Page 1 of The Girl Who Should Be Dead

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After everything that had happened that day, Ambra doesn’t begrudge herself a little light kidnapping.

Her head still pounds after all the alarms, her eyelids drag with each blink, and both the lingering gut wound and the slash on her face throb. Her mouth still tastes of iron, as it always does when the leash gets tightened, and whatever snap of death magic the necromancer had smashed in her face in the fight still echoes in her lungs.

All that’s recoverable, of course, given some time outside the stasis chambers, and they would have to lobotomize her—again—in order for her to go back there willingly.

Straightening the moment her feet hit the floor, she drops her grip on the kidnappee’s collar, dusting off her hands.

The kidnappee, a young man with floppy hair and thick rimmed glasses who shot one of the Five in the head, staggers back, gasping. He’s still holding the gun in his hand, but thankfully, he doesn’t aim it towards her.

“Where are we?” He chokes out, like the teleportation was less than perfect, which is rude.

She obviously took them to a safe house, so she blinks at him.

Ambra, like most demons she’s come into contact with, instinctively crafts safe places to land. A place where she could run to, a place to think, a place to collect whatever catches her fancy, on the rare occasion something does.

She hasn’t been to this one since the merge—her mind shies away from thinking about it directly in a way that’s distinctively annoying—so a thin layer of dust coats the bench and the bookcase.

“Okay, okay,” the kidnappee says, after her silence, as she obsessively lets her mind check her wards, lets it wander to see if anyone else has been in there. “Uh, why am I here?”

That, at least, is a question her mind doesn’t have to think about.

“Because of the leash,” she answers, and his brows furrow, like the answer isn’t intuitive to him.

The leash, the incorporeal, magical leash tied so crudely around her throat by the College. The key to them controlling her. The key to her freedom and her safety.

He just raises an eyebrow at her, so she turns away.

One of her wards is smudged. Not broken, but someone else had clearly been sniffing around the edges, testing them.

Another demon, if the tang of the power is any indication, had probably noticed the emptiness and wanted to observe if the person who crafted it was dead or not.

She stalks towards the offending rune, and the kidnappee’s eyes widen as she passes him, but despite pulling at the rune, despite squinting at it, she can’t tell who it could be.

Another result of the merge. She just…can’t do everything anymore.

Careful, his motions so careful it immediately sends up red flags in her awareness, her kidnappee sits on the bench, gripping the aged wood like it could help him.

The gun is still clutched in his hands, as if he forgot it.

He doesn’t look too injured, near as she can tell, beyond the scrapes and bruises that come from breaking out of a prison.

He stares at her, his eyes a normal shade of human brown, and in between one moment and the next, she can see his brain kick in and something truly analytical lights up his face.

This, at least, she can talk to.

“You’re a dud, you said,” Ambra starts, and he nods. “Duds aren’t supposed to know about any of human magic, yet you do.”

He nods again, his mouth twisting down.

“You’ve been scarred by some magic, in a huge way,” she continues, and it’s obvious all over him. Like someone had taken a surge and shocked it directly into his system. “You knew how to read the runes, you knew a lot of the pathways, and you could instruct the necromancer and alchemist.”

“Good assessment,” he says, cautious, and his knuckles are white against the bench.

He’s afraid of her, which is a bit nice.

“The necromancer killed Korhonen, and you killed Rastian,” Ambra recites. “There’s still Nalissa, Johnsin, and Boltiex out there.”

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