Chapter 14

14

T here’s something soft about spending an evening with someone in silence.

Her wards are pristine, perfect and whole, and after dinner she props herself up on one side of the too-large bed, alternating between poking at the phone and reading an old book she hasn’t touched in a few decades. Gurlien alternates between leafing through old pages of research and writing down an impromptu catalog of the topics she kept in the bookshelves.

He’s going to love the library in the castle.

When it’s all over, when she’s free to do what she wants and he has no more obligations to her, she’s going to let him spend as much time in the castle as he wants. Going to let him sift through the books, find which ones to read and which ones to merely record their existence.

The bed is kind, the blankets plush against her skin, and even though exhaustion pulls at her eyelids and at her very bones, she’s not…she’s not uncomfortable.

“You look like you’re about to nap on a pile of books,” Gurlien mutters, after a few hours of the peace, and the interruption isn’t even an imposition. “Are you going to be weird if we sleep on the same bed?”

She blinks at him, slow. “That’s a human thing, right?”

“Yes,” Gurlien says, glancing at her over his glasses. “But despite the bookcases and the desks, you’re the one who didn’t put a couch or anything in this apartment.”

She shrugs, still not getting up.

“This bed could probably fit four people on it without anyone making physical contact,” Gurlien continues, and she’s not sure if he’s attempting to convince her or convince himself.

“And it’s the safest place in here, now,” Ambra says, pointing at the runes before she belatedly remembers he can’t see them, that it wouldn’t be an instinctive decision.

He nods, his mouth thin, before he exhales, shaking out his hands, and abruptly striding to the bathroom.

Definitely convincing himself.

Humans have hang-ups on strange things, but she rests her head back on one of the pillows, staring up at the ceiling, trying to piece it out on her own, despite the sleepiness.

Humans associate it with intimacy, with safety. And with Gurlien being fundamentally unsafe just by the nature of her mission, and with her still not knowing too terribly many things about him and his past, they don’t qualify for either of the criteria.

But that’s not enough motivation for her to leave the first truly comfortable position she’s been in for ages.

Since that one night with the body in the motor home.

Without getting off the bed, she shifts the books to the floor next to it, pulling one of the two blankets up over her, nestling further into the embrace of the bed, and lets her eyes close, listening to the small sounds of the apartment at night, until Gurlien steps back into the main room .

She doesn’t open her eyes at that, lets him deal with his own hang ups in the only privacy she can really afford him. His footsteps pace across the room, to all the many different light switches, flicking them off one by one.

“You are incredibly obvious when you’re faking being asleep,” he mutters at her, before he slides into the other side of the bed.

“You’re the one who was being weird,” she points out, still turned the other direction. “This is the most comfortable I’ve been in at least a year.”

He’s silent for a long moment, his breathing evening out into something predictable.

“You should seek out this comfort,” he speaks; after so long, she thinks he must be asleep already. “If you’re stuck in that body, you should treat it well. For yourself.”

His words should hurt, should poke at the tender part of herself, but spoken across the softness of the bed and the gentleness of the blankets, they don’t.

In the middle of the night, when even the city outside seems to hold its breath, something whispers against Ambra’s wards.

Her eyes pop open, but there’s nobody else in the apartment, and despite the vast distance across the bed, Gurlien’s foot is hooked around her ankle. Like in sleep his body unconsciously reached out to her, even in that small way.

Ambra exhales into the expanse of the room, and the same whisper against her wards.

Not antagonistic, but curious. Hoping to draw her attention.

A flicker of her mind out towards the edge of her runes, and another demon paces, outside the door to the apartment.

When originally setting up the wards, way back when she had all the time and ability in the world, she had placed them a few feet into the hallway, so even a malicious force couldn’t break through to the door, do damage against the wall.

The whisper again, an acknowledgement that the other demon knows she’s awake, but clearly not an attack. The most polite of queries, the sort that demons dance around when not wishing to embroil themselves in a fight.

Ambra pulls her foot away from Gurlien, and he makes a soft sleepy noise, before burrowing his head deeper into the blanket. She hesitates, but his breathing returns to its rhythm.

Her feet bare against the cool hardwood, she pads her way to the door. The city lights cast shadows through her long windows, just enough to tint the whole room a deep blue.

She sends back the same sort of polite whisper, a communication of something like peace, before she gently creaks open the door, stepping out into the hall, staying behind her wards.

In front of her, wearing the most nondescript dead body imaginable, some sort of businessman who could be anywhere between thirty and sixty years old, is the demon of Minneapolis. The one she traded for artwork all those ages ago.

If he wanted, he could have easily torn down her wards and rend her into many, many fragments of a soul.

She shuts the door as quietly as she could, to not wake Gurlien.

“What happened to you?” the demon of Minneapolis asks, the brow of the body furrowing. “I thought it was you, but…”

Ambra hugs her arms, acutely aware of the stark difference between a living and a dead body when presented with it in front of her.

There are only so many things she can say, none of them good, but she weighs them all the same. “Human experimentation.”

His head tilts, halfway between a predator sizing up the prey and a scientist looking beneath a microscope.

“I still mean you no harm, still using this place for safety and not for power,” Ambra says, keeping her voice hushed in case it spreads to the room behind her. Gurlien wouldn’t be able to hear the demon in front of her, but her words would be perfectly audible.

“Of course,” he replies neutrally, then, “can you escape?”

He means the body, the body that breathes and aches and still tastes like sleep.

“No,” she responds.

“Who did it?” he asks, still expressionless. “Who would do this, so I can avoid?”

Because he, like her, is more likely to run than fight. Despite his base of power, despite the ley line coursing through his city like an onslaught, he’d still pick fleeing over whatever happened to her.

It prickles at the edge of her eyes. “The human research College,” she says, and his face twists. “They tried many times to tie demons into human bodies, don’t fall into their traps.”

He nods, frowning, before his eyes flicker to her door. “You have one in there.”

“Oh, he’s harmless,” Ambra forces out, though her heart jumps at his implications. “He’s helping me, he’s under my protection, don’t touch him.”

“Understood.”

They stand there, in the middle of the night, before he glances away. “Looking at you is like a nightmare, don’t draw attention to my city.”

And he disappears, leaving her alone.

Ambra stares out at the hallway, as if she could will her human eyes to see where he teleported to, but there’s nothing.

Just empty air, recirculated from the building.

And she’s the nightmare.

She withdraws back into the apartment, letting the runes and wards wash over her with comfort.

Someone of her own kind can’t bear to look at her.

Whatever was done, whatever part she has yet to uncover, is so monstrous and so unnatural that even someone she considered at least partially an ally is so disgusted by her very existence.

It hurts.

It hurts viscerally, in the way that such slights never would have before. It hurts behind the breastbone, where the heart beats blood up through to the brain and fills the lungs. It hurts in the scar on her gut, in the aches in the back of her legs, in the prickles of her hair growing out.

She backs away from the door, still staring at it, into the inner circle of her wards.

The hurt burrows into her stomach, into her throat, closing it off far more effectively than Johnsin ever could, and her very fingertips tremble with it.

She’s known her own nightmare, she’s known every horrid thing done to her, every small pain and every small bit of control. But to think, to know, that even looking at her would scare someone like that.

A lump in her throat, she turns on her heel, all but stomping back to the bed, before she climbs back into her side, pulling the blanket up over her head like it could keep out all the thoughts.

It doesn’t.

She curls up on her side, staring out at the door, as if her watch could keep another bludgeon of emotion from hitting her unaware.

Tears prickle at the corners of her eyes, but she keeps them wide open out of some sort of sullen stubbornness. Keeps them open to prove that she has this control over her body, that she is the one in charge. That despite all that had been done to her, despite all the experiments and the surgeries and the fine lines cut into the brain, she could still do this one thing.

With another sleepy sound, Gurlien rolls over, flopping his arm over her midsection.

She freezes.

But he just makes a contented noise deep in the back of his throat before his breathing settles out again, regular, tugging her in close.

His chest against her back is warm, almost obsessively so, and she can feel each crest of his breath, and if she imagines hard, hear each beat of his heart. His arm is heavy, not restrictive, not holding her down, but rather some sort of protectant.

Like just this touch is to keep her safe.

Ambra stays still, barely letting herself breathe, for as long as she can.