Chapter 32

32

A mbra staggers, her feet sliding against the floor of the large apartment, the air stale.

Gurlien catches her, half walking half carrying her to the too large bed, and the pain is like a dagger in her chest. He’s controlling the leash, so tight that she can feel Boltiex tugging on the other edge of it, barely managing a twitch.

“I got you, you’re okay,” he mutters to her, and the blindfold still blocks out her sight, the world just a dark blue smudge. He presses her into the bed, into the cool sheets that still smell of him, and she’s gasping, struggling for breath.

“Who’s there?” Boltiex spits out with her voice. “Who’s controlling her, everyone’s dead.”

Gurlien falls silent, keeping the contact with her shoulder, solid. He’s in the bed with her, his body weight dipping against her, warm.

Ambra hadn’t even been aware of how cold she had felt in the cot until that moment.

But he’s here, he’s next to her, out of whatever prison they kept him in, and Boltiex gives one more brief, brutal yank of the leash, arching her up, until his touch vanishes.

Ambra sags against the sheets, gasping for air, before she reaches up and tears the scarf off her face.

“I got you,” Gurlien murmurs again, and there are circles under his eyes, his hair completely a mess, sticking up in the back. “I got you, you’re safe.”

She’s not, but she swallows. “He was gonna come after them,” she croaks, and speaking pulls at the wound on her chest, at the barely healing crater against her lungs. “He was gonna find them, he was gonna—”

“We planned for that,” Gurlien replies, his brown eyes flickering down to the wound, and for a split second he’s dismayed, he’s panicked, before he controls his face, smoothing it over.

She reaches up to cradle his chin, and there’s a line of black blood on her wrist where the line of death cut into her, even after her healing.

He catches her hand, gentle, and there’s a moment of silence. Of stunned peace, where Ambra’s ears ring and her lungs rattle, but there’s no other sound besides the soft whir of the air recycling around them and the wind creaking against the windows.

Before his lips part, like he can’t believe the world in front of him.

“I’m sorry,” he says, the words falling from him, almost too fast for Ambra to hear them. “You trusted me and I shot you.”

It’s so laughable, so far separate from the terror of Boltiex and the pain from the leash, but the edges of the wound pull at her, so she just blinks up at the familiar ceiling.

Boltiex will try again, and he’s not going to give them warning. Going to wait until they’re asleep, wait until she can’t fight back, then take her.

“I don’t care,” she informs him, after another stretch of silence, then coughs, her throat ragged. “You’re okay?”

His face tight, he nods.

“They shouldn’t have locked you away,” Ambra mumbles. “You distracted her, I killed her, anything else is detail.”

He blinks, rapidly behind his glasses, before he bends over, pressing his forehead against her hand, still held in his. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“Stop,” Ambra rasps out, but still she leans over as much as she can, wound be damned, until she can tilt her head against his, smushing his blond hair against her cheek.

He doesn’t move, his breathing a bit ragged, and Ambra knows he just woke up. Probably disoriented and exhausted. He’s been locked up, away from his friends, no way to defend himself.

“I didn’t mean to,” he repeats.

“Do you really think I’m mad about that?” she asks, and a whisper of Boltiex’s awareness winds its way into her, and Gurlien tightens his hand on the leash in response until he vanishes.

“I shot you,” he repeats.

She nudges his hand until he raises his head and looks at her, actually looks at her.

Deep purple circles rim his eyes, and the collar of his sleep shirt is a bit ragged.

She knows she doesn’t look much better, with the bandage seeping with black blood and who knows the stage of her hair, but she locks eyes with him and keeps it.

It feels like some sort of challenge.

A million emotions flicker over his face, something she can only pray to keep up with, but still, she holds herself as motionless as possible.

“I’m not angry,” she states, then amends, “at you.”

His jaw tightens, like he’s actually about to fight her on that.

“You distracted her enough that I killed her,” she points out, as she had to be reminded of it. “Then got me help. Who would be mad at that?”

“Many people,” he repeats, and finally, there’s something close to amusement filtering into his expression. “If they didn’t press charges, most people would cut someone out for, you know, actively harming them.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she informs him, and gets rewarded with a small smile, like he can’t believe what she’s saying. “If you had meant to hurt me, sure.” She takes another breath, experimental, and it hurts.

He watches her breathe for a few moments, as if he’s counting the seconds between the rise and fall of her chest. Idle, his fingers play with the leash on his wrist, a welcome sensation.

“They shouldn’t have locked you up,” she repeats, after the pain of her motion recedes like a wave. “You were trying to help and they treated you like shit.”

His lips twist, something between amusement and loathing. “I showed up with a woman bleeding from a gunshot wound from my bespelled gun, that is suspicious as hell,” he says, but he settles on the bed next to her. “They put me in an extra apartment. I had books and a stove and Chloe brought my cat, I was fine.”

It’s a little softer than what she had imagined.

“I’m glad Chloe was with you,” Ambra says.

“Yeah, she…” Gurlien trails off, and for a split second she sees sadness on his face, some other form of loss .

“What?” Ambra demands, as imperiously as she can while being slumped against the bed.

With a wry smile, he shakes himself out of it. “She always talked about how she was going to go on and continue her research if she ever recovered her notes,” he says. “We did that at the base. She’s preparing to head out soon.”

So the loss will be the ability to see his friend as easily.

“I’ll teleport you to her if you need your friend,” she says seriously, because of course she would. “That’s hardly a problem.”

A small smile. “I don’t think she’ll tell anyone where she’s going.”

“I can track her,” Ambra says. “Probably.” In odd with her words, she coughs, then grimaces.

“What do you need,” he asks, like a vow, and he traces his fingertips on the leash, sending a shiver down her back. “He’s not going to stop, what do you need to fight back?”

It’s a hard question, one she doesn’t fully know how to answer, beyond holding her down and stopping Boltiex from taking her.

“Food, probably,” she replies miserably. “Rest. Energy.”

“The other necromancer was going to compel you to not injure her and then let you take from her, apparently, but pretty much everyone shut that down,” Gurlien says. “I met her, I do not understand her.”

Ambra blinks at him. “That would be foolish,” she says dryly.

Still, she closes her hand around his once more, and there’s silence, just the two of them, and the closest she’s felt to peace. He’s here, he’s safe, she’ll heal, they’ll fight off the College …

A twist of Boltiex and his awareness blooms in her eyes, her breath hitching.

Gurlien recoils, like he could feel it, too.

And all Ambra can do is blink at him, as Boltiex absorbs her vision, absorbs what she can see, absorbs the pain in her chest.

“Gurlien Banks?” he finally asks through her, flickering her eyes down to the leash in his grip. “There’s no way you have the power to do that.”

Gurlien’s lips part, hesitating one moment, before twisting the leash in his hands, and Boltiex vanishes from her mind, leaving Ambra reeling.

“Okay,” Gurlien says, “so he’s going to just do this.”

Wordless, Ambra nods.

In a sharp motion, Gurlien rolls out of the bed, pushing himself to standing, and Ambra immediately misses his contact.

“Stay,” he orders, and there’s no compulsion in it, but she still settles back as he strides over to the kitchen.

“He’s gathering information,” Ambra murmurs, and Gurlien nods. “You stopped him and he’s gathering information.”

“And I,” Gurlien starts, and there’s something dangerous in his voice, “have spent the last five days with some very knowledgeable people about demons, and we are going to get you back up and running.”

She tilts her head to him, as he opens the cupboards he had stored food in, the non-perishable stuff.

“Mel was a dick,” Ambra ventures, and there’s a small smile on his face. “And I still don’t like Axel. Alette was okay.”

Alette followed her instructions in a crisis and held her down, disparaging comments about Gurlien notwithstanding.

“I met Axel’s girlfriend,” Gurlien starts, making a funny face, “and so much more makes sense.”

He pulls out a box from the cupboard, one she barely remembers him buying, and roots through it.

“You’re going to have a lot to talk about with her when this is all done,” he says casually, as if they’re not in danger. As if Boltiex won’t decide to pull her immediately, to control her and kill Gurlien, backlash be damned.

Giving up on the box, he grabs the backpack because they let him have the backpack before rescuing her, and she gets an irrational surge of gratefulness.

“Did you bring the gun?” she asks, struggling to push herself up to sitting, but he points at her until she settles back down.

“No, they took the gun,” he says dryly, but he rummages through the backpack, pulling out a small yellow bag, too similar to the first aid kit that Misia kept at the motor home.

“I want one,” she tells him.

“A gun that can kill you?” he asks, his brow furrowing as he unzips the bag, digging through it.

“Good self-defense,” Ambra says.

“Jesus Christ, you’re really not mad,” he mutters, before laying the contents on the bed. “Good. They gave me a magician pack. You’re gonna hate this.”

He waves what looks like a foil tube at her, then tears it open and hands it to her.

“Glucose and caffeine gel,” he informs her. “Used by marathon runners for energy.”

She sniffs it, and it doesn’t necessarily smell bad, if a bit chemical.

“Eat it,” he orders, but again there’s no compulsion and she could shrug him off if she needs to. “Eat it and then focus whatever energy you can to healing.”

She pushes a bit of energy towards her chest, and it resists, before the skin slowly crawls together.

“Yeah, that’s still weird,” he mutters, digging into the pack, laying out a variety of things. Another 5 Hour Energy Drink, something called “protein goo” and a bag of dried dates.

Moderately horrified at the display, Ambra attempts to eat the gel in front of her, and it’s wholly unpleasant.

“Sure, you can shake the entire building, but can’t eat something a little bit disgusting?” Gurlien asks, and she flatly raises an eyebrow at him.

“Did being around other people remind you to be caustic?” she asks, and he grimaces.

“Fair.” Still, he watches her, his hands in fists on his side, an odd desperation in his stance, so she finishes it anyways.

Without even pausing, he hands her the protein goo, and it smells even worse.

“Why would you even have this?” Ambra asks, after ripping it open in a move that was rather unpleasant to her chest.

“Because suddenly running out of energy is a normal problem for magicians to have,” he replies, his brown eyes a bit intense for her to eat under. “And Mel said it would be the same for you in that body, and absent a Necromancer for you to kill…” he gestures at the display of food, and there’s a tremor in his hand, one she can’t quite parse out. “I would keep chocolates and caffeine gel with me. Axel did the energy shots and cheese sticks. Alette apparently did tea.”

She hates it .

“Chloe always ate candy,” Gurlien continues, almost babbling, and she eyes him.

He’s nervous, he’s still worried.

“Delina didn’t do enough for us to fully know, but when she raised Maison—” Ambra raises both eyebrows at that, “we gave her some chocolate chips and water, we weren’t prepared for that.”

“Was that before or after the bar?” Ambra mumbles, eating despite herself.

“It was when Karkohen tried to take down Delina himself, before he brought you out,” Gurlien says, grasping on to the distraction with both hands. “He came alone once, with just an activated teleport spell and tried to kill Delina, Maison stepped in front of one of his bolts.”

Ambra had the dim idea that the Necromancer had been way newer to her powers at the bar, but if she had already raised someone with a critical injury, Korhonen was more stupid than she thought at trying again with Ambra and expecting it to be so easy.

She pauses at the thought, but Gurlien just gestures her to continue.

It’s another part of the body she’ll have to get used to, so after taking a rather unpleasant gulp of the protein goo she twists the magic again, focusing on the edges of the wound.

“I’ve spent the last five days thinking you may die because of me,” Gurlien says, voice low, his face pale, as she picks off the bandage to inspect the wound closer.

It’s right underneath her clavicle on the right side, black blood crunching around the edges, and with the half-healed state she can see the flex of the body’s lungs and the tremor of the blood vessels.

“Well, I unconsciously did a lot of this,” Ambra murmurs, poking at the edge of the skin and almost blacking out at the shock of pain. “Not bad.”

This breaks him out of his direness, and he rolls his eyes.

“Can you get me a shirt?” Ambra asks, taking another deep breath and reinforcing the veins, smoothing them over. “I never want to wear a hospital gown again.”

Without even bothering to go to the closet, he pulls out one of his extra shirts from the backpack, shaking it out.

It’s the sky blue one she picked out on their very first attempt to shop, all that time ago. It’s a bit wrinkled, but he places it around her shoulders like it’s the finest of cloth, adjusting it so she can easily worm her arms through it.

It’s been washed since he wore it, and it smells of his detergent, a scent she hadn’t yet been aware of. That her entire existence, she hadn’t contemplated that specific of scent.

She clutches it closed, then tilts her head up to him, sending another tendril of power to the wound. It resists her, the bespelled gun doing the damage it needs to.

But eventually, even the wound relents, knitting back together, the skin stretching fragile over the bullet hole.

The effort leaves her fingertips trembling, so she eats more of the protein goo under his watchful gaze.

It’s dark outside the tall windows of the apartment, snow striking it softly, and he looks, exhausted.

“I think that shirt looks better on you than it does on me,” he murmurs, like he’s aiming for sarcastic and missing it completely, coming out on this side of earnest. His face twists, at the frustration of expressing himself, something Ambra understands completely.

“You’re thinking something,” she whispers into the stillness of the room. “You’re thinking something and I can’t interpret it. ”

Slowly, in a heartbreaking moment of peace, he sits next to her on the bed, folding his legs underneath himself, but still doesn’t say anything.

The bed even creaks with his weight, louder than her beating heart.

“I—”

Loud, his phone rings, and they both flinch.

“Jesus Christ,” he mutters, shoving his hair away from his face and digging it out of the pocket of his—actually fitting—pajama pants, before he freezes.

It’s an unknown number.

“Nobody should know this number,” he says, grim. “It’s unlisted, it’s protected, only people who I give it to should have it.”

Ambra shakily grabs one of the dates. She’s going to need more power, more stability in her limbs.

There’s a detached fear sitting in her stomach, underneath the cursed food he’s feeding her.

“I don’t know when he’s going to grab me,” she says, trying and failing to keep the tremble out of her words. “But you should get dressed and have some food and be ready.”

He leaves the phone, still ringing, on the bed next to her, and it rings twice more as he changes into a pair of his pressed slacks and the deep maroon button up, drawing the color to his complexion. It rings again as he grabs a protein bar and one of the five-hour energy shots, a grim determination fitting over his face like armor.

Gone is the rumpled, soft Gurlien, and now it is the Gurlien who is ready for battle.

“I still think you should have the gun,” she says, as he flips the phone onto silent.

“Is your phone somewhere in Paris?” he asks, and she nods. “Good. I don’t want him hacking that either. ”

“We’ll go get it after,” she says desperately, “and I’ll take you to the library and anywhere you want to go.”

It rings again, now a soft vibration against the bedsheets, the surface lighting up.

“Why call you instead of control me?”

“Two things,” Gurlien says, holding up his fingers, “one, he thinks I can do more than I can, or two, he wants to intimidate me.”

Ambra twists more power into her chest, to try to stop the quivering of her heart.

“Or, a third,” Gurlien continues, “he wants to manipulate.”

The phone screen lights up, a text, and they both pause to read it.

UNKNOWN NUMBER (4:02 AM): She will kill you after this, don’t think you can escape.

Ambra scoffs, and for the first time, it doesn’t hurt her chest. “I won’t,” she assures him.

His lips twitch. “I gathered that.”

Another text.

UNKNOWN NUMBER (4:03 AM): I assume Nalissa tried to bargain with you?

UNKNOWN NUMBER (4:04 AM): I won’t.

“He’s going intimidation,” Gurlien says, picking up the phone and gesturing with it for emphasis.

“You faced a ley line,” Ambra says, and shakily buttons the shirt together before pulling on a pair of the pants they had left here. She palms the pants. The pocket knife’s still stuck in the pocket, and she smiles at it, brief. “Why do they think words would scare you?”

He watches her, a funny sort of smile on his face, before he shakes his head. “I missed you.”

It hits a chord inside of her, a chord of emotion she didn’t know she still had, and she swallows past the sudden lump in her throat.

It’s brutal, the surge of sensation she’s experiencing, and her fingertips shake from something completely new. Like her stomach had fallen out and her gut tightens and her heart aches all over again.

It’s a little like losing Misia.

In the sudden dread, the sudden complete loss of control over the emotions, the rushed scrambling to make sense of the change. Of the stark terror that this could happen, that this is at all a possibility, of the certainty that everything is different.

And he’s still standing in front of her, a fond half-smile on his face, next to an array of horrible foods and the backpack without a gun.

“Oh no,” she whispers, and his brows flash up in alarm.

“What?” he asks, leaning towards her, grasping towards the bag. “Do we need to run, do we need to go, what—”

She shakes her head, the heart pounding, her mouth dry. “I’m…”

She doesn’t have words for this sort of thing, not anymore, and it’s wholly impossible for her to think them for Gurlien.

He leans back, gaze wary, and his hand goes to the leash, like he’s testing for something.

“It’s not him, it’s not that, I just…” she trails off again, gaping at herself, then shuts her eyes, as if eliminating one sense could heal her. “Human bodies experience things different.”

“I can’t imagine a gun wound is very fun,” Gurlien says, his voice still wary, like he’s expecting this conversation to go wrong at any moment. “Not to mention any pain that comes with healing. ”

Healing. Right.

Ambra twists more power into herself, to brute-force the healing to be faster, to knit the skin together.

After a moment of watching her like a hawk, Gurlien slowly starts to repack the backpack, pulling a knife from the kitchen for self-defense, a few changes of clothing, and when he passes by her, the edge of his sleeve brushes Ambra’s.

And that splits her willpower in two.

She grabs his hand, his skin brilliantly hot, catching him off guard, and pulls him close. He staggers, propping himself up on the bed, arms bracketed around her.

There’s a moment, a quick inhale, before she curls her hand around the collar of his shirt and kisses him, straining her neck up.

He startles at her touch, and she knows it’s stupid, knows it’s beyond stupid in this time. She should be healing, she should be preparing, she should be doing anything else but—

With as much passion back, he opens his mouth to hers, his lips moving against hers, settling until he sits next to her on the bed, his clothes creasing in the bedsheets. A hand brushes the side of her scalp, where the hair there is now impossible to ignore, and his other hand circling on the small of her back.

He’s careful, even so, not pressing against her wound and not bearing down against her, his restraint painted in every line of his body, every muscle in his legs and the taut line of his shoulders, but he kisses her greedily, like this too is something he missed.

Making a small noise in the back of his throat, he pulls away, and there’s a flush on top of his cheekbones, but he smiles .

“Is that what humans experience different?” he asks, and his voice is a little lower, a little huskier.

She nods, unable to speak past the beating of her heart.

He must be able to read something in her expression, in the starry awe of her eyes, and he softens, settling back on the bed, until they’re both sitting there, knees touching and heads bent close.

Gentle, he cradles her chin, like she’s the fragile breakable human and he’s the protector.

“I’ve spent the last five days talking about you to anyone who would listen,” he informs her. “About how interesting and unpredictable you are, about how much you’ve shown of me and of demons and about everything else.”

She hopes not everything, thinking of their night in Paris.

“Do you know what Chloe said to me?” he asks, still tilting her chin, his fingers warm. She doesn’t, she doesn’t think she could ever guess, but her heart flutters, completely separate from the injury. “She looked at me and said, ‘I don’t think you’ve ever talked about someone like this, what are you going to do to keep her after this is over?’”

After it is over.

Ambra can’t find the words, instead leaning upwards and kissing him again, this time slow and languorous.

But he wants her to stay after as well. He wants to still know her, when the leash is untied and she is outside of the control. When everything standing in her way of her existence is gone, when she has to answer to no one.

His hand splays on her knee, a firming grip, before he breaks the kiss again. He smiles, actually smiles, genuine and disarming, and she wants to remember that forever. Remember everything about it, every little sensation, every crease of the bedsheets where they touch, every hair out of place on his head, every little freckle across his cheekbones. Every nerve tying her into place, every whisper of air across her skin, even the lights in the room and the dim rumble of the outside world as it wakes for the morning.

Leaning her forehead against his, she breathes in, ignoring the pull from the injury, the skin tightening on around the wound.

“I’ll always be broken,” she mumbles, in the mad rush to make sure he understands this, understands what she is no longer capable of. “I don’t know how humans love, I only know how demons do, and I can’t…there’s no way. Not anymore.”

He nods, still keeping the contact. “Melekai explained that to me.”

“I’ll always be weird, I might not adapt well, I’ll be prickly and uncomfortable to be around.”

“I know,” he says, simple, and her heart stutters once more, at the easy acceptance and the knowledge behind it. That someone could look at all the facts of her and be okay with it.

“I—”

And in that moment, in the perfect whisper of air, in the skin touching and the prickle of awareness of her wound, the leash jerks tight, snapping her head back, away from the closeness and the comfort.

She scrabbles back, clawing at the leash, and Gurlien closes his hand over her arm and—