Ablaze Without Flames

Chapter 8, Part 1 - Blaise

The first hour was interesting.

The second hour was frustrating.

And by the third Blaise was too restless to sit still for more than a moment. The library was vast enough to hold any and all information he might need regarding the barriers between Earth and Learus, even though Thea had implied that no humans were aware of them. But it couldn't be possible for humans to spend more than two thousand years pushing every single limit they discovered without just one of them stumbling across a portal like the one he had fallen through.

He was in the ideal place to learn more about portals, even if there was just a single chapter in one book among the thousands that mentioned them. But he couldn't read them.

Blaise didn't intend to sneak away, but when Maisie excused herself to the bathroom his feet would be still no more. He had walked up and down aisles of shelves, looking at pictures on book covers in the hopes they would point him in the right direction, with no tangible results. Searching every square foot of air in the city would prove more useful, he thought when Maisie left, and so he intended to do just that.

Besides, what could he say to Maisie anyway? That he wanted to look for invisible door or window that led to another dimension? His dimension? Even if he could come up with some believable excuse, he suspected she would insist on coming with him.

The man at the door smiled and nodded at him when he left. Blaise tried his best to return the gesture without hesitating.

Even Earth's smoke-addled breeze smelt fresh after the stagnant air inside the library. It ruffled his hair and stroked his ears through the shrouds. He paused on the street outside the door, watching the cars zip by while he weighed his options: return to Thea's tower and wait for her there in equally stuffy quarters doing next to nothing, find his way back to the patch of grass where he landed and look for the portal he had fallen through, or track the hunters in the hope that they might offer some kind of lead towards another portal. He couldn't be certain it was still there, or if he could scramble back through it even if it was.

Tipping his head back and inhaling deeply, he made his choice. All he needed was a trail.

Blaise was yet to determine what caused the scents of the hunters to differ from those of other humans, but he didn't much care. There were enough of them to leave faint trails everywhere in the city, if he paid enough attention to his nose, even if some of them were nearly a day old.

The one he picked up outside the library had been left recently, leading down the road to his right towards the busier area of the city. Another breath calmed his excited heart somewhat as he turned to follow the trail.

The streets were crowded in the early afternoon, and with his shrouds in place, Blaise's was just another face among hundreds. He didn't feel the need to surround himself with an air buffer anymore, now almost as used to weaving between people as Thea. No eyes lifted to scowl at him the same way they would in his own village, save one pair that eyed him up and down like he was the first batch in the harvest. He had revelled in the anonymity Earth offered, but decided then that he rather enjoyed that kind of attention. He nearly deviated from his path in order to follow her instead, but a spike of bitterness in the air tugged his attention back.

Who the scent belonged to Blaise couldn't tell, but he was certain he was following the same path. He turned down three different roads before his eyes caught up with his nose and latched onto the hunter.

Blaise had glimpsed this one once before. He had been in the group beside the crop fields. With skin dark like the Great Lake kitsunes, he was dressed in jeans and a jacket similar to Blaise's with a hood and writing on the back. Some kind of hat covered his head. He was lacking the black armour, but the scent was unmistakeable. The hunter pressed a phone to his ear, but Blaise couldn't hear the conversation over the rabble of the crowd.