Chapter 19

19

A fter the shower, she crawls right back into the bed, her head pounding, and flexes her power across the room to plunge the lights off in one large movement.

Gurlien doesn’t say anything, just turning on the one desk lamp to illuminate his reading with a small motion. It’s not passive aggressive, it’s not denying her the want for darkness, instead just a tiny movement for himself.

The light spills out the large floor, just enough to send a shadow of his silhouette across the wall, and that too is something comforting. That even with the darkness she so desperately wants, there’s still a hint of him in her vision.

With exhaustion pressing down against her body and dragging her eyelids to close, she curls up on the bed, shuffling so she’s under the blankets the best she can, and tries to sleep.

In the small hours of the night, she drifts back up towards awareness, the sleep clinging to her like a fog on a lake, but it’s just Gurlien climbing into the other side of the bed, whisper soft in the darkness.

Not a threat at all, and she drifts back to sleep within moments.

She awakes in the morning with a start, and sun streams through the windows, piercing through her eyelids and stabbing her in the brain.

Gurlien’s arm is tight around her middle, his body warm under the blankets, and he’s still breathing deep, still asleep.

Ambra jerks slightly, before getting the body under her control, and blinks up at the big room.

Somehow, she slept through him cuddling against her; somehow, she rolled over until she’s in the center of the bed with him, and her limbs are loose with warmth and comfort. His foot is once more hooked around her ankle, as if keeping her in place.

She breathes out, and dust mites dance in the morning sunlight. It’s bright, clear and cold, and the far away howling of wind across the building just prods her to stay in place. To stay under the blankets and against the pillows.

Gurlien had changed the pillowcase to one she didn’t bleed on.

She knows enough about humans to know that this level of contact isn’t normal, that humans don’t just do this with one another unprompted. That the body had dreamt of contact like this, in her most loneliness, and Ambra had marveled at the specificity of the images.

Yes, some demons chase after contact with humans, rare and difficult with the realities of their biology, but Ambra never had. Never had the impulse to lose herself with touch, to intentionally overwhelm her senses, with this close of physical connection.

This doesn’t feel overwhelming, not in the way she’s become accustomed to. Other demons had described it as incandescent, as burning a hole through their sense of self until all they can think about is the physical need. But this, with his arm around her and her back against his chest, is much closer to just…comfort.

She breathes out again, and he sighs in his sleep, a small sound.

And he had saved her. Had, despite all his own misgivings of the leash, despite all his own doubts about his own ability, been able to grasp the leash right back and slam her into place.

And then cuddle her.

Now well and truly awake, she wiggles out from underneath his arm, and he makes another sleepy noise, deep in the back of his throat, before he flops over to the other side of the bed, his blond hair sticking up in the back.

Even his glasses are by the side of the bed, rendering him almost entirely without armor.

Ambra takes a few moments to slip on her tinted glasses and some socks and grab her phone, then carefully creeps over to the fridge. Gone is the acid wash of fear in her stomach, leaving her with an almost contented hunger.

It’s wholly unreal. Wholly unlike her.

She shivers the moment she strides out of her strongest protections, but no jerk of the leash strikes her, no otherwise demon interference.

And she lets herself hope, until she squashes it down .

It’s too much to hope that they’d give up. It’s too much to hope that they’ll view the night before as a final act.

Instead, Nalissa or Boltiex is out there, scheming a way around her defenses, as much as they don’t understand them. Scheming and researching and poking around them until they figure something out.

And here Ambra is, wearing socks that were bought just because they’re soft, and staring at the fridge like it could solve her problems.

Balefully she opens it, and finds no more elucidation. There are protein drinks and some leftover casserole that Gurlien made, which was nice but not appetizing at the moment. There’s more cheese sticks, which appear far too rubbery for her taste, and a few things she would categorize as ingredients but not necessarily ‘food.’

She’s going to have to learn how to cook and clean and do all the small things humans do to fill up their time. And if the mere act of rebandaging a wound is boring…this isn’t going to be great.

She grabs a bottle of juice, and the warm comfort of sleeping next to Gurlien is almost already gone, so she settles into the desk chair, poking on the phone.

Somewhere in the middle of the night, her phone must’ve lit up like crazy, but that too didn’t wake her up.

It’s the contact ‘T,’ not in the group chat, just to her.

T (2:03 AM): Are you alright?

T (2:23 AM): To clarify, Gurlien told us you fought off an attack.

Ambra scoffs, because she did no such fighting and to call it an attack is almost a misnomer.

T (2:24 AM): Everyone was focusing on how it’s exciting that Gurlien was able to do something and the implications, but I wanted to check on you .

T (2:24 AM): And I know something about how terrifying it is to not be in control of yourself.

It’s another small hint of the mystery, and Ambra lets her eyes flicker to Gurlien’s still sleeping form. All she can see of him is his hair, the blankets pulled up to his ears.

AMbrA (9:12 AM): I feel like shit. Gurlien did all the fighting and I just got bloody. Then I slept for about twelve hours.

Even though not enough time for this person to get enough sleep has passed, immediately three dots fill the screen.

T (9:13 AM): And let me guess, now he’s bothering you to eat and that sounds horrible.

AMbrA (9:14 AM): He’s still asleep and there’s nothing appetizing in the apartment.

Then—

AMbrA (9:14 AM): How much can I talk to you? How much do you know?

She sips from the juice—it’s fine, if cloyingly sweet—and props the phone up on the desk, so she can see the response without holding it up.

The three dots appear, then disappear, a few times.

With a start, Gurlien jerks himself awake, flailing in the blankets, and Ambra blinks over to him.

“Are you okay?” she asks, and she hadn’t spoken yet, her own voice almost foreign against her throat.

He stares wildly at her, then scrambles for his glasses.

“Just how bad is your eyesight?” she asks, sipping from the juice again, the idle motion somewhat entertaining while he’s so flustered.

He shakes his head, more of getting himself together than a negative.

“Are you doing okay?” he asks, voice still bewildered .

The answer is not terribly, but not critical at that very moment. “We can discount the idea that they’re going to give up on retrieving me.”

He rubs his entire face, still disoriented. “Are you a morning person?”

“I didn’t need a sleep schedule before the merge,” she points out, “so who knows.”

“Right,” he says heavily, then swings his feet to the side of the bed, right as her phone buzzes again.

T (9:32 AM): I don’t want to give too much information in case of a success from them.

Ambra expected that, with how secretive they seemed to be.

T (9:32 AM): And Axel halfway thinks that Gurlien is going to turn on you, if push comes to shove.

Ambra slates her eyes over to Gurlien, who’s staring blankly at the middle distance, blinking behind his glasses.

AMbrA (9:35 AM): He’s saved me twice now.

T (9:36 AM): Axel has his reasons and they’re good.

It’s still puzzlingly vague, and Ambra scowls at the phone.

T (9:37 AM): All of that to say, no specifics. But I can talk emotions, and I know that in times like these emotions get pushed to the back of the priorities and that can be just as hard.

And with that, right then, Ambra decides that there’s no way this expert is a demon trapped in a human body. No demon would talk like that, no demon would offer that unprompted.

It’s still nice, though, and the temptation to push on it, to needle it out, still digs underneath Ambra’s skin.

AMbrA (9:39 AM): So human emotions are odd and don’t make sense, right ?

T (9;39 AM): Lol.

AMbrA (9:40 AM): They all manifest in physical ways and I can’t stop the reactions even when I want to.

“Did you eat already?” Gurlien mumbles, stripping off his undershirt and reaching for a clean one, facing the other direction.

Ambra raises an eyebrow at his back. Again, not behavior she associated with normal human interactions with each other, right in line with the cuddling.

“No,” she replies, not making herself glance away. If he, the one actual human in her life, isn’t going to act normal, then neither is she.

Plus, his shoulders are nice to look at. All the humans Ambra has been around since the merge, have either been older scientist types who viewed her as an object of experimentation or excessively muscular combat types who seemed unpleasant to touch.

He glances back at her, catching her eyes as he throws on another button up shirt, this one the color of deep olive green. “What?” he asks suspiciously.

“Axel thinks you’re going to betray me?” Ambra says, and Gurlien shuts his eyes with a sigh. “And T isn’t a demon, that’s for sure.”

“Yes,” he shoots back at her. “You’re a morning person, that’s what this is.” He rakes a hand through his hair, and it’s nowhere near as neat as it normally is. There are circles under his eyes, even visible from this distance.

Ambra sits up straight, but he ignores that.

It’s alarming, and she squints at him across the bright early morning light.

“You need food,” she declares, pushing authority behind her voice to force out the question. “You did more than you anticipated, and now you need food. ”

He sighs. “Probably.”

Ambra bounces to her feet, and her head only aches a bit with that action. “No, you do. It’s been what, a year, since you’ve done any sort of combat magic?”

He stares at her, baleful underneath his glasses. “That wasn’t combat magic.”

“Bullshit,” she informs him, and his lips tug into a smile before he stops himself. “You were controlling a demon, actively against another force trying to control her, and you won. If there’s a winner, then it’s combat.”

“That is so incredibly reductive,” he mutters, but stands, reaching for his heavy wool coat.

Despite the rush of terror at being beyond her wards, despite the headache that bubbled up after only five minutes outside in the bright cold, she follows Gurlien along to a restaurant and coffee shop, and doesn’t say a thing about leaving until the color returns to his cheeks and the analytical light flickers back on behind his eyes.

And she lets him bully her into walking, actually walking, back, in an almost familiar action now. Even though they have only done this once before.

But Gurlien turns up the collar of his woolen coat against the wind and Ambra tucks her hands into the sleeves of her sweater and, for a split second, they actually look normal. They look like two absolutely run of the mill humans walking around the busy downtown, huddled close for the wind.

And for the first time, it doesn’t quite feel like a bad thing.

“So,” Gurlien starts, as they’re strolling back, and she tilts her face towards him. She’s not wearing the earplugs, but outside the noise isn’t as severe. “Do you think that was Nalissa or Boltiex?”

A shiver of fear winds up her back, but it’s far away, now that she’s out in the bright sun with the clear blue sky overhead.

“I’m not sure,” she murmurs, keeping her eyes on the snippets of sky visible from in between the sky scrapers. “Felt like Boltiex, but I think…he’s generally stronger,” she says, and it’s so strange to be speaking so freely. “He’s more instantaneous, we had…that bit of warning.”

He nods, almost neutral. “And I would think that Nalissa would be busy preparing for her event,” he says, and the wind has turned his cheeks pink. “I’m surprised she didn’t cancel, with the Toronto base.”

“She never thought much of the Toronto base,” Ambra supplies. “She hated the weather, hated the culture. When she…worked on me…” she swallows. Even the clear air can’t stop her throat from seizing. “She had me transported to Paris. Once Italy.”

The body had found it glamorous, with the old-world beauty and fields of lavender, and Ambra had been struck by the extremes of sensations. Of the beauty of nature, at how sharp the scents surrounding them, at the difference in the magic flowing through them.

“She hated that they kept me on the other continent,” Ambra forces on, kicking a pebble and watching it skitter into the gutter. “But three of the Five lived there full time, so she was outvoted.”

And now just two of the Five remained.

It’s still weird to think about.

“So she wouldn’t stop something she liked just because her least favorite base fell,” Ambra continues. “She likes her music, she likes her spectacle, she likes when they come together. Did you know,” Ambra pivots to face him while walking, “that she brought in a specialty record player into her labs? Not just a speaker, everyone had those, but an actual record player that took up almost an entire desk.”

“I only met her three times,” Gurlien says, and it's a bit of a jolt to imagine him speaking with Nalissa. “I had to draw up a contract for her once, she was not…very responsive.”

She raises an eyebrow at him, and he had the temerity to shrug, embarrassed.

“I wasn’t the most interesting of person,” he says. “I mostly did legal work, I did diagnostic spells, I did magically binding contracts. Not a combat mage, not someone terribly important.”

It tickles her all the more that he still did something to get kicked out.

“I wasn’t the sort of magician to be invited to fancy musical spectacles,” he says, his face soft in some sort of self-deprecation. “When people saw me, they knew I was there to fix a mess that was mostly paperwork.”

“I’m glad,” Ambra declares, and he gives her such a startled glance that she almost feels bad. “If I had met you on the experimentation table, I would’ve absolutely killed you.”

“Right,” he says, unnerved. “You and murder.” He takes a deep breath, like physically moving himself on. “Nalissa. Any friends to manipulate?”

“She didn’t make a lot of friends, unless you were an artist,” Ambra says. “I don’t think any of the Five liked her terribly much.”

“Did anyone in the Five like each other at all?” Gurlien asks dryly. “They’re not a group of people I can imagine being friends. ”

“I think that was the point,” Ambra says, before she falls silent, the hint of a plan unfolding in her mind. “She had her enemies.”

Gurlien gives her a brief smile, like he could read her mind. “Any particulars you want to try?”

They spend the day sketching out ideas, playing with potentials, before having a completely uneventful night's sleep, one where Ambra doesn’t dream and wakes up with her chin tucked against Gurlien’s shoulder.

But it’s another day closer to the possibility of Nalissa with her guard down, and Ambra doesn’t want to spend time in the warm comfort.

After some arguing and some agreeing and back to arguing, they settle on a target.

Bianchi Layton. A rival in research funding and someone who once yelled at Nalissa’s research assistants when they had the body’s brain peeled open and Ambra was aware during all of it.

She didn’t stop the assistants, just disagreed with their tactics, and Ambra could hear her argue with Nalissa the entire time her skull bled over the sterile experimentation table.

They track her location down to her flat in rural Scotland, where Nalissa once took Ambra after the leash was tied to show off, and Gurlien managed to figure out a schedule of behavior, aided by Axel and one of Gurlien’s contacts titled ‘Alette, do not message.’

“She hates me,” he supplies, again somewhat embarrassed. “Axel at least sympathizes with me, but Alette can’t stand me. ”

“She’s helping you,” Ambra shoots back.

“No, she’s helping you,” he replies. “She feels bad that her aunt's research ruined another life and likes that you saved her cousin. After this is all done, you could probably meet her, she would kick me out of her house.”

Ambra crosses her arms and squints at him. “She’d rather help a demon than you?”

“Absolutely,” he says, crossing his arms right back.

“She also hates the College, though,” Ambra needles out. “Why is she even not on your side?”

She half expects him to sigh, she half expects him to shut up and withdraw, but instead he scrunches his face at her in such an expression that it surprises a smile out of her.

“If I promise to tell you the story of that, can you promise to not kill Bianchi?” he asks, which is a strange sticking point for him once again.

“She’s not a good person either,” Ambra reminds him, the knife sharp memory of the skin peeled open still sitting underneath her gut.

“Nobody is,” he says. “Let's keep the murder down to the Five. The story in exchange for keeping the murder to a minimum.”

She’s not entirely sure how feasible that would be, but the want of information about Gurlien wins over the bone deep need for revenge.

“Fine,” she says, then grins at him, baring all her teeth. “Unless she tries to kill you, then she’s fair game.”

“Not this again,” he mutters, but at least doesn’t argue, so she watches him pack a bag with some quick energy food and throw the woolen coat back on, before she grabs him by the shoulder, teleporting him directly into the kitchen of Bianchi’s flat.

And into chaos.