Chapter Twenty-Five
Three steps through the door, Chloe nearly smashed face-first into a concrete wall. She turned in a full circle, confused to find herself in a dim hallway, rather than outside.
"Make a right, Detective Decker!" Bethany instructed over the speakers.
Chloe took off down the hall without even questioning the order. She rounded a corner, found another open door, and burst through it. The hallway here had steel walls, just like the main room she and Lucifer had been trapped in.
"Left!" Bethany called, and Chloe started running again.
The place was a maze of doors and hallways. A building within a building within a building. And Chloe knew, even before she reached the final exit, that she and Lucifer never would've broken out of this place. They would've wasted all their time on an impossible task, and he would've died.
It was cold comfort, though, knowing she'd made the right choice in focusing on Martin's case. After all, she was probably still way too close for Lucifer to start healing. He could still die. He might have, already.
Chloe shook the thought away and pushed harder, her pounding footsteps echoing like gunshots through the empty hallway. She turned another corner, found a door labeled "Emergency Exit," and body-slammed her way through it.
Blinding sunlight, warm wind, and the smell of coconuts assaulted her senses in a disorienting wave. Chloe blinked, shielding her eyes as she stumbled across the sandy ground toward a row of palm trees swaying in the distance. The whole scene didn't even seem real. She couldn't believe it was daytime. It had always been night, in the warehouse. It had been night for so long…
Chloe looked back over her shoulder at the place that had been her prison, squinting for any hint of a company name or an address, but the outside of the building was dusty and blank. From this distance, it actually looked small.
She reached the tree-line and discovered an empty road running alongside it. Chloe took off down the lonely expanse of shimmering pavement, hoping to flag down a passing car, but none came. Instead, she found an envelope with her name on it, nailed to a tree trunk about half a mile down. Chloe tore the envelope free and pawed through the contents as she ran: her gun, her badge, their phones and the batteries that went with them.
Missed calls and worried texts from Dan and Ella crowded her screen the instant she turned it on. She called Dan back, made him trace the GPS chip in her phone, then hung up on him as soon as he gave her the location. Chloe had already decided to call an ambulance for Lucifer. He might need medical help to stay alive until his immortality fully kicked back in.
Chloe called 9-1-1 and started blurting everything out, only to have the operator cut in to inform her that an ambulance was already on the way to the warehouse. Another woman had called about the situation five minutes ago.
Bethany.
Chloe thanked the operator and hung up, turning her mind to the next order of business: having someone on hand to make sure Lucifer didn't accidentally reveal himself to either the paramedics or the hospital staff. In his disoriented state, he might very well get defensive. And while glowy eyes might be written off as a trick of the light, his full-on Devil face was another story. A nightmare-inducing, pee-your-pants, end-up-being-committed-to-a-mental-institution story. Having someone close by, someone he trusted, would go a long way towards preventing this.
Chloe raked an arm across her eyes, clearing them of stinging sweat. The heat and exhaustion were making her dizzy, making it hard to think, but she couldn't slow down. Not yet. After a short deliberation, she called Linda, gave the doctor the Cliff's Notes of what was going on, then hung up on Linda's promise to meet Lucifer's ambulance at the hospital.
Chloe's phone immediately rang again—either Linda calling back, or Dan calling back again, or maybe Ella this time. Chloe just put it in silent mode, shoved it in her pocket, and kept running, her feet slapping the pavement in a steady one-two rhythm that became her only company for the next fifteen minutes or so.
She was so caught up in the beat of rubber against road that it took her a while to notice that the breeze on her cheeks felt cooler, and now smelled of seaweed and salt and ocean. The phone in Chloe's pocket buzz-buzz-buzzed with ignored messages. She thumped past a yellow sign that indicated the road was ending. Minutes later, was she jogging through shallow, dry sand, then deeper, wetter sand.
Gulls cried in the distance as she reached the place where frothy waves kissed the shore, her footprints laid out in a long string behind her, proof of how far she'd traveled. How much distance she'd put between herself and Lucifer. Panting and clutching at the knife in her side, Chloe sank to her knees, knowing she'd gone as far as she possibly could.
Not knowing yet if it was enough.
Her phone buzzed again, for the millionth, billionth time. Chloe took a deep breath and pulled it out. It was a long minute before she could make herself look at the screen. In a sea of "Holy crap girl are you okay"s from Ella and numerous "What the hell is going on"s from Dan, a single message from Linda stood out:
"At the hospital now. He's going to be okay."
With a strangled laugh, Chloe flopped backwards into the sand, closed her eyes, and let the cool waves wash over her.