Page 75 of The Girl Who Should Be Dead

“Did you eat already?” Gurlien mumbles, stripping off his undershirt and reaching for a clean one, facing the other direction.

Ambra raises an eyebrow at his back. Again, not behavior she associated with normal human interactions with each other, right in line with the cuddling.

“No,” she replies, not making herself glance away. If he, the one actual human in her life, isn’t going to act normal, then neither is she.

Plus, his shoulders are nice to look at. All the humans Ambra has been around since the merge, have either been older scientist types who viewed her as an object of experimentation or excessively muscular combat types who seemed unpleasant to touch.

He glances back at her, catching her eyes as he throws on another button up shirt, this one the color of deep olive green. “What?” he asks suspiciously.

“Axel thinks you’re going to betray me?” Ambra says, and Gurlien shuts his eyes with a sigh. “And T isn’t a demon, that’s for sure.”

“Yes,” he shoots back at her. “You’re a morning person, that’s what this is.” He rakes a hand through his hair, and it’s nowhere near as neat as it normally is. There are circles under his eyes, even visible from this distance.

Ambra sits up straight, but he ignores that.

It’s alarming, and she squints at him across the bright early morning light.

“You need food,” she declares, pushing authority behind her voice to force out the question. “You did more than you anticipated, and now you need food.”

He sighs. “Probably.”

Ambra bounces to her feet, and her head only aches a bit with that action. “No, you do. It’s been what, a year, since you’ve done any sort of combat magic?”

He stares at her, baleful underneath his glasses. “That wasn’t combat magic.”

“Bullshit,” she informs him, and his lips tug into a smile before he stops himself. “You were controlling a demon, actively against another force trying to control her, and you won. If there’s a winner, then it’s combat.”

“That is so incredibly reductive,” he mutters, but stands, reaching for his heavy wool coat.

Despite the rushof terror at being beyond her wards, despite the headache that bubbled up after only five minutes outside in the bright cold, she follows Gurlien along to a restaurant and coffee shop, and doesn’t say a thing about leaving until the color returns to his cheeks and the analytical light flickers back on behind his eyes.

And she lets him bully her into walking, actually walking, back, in an almost familiar action now. Even though they have only done this once before.

But Gurlien turns up the collar of his woolen coat against the wind and Ambra tucks her hands into the sleeves of her sweater and, for a split second, they actually look normal. They look like two absolutely run of the mill humans walking around the busy downtown, huddled close for the wind.

And for the first time, it doesn’t quite feel like a bad thing.

“So,” Gurlien starts, as they’re strolling back, and shetilts her face towards him. She’s not wearing the earplugs, but outside the noise isn’t as severe. “Do you think that was Nalissa or Boltiex?”

A shiver of fear winds up her back, but it’s far away, now that she’s out in the bright sun with the clear blue sky overhead.

“I’m not sure,” she murmurs, keeping her eyes on the snippets of sky visible from in between the sky scrapers. “Felt like Boltiex, but I think…he’s generally stronger,” she says, and it’s so strange to be speaking so freely. “He’s more instantaneous, we had…that bit of warning.”

He nods, almost neutral. “And I would think that Nalissa would be busy preparing for her event,” he says, and the wind has turned his cheeks pink. “I’m surprised she didn’t cancel, with the Toronto base.”

“She never thought much of the Toronto base,” Ambra supplies. “She hated the weather, hated the culture. When she…worked on me…” she swallows. Even the clear air can’t stop her throat from seizing. “She had me transported to Paris. Once Italy.”

The body had found it glamorous, with the old-world beauty and fields of lavender, and Ambra had been struck by the extremes of sensations. Of the beauty of nature, at how sharp the scents surrounding them, at the difference in the magic flowing through them.

“She hated that they kept me on the other continent,” Ambra forces on, kicking a pebble and watching it skitter into the gutter. “But three of the Five lived there full time, so she was outvoted.”

And now just two of the Five remained.

It’s still weird to think about.

“So she wouldn’t stop something she liked just because her least favorite base fell,” Ambra continues. “She likes hermusic, she likes her spectacle, she likes when they come together. Did you know,” Ambra pivots to face him while walking, “that she brought in a specialty record player into her labs? Not just a speaker, everyone had those, but an actual record player that took up almost an entire desk.”

“I only met her three times,” Gurlien says, and it's a bit of a jolt to imagine him speaking with Nalissa. “I had to draw up a contract for her once, she was not…very responsive.”

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