Chapter 9

9

T he next morning, once dawn lightens the sky through the blowing snow, the Wight walks Chloe to another cabin hidden deep in the forest, leaving her with a mumbling human who doesn’t talk directly to her, just drives her silently and dumps her two cities away.

First thing Chloe does is walk herself into a cell phone store, break the automatic location tracking of the phone, then pushes the changes into place that Axel taught her—really nifty, by the way—and punching in Gurlien’s number into texts.

CHLOE (11:02 AM): Charter oak. I’m safe.

She stares at the texts.

GURLIEN (11:03 AM): Ida Grove.

At least he’s not so mad at her he won’t respond to that.

Then, another number.

XXXXXX(11:04 AM): This is Ambra. What happened to your phone, everyone’s panicking and they’re loud.

Chloe smiles down at the phone, idly standing outside the store, before glancing up at the snow.

CHLOE (11:05 AM): A lot, but I am safe. And making progress, I think.

AMbrA (11:07 AM): And your phone?

Chloe worries at her lip, as a car drives by the road, fully ignoring her.

CHLOE (11:09 AM): Stolen by another treasure hunter. But I’m okay.

AMbrA (11:10 AM): Gurlien is gonna do a remote wipe of it, so it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. He’s also pissed off.

It’s fair, but Chloe just exits out of the text services, poking through a few more useful apps (including a coordinate reader), before unfolding the piece of paper.

A little closer now that they’ve driven away from the forest, but still at the same coordinates. Still just one set of coordinates.

She sets the compass on her leg next to the paper, and it twists to pointing the other direction.

Until…

As Chloe watches, the coordinates blur, the distance jumping to thousands of kilometers away, and her heart catches.

Still just one set of coordinates.

She punches it into her phone, and it’s in the same direction as the compass.

“Okay,” Chloe whispers, to the chilled air of the small town.

So he’s hunting, too.

Chloe uses her Midwest charm and underhanded tactics to bribe a small craft pilot to get them most of the way down south, and she just watches the paper in fascination as the kilometers trickle down.

The small craft is cold, relatively low flying, and they stop for fuel several times, but Chloe’s eyes don’t close the entire trip down.

She should sleep. She should get rest, let her mind settle down, give into the weight in her bones, but each time she takes a few deep breaths, every time she thinks she might be able to get a smidgen of sleep, the power in the demon’s eyes pop back to her, starting her heart pounding once more.

It’s probably stupid, to be knowingly going after a demon without matching backup, but somehow this is the most alive she’s felt in ages, sitting on cold vinyl seats in an airplane that holds five people, soaring illegally over dead cornfields. On her way to the next step in tracking down her friend, breaking into things, dealing with dangerous rivals and untrustworthy allies.

It’s what she is made to do.

Chloe smiles out at the cold window, out at the darkness below.

The small craft pilot refuses to shake her hand, but drops her off at an air strip in the middle of the desert as the sun starts to rise, and the distance says just thirty-five kilometers away.

Her compass points true, in the same direction.

And then, in the dusty airstrip, watching the man fly away, Chloe opens the paper back up.

Sparks tingle against her fingertips with each touch, and the coordinates flicker on the paper like a dying lightbulb.

She flicks the paper again, then tugs the compass out of her pocket. Still in the same relative location, only changed a few kilometers since she got the new location lock, and the compass still points true.

It’s still barely dawn, the rural airstrip all but empty, so Chloe turns her head to glance at the dirt parking lot.

Chloe hot wires a broken car with only a twinge of guilt, coaxing the engine to turn over and chugging to life.

The car air conditioning blasts her in the face, watering her eyes, and she immediately twists the dial down. With the amount of dust accumulated on the windshield, it had probably been here since early summer, but…

The air refuses to decrease, only giving her a tinny whine at the movement.

She pokes at the radio. Usually, radios are simple to fix, to snap into place, but this one has an unusually large amount of rainwater sloshing around in it.

“Great,” Chloe whispers, then glances at the piece of paper.

She can barely read the numbers, they’re so faint.

“Fuck you,” Chloe whispers, her blood fizzing, then throws the car into drive and dials her new phone from memory.

Instead of Gurlien, however, Delina picks up. “Chloe, you okay?”

Chloe sighs, attempting to use windshield cleaner to wipe away some of the dust but only creating mud. “I was hoping to get Gurlien?”

“He’s with the Half Demon, I think they’re arguing,” Ambra’s voice filters through, which great, she’s on speakerphone. “I’m letting it happen.”

Chloe has no doubt that’s how she views it. “Well, I’m in central Arizona right now,” she starts, and Delina makes a wordless noise of delight. “And my coordinates are pointing me to a place called Jerome, ever heard of it?”

“Tourist trap,” Delina says, though her voice is full of barely disguised delight. “Good BBQ places, though.”

Right, she’s from the area, and Chloe squints at the rural airport sign. “What about bases?”

“An old one,” Ambra replies, thoughtful, which means she’s never stayed there. “They spoke of abandoning it, how it’s outlasted its usefulness, don’t know why”

“There was a base that close?” Delina asks, and Chloe just shuts her eyes.

Of course she would get the two people the least likely to have answers.

“So Maison would probably know?” Chloe asks, finally pulling off of a gravel road and onto an actual paved highway, heading south. “If you were there and all…”

“Good bet,” Delina says, “listen, if you’re there for a while, go to Bobby D’s BBQ.”

Chloe sighs again.

“I know it’s a vault,” Ambra says, almost indignant that Chloe would go to Maison instead of her. “I know they co-opted an old structure in the mountains.”

“So it's a mine,” Delina interrupts her, “the whole mountain over there, full of silver mines.”

Chloe lets them ramble on, attempting to point the air conditioning somewhere else for the drive, and her heart pounds all the same.

She gets to Jerome as the loosely described city starts to wake up, exhaustion eating at her eyes. Ambra and Delina made her promise to not dive into something until after they get info from Maison, who is apparently out of cell contact with Gurlien for possibly all day, and

so she pulls into the parking lot of a cheesy motel.

As she cruises into town, the numbers fade, fully unreadable. Sure, she has a general direction of where it is, but without the exact information…

She opens the car door in the parking lot of a cheap motel, rubbing her face.

Her eyelids hurt.

“This is what I mean,” from behind her, the Wight speaks up, thoroughly startling Chloe. “You overwhelm yourself and it’ll stop working.”

Chloe just blinks at her, in the morning light. “You just teleported, didn’t you?”

The Wight gives her a blandly unamused expression.

“I take it there’s a reason you couldn’t just teleport me out here?” Chloe asks. The air is so dry her lips feel already chapped.

“The amount of energy it took to get everyone out of Toronto was the result of years of planning for the right opportunity,” the Wight says simply. “No. No I couldn’t.”

Chloe sighs. “Look, I’ll get breakfast and I’ll be fine,” she says, and the Wight just raises an eyebrow. “I’ve done more on far less sleep.”

“Have you slept?” the Wight asks.

“I was knocked out for like thirteen hours, so yeah,” Chloe replies, and the expression the Wight overwhelmingly reminds her of being in kindergarten and being caught stealing snacks. “That counts.”

Instead of immediately answering her, the Wight just glances off towards the mountains, towards the mines that embed themselves into the pale rocks.

“You are, at minimum, facing a demon,” the Wight says, her voice dry. “And I’ve seen you practice, you’re not a combat mage on your best days.”

“I dunno if combat will happen,” Chloe says, sheltering her eyes from the sun, which was at just the right angle to blast through her defenses. “He didn’t seem too interested in hurting me last time.”

“Besides the sleep spell,” the Wight replies dryly. “And the teleporting to an occupied territory. And the thievery.”

Chloe knows when she’s beat and says nothing.

“Think of the energy equations needed for what you do,” the Wight says, still strict. “And now it can’t even maintain a connection to a piece of paper.”

“You sound like a spellweaver,” Chloe grumbles, and her entire face hurts with exhaustion.

“I take that as an insult,” the Wight says, voice still dry and grave. “If you charge in now there’s no likely manner you’ll make it out alive.”

“Eh, died once, I’ll be okay,” Chloe says, then attempts to give her a sunny smile.

It falls flat.

“I will tell Zoel, and I will make sure that report gets to your people, if you don’t rest,” the Wight says, and Chloe gapes at her.

“Why?” Chloe blurts out, and the Wight fixes her with a glare. “I mean, you don’t need to, nobody would hold it against you if you didn’t…”

“You already made a demon teleport into my territory, close to my daughter, for this quest, you can rest so it’s actually successful.” The Wight casts a significant glance at the piece of paper, her wiry gray hair a halo in the morning sunshine. “No demon should have a hand in getting the fox.”

Chloe shivers, even though it’s far warmer here than in northern Washington, and the Wight waits, watching impassively, the weight of her gaze almost as heavy as Chloe’s exhaustion.

“This won’t work until I rest?” Chloe mutters, and the Wight nods. “Fuck. Fine. I’ll get a room.”

“I’ll let Zoel know,” she says, then disappears, and Chloe gapes at the gravel spot she just inhabited.

Great. Now her friends will text her with their worries, she has another delay, and every delay just gives the demon more of a chance to get ahead, to move with her research, leave her completely behind in the dust.

The hotel in front of her is old-west themed, with fake skeleton cowboys posed outside—at least Chloe hopes they’re fake, Delina would know better—and the entire world is pale and bleached in the sunshine, hurting her eyes.

“Fuck,” Chloe whispers.

Chloe doesn’t sleep, of course, but she makes herself lay as still as possible, her mind racing the entire time.

Sure, she’s tired, but the replay of the sands dripping off her scrolls when the demon rolls them up, the soft grip of his hand in hers, and the magic cuff sparking against her awareness filters behind her closed eyes.

The bed isn’t the most uncomfortable thing she’s ever stayed in, that’d be prison, but the hours stretch on interminably long, her brain fully uncooperative with the idea of rest. The sun slips through the blinds, bright despite the time of year, casting deep shadows against the pastel reds and yellows of the western themed hotel.

It’s the same crawling sensation she sometimes got in the cabin, when Gurlien and her first found it, of being stuck in place. Of being unable to leave without jeopardizing herself.

It’s a different sort of prison, the sort that anchors her body to the bed with just blankets, tugs her deep into staying in one place. To where all she can do is breathe out her nose and stare hard at the ceiling and promise herself that she’s not being kept captive, just that staying in one place is the smartest decision.

And this is just for a night. Just until the crazy Wight magic is satisfied that she’s rested enough to push forward.

She got over it, back in the cabin, as it slowly transformed from a hiding place to a home, but it took time. Took time for her to unpack her suitcase, even if she left a go-back easily available. Took time for her to trust that each time her door closes, she’ll be able to open it again.

And still, the piece of paper reads blank, no matter how much Chloe flicks it.

So instead, she flops over on the bed, pulling her phone to her.

CHLOE (6:22 AM): Still alive. Didn’t you grow up near Jerome?

DELINA (6:25 AM): Prescott, which is close enough, I guess.

CHLOE (6:25 AM): Is everything country western themed?

DELINA (6:26 AM): Yes, absolutely...Good whisky bars.

Chloe attempts to snuggle with the pillow, but it’s not nearly as good as hanging out with friends, as comfortable as the couch in the cabin.

CHLOE (6:28 AM): Ask Maison if he knows of any demons in the area. I haven’t got his phone number in here yet.

Immediately, her phone rings, and Chloe silences it out of sheer habit, her heart suddenly jumping.

CHLOE (6:29 AM): Can’t take a call! Just text!

DELINA (6:29 AM): Congrats, you just got both Ambra and Maison super upset.

Which means that whatever messaging the Wight got to Zoel, it hadn’t filtered to them.

CHLOE (6:31 AM): I had one encounter with a demon and all he did was knock me out for a few hours and teleport me out of the way.

It’s something akin to throwing a hornet’s nest into a train, but she figures Delina would have the best reaction to these things.

DELINA (6:34 AM): Ambra says “nice of him” and stomped off. Maison’s asking if you feel hungover or not.

Finally, information. If Chloe could have an entire world where people approached problems like Delina did, she’d be a hell of a lot happier.

CHLOE (6:35 AM): No hangover, no issue with lingering effects. Just got me out of the way like I was a nuisance.

DELINA (6:36 AM): sounds about right. Stay safe, use the gun, Bobby D’s is good. If you get out okay and drive up, I might ask you to stop by our old apartment and get some clothes, but Maison says that’s a bad idea.

Again, finally a reaction Chloe can deal with.

CHLOE (6:38 AM): Deal. I’m gonna go into some silver mines and I’m jazzed about that.

DELINA (6:39 AM): Lol they’re tourist traps.

CHLOE (6:40 AM): Not the one I’m going to.

She thumbs over to her browser, looking up the restaurant, and it’s about a fifteen-minute walk away from the entrance to the silver mine.

A perfect after-mission spot.

DELINA (6:45 AM): Do you think your friend will be in there?

The answer to that is no, she got moved around too often, but again, clues and traces can be found.

But also it appears that Gurlien has at least explained the issue with them, why she’s searching, lifting that responsibility from her.

CHLOE (6:49 AM): Probably not, but I’ve gotten some good clues and hints, so it’s going well.

CHLOE (6:49 AM): I had nothing two months ago. Now I have all of this.

It’s something, something she wouldn’t have ever let herself dream on, and she cradles the phone to her chest.

Because even with the demon stealing the sifting sands of her research, she’s so close.

And her blood sings once more.

Chloe stares avidly at the compass, after a full day of lying there and thinking, at the closeness of the needle. They’re so close that if she paces from one side of the room to the next, the needle shifts, and when she tromps down to the lobby the needle shifts some more.

At what passes for breakfast in the crowded hotel lobby, when Chloe’s practically vibrating out of her skin with energy, a man sits across the cheap table from her.

Her immediate reaction is to throw her energy drink at him, but instead, she just stares at him.

“What are you doing here?” the man says, leaning forward. His eyes are the brightest shade of blue Chloe’s ever seen, and it sends prickles down her back.

“Do I know you?” Chloe asks, picking at her pastry.

It’s not unreasonable to think she might, with the college having a presence in the area, but the man shrugs.

“You just stick out.” He smiles at her, and the smile doesn’t meet the blue eyes at all as he stands. “Enjoy your trip.”

And he strides away, without touching anything and without another word, leaving Chloe staring at his disappearing back, her skin crawling.

After ducking into a convenience store to buy some pocketknives, Chloe stands in the warmth of the sun instead of going back inside. In the parking lot, leaning against the car, Chloe pokes and prods at the knives, reinforcing the metal pins, strengthening the cheap steel, enchanting it to always sharpen itself, before she takes a deep breath, settling her mind into the molecular structure, mapping it out like she did the gun.

The Wight flickers into existence next to her. “What are you doing?”

“Making it cut demons,” Chloe murmurs, flicking the metal into place, ironing out the enchantments into the mineral itself.

“That’s impossible,” the Wight murmurs right back.

“I shot one, didn’t I?” Chloe mutters, and it’s not exactly easy work, and she has to start over twice before she can preserve the structural integrity of the knife as well as holding her spells. “If our friend is in there, I want at least some sort of weapon.”

“How many demons do you know?” the Wight asks, her eyes narrowed, and that’s far more a complicated question than it should be in her life. “They should have stopped you. Demons…”

“Hold a grudge?” Chloe supplies. “Remember those who hurt them? Can recognize bad actors? Hates almost every human magician because they know what we’ve tried? Rightfully so?”

The Wight gives her a glance bordering on appreciative. “Oh, so you did go full conspiracy theorist.”

“All we know about this one is he’s also after the fox and wanted to put me behind a shield instead of just immediately killing me. That’s somewhat better.”

Chloe knows she can’t assign human morality to demons, but at least this one seems not the worst in terms of respecting life.

“The fact that a demon knows about the fox is terrifying,” the Wight says, soft, like somehow Chloe has endeared herself. “I can’t imagine what would happen if they got ahold of it.” Still, she stands, stretching. “They say someone’s trying to take over,” she murmurs, so quiet Chloe almost loses it in the background noise of the motel parking lot. “Going through and killing competition. Consolidating power. Being charismatic.”

“Who?” Chloe asks, tilting her head at her.

“Humans don’t pass on their knowledge easily to Wights,” she says softly. “Just hearing rumors of some grand unification. That after Toronto fell and Boltiex died and all those experiments got out, that they’re looking for someone to lead.”

“Not surprising,” Chloe mutters.

“Ambra killed Boltiex, right?” the Wight asks, almost shrewd. “I know he had a hand in her captivity, and I know she killed Nalissa.” She swallows, like she has intimate knowledge of just how awful Nalissa was. “Nalissa deserved it.”

“Boltiex was insane, though,” Chloe says instead. “He gave a lecture to my class once, we kept track of how often he brought up how ‘powerful’ he was in the speech and then took a shot for each one.”

The Wight coughs out a laugh, like it’s startled out of her, and Chloe’s not sure that the Wight has ever laughed in her life. “How drunk did you get?”

“Yes,” Chloe says firmly, and she glances at the paper, where the coordinates are still blank. “I’m feeling better, I ate, I… rested…why isn’t it working?” she asks, brandishing the paper to the Wight. “I know myself, I can absolutely do this.”

The Wight doesn’t so much as smile as she exudes an air of smugness. “Do you think I’d tie Wight magic to a human?”

And as easily as before, she taps on the paper, and coordinates bloom anew.

Two sets of them.

Chloe sucks in a breath.

The backpack remains where the demon was last seen, just a few scant kilometers away in the silver mine, and the demon himself is…thousands of kilometers away.

Leaving her research behind.