Chapter 5

5

N o matter what Ambra does, she always loses consciousness at first, and she’s never sure if it’s for a split second or if it’s for an eternity, but she stumbles, her feet sliding on slick tile, until the leash around her straightens her, pulling her upright.

And Gurlien falls onto the tile in front of her, a sudden body weight not against her, clattering to the floor.

She gapes at him, she wants to, before her head snaps back again, ripping her eyes away from him and up to the room at large.

Warm lights.

Oppressive humidity, burrowing into her skin and weighing down her lungs.

Her arms prickle and the leash turns her around, to stare right at Johnsin, leaving Gurlien on the floor, scrabbling to get up.

Johnsin, with his black hair with streaks of gray in it, prematurely light. Or dyed, she never found out. He’s younger than he looks, but cultivates a facade of handsome wisdom. Of someone who should be wealthy .

Johnsin, who lives in Florida, and would have been in the same time zone as the base and the fastest one to move.

Johnsin, who’s holding a knife, casually, his other hand fisted around the leash.

Ambra tries to speak, tries to open the body’s mouth and force words out, but her jaw doesn’t move.

Because Johnsin is always the one with the most iron hand of control on the small things of her. He couldn’t control her magic too well, so he never tried, but her body…he definitely controlled that.

The dread floods through her again, lighting her gut on fire.

And he looks past her, to where she can hear Gurlien pull himself to standing, and Johnsin’s dashing eyebrows furrow. “Gurlien Banks? Is that you?”

She tries to turn to glance, but Johnsin’s grip on the leash doesn’t even allow that small of movement.

“Okay, this isn’t what it looks like,” Gurlien says, voice wheezy, like the teleportation winded him. “Uh, put down the knife?”

Johnson’s face wrinkles with something resembling derision. “Hit any more ley lines lately? Get another concussion? Not gonna do that.”

Gurlien’s face spasms, before he controls it.

Johnsin meets Ambra’s eyes. “You thought you could run off with a dud?” He pulls the leash tight, so tight the edges crowd around Ambra’s vision, but still, she can’t move an inch. “Surely you could tell.”

He loosens the leash enough for her to nod, then chokes it back again. She gags, the unconscious movement happening despite his control, and her fingers spasm.

He always enjoyed gagging her .

Horror winds its way into her blood, sudden and vicious, and in front of her, Johnsin’s lips twitch upwards.

“Okay, Kyle,” Gurlien starts, and that must be Johnsin’s first name, even though Ambra’s never heard it. He straightens, and it’s just out of the corner of her eye that she can see the flop of his hair, can see the edge of his silhouette. “Uh, this is a misunderstanding, stop choking her.”

“What, and let Boltiex take her with no additional controls?” Johnsin shoots back, jerking the leash again. “I don’t know how you’re in all of this, but this isn’t a person, you don’t have to get all lawyer about this one.”

Gurlien takes another step forward, and he has his hands up, as if showing he’s unarmed, but the leash is still around his wrist.

Johnsin’s eyes follow it down, then he snaps Ambra away, jerking her enough so she’s across the room, teleported in between one breath and the next.

“What have you heard?” Johnsin asks, suddenly guarded, and the back of Ambra’s neck prickles.

Gurlien wets his lips, but there’s something working behind his eyes, some intelligence, some calculations. “Not much,” he replies, voice cautious. “She took me by surprise.”

Johnsin’s not buying it, at all, and he tightens the leash around Ambra’s neck, and her breath squeaks out again.

She hadn’t had time to coach him, she hadn’t had time to do anything. She doesn’t even know if he could pull it yet, if he could counteract it.

“No, she literally kidnapped me,” Gurlien emphasizes, “because of my…”

“Because of your accident?” Johnsin’s skeptical, and it’s a teasing bit of information, something just interesting enough that it derails the pain, derails the panic screaming through her. That Johnsin knows something she doesn’t .

Gurlien swallows, his throat bobbing. “I think so.” He blinks towards Ambra, some sort of message, attempting to say something with his eyes, but she can’t tell what. “She said she didn’t want me to control her.

It’s the correct thing to say, but Ambra goes cold. It’s correct, it’s exactly what happened, but…

But if Gurlien’s divulging it so easily, he could hand it over, and be done with all this.

She takes a big gulping breath. “He—”

Johnsin jerks on the leash, effectively cutting off her words, and she gags again, her eyes blurring. Blood wells up in her throat, but she can’t even clear it out.

“Can you untie that” Johnsin asks, gesturing towards the leash, which of course Gurlien can’t see. “I don’t want to muddle the chain of command; this is a delicate project.”

Gurlien shakes his head immediately. “I can’t even see it.”

Again, it’s true, it’s correct, but he’s revealing too much. He’s revealing too much and she’s going to be handed back and she can’t…

Unable to stop herself, she scrabbles at her neck for the leash, cutting into the skin, until Johnsin snaps the leash tight enough and her hands fall away, her muscles abruptly relaxing.

Outside of her bidding, she stands up straight, perfectly still, the body’s shoulders settling back.

“It’s okay,” her voice says, Johnsin compelling the words out of her, and he mouths along with her.

Gurlien recoils back, as Johnsin turns her eyes to him.

“Did she work real hard at convincing you she was a person?” Her voice speaks, and it hurts to have them forced through her throat, after all the screaming and the tightness. “She does that. ”

Gurlien’s pale, his hair firmly out of place after the teleportation, and the too short pajamas and hoodie stick out in all the slick white tile. Even though he showered, there’s still a bruise on the underside of his jaw from whatever trials he had gone through in the base before they let her go.

“How hooked into the communications are you?” Johnsin asks, casually flipping the knife in his hand, and Gurlien doesn’t stop staring at Ambra, fully spooked.

“Not very,” he replies automatically. “I hear rumors.”

“And did this one tell you what happened just yesterday?”

Ambra attempts to stare over at Johnsin, but he doesn’t let her move her eyes, keeping her focus on Gurlien.

“She definitely didn’t tell me anything,” Gurlien replies, and Ambra blinks.

That’s also the truth, but this time it's misleading.

Idly, Johnsin tugs against the leash, and all at once, all her nerves ignite. Flame up, the pain whitening out her vision and sealing her lungs and weakening her spine and —

She can’t move. Can’t do anything from her passive position, standing next to Johnsin and observing Gurlien.

Johnsin doesn’t let her knees buckle. Doesn’t let her sag over, doesn’t let her lose control of her body and fall to the ground.

“The entire Toronto base is gone,” Ambra’s voice says, perfectly even, despite the agony. “Years of experiments, monsters held there for decades if not centuries, all released. Took us this long to realize this one was one of them.”

Always with a flare for the dramatic, Johnsin makes Ambra examine her own hand, as if the motion doesn’t feel like her bones shatter in place .

Gurlien wets his lips again, and she can see the calculations flying through his eyes. “What are you doing to her?”

“What?” Johnsin blurts out, stopping the casual knife flipping. “I’m just holding her in place.”

Gurlien’s brow furrows, as if he very much doesn’t buy that. “You’re doing something.” He takes a step forward, keeping his hands up, very much not grasping at the leash.

“Oh, she got you really convinced she’s a person, didn’t she?” Johnsin says, twisting his fingers around Ambra’s leash, a telltale sign he’s about to do something. “Demons do that, right up there with Wights, pretending to be human.”

Gurlien flinches, like it’s a personal attack, and Johnsin’s lips curve up into a smirk.

Again, he knows something Ambra doesn’t.

“Anyways, I heard you were exiled somewhere up north or something, how’d you end up getting kidnapped by a demon we buried in Toronto?”

He loosens up something in the leash, some sort of split concentration, and Ambra exhales, pushing the trapped air out of her lungs, past the agony and the rawness of her throat. Everything still bites of pain, tearing teeth into the nerves of the body, but if she could breathe…

How did you find him?” Johnsin asks, turning back to Ambra and…

Tangling his fingers in the leash, compels her.

The words spring, unbidden, without her consent, and she struggles with them for a few moments, her teeth cutting into her own cheek, before, “He freed me from the stasis.”

Johnsin nods at her, as if she gets some sort of pleasure from the acknowledgement. “Good girl. ”

She twitches her hands out, but he catches her, smoothing out her body back to the peaceful stance.

Gurlien makes a choked off sound, something between horror and anger.

“And how did he get to the stasis chambers?”

Again, the same pull, and she digs in, tries to pull herself out of it. “He had a necromancer, a Half Demon, and an alchemist.”

Johnsin’s face twitches in some sort of surprise.

“She’s lying,” Gurlien says, and now desperation coats his voice. “I would never—”

“Sure you wouldn’t,” Johnsin says, smooth, turning his back to Ambra. “Of course not.”

“I don’t—”

With only a moment of warning, one Ambra only barely sees, barely gets out a quick inhale, Johnsin drops the physical control of Ambra, twisting his hands into the very fabric of the magic in the room, snapping out an attack towards Gurlien.

Ambra reels to the side, her vision blacking out and leaving her aimless for a split second, before she gets her feet underneath herself and braces.

Gurlien yells, something choked out, and everything snaps back into the laser focus of panic.

There’s blood, sprayed finely over the slick white furniture, and Gurlien clutches at his arm, and Johnsin’s already winding the strip of magic around his hand for another attack.

It’s the arm with the leash. Johnsin’s trying to get it off him.

Ambra jerks forward, the pain edging around her view, and Johnsin snaps the leash taut with nary a thought.

And in between one moment in the next, his eyes wide with something resembling terror, Gurlien grapples for the leash tied on his wrist and yanks.

Yanks just hard enough to stagger Johnsin, breaking his concentration on her, and Ambra whips that around, her power flooding back into her control.

She gets a bare glimpse of the white of Johnsin’s eyes, a flash of terror, before she clutches her fist into the magic.

And snaps his neck.

Snapping necks is her favorite way to kill someone.

There’s no gore, there’s no confusion, just between one moment and the next the person is no more.

For a split second, there’s nothing, no sound, before he slumps to the ground, dead before he hits the tile.

Gurlien recoils back at the wet sound of Johnsin’s body against the slick white floor, and he’s panting, his chest heaving up and down.

“How—” he manages out, before he clutches at his forearm again, at the bloody gash Johnsin left in his attempt. “What?”

Ambra rolls her shoulder back and almost blacks out from the pain again, blinking out against it.

“He keeps bandages in the second drawer of the coffee table,” she manages, before coughing again, spitting some blood onto the slick tile. “The gauze should be sterile, he hated infections.”

“What the fuck,” Gurlien whispers, and she turns her eyes to him.

Besides the gash on his arm, he’s unharmed, though his pulse jumps at his throat, almost derailing Ambra’s attention.

“Why the hell did he keep sterile gauze in his living room?”

“Do you really want to know that answer?” Ambra asks, curious, and he’s already shaking his head. “This wasn’t the first time he did that pain surge on me.”

“Jesus Christ,” Gurlien mutters, and mechanically, he sits on the white couch, yanking open the drawer.

Sure enough, antibiotics, saline, and perfectly sealed paper packets of gauze sit in perfectly organized clear plastic containers.

Gurlien paws through them, and there’s blood all over the hoodie, enough that Ambra knows the body would’ve been upset to see, so she examines Johnsin’s corpse instead.

Every spark that made him threatening, every bit of control and malice, all gone, leaving behind a completely normal human corpse.

Ambra nudges him with her foot, and the body is still warm. If she could switch bodies into that dead one, she would, just for the satisfaction of controlling him instead of the other way around.

But instead, she’s still in this one, and her shoulders slump with exhaustion from the pain, her nerves still firing wrong all down her spine.

“He has a lot of clothes in the other room, if you want to grab some,” Ambra remarks, and she doesn’t have to look at Gurlien to know he blanches. “They’re good quality, he’s a snob.”

“I’m not stealing a dead guy’s clothes,” Gurlien replies faintly, but he studiously wipes the gash with an antibacterial wipe. It’s a clean cut, the edges neat, and unless he does something stupid, it should heal up with just a normal scar.

She eyes him. In all the available skin to view, she can’t see any other significant scars, and it sticks wrong in her that he would have one because of her.

He had been squeamish at the idea of her killing to begin with .

“Do you want to go to the other room?” Ambra asks him, finally, and he pauses in his cleaning to glance at her. “I’m going to make an example of his body, it could be upsetting.”

He stares, his fingertips still against the paper wrapping of the gauze.

“I want Nalissa and Boltiex to think twice before trying,” Ambra continues as gently as she could, but a shiver of pain chokes out her voice before she could finish. “This’ll be the easiest way to.”

Abruptly, he stands, clutching the medical wrapping to his chest, and stomps into the other room.

Leaving her with the dead body once more.

“Okay,” Ambra whispers, before she crouches down next to the corpse.

The legs hate that move, but she forces herself to stay like that, to get some control over the body she’s trapped in.

She seriously doubts she could permanently scare Boltiex away, but Nalissa likes pretty things. Likes comfort and control and ‘vibes,’ as the body once put it.

So time to thoroughly mess up the ‘vibes’ of the bright white room.

Ambra exhales, then funnels herself into the power of the room, as if the very air is hers to flex. As if she could grab it, rip it apart, and leave the entire house a shell.

But there’s a living human just in the other room, so that idea is gone.

“Fine,” she mumbles, then takes the strip of power, small in its scope, and shreds it.

Immediately, the world blooms gold, the bubble breathing out with her, surrounding the dead body. Ambra’s hair flutters in the air, the clothes still on Johnsin’s frame shifting as if in a breeze .

Stepping back, she lets the magic tear into his skin, drawing vicious lines of red, peeling it back. It’s garish, but Nalissa would hate it.

Then, with just barely a thought, she sends a jolt into the bubble, until his bleeding body slumps up, levitating off the ground.

Still limp.

Ambra exhales, taking a few more steps back from the bubble.

If there is ever any indication of a demon, ever any style that anyone would spot, it’s the ripped magic and the bubble surrounding it.

And a dead body hovering in the middle is certainly a message.

“Fuck you,” Ambra whispers, in some weird instinct left behind in the body, then turns on her heel to the other room.

Gurlien’s standing still in the middle of the bedroom, his face pale, and he twitches when he sees her.

She didn’t get any blood on her, so he shouldn’t.

“You done?” he asks, his voice strangled.

“Three dead, two more to go,” she answers.