Page 124 of The Girl Who Should Be Dead

Nalissa gasps, and Ambra can’t tell if it’s from pain or shock, but Ambra reaches up, twisting her magic up and around, and, despite the agony searing through her and the edges of her vision caving in, Ambra snaps Nalissa’s neck.

There’s a moment, there’s a breath, where Nalissa’s fingertips twitch, before she collapses against the medical table, lifeless.

Ambra staggers back, and Nalissa’s body slumps down.

There’s pain everywhere: in her chest, her lungs, her bones. Her knees feel weak, as if the very tendons keeping her upright are giving out.

Gurlien yells something, rushing across the demon circle to her, but there’s a roaring in Ambra’s ears, drowning out everything else, and she turns towards him.

Blood falls from a hole in her chest, just above her collarbone, viscous and terrible, and she stares down at it for a second.

Even as she does, she can feel the protections of the place unravel. The wards, the magic twisted into the walls and the bones, all unfurling with a snap outwards from Nalissa’s death, rendering them useless.

“I can teleport out now,” Ambra manages out, but firedraws in with each breath and her own words are distant, off beyond the rushing roar, as Gurlien surges to her, bracing her.

She stumbles, her knees wobbling, her hands slipping as she tries to grasp Gurlien’s arm, slipping on her blood.

Ambra’s been shot before, even in this body, but it hadn’t hurt like this. Hadn’t echoed through the body, hadn’t struggled the lungs, hadn’t blacked out her vision.

Gurlien grips her, keeping her upright as her knees give out, pitching her into his chest.

It’s bad. It’s very bad, and she sends a tendril of power to the wound, but her grip on it is weak, ephemeral. Like it could escape her with just a thought.

Gurlien says something again, she can feel the rumble in his chest, but nothing reaches her ears, nothing beyond the vague panic of the body flooding itself with adrenaline, of the gaping lack of Nalissa dead in front of her, on the brilliant heat of Gurlien’s hands on hers.

“I have to get you out,” she mumbles, and the words are tinny to her hearing. Guards must be coming, guards will bang down the door and she can’t defend him and—

She grips the collar of his black shirt, and does the simple most instinctive action a demon has.

She teleports.

Her knees crumple the moment she does, into snow and howling wind, and the last thing she sees is the burnt-out remnants of the motor home, before the black crowds her vision and takes her over.

30

There’s cold against the cheek, something frozen and wet, and all she can muster is the twitch of an eyelid. Wind screams at her, stealing all warmth from her skin.

The world is bright, way brighter than the nighttime it should be, and pain echoes harshly in her chest, fighting against the lungs and the still-beating heart.

A voice reaches her ears, distant and panicked, but not talking to her.

Something hot, brilliantly so, brushes the hair away from the forehead, and she tries to unstick her eyes, but she can’t.

Can barely move, none of the limbs follow her direction, and after a few moments of struggling, she slumpsdown into it again.

Something moves the body,jolting, a rumble of machinery beneath her. There’s a low murmur of voices, multiple voices, and she can’t pick them apart.

There’s a scrape against glass—windows?—and tree branches against metal, before the rumbling beneath her turns rougher, gravelly. She’s still moving, even when held perfectly still, some sort of vehicle.

It had been so long since she’d been in a vehicle.

The magic is strange, here, the lines slipping in and out of contact, tasting of the wild.

The head is against something soft, and a hand shifts through the hair on the side of her head, gentle.

It’s almost enough to distract from the pain.

A bright flash of necromancy,and Ambra surges upright, terror and hunger inside her, before her vision blacks out and hands push her back down.

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