Page 94 of The Girl Who Should Be Dead

“A Wight’s outside and she wants to speak to me,” Ambra says, and to her ears her words sound remote. “Nothing I can think to say can convey how much I really don’t want to deal with the Wight population right now.”

He grimaces. “In a city?”

“Right?” Ambra responds, and, finally, a trace of a smile flickers over Gurlien’s face. “I don’t…my head hurts and I don’t want to talk about anything they’ll talk about.”

Gurlien glances over his shoulder, towards her focus, then shakes his head. “Yeah, they’re not showing themselves to me.”

“Naturally, that’d be convenient,” Ambra says, then rubs her face, her eyes still too crunchy. “Stay here, I’ll be…I’ll be within 45 meters.”

But the moment Ambra pushes herself up to standing, the Wight teleports away, because of course she did.

“Ugh,” Ambra says again, letting herself flop back into the chair. “She disappeared. Why…ugh.”

“Why would they talk to you?” Gurlien supplies, and she nods. “Either because you’re here with me and they know my face, or because you’re completely out of the norm and puzzling.”

“I’m not so puzzling that I couldn’t destroy her with a thought,” Ambra replies darkly, staring at the straw of her now empty espresso drink.

“I am too hungover for murder talk,” Gurlien mumbles, which is fair, then he sighs again, put upon. “I’m going to really regret this—”

This catches Ambra’s attention, and she sits up straighter.

“—but we should focus on what’s going to happen in Paris in a few days.” He pokes at the shreds of his pastry, a sour expression over his face. “Even if we get in there, even if we get through all the security and past the literal…metal music festival, we’re still going to have to see her.”

Ambra sits back, her stomach turning all over again. “Well, I’m not going to do it when I’m like this,” she mutters, gesturing at her head, then chews on her lip. “If she’s among the crowd I’ll just break her neck from a distance,” she says, and a passing human gives her an alarmed expression.

“That would be ideal, wouldn’t it?” Gurlien responds, then scowls at his pastry. “Let’s go get greasy food, this isn’t cutting it.”

25

Greasy food is absolutely worse, but Gurlien gets a much better pep into his step, and Ambra’s not going to stop that.

Instead, afterwards, she lets him convince her to teleport back to the Pacific Northwest, on the advice about the passport.

“I can teleport in and out, I don’t see why I need to care about this,” Ambra says, surly, the moment her feet hit the forest floor.

It’s cold, but a different sort of cold than the ones on the street of Minneapolis. Here, clouds hang low in the sky, ominously grey, and the snow crunches sparsely along the gravel sidewalk.

It’s a small town, with nary more than a few boarded up shops and a meager coffee stand next to a lumber mill. There’s a church with an ancient graveyard, a dubious looking animal hospital, and a long road leading up to some motorhomes, more run down than not.

Ambra squints at them, at the memory of the sleeve of the sweater and the house that was no more.

It sits poorly with her still sour stomach.

“I don’t like this,” Ambra mutters. “This isn’t needed and we could be preparing.”

Gurlien just turns the collar up on his wool coat, nonplussed. “Same reason I have this bag,” he says, shifting the weight of the backpack. “In case we get separated.”

The thought sends a shiver down her spine, even worse than it used to.

Because if they get separated, she doesn’t think she’d ever see him again.

As they walk, there’s the same wight, staring at her.

And her arm is protectively around…

Stella. The little wight who cried.

Her hair is brushed now, less of a mess, though there’s a sunken depth to her eyes, a hollowness to her shoulders.

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