Chapter 2

2

A mbra’s feet hit the floor of the motor home, and her kidnappee’s knees buckle upon impact, knocking her off kilter.

“You’re bad at that,” she informs him, releasing his collar and letting him stagger away, to the comfortable plush couch she crammed into one side of the small space.

He all but collapses onto the couch, almost comically. “Why are we somewhere new?” Careful, he places the gun on the side table, the metal clattering against the cheap wood. Ambra’s a bit grateful that he didn’t try to shoot her with it. It wouldn’t have done anything serious, but it would’ve been exceedingly annoying.

Despite the disorientation and the obvious physical effects of the teleportation, his words are sharp. Like his brain doesn’t turn off, even when going through something strange.

It’s not a bad thing. If someone has to hold the leash, at least she picked an intelligent one.

“Another demon was sniffing around the spot,” Ambra answers, because a smart question deserves an actual response. “I haven’t faced another since…” she gestures at the body. “And I don’t want to try.”

He stares up at her.

“The Half Demon not-withstanding,” she amends, in case she offended him on behalf of his friend. “And that wasn’t exactly a fun time.”

He nods, then, obviously, as if hoping she would notice, looks around the room.

It’s a small motor home, the sort on concrete bricks instead of wheels, and it creaks in high wind. The glass of the window is streaked with grime, barely letting in the light of the setting sun.

Snow powders the grounds outside, more slush than anything else, and tall trees stretch towards the pink streaked sky. Moss grows on most things, probably some on the outside walls of the motor home, and the mud darkens with all the moisture in the air.

“Pacific Northwest?” her kidnappee guesses, and she nods.

“The body liked the cold air,” Ambra says before she can stop herself, then the lump threatens to choke her again. “I took her here a few times, she grew up within a hundred miles.”

His brows raise over the glasses, then he lifts his hand, flexing it.

The hand with the leash.

A cold, irrational fear stabs into her, at the casual motion, despite the fact that she’s the one that put that in place.

“First things first,” he murmurs, squinting at his hand, “what did you do to me?”

“Tied the leash,” she answers. If he’s a dud, if he has no way of seeing what she did, then she at least needs to give him the information he needs. “If someone pulls on it, pulls me away, you’ll feel it and be able to pull me back.”

He nods, a bit pale, before an utterly bored expression settles across his face.

It’s completely fake. Completely fabricated, and it’s almost fascinating to see, so she takes a few seconds to stare at him before she checks the wards.

They’re completely untouched, pristine, and perfect.

“This place will be safer than the last, it’s in the territory of a demon who won’t bother me if I don’t bother them,” Ambra supplies, squinting at him to see if the utterly fake expression falters. “I spoke to him about this place three years ago, it’s outside of the area he really cares about. No other one would cause strife in these woods.”

“And the leash?” he asks, and there’s a flicker of panic under the expression, before it solidifies again. “Could they get you here?”

“If they think about it, they can get me anywhere, it’s all a matter of who tries first.” She has to swallow down again, and this might be the longest she’s been without being in the stasis chamber since the merge, and the body is still giving her all the unconscious signals. “And how long it takes for them to sift through all the wreckage of the prison. I’m not the deadliest thing you let out.”

“Good to know,” he replies, before he glances around the room. “So, what, you’re here to sleep? Get some food, get some power back?” He gestures at the still-bleeding gut wound, and there’s a small tug on the leash at the motion. “Fix that?”

Unsteady again, she nods. “There’s a bed in the other room, the body liked the pillows if you need rest.”

“The body,” he states, and she flinches, completely out of her control, before he raises his hands in some obvious surrender. “Good, got it, okay—”

A shrill beep echoes in the small room, like a little spike into her brain, and she recoils back, then another, then another.

“It’s just my phone,” he states, digging into his pocket and pulling out one of the small electronics that all of her handlers kept on themselves. It beeps again in his hands, and he slowly, deliberately shows her how he can unlock it.

He’s treating her like a spooked animal, instead of the other way around.

“It’s my friends,” he says, again slowly and deliberately. “They’re worried.”

“Why?” Ambra blurts out.

He stares at her, blank. “Because a demon grabbed me and then disappeared and that’s not normal?”

“I wasn’t going to hurt you, that’d be counter intuitive,” Ambra says, gesturing to the room in some strange impulse she doesn’t fully understand. “I want you to make sure I don’t have to go back, not hurt you to the point where you willingly hand me over.”

“Which they didn’t know,” he points out, then starts tapping on the electronics, and her heart jumps again.

“Let me see,” she interrupts, and he sighs, turning the phone around.

It takes the body a few tries to focus her eyes, before the words swim into focus.

CHLOE A (7:30 PM): Are you okay?

CHLOE A (7:34 PM): I can’t track your phone, where are you, are you alive?

DELINA N (7:36 PM): All I can tell is you’re not dead.

FREDERICK HD (7:37 PM): The Wights can’t track you right now .

CHLOE A (7:49 PM): Gurlien, can you answer?

“What’s a Gurlien?” Ambra wonders aloud, and in front of her, he shuts his eyes.

“That’s my name,” he says wearily. “Chloe is the alchemist, she’s my best friend. Delina is the Necromancer and Frederick—Maison—is the Half Demon.”

She blinks up at him. “Okay, Gurlien.”

“Here,” he says, then types in front of her, pressing send.

GURLIEN (7:52 PM): I’m alive, with the demon, will explain later.

“No, you won’t,” Ambra protests, fear prickling over her skin. “How do you know they’re not with the College? They could be captive, someone else could have their electronics and be impersonating them, they do that.”

He sighs again, typing.

GURLIEN (7:53 PM): Chloe, code.

Immediately—

CHLOE A (7:53 PM): Charter Oak.

GURLIEN (7:54 PM): Ida Grove.

“There, it’s her, she wouldn’t give that up under torture,” he says, dark. “Believe me, they’ve tried.”

Ambra believes him, based on the amount of exhaustion and yet still power she saw in the alchemist, so she steps back, giving him a bit of space, as he continues to type out.

The wind creaks through the motor home, and the body shivers in the chill, outside of her control, but she stalks closer to the window in the meager kitchen.

Spiderwebs stretch between the faucet and the sink, but when she gives the sink an experimental twist, the water gushes out, bright and clear.

When she first took the body here, she had laughed in delight that such a run-down place could have such good plumbing, and Ambra hadn’t wanted to tell her that she had done it with magic. The body had filled a glass with the water, drank from it, and it had been such a contradictory burst of sensations for Ambra that she almost teleported them away instantaneously.

The glass still sits, upside down, in the rack next to the sink, a thin layer of dust along the bottom.

Her kidnappee, Gurlien, taps out on the phone, his face serious, and gets corresponding beeps with every action.

The beeps are less painful with just that bit of distance.

“Did the rest of your team escape?” Ambra asks, still staring down at the dusty glass.

“Yes,” Gurlien answers, curt. “They’re in a safe house, Maison’s mother is recovering, and they’re going to find a hospital for Maison to get his knee checked out.”

Right, because he can’t self-heal.

Ambra scoffs, then stares down at the oozing gut wound, the blood still staining some of her clothing, sticking unpleasantly to her skin.

She pokes at it, and the pain sends edges of black at the periphery of her vision.

The damage cuts through the skin, into one of the secondary organs, but those are easy to fix with enough energy. The body had taken damage before, and she had fixed it then.

Her legs are less steady this time, though, so she sits herself down on the plastic tile and leans her head against the cabinet there, hearing the whisper of the water draining through the pipes.

The tapping of Gurlien’s fingers stops, but she can’t see him from her position. “Ambra?”

“I’m here, just sitting down.” She pokes at the wound again, hissing involuntarily through her teeth, then focuses on the secondary organ, knitting the tissue back into place .

It’s harder to do after the merge, and she hates that, bitterly.

There’s maybe a few minutes of blessed silence, of letting her power focus in on that one little part of her, let it sink into the still breathing physical form she’s stuck in.

Before Gurlien stands, the floor creaking with the movement, and in just a few steps is in front of her.

“What are you doing?”

She didn’t want to have to explain.

“Healing the wound,” she says, after he stares blankly at her, lifting the shirt to show.

The skin is still split, black blood spooling out, but with the absence of the cut in the secondary organ it feels significantly better.

He blanches.

“Don’t be squeamish, your Half Demon was the one who did it,” Ambra says, then pokes at the broken skin again, willing it back into place.

“No, I’m going to be squeamish about that,” he says, his words faint. He’s still looming over her, and it’s too similar to being on an experiment table and looking up at her handlers.

“The body left some changes of clothing in the bedroom,” Ambra mumbles, after a long moment of stitching the skin back into place, indeterminately slow. “Closet by the bed, can you find me something without blood?”

He dashes away, relieving the pressure of the looming, and she exhales, controlled.

Well, not as controlled as it would be in an actually dead body, but as controlled as all of the unconscious spasms this one allowed her.

She hadn’t ever been so aware of blood in other bodies, either. Of it sticking and drying against her skin, pulling on all the tiny hairs all over the body, flaking and tightening against her.

With another impulse, she lifts her hand to the shaved side of her head, where the leads once hung. The body had cried when she saw them in the mirror, with her beautiful long hair chopped so severely, but it…made sense. At least.

The handlers had spoken so many times of monitoring her brain patterns, at seeing how a demon soul in a human body would react, and, especially at first, Ambra had been so excited.

And now she’s sitting on the floor, slowly stitching her skin back, as Gurlien audibly goes through the closet.

“Any shirt will do, it doesn’t matter,” she calls out, and her throat turns the words into something tight, something choked out.

He immediately comes back out, holding a perfectly functional pull over sweater, the type that the body would always reach for with the first hint of a chill.

Still working on the skin, she chucks the bloody shirt off, using it to scrub some of the dried viscera off her stomach, and Gurlien blinks away, visibly startled.

“Do you need bandages?” he asks, his voice a bit strangled.

“No, I’m almost done,” she responds, taking the moment to squint at him, at his clear discomfort, before she clings to the side of the sink, hauling herself up.

Her legs shake at the action.

Firmly ignoring that, she runs the ruined shirt under the water, then dabs off the rest of the dried blood, until the only reminder of the wound is a thin pinkish scar, slightly raised .

She frowns at it, but the skin resists any of her effort to smooth that away, too.

The body has several other scars, raised in the same way, thin strips of skin poorly healed. Ones on her fingers, almost blended in with callouses. Some on her knees, like she fell. One on the side of her hip that aches a bit in bad weather, one curved against her breastbone, neatly hidden by the undergarments the body still wore.

It’s somehow wrong for Ambra to be adding to them.

Besides the surgery scars, of course. Besides the places where they hacked the body open in their mad rush to fit Ambra’s soul inside as well, then sealed them back up in the trap.

The rest of the blood dabbed away, she shrugs into the sweater, and it’s soft, like the blankets on the bed.

“Thank you,” she says to Gurlien, because that at least seemed appropriate, if she wants to keep him from handing her over.

He still watches her, sharp.

“You can go sleep, the leash will wake you if they pull me,” she says.

“Is there food here?” he asks instead. “If you were hurt so badly, you need to replenish.”

“Why?” she asks, but gestures to the small pantry where the body had requested sweets be stored. “Go ahead.”

His forehead furrows, fascinatingly so, and if her legs were shaking less, she would’ve reached out and pressed her thumb into the wrinkle between his brows.

But even with his visible confusion, he opens the pantry, to the brightly colored snacks within. The candy, the preserved pastries, the thin bags of something called popcorn that the body had promised they would try together, and then never did .

Thankfully, his hand passes over that, pulling out a box of foil wrapped bars and popping them open.

“How often did they take you out of stasis?” he asks, and his casual tone sends the small hairs on Ambra’s arms to raising.

“Not often,” she replies, cautious.

“How long were you out each time?” He pulls out two of the bars, then, to her horror, hands her one and leans against the other side of the counter, tearing open the one in his hands. At her blank look, he continues, “Hours? Days? Minutes?”

“Never days,” she answers, and he nods, like he expected that answer.

“And did they give you food?”

“You saw me with the necromancer,” Ambra points out, and he wrinkles his nose. “That was only about…two and a half hours ago out of stasis.”

Again, his eyes slate over to her, like he’s evaluating something she can’t see, but thankfully remains quiet.

At least he’s not panicking anymore. At least this house has nobody else sniffing around, no other safety concerns. There’s running water and a bed—two things important to humans—and the ambient temperature isn’t too far outside of comfort.

The phone beeps in his pocket, and she flinches again.

“Do you have a plan?” he asks, after a long moment of scrolling over whatever messages he has.

She generally doesn’t, never was one to craft elaborate schemes. Some demons excel at them, some spend their entire lives in one stratagem after another, but that usually bores her.

But.

After all that time in stasis, after all that time doing nothing but pace, without the body or any other company, sure gave her time to think. All the times she was brought out, the leash choking her throat, all gave her ideas. All the experiments, all the humans looming over her and making decisions, ensured that her mind had been locked on too few of things.

Another strange sensation crawls over her, this one not wholly unwelcome.

“There’s three more handlers still alive,” she says, lifting her chin, watching him as he nonchalantly eats food she had purchased for the body, inhabiting the space that nobody else had. “Two dead, three more to go.”