Page 81 of The Girl Who Should Be Dead

Any demon, too. Any anything.

“Alette fixed it, literally stitched it back together with her needle like a fucking spell weaver would repair a thread, and I…” he gestures at all of himself with the pencil. “Couldn’t touch magic anymore. Gone. Completely erased.”

“You’re lucky,” Ambra murmurs, and he shuts his eyes, like he’s heard that so many times before. “That should have killed you.”

And his College should have hailed him as a hero, for putting himself into harm's way so thoroughly he couldn’t have hoped to get out.

“It didn’t, and the moment I recovered from the concussion and rib fractures and punctured lung, they exiled me and told me I was useless.” Finally, he lifts his eyes to hers. “So that’s the story of why everyone hates me, all neatly wrapped with why they kicked me out and why I’m a dud with nothing more but a spectacular education.”

“That’s bullshit,” Ambra informs him.

“Well, that’s what happened,” he snips back, then rubs his face. “Chloe reached out, I tried to put my life back together—twice—and failed both times. Read some psychology books, those didn’t help. She gave me a book on getting out of cults, that one did, and then ended up in a cabin in northern Washington with no cell signal until Delina waltzed in with her Necromancy locked up and now…” he gestures over to her.

He sits back, exhausted once more, like the discussion and the talking is just as difficult as the combat magic.

And Ambra’s fragile herself, from the pain of losing control and the grief and from the pain in Gurlien’s words,at his distaste for his own actions and the obvious self-loathing.

“They’re even more foolish than I thought,” Ambra says, and he cracks a smile at her, like the effort took out any control of his expressions, leaving him entirely unguarded. “Any place that rejects those that gave the most for them will die a slow and painful decline.”

He shrugs, and he has a smudge of dust on his cheek, still from Ambra almost destroying Bianchi’s cabin, that she’s just now noticing.

“Do you need to take a break?” Ambra asks, gesturing down towards the well-marked up map, with the runes and protections lightly penciled over the ink. “Do something that has nothing to do with this? Forget about it for a little while?”

It’s something that Misia used to say, whenever she noticed someone with the look in Gurlien’s eye, and Ambra’s not sure she fully understood why until that moment.

Would letting her—and his—guard down be a bad idea? Absolutely, the College could decide at any time to pull her back.

But deep in her skin, behind the scratches and the still healing wounds from the trap, she desperately wants to erase that expression from his face.

He eyes her, like it’s a trick.

“Tomorrow, we’ll continue this,” Ambra says, pointing at the maps. “We’ll continue this and go to Europe, find some more info there. But it’s…” she flounders, trying to figure out the words to say. “I don’t think there’s anything else our brains could do productively tonight.”

This seems to be the correct thing to say.

He sighs, almost explosive. “You know what? Yeah. I saw a chair explode today. Let’s do something else.”

22

After a quick shower to get rid of the still pervasive blood remaining on top of the scratches, Ambra throws on a deep green shirt that sits close to her skin, the fabric moving and flexing with her motions. It shows off a bit more of her chest than she’s used to, but in a way that her skin is a shocking contrast with the color.

She frowns down at her chest. The hint of the scars, from where they carved up the body in the merge, trail up from underneath the left breast, visible with the cut of the shirt.

The few times the body had seen them, she had cried. Had cried that nobody would want them, that they were ugly with the vicious marks.

Gurlien dresses in another one of his button ups, a bright cardinal blue, and Ambra’s getting the sneaking suspicion that no color truly looks horrible on him. That everything he puts on will find a way to be complimentary.

He raises an eyebrow at her outfit, as she fits on thegreen-tinted sunglasses on her face. “In a different world, you’d be very popular at a punk bar.”

She glances down at herself, but nothing stands out terribly much.

“They’re a bit loud,” he says, which makes more sense. “Loud and generally crowded. But with the shaved head and those boots, you’d have a lot of attention.”

She wrinkles her nose at him, touching the side of her head, where now a soft smudge of hair covers her scalp. It’s past the prickling stage, thankfully, but it still sticks in the back of her mind as wrong.

“Misia,” she starts, and it’s almost a bit easier to say her name this time, “liked fancy cocktail bars. Or wine bars. The types with cheese and bread and olives and we could sit and read without anyone interrupting us.”

“She took you to a few of those?” Gurlien asks, packing an extra shirt into the backpack.

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