Chapter 10

10

A mbra breathes in, one moment so still, before power flashes around them.

Immediately, she slams up a shield around them, yanking Gurlien in close, and a crack splits the air.

Gurlien has a chance to inhale, to open his mouth to say something before the very motorhome around them…

Detonates.

Ambra clutches at him, plaster and wood crashing into the shield around them. Splinters fly through the air, blindingly fast, the very concrete pad beneath them shuddering.

Her ears pop, and in between one moment and the next, fire slams against the shield.

Gurlien staggers against her, the heat brutal even despite her shield, and she squeezes her eyes shut, tightening her fist in his shirt, doubling the shield, tripling it, coating more and more power into it, the effort catching in her throat.

Her feet slide on the broken linoleum, and fire flings around them, roaring into her ears, until…

All at once, it stops. The fire disappears, leaving a broken wreckage around them, a smoldering smoking wasteland .

Her breath hitches.

A trap.

Gurlien stumbles, almost clattering them to the ground, but she widens her stance, gripping the magic around her tight, holding him in place.

And there’s…nothing.

Just the wind blowing snow through what should be a warm pocket of air.

Cautiously, Ambra lowers the shield, keeping her grip on Gurlien’s collar, but nothing but wet slush hits them.

“What the fuck?” Gurlien sputters, still gripping the bags.

Her wards are in shreds, littered all over the forest floor, snow piling on the broken remains of the couch, scorched beyond recognition.

Ambra doesn’t even let herself swallow, stilling herself, tasting the air.

No other demon had touched the place, and the stereotypical tang of wight or spirit magic is nowhere to be found.

Which means humans.

Shards of cupboard and splinters of the closet are spread all over the tiny clearing. Burnt scraps of fabric char against the snow, and a sleeve of a brightly colored sweater still smolders on the driveway.

It shouldn’t be in the driveway. That had been safely in the closet just moments before.

Ambra’s head lightens, and she forces herself to breathe, to get air into her system.

“Fuck,” Gurlien mutters, and he’s not struggling against her grip, just standing close, his shoulders broad. “What—”

“Shh,” Ambra breathes, and there had been no attempt on the leash, none at all, since she had left Johnsin floating dead and bleeding .

Carefully, she loosens her hand on his collar, instead gripping his wrist where she had tied the leash, and the skin on the back of her neck crawls.

Someone had been here. Someone with enough knowledge to discard demon wards and then lay a trap that could systematically rip apart a protected space, all without alerting her. Someone with enough familiarity with her to suss out a hiding place so quickly.

Or knew of it from before, when Ambra had visited it with the body. Had taken the time to carefully hang up her clothes, had stocked the food for her, had shown her the beauty of this area.

Only a few people have that ability, and only a few people would dare.

Snow settles on the shaved side of her head, sticking uncomfortably to her scalp, but she can’t move. Not when the very foundation of the ground, the concrete and the cinder blocks that were below the motorhome are cracked so deeply that nothing will ever sit easily on this place ever again.

“Ambra,” Gurlien murmurs, and the sound of his voice makes the hair on the back of her neck rise. “Ambra, what was that?”

She doesn’t tear her eyes away from the single smoldering sleeve of the sweater. It had been one that the body cherished, one she wore to all of the early meetings with the College, before they both knew what they had gotten themselves into. Back when the whole adventure had been new and fun and they had been together.

Only two people left alive would know to put that sweater there.

The nerves of her shoulder lock up, but she keeps her head high .

“Is there anything you can think of to salvage?” Ambra asks, and even her voice is remote, like it’s yet another part of her that is alien and uncontrollable.

Gurlien exhales, strong, pushing his hair away from his face, grim, as he surveys the wreckage.

And she wishes, for one brief, wild moment, that she could see it through his eyes. Without the shreds of her runes, without the emotions of the clothing. Just as a place of destruction and fast accumulating snow and a sky that’s quickly darkening towards night.

He’s quiet for a few moments too long, so she grips him harder on the wrist and teleports again.

The small condo is perfectly intact, with the streetlights merrily shining through the window and a neighbor walking a dog outside.

And no disturbances to her wards, no disruptions to the floor, nothing.

Her knees pick that moment to buckle underneath her, and she clatters onto the hardwood floor, barely catching herself on the boring wooden table before she smashes her head against the ground.

Gurlien, breathing hard, sets down the bags he’s still carrying, and his hands are shaking.

“This place is okay,” Ambra says, and her legs don’t want her to stand, so she lets her head rest against the floor.

He clutches at his wrist, right at where the leash is, and a tired, weary thrust of fear stabs through her heart.

She struggles to at least sit up, but all at once it’s like the body has had enough. Enough of the pain, enough of the emotions, enough of the walking and activity. “You’ll be safe here, at least for a little while.”

Instead of walking away, he crouches next to her, and there’s some ash on the hem of his new pants, incongruous.

Ash from the smolders of the motorhome.

Gentle, he places a hand behind her shoulder, guiding her to sit up and lean against the leg of the table, and her chest tightens, almost trembling from the effort.

She’s weak. She thought she had been regaining strength, she thought she had been getting better.

“What sort of shield was that?” he murmurs, as he presses the back of his hand to her forehead, and his hand is chilled, cooler than her skin. “Never seen that before.”

“Just a…normal shield?” she answers, voice lilting up. It’s not the question he should be asking.

“Hell of a normal,” he says, then moves the hand to the shaved side of her scalp, where it prickles at his touch.

“I don’t know when they got there,” she continues on, as if purging the words from her system will help. “I don’t know how they shredded my wards, I don’t know—”

He holds up his other hand and she falls silent.

“Are you injured?” he asks instead, it’s a logical question, what with her literally sitting on the floor and shaking. “I didn’t see any fire get through, but that doesn’t mean anything.” Careful, he checks the back of her head, moving her neck forward in some gentle sort of inspection.

She has to swallow down the lump. “No.” She fists her hands by her sides, and they, at least, follow her command. “Not anything that’s new. Just the pain from Johnsin.”

He nods, as if that confirms his suspicions. “And can you tell who blew up your safe spot?” His hands still soft, he reaches down and holds her wrist, counting the beats of the heart against the thin skin next to the bones .

“Humans,” she answers, voice rough. “Not another demon. They knew…” she bursts out, then squeezes her eyes shut.

Gentle, so gentle she barely feels it, he reaches up and slides the tinted glasses off her nose, and it startles her out of the anger.

“I see no sign of concussion,” he says, examining her eyes in a way that’s almost disorienting, and she blinks at the sudden brighter light. “I’m going to get you up off the floor, okay?”

After waiting for her nod, he grips her by her upper arm, hauling her up, and her knees wobble, before he guides her over to the beige couch.

It’s far less comfortable than the now broken and burnt couch in the other home, but she sinks into it just the same.

“There’s food in the cupboard I think,” she says, and every time her eyes shut there’s just the smoldering sleeve of the sweater.

“Where are we?” he asks instead. “This is a bit more populated.”

“East coast of the continent,” she supplies, and he raises an eyebrow. “The body liked the river.”

“The river,” he mutters, before he disappears into the other room, clearly checking it out.

“I should set up another human friendly safe spot,” she calls to him, “in case they tracked me here with the body before the merge.”

“Think that’s how they found the last place?”

“It’s that or they tracked me,” she says, to the muffled sound of him opening the closet in the other room, then closing it.

The body liked this place for its nearness to the views, not the coziness of the space, and it lacks a lot of the cheerful warmth of the motorhome. Sure, there was an extraordinarily large bed and much larger kitchen, but it just wasn’t the same.

And now the body’s favorite place is gone. The place where she slept, the place where she smiled when setting everything up. The place where she felt so accomplished the emotion bled over into Ambra.

Ambra curls up on herself on the couch, checking the wards, listening to Gurlien putter around.

They’re not going to give up on getting her back. They’re not going to let her disappear easily away from them, not while they still have something resembling a way to control her.

And one of them found a way to tell her.

She refuses to shut her eyes.

The showy nature, the dramatics of leaving her wards like that, reads towards a sign. They weren’t just destroying someplace for her to hide, they were showing she can’t hide.

Though why wouldn't they just pull the leash and be done with it…

Gurlien steps back into the room carrying something, eyes her critically, then stomps over and flops dramatically on the couch next to her.

She startles upright. “What?”

“You look like you’re having an internal meltdown. You shouldn’t.” He pulls out the small package he’s carrying, and it’s the first aid kit the body told her she needed to buy for each location under no arguments. Then his voice gentles. “They’re awful. I had to learn how to keep my head above the water every time they did something.”

“I’m not melting down,” she protests as he unzips the package, setting aside some gauze, alcohol wipes, and medical tape. “I’m trying to plan. ”

He raises an eyebrow without even glancing at her. “Sure.”

She struggles to sit up straighter, settling for half propped up against the back of the couch. “I have to plan, if they know all the spots I went to with the body, then we should be prepared—”

He unbuttons the cuffs of the sky-blue shirt, rolling it up to his elbows, revealing the bandages he placed while shaking in Johnsin’s living room. Some blood had seeped through the top layer of the bandage, barely showing up against the white.

“Should that still be bleeding?” Ambra asks, almost whispering.

“Probably,” Gurlien responds, but he doesn’t sound perturbed by it. “Cuts like that, with how deep he got, usually take a while.”

With an awful ripping sound, he peels up the medical tape, and Ambra winces.

“How can I help?” she asks, and to her dismay, despair leaks into her voice. “I need to help.”

Barely a flicker in his brown eyes at that. “Just time is needed. Time and changing the bandages every few days.” Even though the skin around is abraded by the bandage, the cut itself is mostly a thin line of scab, bloody and stiff, and Gurlien meticulously wipes at all remaining blood with the alcohol wipe.

It’s still so strange to see the blood be so red, so close.

For the brief period before the body died but Ambra was still part of her, they had bled both black and red, and it was a shock to both of them.

Now, just black.

“On a scale from one to ten, how much pain are you in?” he murmurs, still focusing on his arm .

“That’s too imprecise of a scale,” she counters.

Of course she’s heard that scale before. Back when they were tying in her nerves, back when the handlers were trying things, they asked it constantly.

It annoyed her back then, too.

“Then give me an accurate scale,” he says, which is a far more difficult question, but he’s letting her lean in and watch as he patches himself from an injury.

“It’s not the worst pain I’ve been in,” she starts, because they all seemed to want to know that. “It’s more…weakness.”

Another brief flicker of his eyes to hers.

“If I stand, it feels like the nerves would stop the muscles from working and make me fall down again,” she supplies, and he nods. “Shooting pain when I do that, aches when I’m not.”

He finishes with the alcohol wipe, folding it back and putting it in its open foil packet for safe keeping, then placing the gauze over the cut. “Hold this in place.”

She does, of course, and the edges of his skin are warm, hot to the touch, but he doesn’t react to the contact as he quickly wraps the area in medical tape.

“The pain during the spike was way worse, but this has less functionality,” she continues.

“So we should evaluate in terms of severity and function?” he asks, business-like, before examining the bandage and wincing. “Did he have to cut up my good wrist?”

“What’s wrong with the other?” she asks, and he rolls his eyes. “What?”

“Carpal tunnel,” he replies sarcastically, and it’s not a term she’s familiar with. “It’s a normal human injury, just lasts for a while.” Then, after rotating his other wrist, says, “It’s not bad on the severity scale, just have to take it easy on it or it’ll bother me more. ”

Makes sense.

He neatens up the rest of the med kit, placing his trash precisely to the side and fitting everything back into its place, like the actions soothe him somehow. Like the day caused him distress as well, and this is how he needs to process it.

Humans are horrifically complicated.

“What do demons usually do when they need to recover?” he asks, raising another critical eyebrow at her, making his opinion of her physical state very obvious.

Which is fair, the body did collapse.

“Hide,” she replies truthfully. “Usually, with something that can entertain the mind, a puzzle to solve, a book to read, a library to research, for however long it takes.”

“Is hiding the answer for every demon ill?” he says, and she knows he’s mocking her, but he’s also not wrong.

“Hiding or fighting,” she says. “Some…some go hard into sensation seeking, some collect influence over humans, some build power, but all that goes back to hiding or fighting.”

He watches her face and she’s acutely aware of it, and she almost prickles underneath his gaze, before something thoughtful crosses behind his eyes. “So you were the hiding sort of demon.”

He’s not saying it derogatorily, thankfully. “I saw no reason to risk myself in open conflict.”

“Then the College made you into a puppet assassin.”

She shrugs one shoulder. She’s still wearing the reddish sweater, and it smells of ash, but the collection of clothes they left at this condo is way smaller and she doesn’t want to stand to go look.

“And you have a library of hidden books and research. They could have made you an Archivist. ”

Unbidden, she smiles at the thought, and his eyebrows flash up.

“They didn’t like it when I told them their research was wrong,” she says. “Well, Boltiex usually indulged me in talking about it, but the rest always got irritated.”

She lets her finger trace on the rough canvas of the couch, some design that she can’t see.

“Turns out most humans don’t like being told they’re wrong and they should be ashamed of it,” she drawls, and this time his eyes crinkle upwards. “And it doesn’t matter how many primary or secondary sources you quote, they’ll still be irritated.”

“That’s not limited to them,” he says, before zipping up the med bag. “The moment you bring up primary sources, most people’s eyes will just glaze.”

“There was a scientist in the early days, back when…” back when the body was alive and chatting and Ambra wasn’t alone. “Who obsessively asked questions, took notes, and tried to source all the books I talked about. I liked her.”

Gurlien’s face solemns, and Ambra eyes him.

“She was related to the Necromancer, wasn’t she? Delina?” Ambra gestures at her head. “They had the same face.”

“That was her mother, yes,” Gurlien answers, cautious. “That scientist died at the hands of another demon.”

Ambra shouldn’t be surprised at that. “She asked some really risky questions, that tracks.”

Outside the condo, a child calls out to another, and there’s the merry sound of life, filtered through the walls of the safety spot.

“I want to ask so many questions,” Gurlien murmurs. “There’s so much scholarship around demons, and I feel like I have learned more in the last two days than I did in a lifetime of reading. ”

“Then ask,” Ambra replies, and it’s almost a sort of bravado that keeps her talking. “I’m never going to be accepted back among them, it won’t matter if I divulge secrets. I’ll get any answer I don’t know for you once this is all done.”

Once this is all done.

He’s still for a few moments, obviously considering. “I’ll include them in my notes,” he says, finally, and it’s a strange de-escalation to the conversation. “Is there anything we can do right now to protect this place better than the last?”

She swallows that down and assesses her own power levels. Body pain aside, she’s not weak with her powers.

She should ward for alarms, protect this place within an inch of its life. Map out the line of powers until she controls it all.

This small city is outside the normal range of any demons, so it won’t be offending territories, just other wandering demons. Such a high level of alert would absolutely draw their attention.

But is her risk from other demons or humans?

“I have some, but they should be done outside the walls,” she says finally, mulling it over. “Alarms without beacons, etcetera.”

Still, she pushes herself up and only wobbles slightly, before pushing aside the curtains to the road below.

It’s a merry street, with a cafe across the corner and an ice cream shop next to that, and kids play, bundled against the cold.

Ambra closes her human eyes, letting all the light and sensory hell fall away, and settles more into herself.

It’s harder to do in a living body.

But still, her awareness of the pulse of the world, of the heartbeat of this small town, with the merriness and winter outside her window, grows.

There’s the same strip of magic she remembers from when she set this up, pulsing down the street, twisted among the trees and fluttering with the cars. There’s the ever-present thrum of the river, just a few blocks away, a conduit towards a major ley line, healthy and strong.

The strip of magic from the street flutters towards her, as if tasting the familiarity of her presence. She had been careful when setting up the safe spot, she’s always careful with things like that, and most of the local magic appreciated it.

Maybe that’s why the College put the wight next to her in the stasis.

She taps her hand against the strip of magic, compelling it into an easy twist around her windowsill, and it complies readily, flashing into the brick and teasing its way into the glass of the window.

Behind her, Gurlien hisses in a breath.

“Yes?” she asks, not opening her eyes.

“I can tell you’re doing something, but I can’t see it,” he says, and even without looking she can tell his hand is on the leash, like he’s testing it.

Which, if she’s this close to him, it makes sense he would get that feedback.

“Do you want to?” she asks, keeping a hand on the magic, velvety soft against the human palm. “Come here.”

Stillness behind her, carefully so. “I’m a dud.”

“And I’m a demon,” she responds, and the magic flutters against her touch. “Your ability has nothing to do with it.”

She doesn’t want to look at him, out of some strange knowledge that it would spook him. That this is something he would resent being watched for, resent the witness. That having someone watch whatever internal struggle he’s so obviously having would render it useless and hurt.

It’s a long moment, before the couch creaks with him standing.

He approaches, whisper quiet, and without the human sight, all he is, is a gaping raw scar where his magic had been torn from him, but he settles next to her, his weight against the brick of the windowsill.

“Here,” she says, settling her other hand on his wrist, next to the leash, and sends a small pulse of energy into his warm skin.

He twitches, and she lets her eyes blink open.

His lips part, just barely, and she can see the whites of his eyes, vivid, and the gold magic of the world around them reflected in them.

His eyelids flutter, too fast, and for a split second she’s afraid he’s going to pass out, but she saw the Half Demon grant this sight to his necromancer so she knows it can’t be too dangerous.

“I’m just reinforcing the window,” she murmurs, tapping the strip of magic in her hands, and his gaze jerks down to it. “It’s been a while since I’ve been here, I’m reminding it of my connection.”

His pulse pounds in his neck as he swallows.

“You can just barely see the river over there,” she says, pointing with her chin towards it. “It feeds into the ley line that feeds into the Atlantic crossing.”

Barely, just barely, he flinches.

“It’s friendly here,” she continues, holding the strip of magic up, and it flickers around her hand, likely a playful animal. “If you treat it gently, it’s always more willing to work with you. ”

His throat bobs, staring down at her hand, like his mind is desperately trying to catch up.

But he claimed to be a spell weaver before, he would have been able to see all of this without any issue. This wouldn’t be new to him.

“I thought demons didn’t need it to be friendly?” he says, his voice a rasp, and the back of her neck prickles, like she’s in danger.

She shouldn’t be.

“We don’t,” she responds, settling the magic back down on the window sill. “Still easier when the area is friendly.”

He watches as the strip of magic flashes back into the brick, then jerks his hand away from her, breaking the contact.

“Did that hurt you?” she asks, curious. “It shouldn’t.”

“No.”

He stares down at her from behind his glasses, and for the first time she realizes that even his lashes are blond. His lips part, like he’s about to say something, like his thoughts are chasing around his mind, before he abruptly turns on his heel and strides into the bedroom, shutting the door with a firm click.

Interesting response.

Certainly, a reaction she didn’t anticipate.

“Huh,” Ambra murmurs to the magic now pulsing in her windowsill.