Page 146 of The Girl Who Should Be Dead

It’s a lie, she doesn’t know what protections her father has built around the cage with the demon.

“I’ll come back down and get you somewhere else,” Ambra vows, and her voice quivers uselessly, like she’s a newborn animal. “Anywhere you want, anywhere you need.”

The girl glances obviously to the other demon, who watches them both. “Can you take me to my mom’s house?”

Ambra nods, relief flooding through her with all the panic and the adrenaline and the pain. This child has another home, another place to go. “Of course,” she says,and the girl scowls, like she’s confused and doesn’t want to show it.

The girl backs up, until her hand closes around the rusty bars of the cage, as if the monster in there will protect her from the monster breaking out of stasis.

With another dig of her nails into the packed dirt, Ambra folds more power into herself, creaking the ground underneath the stasis chamber, then teleports herself to right outside the glass observation wall.

Immediately, she knows she can’t teleport outside the building, a normal two-story house with a basement. There’re locks in the walls, traps to prevent her from going far. An entire building is a cage.

The child recoils away, towards the other demon in the cage, and Ambra puts her hands up, then points at the TV.

“How far away is that?” Ambra croaks out, and her skin shivers with the air brushing against it, derailing her thoughts.

The girl just cringes away, but…

The demon points up the stairs.

Good, they’re in the same house.

Whenever she is brought out of stasis, the body dumps all sorts of chemicals into her veins. Panic, terror, fear, excitement, dread, all of the pent-up emotions from the chamber all at once. There’s the leash, suddenly vivid against her awareness, slack. There’s the itch of her scar underneath her breastbone, the gaping wound in her chest, her feet are cold against the concrete of the basement, and she’s wearing Gurlien’s shirt.

“I’ll get her out,” the demon whispers, and she can pick up their words now that she’s out of stasis, pick up what they’re saying. “I know where her mother lives.”

Ambra inhales, but the girl nods.

And Boltiex strikes again, and this time there’s some blood on the ground, fuzzy on the TV.

“There’s a trap upstairs,” they say, eyes glittering. “Unravel it and I’ll get her to safety.”

Ambra doesn’t trust them at all, but she turns towards the stairs, her heart panging with stress as it attempts to cycle the blood sluggish in her veins.

Behind her, the demon laughs, low.

34

Without an accurate map of the building and with the traps built into the walls, Ambra can’t pinpoint the exact location of Gurlien.

There’s the awareness of him against the leash, faint, but neither of them are paying attention to it. It’s hanging slack against her neck, and the lack of Nalissa on the other side of it hits her like a brick.

But she can’t obsess over it.

Without the TV to give her information, without the visual of Gurlien and Boltiex, dread just pools in her stomach.

Gurlien is almost certainly hurt in some way, and her very bones vibrate with the need to get to him. To get to him, get him away, anything

Anything.

She creeps through a darkened room, the carpet crunchy against her bare feet, a sensation she didn’t know was possible and never wants to experience ever again. The dim outline of a normal suburban living room, the sort found in the houses on the outskirts of the cities in mostEastern European countries, surrounds her. The house is more narrow than the ones found in North America, but still functional, still has enough space to sit and turn around.

Pictures of a family without Boltiex lie in frames on the walls, each frame a different group of people, all too plasticky and perfect. It’s the decorations of someone who wants to appear like it’s a normal house, but can’t quite comprehend the personal connection needed for such a touch.

Wards, in Boltiex’s brutal script, line every windowsill and vent, forbidding entry and exit unless they come through with his permission. Anything that enters is trapped here, with no way out unless he allows.

Including, explicitly, written into the very protections of the house, his daughter, aged twelve. Couldn’t even open a window, wave her hand outside, without her father there to allow her to pass.

---