Page 60 of The Girl Who Should Be Dead

“Anything in particular you want?” Gurlien asks, and the menu doesn’t have anything particularly enlightening on it. “Want some coffee? You don’t look like you slept enough.”

She doesn’t exactly know what that means for her, but she rolls her eyes. “It tastes bitter.”

“I guarantee I can get something here that doesn’t taste bitter,” he challenges, as if he’s being aggressive to distract from her twitchiness. “You might feel better with some food.”

“Sure,” she replies, and another person steps in, forcing the line to compact a bit more.

“I’ll grab hot sauce,” he continues, obviously seeing her reaction.

“There’s an open table on the edge, I’m going to take it.” Barely waiting for him to nod in receipt, she ducks out of the line, sliding into the table before anyone else can take it.

It provides her with a decent view of the little cafe, withall the people bustling around, and Gurlien a solid figure in the middle, as if the rest of the world flows around him, leaving him untouched. Her back is to a wall, and the other side of the table is against the large floor to ceiling windows.

She touches her fingertips to the glass, and the chill from outside barely touches her back.

The city outside streams along, people blurring together from their fast motion, as if everyone needs to get to their location faster than the next. It’s almost hypnotic, something akin to sitting on the edge of a smaller ley line and watching the magic shift across the world.

Maybe that’s why the other demon chose to stay here. Unending views, never the same but startlingly uniform, so similar to the natural world that they were born for.

“You look hilariously punk with those glasses,” Gurlien says, startling her out of her thoughts, sitting down with a huff. He pushes a large, frothy drink across the table to her, plastic cup glowing with the cold, topped with whipped cream, then hands her a small sandwich.

“Is that an insult?” she asks, poking the cup.

“Not really,” he replies, setting down a plain cup of his own. “Axel swears that his ‘experts’ like that drink.”

Ambra raises an eyebrow at him over the tinted glasses, and Gurlien snaps a picture in the moment before she resets her expression.

“Why?” she asks, suspicious.

“Because it’s a bit funny,” he informs her. “When Chloe and I have cell signal, which we both do right now, we try to send ridiculous things to each other.”

A smidgen of discomfort worms its way inside of her, that she’s so easily perceived, so she unpeels the sandwich instead.

“So. You and Chloe,” she starts, then frowns at the food,despite the fact that Gurlien’s already casually eating his pastry. “How’d a dud like you end up working so closely with someone so powerful to break through the locking pits?”

He blinks at her, owlishly, like her words caught him off guard, before he sets down his coffee cup. “She heard I was kicked out and remembered me from school.”

Ambra pokes at the entirely unappealing sandwich, before Gurlien places a bottle of self-described ‘hot sauce’ in front of her.

“Use that,” he instructs. “Chloe’s like the little sister who annoys the shit out of you but also saved your life.”

Ambra nods, not quite sure what the emotions she’s experiencing are, but decides they’re something close to relief.

“Do Demons have siblings?” Gurlien asks, leaning forward and ducking his voice down just enough that the ear protection almost blurs out his words. “Is that a concept I should explain?”

“We have genetic siblings,” Ambra answers, idly taking a bite of the sandwich, and it’s a lot more appealing with the hot sauce. “Not the family structures of humans, but I’m familiar with how they work. Wights have huge, sprawling families, and we interact with them enough to know.”

A hint of a flinch, one barely caught, but Ambra seizes on it with both hands.

“You dislike wights,” she states, not a question but so he could deny it if he wants, “and yet you saved the crying one in the cell. Stella.”

“Wights dislike me is more accurate,” he mutters, and the lines around his eyes tighten.

“And Johnsin referenced them,” she forces the words past the same pang of loss, “and Axel said Zoel hated you,which seems like an awfully strong word for someone as utterly mild as him.” To act casually, she takes a sip from the frothy concoction, then jerks in surprise at the insane rush of sugar. “What the fuck?”

“Doesn’t taste bitter, does it?” Gurlien mutters, scowling at the remains of his pastry.

She takes another drink, and the chill of it numbs the roof of her mouth, derailing her thoughts completely. “And people consume this? On a regular basis?”

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