Chapter 38

38

W hen Chloe blinks herself awake, sun is streaming through the boarded-up windows, and Killian’s standing, silhouetted at the empty door frame, the wind tossing the curls on his hair.

Not shifting, she watches underneath her lashes as he exhales, his shoulders moving, and all at once power floods the little cabin. It warps over the floorboards, through every small crack in the sand-bitten walls, until it reaches Chloe, barely grazing over her cheek like a caress.

Killian startles, then turns, and the circles are gone from his eyes. “You slept for thirteen hours,” he informs her, and there’s a tenderness in his voice, like the mere act of her staying asleep is something to be celebrated. “No input from me, no manipulation.”

Chloe believes it, from the ache in her small back, so she stretches, pointing her toes and flexing her feet. Yesterday's battle echoes in her ribs, in the dull pounding of her head, in the stinging in her fingertips.

“Anything?” she asks, and her voice comes out in a rasp.

“The same man tried to break into the house,” Killian responds, coming back into the shack and sitting on the ground next to the mattress. “He hit your trap this time—nice work—broke it in thirteen minutes, then spent about an hour trying to see inside the windows.”

Chloe exhales, pushing herself up to sit, and sometime while she had been asleep Killian had obviously teleported to a sandwich shop and then back, with an energy drink and a bag of chips along with a sub waiting for her.

She doesn’t know when he would’ve observed it, but it’s her favorite type.

As well as a set of lockpicks, still in their plastic packaging.

They’re the cheap kind sold at hardware stores for hobbyist and delinquent teens, but it still brings the hint of tears to Chloe’s eyes as she unwraps them.

She cracks open the energy drink first thing, blinking out at the bright sunshine.

“He left a trail,” Killian says, and this time there’s a deep satisfaction in his tone, warring with some frustration she can’t quite scratch. “He left a trail and it goes back to the Auburn base.”

Where he said the fox was.

Chloe shuts her eyes against the brightness, swallowing down the immediate emotional reaction, the immediate terror, and Kilian’s hand closes around hers.

He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t push, just holds her hand.

It bodes poorly, and Killian practically vibrates from the tension.

And if that man gets his hands on the spirit fox…when he’s already able to block demon magic and wants to control a Terese Project…

“The protections from the Auburn base started to fall an hour ago,” Killian continues quietly, and Chloe had just been sleeping.

She swallows, then swallows again, taking a large determined swig of the energy drink, as if it could firm up the odd swell of shame and fear inside of her.

“So we go to Auburn,” Chloe says, and this time her voice doesn’t waver. “We go to Auburn and get my friend.”

Going into a base with no floor plans, no gun, and no research terrifies Chloe, but she has Killian teleport them into a sporting store to quick steal a bag with power bars, pocketknives, and caffeine, then right outside the proximity alarms for any sudden movement.

It’s dusk, and the base is set deep in a grove of trees, all perfectly tall in uniform straight lines. The ground is damp, their footsteps squishing with the deep give of thick moss and loam.

Chloe’s spent a lot of time in Washington at this point, and the ground never sunk so much where she trod, especially in winter.

Killian stands straight, his eyes focused further away than Chloe can see, as they stride through the pristine straight lines of the grove.

They’re sitting ducks. Anyone could look down any of the rows and see them. Any anomaly is obvious.

But Chloe hasn’t spotted any surveillance yet.

After her boot almost gets stuck in a particularly slurpy chunk of mud, Killian offers his arm to her.

“This must be why they set up deep in a water reclamation plant,” he mutters, disgruntled despite his chivalrous motion. “Natural deterrent.”

“Is that what this is?” Chloe asks, before quickly bending and reinforcing the rubber sole of her boots, adding additional waterproofing. The last thing she needs is wet socks while trying to save her friend.

Her friend.

Her pulse thrills, once more, at just how close they are. That before the end of the day, she might be holding the spirit fox. That this walk through white birch and deep mud might end with them being triumphant, with her ensuring the safety of the only reason she survived any of her captivity, with Seanna being safe forever.

They just have to get through the base in front of them.

A base neither of them have seen before. A base with no floor plan. A base with a completely foreign set of traps, of protections, of guards.

Killian gives her a sharp glance, then whatever he sees in her expression softens his face.

“What?” Chloe preempts, as the dusk streaking over them reflects purples and pinks on the white of the birch bark. It’s almost beautiful, it’s almost meaningful, and if they weren’t on this quest and weren’t about to do something incredibly dangerous, it would almost be…romantic.

She wants to do more of that, suddenly. Wants more peaceful walks, wants more moments snatched away with him.

“Your excitement and dread and nerves are practically a knot here,” he murmurs, tapping right beneath his breastbone.

“You can tell that?” Chloe asks, and all the hope inside of her delights in this.

“Apparently,” he says, then pauses and smiles.

It’s different from most of his smiles. Usually, the corners of his lips tilt up, the second face underneath the first more subdued.

This time, she catches a hint of his teeth.

She should feel threatened—he is, after all, technically a predator—but instead the hope just grows more warm, until it’s warmer than the glow of the sunset around them.

The light reflects off his hair, catching in the red of his eyes as he smiles, and even the gray of his shirt seems bright with the lowering sun.

She grins at him right back, a little bit crazy at it, as the lines of the trees begin to narrow, the shadows growing deeper.

And then…

Out of the corner of her eye, Chloe catches some glimmer of movement, something between refracting light and a smudge on her glasses, and she stills.

Without her having to say anything, Killian stops as well, almost midstep.

Again, almost outside of her awareness, there’s something in between the trees, flitting in the growing shadows. Chloe didn’t get to be as good as she is by being unobservant, and…

“Can you see it?” she breathes.

“Describe it to me.”

She tries not to squint at it, as if looking directly at it would cause it to disappear. “Something iridescent, something watching.” She blinks, fast, the hair on the back of her arms prickling.

He straightens, all at once back into the stance of a warrior, as if the soft moment didn’t happen, and his chin lifts.

“It’s…” Chloe trails off, and when she breathes out again, she could swear she could taste it. “That’s not any surveillance I’ve ever seen.”

“Good,” Killian replies, silky low. “That man must’ve manipulated the local spirits into the protection. Bound it to be a sentry, unable to rest, unable to do anything but observe and sound an alarm.”

Chloe doesn’t know exactly what that means, but the same flicker of light hits the edge of her vision again.

“So another thing to break out,” she replies, a little well of horror inside of her. “Another little stake in this.”

“Your capacity for mercy will never cease to amaze me,” he murmurs, then raises his hand and….

The branches of the forest around them creak, the leaves of the birch trees rustling, and Killian’s power creeps along the mud of the floor, swirling around Chloe’s ankles and seeping into the moss and the loam.

On the edge of her hearing, there’s a soft sound, almost a squeak, before something akin to a sigh and Killian lowers his fist.

“There,” he says, and the easy relaxation is gone. “It’s asleep, and it’ll stay that way until long after we’ve left.”

Chloe hadn’t heard any alarm, but still she shivers.

“Freeing it would absolutely set off alarms right now,” he says, but there’s something solemn in his tone. “So it’ll sleep, and either wake up free or wake up without any knowledge we were here.”

The woods don’t quite look so pretty anymore, the shadows deepening, the world almost tilting.

“I thought this was Zoel’s territory,” Chloe says, rubbing her arms.

“Even he wouldn’t get this close unless one of his people got taken,” Killian says, almost brusk. “He may be backed by the heir to the Frisse knowledge and base, but he’s not stupid to go against a force that could imprison him just as easily.”

“I guess it’s useless to say that’s ghastly, right?” Chloe says, attempting a smile to him, but in the dimming light his face is carved of stone.

It’s easy, suspiciously easy. Even with the warning spirits, there should be far more traps.

Far more things to stop them than just rows of muddy trees.

“What do you think,” Chloe murmurs, as they pass yet another spot where it’d be damn convenient to lay up a trap with nothing there. “Lazy or was our path fully cleared?”

Killian’s lips twitch, like he wants to find her funny, but the situation is too dire. “I don’t know which is worse.”

He has to knock out three more spirits by the time the sun has set, and when they get to the last one Chloe can barely make out a suggestion of a child’s form lying prone in the mud.

The base has no outside lights, no way to predict how close they are, until very suddenly the rows of trees end, revealing a small clearing with a squat brick building in the middle.

Killian twists his hand, something subtle, and a thin sheen of a shield warps around Chloe.

There’s no windows, no doors, and the roof is one solid sheet of metal with no creases, and Killian’s brows furrow as he observes it. The building halfway lilts to the side, not on a foundation, the loam slowly destabilizing it. No security cameras, no obvious forms of surveillance.

And yet, it’s meticulously clean, no weeds or sprouts or blackberry brambles in the clearing. No grass, no pad of concrete, nothing.

Wards and traps flicker at the edge of Chloe’s awareness, sunk into the mud around, the biggest indicator that there’s an active presence here.

They’d be simple to break, now that she can see them, relying more on people striding over them without awareness than any deep complexity.

“That one will send someone into hypovolemic shock,” Chloe murmurs, pointing to the mud. “There’s a reversal spell in the brickwork, but they’d have to know where to look.”

“Don’t even try it,” he murmurs back.

Chloe raises an eyebrow at him, then crouches down, still keeping in the tree line, as Killian stalks along the edge of the clearing, circling the building.

There’s a broken ward, flickering in and out of her view, a piece of craftsmanship that would have caused Chloe to weep in other situations, now slashed to pieces with the crudest magic imaginable.

Like someone took a flamethrower to a carved wooden gate.

Killian catches her gaze, strides closer, toeing the edge of the slashes, before giving her a confirming nod.

It’s rather small for a facility to be cleared to hold something as valuable as the spirit fox.

And the simple fact that there is no door.

“How deep do you think it goes?” Chloe murmurs, and even despite him being across the clearing, he quirks an eyebrow at her. “This can’t be all of it, there’s not enough.”

“You dig three inches here and you hit water,” he replies at full volume, because he doesn’t have to be wary of things like people overhearing him. “It would require a massive amount of useless energy to stabilize it.”

Chloe’s broke into enough things to know that the best defense is appearing like it would be too much effort to be something important. That the best hidden spots are in plain sight, where nobody would think that it’s worth the effort to hide.

And the college knows that, too.

“Useless energy could practically be their middle name,” Chloe says, flashing him a bright smile that leaves him blinking, before she squints harder at the small, squat building, attempting to filter out the protective wards.

It’s harder than it used to be, but she lets Killian stalk around, only half minding him as he unravels a few spells, as he pokes into the base level defense. Alarm spells ring around the place—easy—and the mud is annoyingly full of organic material, befuddling Chloe’s usual scans.

But everyone has to be able to get inside the building, which means someone’s left a trace, which means she can re-create it.

And whoever set those spirits as prisoners, whoever slashed up the ward, is somehow most likely still there.

There’s an anti-teleportation ring, meaning that nobody would be able to easily get in that way. No loose bricks, no cracks in the cement, no seams in the roof.

“Chloe,” Killian murmurs, stalking back to next to her. “Something is going wrong.”

She flicks a glance to him, and her gaze sticks. Here, in the dim gloom of the setting sun, he appears more demon than man, hunger lined in every slope of him, and fear etched even deeper.

In that fear is something bone deep that Chloe knows. That Chloe understands. That they’re so close, that the thing they’re looking for could be within their grasp, if only there isn’t something holding them back.

Chloe places her palm on the soft mud of the ground, thinks deeper. The water underneath is sludge, muck, and she tries to follow it with her mind until it hits a solid barrier, impassable and immutable.

So yes. The base goes underground.

An alarm glimmers in her awareness, already set off by someone not them, blaring sadly across the mud, and Chloe pulls herself back, breathing deeply.

Killian stalks back over to her, hauling her up by her shoulder.

“Alarms are already off,” she hisses, and mud drips from her palm. “Alarms are blaring and being ignored.”

Never a good sign.

So Killian jerks his chin towards the building, towards the unmarked surface. “So we go loud.”

It’s an odd echo of Chloe’s time in the Toronto base, when she coached Delina how to cut the stasis wards and all hell broke loose.

Chloe knows how to go loud.

Before she can put words to the idea, Killian clenches his fist and the bricks on the corner of the building—away from the exsanguination ward—explode outwards. Shards of brick pepper into the tree line, dust billowing over the mud, catching in more lines of invisible traps and magic.

Revealing…wreckage.