Chapter 4

4

A fter that debacle, Chloe declines to bother to say goodbye to anyone else and Ambra stays true to her word, studying the coordinates in her little notebook before gripping Chloe by the arm and teleporting her with a jerk.

Chloe stumbles into the snow—it’s not her first time getting teleported by a demon but it’s still not very comfortable—before shuddering in the immediate, sudden cold.

Icy wind blasts through her meager jacket, and even Ambra ducks her head, sheltering her eyes.

Chloe ties on her bright orange scarf, a thin little strip of fabric that does little for warmth.

The wind howls in the trees high above them, snow whipping through the branches and flinging sharp against Chloe’s cheeks. Despite the time of day, despite the sun that must be risen behind the clouds, the entire world blurs in shades of grey and white.

With a muttered curse, Ambra flings up her hands, twisting up magic and flaring it around them, bright and vicious, until a buffer blasts up around them, stopping the scraping ice and cutting wind.

It warps, brutal red and black, and the actions are familiar to Chloe, even if the visible result isn’t.

“Well, this is awful,” Chloe says brightly, taking a few moments to blink the snow away from her eyes. Her research tells of a trap door, hidden against the forest floor, leading her to her first aim, but it’s probably under a good foot and a half of snow. “Thanks?”

Ambra frowns, not at her, then jerks her head. “Look.”

With each gesture, there’s a small physical component, and Ambra must be eternally gesturing with magic, unseen by everyone.

Where she points, however, is the barest hint of a warping black indicator, almost blended in with the shadows from the deep trees.

“That,” Ambra starts, as if there’s a foul taste in her mouth, “is a demon illusion spell.”

The hairs on the back of Chloe’s neck raise, despite the relative warmth of the little buffer Ambra crafted for them.

Illusion spells Chloe can tear down, as long as she knows they’re there.

She confidently steps forward, letting her fingers drag into the snow, twisting it up and shifting it around until it forms into the counter spell.

The thing about Alchemy is it’s fundamentally different from spell weaving. Spell weaving is all about intention, all about feeling the world around oneself and tugging at the threads to do your will.

Alchemy is all about what is around you and what you can do with it. Everything can be turned into something else, and every spell can be studied, and every spell can have its exact opposite molded from the environment around it.

Trap work like this sings in Chloe’s blood.

Ambra points to the edge, where the indistinct edge blurs into the snow, where a barb is hidden away, ready to snap at someone who’s unaware.

Chloe nods and despite the exhaustion, despite the caffeine still buzzing around her brain, a smile breaks over her face.

“That’s recent,” Ambra says, barely audible behind the rushing in Chloe’s ears, the excitement in her veins. “Last few days.”

More adrenaline trickles into Chloe’s spine. “Fresh trail is good.”

Letting the air around her tug out of focus, letting the snow and the wind and noise fall away, Chloe disarms the counterattack first, leaving the barb limp and useless against the snow. It’s easy, barely giving her any trouble, as its strength lay in the fact that most humans can’t see demon magic, and whoever this demon is, they didn’t expect one of their own kind to follow them down.

Ambra hisses out a breath but shakes her head when Chloe glances back. Not anything dangerous, then.

“We should go back,” Ambra says, and her eyes are red, vividly so, even among the wind and the snow. “You should train more. Get used to what you can see now.”

Chloe’s had enough training in her life and enough restrictions stopping her. “I’m good.”

Ambra evaluates her, in that too still way of hers, but the double outline of her shifts, like her very nature disagrees with the lack of motion.

“If I hadn’t seen you in Toronto, I would teleport you back, no matter what you’d say,” Ambra says quietly, then nods to the illusion spell as Chloe unravels it with a snap. “Careful with this one, there’s something familiar about it.”

That, out of everything else, causes Chloe to pause. “Did you know them? This demon person?”

Ambra favors her with another almost glare, which is way more terrifying with the double self visible. “Don’t get killed, I don’t want to deal with everyone’s emotions.”

“Fair,” Chloe says, then surveys her work.

The ground underneath the illusion spell is cleared, not a hint of ice or frost, and if someone unaware had stepped into it without knowing they would have broken an ankle. Instead, dead moss lays damp against the dark earth, decaying leaves tossed around, all rather wet.

And the barest hint of a wooden door in the floor, propped open with a stone, water dripping off the boards.

“Gotcha,” Chloe says, before a spike of awareness snaps through her back and she twirls.

Just in time to see Ambra gather her power among herself and teleport away.

Leaving Chloe alone.

“Right,” Chloe says, unnerved, before she steps down into the barren patch of dirt. Magic swirls up against her ankles, like it’s seeking out her skin, before settling down again amongst the dead leaves.

The cut into the snow is precise, the edges of it melted into more of a slick ice against the illusion spell, and Chloe tugs off her glove to touch the surface.

It’s almost damp, like the part bumping against the spell are constantly melting and refreezing, which has interesting implications to a constant export of energy of demons. Ambra hadn’t said anything, but if Chloe had to guess, Ambra didn’t really think it needed remarking on.

But she can’t muse about that, not when there’s a trap door in the middle of the forest floor, leading her to her goals.

Testing the edge of the wooden door with her steel-toed boots, no magic sparks up there, giving her the base reaction of completely boring, completely dead wood, so she uses her boot to kick it up, revealing a pristine metal ladder, not a trace of rust or frost on it.

It’s a short, maybe six-foot ladder, leading to a clean-cut stone floor beneath.

“Neat,” Chloe mutters, then tests the first rung on the ladder. One hundred percent inert, nothing special about it, and it’d be easy for her to mold into a weapon if she needs it.

Always good to have.

Before she can further question herself, she hoists herself over the edge of the trap door, stepping down onto the ladder, careful to prop the door back open how she found it. She’s been in enough tombs underground to know to always leave an easy and obvious air source open.

It blocks most of the filtered light through the snow, stretching the shadows long, so by the time Chloe steps a foot onto the hewn stone floor, everything is dim, lacking details.

Except for the traces of magic. Power. Demon residue. Whatever.

It warps along the hallway in front of her, glowing darkly red against the wall, like the demon had trailed their fingers along the uneven stone while they walked. Not someone terribly concerned about leaving a trace, or that anyone would follow behind and see it.

And Chloe knows, she knows, that going to find her friend would lead her close to demons, all of them obsessed with the power innate, but still her skin crawls with how obvious it is.

There’s one thing to intellectually know, it’s another to see it.

Chloe pats the gun in its holster on her hip, then pulls out the single rechargeable battery from her pocket.

Some alchemists can easily transform biological matter; some alchemists can change their own faces, but Chloe? Give her a battery, give her a stone, give her a lock, and she can twist it to her will.

Rolling it in between her fingers, she clicks it into place, into the familiar shape of a small pen light.

After she had discovered her abilities as a pre-teen, she took it on herself to study everything she could possibly want to transform, and flashlights were easy to dissect and pull apart and understand.

She ruined quite a few computers dissecting before she truly understood them.

The pen light shakes in her hand, sparking against her palm, before it flicks on, illuminating the hallway.

The floor is neatly hewn stone, as even as you can get without power tools, and ancient. The age of it seeps into her feet, the echoes of people long lost, and all the potential therein.

If needed, she could change it.

It’s the same sensation she got in ancient churches in Europe, in long forgotten ruins in South America, and the echoes of old trapping cabins in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. That if needed, all it would take is a thought and she could change the very land she stands on.

Despite herself, her face splits into a grin.

The walls were carved with less care, rough and pockmarked with time but meticulously cleaned. Or kept clean with some magic, some automatic buffer from dust, keeping the ages of time away.

It’s been ages since Chloe’s been somewhere this old.

“Oh, this is great,” she murmurs, letting her fingertips rest against the stone. It’s granite, deep and black, close enough in molecular structure that she could do so much with it.

Her words echo around her, and the magic left by the demon flutters in the noise. Like it’s affected by sound waves, which is another level of interesting, if she’s being honest with herself.

But she’s not here for study, she’s here for clues.

So she steps forward, marveling at the age, but keeps the pen light loosely in her left hand, resting her right on the gun.

There’s a fire spell, cleanly written on the wall, and Chloe skirts around it. Sure, she could probably break it, she’s literally built to destroy such securities, but…

The first time she ever broke a fire spell, she burnt her fingertips so badly it took her months before she could pick a lock again.

Her phone beeps, startling her into a jump.

DELINA (8:03 AM): Wait, did you already leave?

Apparently, she gets signal underground, in the middle of the Northwestern Canadian Forest.

Not wanting to answer, she shoves the phone back into her pocket, silencing it with a flick of her hand. If needed, she can use it as a backup flashlight, but she doesn’t need it adding to any alarms she could be tripping.

Her research reports that her friend was once held in a cage, three floors down into the permafrost, where the cold was just as much a defense as it was a fact of nature.

Does she believe her friend is still there? No. But even a glimpse of the trail can reignite it for her, show her where’s next.

Hollowed out caves pocket the walls, all empty but for dust and the skeletons of old furniture, and Chloe still flickers the pen light into each of them. No sign of her friend, no sign of any other magic signature, and the demon trace continues right on by.

Chloe doesn’t want to rely on a trail left by an unknown demon, but it says something in how single-minded they are, that they’re not distracted by things others would have stopped and investigated.

The rooms are mostly remnants of a hidden office, a place that required a bureaucracy to exist, abandoned for at least a year.

Sure enough, according to her research, at the end of the first hallway, another metal ladder leans out of another trap door, and the trace of demon trails down it, small shimmering marks of where hands gripped the rungs.

Which, according to what she’s gleaned from Ambra in the last few weeks, means the demon is in a physical body. A dead body, but a physical body.

Which means it’ll be easier to communicate with, if needed.

Chloe pats the gun on her hip again, then grips the penlight in her teeth and descends, the rungs of the metal sharply cold against her hands. It creaks, ominously so, but holds her weight as she clings to it.

The next layer is even colder, even darker, and the floor even rougher, like everyone had spent most of the energy on the first floor, where more people would stay.

Dust billows around her feet when she lands on the floor, and a single line of footsteps, glimmering with red, stretch down the hallway.

She tugs the scarf over her mouth against the dust, breathing through the neon orange fabric.

So not only is it just her and the demon, she’s the second person to make this trip in ages. Which suggests that her friend was moved long ago, of course, but not that it’d be so bereft of clues that she can’t find anything.

It also means that this is a new place. A new place without secure enough coordinates that a demon wouldn’t feel comfortable teleporting into—or couldn’t. Which is another interesting bit of information.

Her phone buzzes in her pocket, despite now being two floors underground, but she ignores it.

The demon’s footsteps pause at another little alcove, as if they scuffled their feet before continuing on, so Ambra hesitates there, tries to see what they see.

There’s a whisper of a different trace of power, crackling and human, like someone sat there and expelled a shit ton of magic, but all that remains is a rib cage, still white and still glistening.

Whatever happened there, they took the skull with them.

“Neat,” Chloe whispers again despite herself. Delina would be able to tell her how long it had been, how exactly the person died, what killed them, but now it’s just a haze of mystery. Sure, she could approximate, given her knowledge of bones and the lack of dust on them, that it was most likely within the last year, but beyond that…

That this underground bunker became a different sort of tomb to someone.

By nature of her inquisitiveness and her specialties, Chloe’s seen a number of dead bodies in her explorations, but rarely are they without the skulls. Rarely are they at a place with so much power expelled, and rarely are they with no trace of anyone else.

“Alright,” Chloe whispers, giving the mysterious dead a small nod, before continuing to follow the footsteps down the hallway.

The walls narrow, almost imperceptibly, as if focusing her in one direction, squeezing the flow of humanity towards a single goal, and her pen light casts deeper and deeper shadows against the rough stone, before Chloe almost steps into a trap, disguised by the dust.

The hair on the back of her neck raises, sudden, and Chloe stills, letting only her eyes move. The demon’s footsteps confidently stride right through, but the barest hints of the runes Chloe can see suggest pain, suffering, and madness.

Bit of an unusual one.

Chloe crouches next to it, thumping the penlight against her leg, spending the little bit of energy to brighten its beam, widening the light it casts, until she can set it on the ground and it illuminates the entire thing, casting it in a sterile white glow.

The trap is written in blood, and Chloe takes a lockpick from her pack and scrapes away at the edge. It crumbles where the metal meets, breaking into flakes like a peeling scab.

Roughly the same age as the rib cage, if she had to guess. Old enough to start decaying, new enough that it could still cause harm.

On the other side of it, something…ripples.

Chloe snaps her eyes up, but it’s just more of the hallway, of the rough-hewn granite and the dust on the ground. There’s not even more alcoves, just the single line of footsteps before another wooden trap door.

With an eye up to the hallway, Chloe scrapes away another edge of the blood, and there’s the same shimmer, a rippling of the air, like something trying to be seen but failing. Like the trap is hiding something besides just the pathway on.

Shifting herself so her feet don’t cramp, Chloe takes a deep breath in, then lays a hand on the top of the trap, flaring it to life.

Immediately, pain sears through her palm, but she anticipated that, most traps do, and she twists her hand in the magic along the blood, unraveling it with a snap.

It flares, bright in the darkness, before snuffing out, rendering the trap into flakes of dried blood, useless and inert.

Shaking her hand, Chloe sits back, her heart pounding. She’s dealt with meaner traps, she’s laid meaner traps, but—

The other side of the hall blooms into brightness, golden runes carved into the very stones, lighting the way, chasing away any hint of shadows. The floor is clean, no dust, though the footsteps still stretch to the trap door.

It’s been a while since Chloe’s seen an illusion spell quite like that, and it sets all of her internal alarms off the moment she sees them.

Well-lit areas are the quickest way to set someone at ease, to lull them into complacency in risky areas, and she’s fallen for that trap before.

And there’s no reason for it to be so nice down here.

Chloe shifts, getting her feet underneath herself, then stands, as smoothly as she can. There’s no additional clue, nothing showing itself as evidence, just…brightness.

In a sane world, one where she is traveling with people and has backup and others around, this would be less risky.

But the trap in front of her lays dead, the only remnant the dried blood and the stinging in her palm.

Tugging her phone out of her pocket, she takes a quick picture, then flips over to her text messages.

GURLIEN (8:59 AM): Leaving before telling everyone else is a cowardly move.

He’s not wrong, but she huffs anyways.

CHLOE (9:01 AM): Just came across a pain trap written in blood that revealed a brightly lit corridor 2 stories underground.

Such an obvious thing is worth sending an alert for.

GURLIEN (9:01 AM): ???

CHLOE (9:02 AM): It’s maximumly spooky.

The three dots start typing up before something else flickers in the hallway in front of her.

Freezing, Chloe blinks up, her heart jumping in her throat. Sure, her heart had stopped not twenty-four hours before, but now—

On the other side of the blood trap, stands a man.

No.

Stands…something else.

Her mind shies away from it. Sure, there’s a generically handsome face, taller than her, and dark hair, but beneath the face, beneath the skin, something shifts. Something darker, something more sinister, something…

Something much worse than Ambra appeared to be.

Power swirls around them, more than she’s ever seen, incomprehensibly more. Massively more.

She thought she’s seen demon power, what with Ambra and Maison. But this is…utterly more.

There’s a strange magnetism, in the shifting double face, one that immediately draws her eyes up to him. A handsomeness, almost completely obscured by the human form, despite all the terror it should inspire.

If she saw that face first instead of the human one, she might somehow be less afraid.

The brow furrows, and Chloe takes a step back, her feet moving beyond her control, her boots sliding in the dust on the floor.

Because the dust is still in place on her side.

The being’s eyes flicker from the phone in her hand to the lockpick in the other, and then to the gun at her hip.

“No,” they murmur, the voice low. “I don’t think so.”

Between one moment and the next, the demon flickers to in front of her, and she flings her hands in front of her face, some instinctive shield, before—

A finger, real and physical as anything else, presses against her forehead, and all Chloe’s dimly aware of is her knees buckling and her head going light.