Chapter 21

21

G urlien carefully sets down the scroll protectors on the oversized bed, his face sharp.

If they didn’t have to stay in a 45-meter radius of each other, Ambra would teleport herself to somewhere far away. Somewhere in nature, where she can sit alone for as long as she needs, and doesn’t have to see the look on his face.

“That was an interesting shield,” Gurlien says finally, and she squints at him. “That trap had a subroutine that tears through human shields. Thank you.”

Ambra hadn’t even noticed.

Gurlien pops off the top to one of the scroll protectors, pulling out the giant roll of whisper thin onion paper.

“Good call on the maps,” he says, and her skin prickles, like he’s building to something. He unrolls it, spreading it across the wooden floor, and it’s far more detailed than the version on his phone. Water lines, electricity, magical conduits, all of it. “So all that was horrifying.”

There it is .

She sits on the bed, watching him smooth the paper down, his actions neat, economical.

Like he’s used to doing this. Like the time in the compound, when she barely knew him, was definitely not the first time he handled maps like this.

“I am horrifying,” Ambra replies back, and her voice still hurts from even the memory of all the screaming. “There is no part of me that isn’t an abomination. I shouldn’t exist.”

“Okay, edgy,” Gurlien says, his normal sarcasm creeping in. “I meant how she expertly triggered you into a rage and then had the temerity to cry about how scary you were.” He sits up, so he’s staring at her. “I’ve known her for years. I’ve seen her cry hundreds of times. It’s never been genuine.”

It’s not what she expected.

“You’re not angry?” Ambra asks.

That seems to throw him. “I can recognize manipulation when I see it. Spend enough years among people like that, you have to.”

“I meant at me,” she says, and a bit of frustration filters back into her tone. “I’m the one who lost control.”

“Ambra,” he starts, sharp, and she straightens, her spine drawing up, “in the last month and a half I have seen a Necromancer bring back someone from the dead who had a bleeding hole stabbed through his chest. I’ve seen a Half Demon disappear before my eyes and almost kill his girlfriend on pure instinct. I saw the same Necromancer turn a combat mage into dust without knowing what she was doing.”

“That was terrifying,” Ambra murmurs in agreement.

“I have broken into a protected compound that I used to be loyal to, I saw an entire hallway of experiments that could never live outside of stasis. I saw a captive pre-teen held in what amounts to a torture chamber, and she had been there long before I got kicked out, so that happened while I was there.” He thumps a book down on a corner of the map so it doesn’t roll up, then scowls in frustration at it. “You not quite having a grasp on regulating traumatic emotions when deliberately provoked does not even register on the things that get me angry.”

He stares at her, hard, like he could impact more meaning with it, and her mouth goes dry.

“Did I wish that you weren’t provoked like that? Yeah, it was terrifying, you literally damaged the foundation of a fucking house. Do I hold that against you? No!” He scowls. “Do you need to do a bunch of work so you don’t get manipulated like that? Absolutely. Do I think that’s something you do in, what, a week and a half since you’ve been out of stasis? Not at all. It took me years—years!—to recognize when someone was manipulating me like that, and that was with me dealing with it every day, all day.”

Ambra doesn’t know much about human development, but she does know that the College generally takes children with a grip on magic at a very young age, molding them and raising them to be what it wants them to be.

And the idea of Gurlien like that, a scared kid, underneath the brunt of all of the expectations and emotions and trainings, is just…sad.

“Did they kick you out because you were too kind?” Ambra murmurs, pulling the plush blanket off the bed and wrapping it around herself, sitting on the floor next to the maps as well.

“God no,” Gurlien mutters, then he rakes his hand through his hair, completely messing up the neat precision. “Can you heal yourself so you don’t bleed on the maps?”

“All of these are superficial,” she informs him, before poking at one of the cuts on her arm, prodding the skin together, feeding a bit of energy into it.

It stings, still.

Gurlien spreads out another one of the maps, another detailed drawing of the catacombs, elongating down into the experimentation rooms.

It’s more detailed than even Ambra knew, more rooms and more storage than she ever saw.

“Just when I think I can’t get more disgusted by them, something else happens, and I’m right back where I was a year ago,” Gurlien mutters, marking with a pencil the placement of a rune, matching it with the map on his phone. “I thought Bianchi would be logical, would jump at the chance to get back at Nalissa, but no, she immediately went for the most hurtful thing.”

“I didn’t even know she knew…Misia’s…name,” Ambra says, forcing the shape of the name past the lump in her throat.

Misia would’ve scoffed at Bianchi, at the cruelty that Gurlien just described. Would’ve smiled at the homeliness of the little cabin in Scotland, would’ve liked the carving on the chair.

Misia would’ve been vastly entertained by the floor full of maps, would’ve appreciated watching someone like Gurlien sketch on them.

Gurlien stills the pencil on the paper. “Does it hurt to say her name?”

Ambra nods, swallowing.

His eyes are unreadable behind his glasses for a long moment, before the pencil starts to move again. “That’s grief,” he says simply, and she watches his hands instead of him, through the silence that follows.

It’s close to an hour before they speak again, as Gurlien sits back and cracks his neck from hunching over on the floor.

“A year ago, after the spectacular crash of the Terese project, the College sent me to deal with the will of the scientist behind it and check for magical anomalies,” he starts, as if this is any other conversation. “I found a cagey and heartbroken spell weaver, an alchemist who lost his magic, and a series of ley lines so twisted on themselves that they were breaking.”

“Alette and Axel?” Ambra murmurs, and he nods, not looking at her.

“Alette was the beneficiary of the will, but the magic of her aunt’s compound was fragmenting around her and she had no way of repairing it. The demon—Terese—had ripped into the very matrix of power in the region and shredded it to her will, decaying it until entire regions were going dark. It was…perilously close to the main Line through Washington state.”

Having been to that Line, having walked through the pebbly beaches of the bay and sat with the magic coursing through her, it’s hard to imagine it in any other way but strong.

“The College told me I had to stop it before it took down the Line, and that I had to cleanse the Line itself if it got infected.”

“That’s insane,” Ambra replies flatly, and he startles, almost like he didn’t quite realize that she’d have her opinions about this as well. “That’d kill someone who did that. That was a death sentence.”

“They told me two people could do it safely,” he says, and she scoffs at that. “Well, I tried to enlist Alette, she resisted. She was working with Zoel—not that I knew it at the time—to untangle on her own, got injured a few times, but was far more successful than my monitoring and scans were. I was, to put it mildly, a dick about it.”

This brings the hint of a smile to Ambra’s face, and he shakes his head at her expression.

“I dangled the idea of being able to heal Axel—”

“—no human could, I felt that scar,” Ambra interjected.

“Over Alette, to try to get her cooperation. Here she was, growing a relationship with the Wight community and saving them, and I was telling her she had to choose between killing all of them and getting her best friend his abilities back.” His face twists. “Like I said. Manipulation. You stay in it long enough and you think it’s normal.”

“Ah,” Ambra says.

“Yeah, you’d hate me, too.”

Ambra shrugs, because she doesn’t have a good answer for that.

“They told me the world could end if I let the Ley Line break, that it was all my responsibility, and that I had to do everything to fix it. Then…no backup. No help. No battle mages or healers or experts, just me staying in the compound of a dead scientist with her angry niece and an ever-growing awareness of magic decaying around me, piece by piece.”

It’s a ghastly thought.

“It got worse, until the Ley Line was about to break, and I went down to try to cleanse it alone. It broke, with me in the middle of it.”

Ambra eyes him, because the Ley Line was perfectly healthy when she touched it briefly while in the motor home .

And because Gurlien’s still alive. That would have absolutely ended any human near it.

Any demon, too. Any anything.

“Alette fixed it, literally stitched it back together with her needle like a fucking spell weaver would repair a thread, and I…” he gestures at all of himself with the pencil. “Couldn’t touch magic anymore. Gone. Completely erased.”

“You’re lucky,” Ambra murmurs, and he shuts his eyes, like he’s heard that so many times before. “That should have killed you.”

And his College should have hailed him as a hero, for putting himself into harm's way so thoroughly he couldn’t have hoped to get out.

“It didn’t, and the moment I recovered from the concussion and rib fractures and punctured lung, they exiled me and told me I was useless.” Finally, he lifts his eyes to hers. “So that’s the story of why everyone hates me, all neatly wrapped with why they kicked me out and why I’m a dud with nothing more but a spectacular education.”

“That’s bullshit,” Ambra informs him.

“Well, that’s what happened,” he snips back, then rubs his face. “Chloe reached out, I tried to put my life back together—twice—and failed both times. Read some psychology books, those didn’t help. She gave me a book on getting out of cults, that one did, and then ended up in a cabin in northern Washington with no cell signal until Delina waltzed in with her Necromancy locked up and now…” he gestures over to her.

He sits back, exhausted once more, like the discussion and the talking is just as difficult as the combat magic.

And Ambra’s fragile herself, from the pain of losing control and the grief and from the pain in Gurlien’s words, at his distaste for his own actions and the obvious self-loathing.

“They’re even more foolish than I thought,” Ambra says, and he cracks a smile at her, like the effort took out any control of his expressions, leaving him entirely unguarded. “Any place that rejects those that gave the most for them will die a slow and painful decline.”

He shrugs, and he has a smudge of dust on his cheek, still from Ambra almost destroying Bianchi’s cabin, that she’s just now noticing.

“Do you need to take a break?” Ambra asks, gesturing down towards the well-marked up map, with the runes and protections lightly penciled over the ink. “Do something that has nothing to do with this? Forget about it for a little while?”

It’s something that Misia used to say, whenever she noticed someone with the look in Gurlien’s eye, and Ambra’s not sure she fully understood why until that moment.

Would letting her—and his—guard down be a bad idea? Absolutely, the College could decide at any time to pull her back.

But deep in her skin, behind the scratches and the still healing wounds from the trap, she desperately wants to erase that expression from his face.

He eyes her, like it’s a trick.

“Tomorrow, we’ll continue this,” Ambra says, pointing at the maps. “We’ll continue this and go to Europe, find some more info there. But it’s…” she flounders, trying to figure out the words to say. “I don’t think there’s anything else our brains could do productively tonight.”

This seems to be the correct thing to say.

He sighs, almost explosive. “You know what? Yeah. I saw a chair explode today. Let’s do something else.”