Page 68 of The Girl Who Should Be Dead

His mouth tilts up into some sort of half smile as he taps out a response.

“Check with your experts to see what they experienced around coffee,” he says, almost lazily, scrubbing his hair with the towel again.

And he’s so vulnerable like this. His attention split, halfway between a mundane automatic behavior such as maintaining his body and whatever he’s reading and writing on his phone. The ruddy ness of his cheeks, from the hot water. The bright red of the cut.

“Do you need more medical care?” She blurts out.

“Hmm?” he asks, glancing back up at her, and even his glasses are still a bit fogged from the steam. “Wait, this? No, I was just letting it dry before bandaging.”

She creeps upwards again, drawing near him. “It looks bad?”

He twists his arm to get a better glance at it. “It’ll definitely scar,” he replies, matter of factly. “It’s not terrible, I’ll recover.”

It still sits poorly, and that must’ve shown on her face.

“It’s just a normal stage of human healing,” he informs her. “It’s not infected, it’s clean, and the skin is connecting again, which means it wasn’t too deep. Stop making that face.”

“What face?” She shoots back immediately.

“Like you’re grossed out by normal biology,” he says. “It’s just a healing cut. It takes a while.”

“I’m not grossed,” she starts, then shuts her eyes, forcing the lungs to inflate and her ribcage to flex, to see if that’ll calm her down. It doesn’t. “How do we make it heal faster?”

He gives her a blank look. “We don’t.”

“But there has to be something we can do.”

“There isn’t,” he says, running the towel through his hair again, making it stand on end. “Or, rather, this. This is what we do. We let it air out while clean, until the skin is dry, then put on more antibiotic gel and rebandage it. That’s what we can do.”

She scowls at him.

“No, really,” he says, returning to hang up the towel, even though his hair is still out of place. “It’s doing fine, I’m not concerned with it.”

Out of a fit of frustration, she sits on the bed, but her leg still jangles with the want for motion.

“Do you need any help healing that?” he asks, gesturing at her face, where the blackened wound from the Necromancer—Delina—still annoys. “That looks way worse than this.”

Impulsive, she reaches a hand up to touch it, and while it stings, it’s not even registering on her awareness of her general pain.

“Why didn’t you heal that one?” he asks, giving his hair one more go through before hanging the towel back up.

“Apparently, necromancer wounds don’t heal nice,” she answers, before lifting her chin at him. “Teach me how to help rebandage that.”

He raises an eyebrow at her, bemused.

“If I have to be ‘among humans’ then I should know how to help them,” she says, mirroring the quotation marks with her fingers the body occasionally did. “And I don’t like that…” She trails off, actually hearing herself approach something emotional and actually able to stop herself from going too much further.

“I can do that,” he replies cautiously, because of course he caught that hesitation. “Give me about an hour for this to dry.”

18

Ambra regrets that, as bandaging humans turns out to be intensely boring, but the knot inside her chest loosens the moment the pristine white bandage is back in its place.

“See,” Gurlien says, twisting his arm around once the final bit of tape is in place. “I’m fine.”

“He still shouldn’t have injured you,” Ambra mutters, for what feels like the hundredth time in this process. “There were other things he could do.”

There obviously were, but even in saying that she knows that Johnsin never would have picked them. He liked blood too much and the pain, to miss a chance to do it to someone unsuspecting.

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