bone in her body aches at that simple motion, with the world too quiet. The bed should creak, the scratchy blankets rustle, the wind outside should clatter the glass.

GURLIEN (3:28 PM): Ambra and I will take her and work on everyone else.

Chloe flops over on the bed, which should creak, squeezing her eyes shut.

UNKNOWN (3:28 PM): He wanted to make sure she could be protected. His first thought was Ambra and T.

GURLIEN (3:29 PM): Large Tree at the base of the driveway of Alette’s compound. We’ll meet you there.

Chloe doesn’t know how close he’s gotten to there, but it’ll have to do.

Seanna wanders in the room, and Chloe opens her eyes to a curious stare of a pre-teen. Her bright purple backpack swings from one shoulder and a few scrunchies adorn her wrist.

Killian’s in the kitchen, and she can hear his still belabored breathing.

“Hi,” Chloe says wearily.

Seanna says something, completely silent in the still room, and Chloe just shakes her head.

“Sorry, still nothing.”

Seanna nods, her little face solemn, and Chloe suddenly, viciously, wonders if she’s ever had an appropriate amount of childishness, an appropriate amount of whimsy, or if her life has just been one experimental magician to another, to an addict mom and a demon caretaker.

“We’re taking you to my friends,” Chloe says, because it seems appropriate to warn her. “One’s the demon stuck in a human body that you helped escape from your father’s house.”

Seanna’s eyes widen, but otherwise her expression doesn’t change.

“They have a cat?” Chloe offers, because who knows what will get this child to smile. “You’ll be very safe.”

Chloe sits up and her ribs give a twinge, something violent, like the small, short battle re-cracked the bone that was just beginning to feel normal again.

Seanna tilts her head at her, a somewhat funny approximation of Killian’s common expression, then she steps closer to Chloe, holding her hand out.

And Chloe’s tired and aching and still quite wigged by her ears not working, but she hauls herself up to standing, because she’s not gonna be the person who doesn’t respond when a kid clearly wants something.

“Yeah?” she asks, rubbing her face, then reaching out.

Faster than she thought possible, the kid snatches her hand, scrabbling tight, and—

Sound, sudden and vicious, crashes into Chloe, and she reels back, but Seanna digs her nails in, her brows perfectly furrowed. The microwave crackles, electricity humming across the power lines outside and down the wires in the walls, the fridge rumbles, her own pulse thuds, and—

“Stop!” Killian orders, suddenly in the room, and the crease of his boots rustle the carpet as he shifts and gently, ever so gently, lifts Seanna’s hand away from Chloe’s.

Chloe stumbles backwards, the back of her knees hitting the bed with a creak, the blankets deafeningly loud.

So fast she swears she can hear the pop of displaced air, Killian’s next to her, catching her, guiding her down to sitting as her legs shake and her fingers tremble.

“I didn’t even get to her rib!” Seanna protests, loud, so loud Chloe flinches. “There’s a facia messed up in her rib, it’s folded all weird, and—”

“It’s not safe,” Killian says, soft and gentle, but Seanna’s lower lip wobbles. “It’s dangerous, and…” His eyes turn down to Chloe, who quite feels like she’s been slammed over the head with a dumbbell.

“I can hear now,” Chloe says, and her own voice is deafeningly loud. “Jesus Christ, what…”

Killian watches her, rapturously, for a few seconds, before his eyes snap towards the window. “Ambra’ll take her?”

“The Frisse base, at the bottom of the driveway,” Chloe recites, and all the sound’s making her dizzy. “Do you know it?”

“Every demon on this continent knows it,” he says darkly, before back to Seanna, who looks like she’s about to cry. “You can’t do that. Ever again.”

“But she was hurt,” Seanna protests. “She was hurt, and I could help and…”

“Thank you,” Chloe interrupts, as Killian takes a deep breath to answer. “Don’t know how you just healed me, but…”

Chloe blinks over to Killian, and she swears she could hear her own eyelids.

Healed.

Killian kept on emphasizing that Seanna’s magic is rare, kept on insisting that people would experiment with her, that she’d be completely locked away, but…

A healer.

“Oh,” Chloe says lamely. “Uh. Yeah.”

It takes Seanna less than ten minutes to finish packing for a week trip, and she never loses the sad wobbly expression, and Chloe never loses the headache.

Killian watches them both from the doorway of the room, his arms crossed and the groove in his forehead prominent.

And Chloe wants to ask so many questions. Wants to know every little detail, wants to know all of the intricacies and the hows and the whys that they had an actual healer on their hands, but…

“If that man finds out,” she starts, and Killian doesn’t even have to look at her to nod. “That’d be a disaster.”

Someone so insistent on gaining power gaining access to a healer…

She shudders.

“Exactly,” Killian murmurs, quiet enough to be unheard by the pre-teen throwing things into a suitcase. “And every time she heals it throws up a beacon to every magical creature, every being who sees through something besides visual light, knows where she is.”

It’s similar to how Ambra described seeing Necromancers.

And if the man knew exactly where the spirit fox is, knew exactly where that sort of power is based, could…

Chloe squeezes her eyes against the thudding of her own veins.

“I can hear too much,” she says.

“It’ll balance out,” Killian says, and there’s still a hitch in his breathing, something still left over from the attack, from turning his own power in on himself. “Chloe…”

“I’m not telling a soul,” Chloe promises, and he watches her, his eyes flickering over her face like he wants to read her very sense of self. “Nobody will know from me.”

There’s a beat, a moment where all the little noises of the house creep up, the electricity through the walls and the rustle of the air pushing through the heater, before Killian nods.