Page 13 of The Girl Who Should Be Dead

“I expect Axel’s probably laughing it up with his friends,” Gurlien mutters, swiping the phone back and sitting on the other side of the couch. “Do you want another bar?”

Ambra squints at him, weighing whether or not that was a normal thing.

The body had eaten more food than Ambra had thought necessary, but she had done a lot that Ambra wasn’t sure of the purpose of.

“Why?” She finally settles on.

“Because humans,” he starts, pushing himself up to the cupboard, “expend a lot of energy whenever they use any sort of power, and they need to replenish it. So if you want to be powerful enough to kill any of those three when they call for you, you need it.”

“Sure,” she says, “but if there’s anything that’s less awful than those, I’d appreciate it.”

“Okay,” he mutters, then tosses her a brightly wrapped candy bar. “Demon doesn’t like protein bars.”

She raises an eyebrow, unwrapping the candy and sinking further into the couch. On the table, the phone beeps, and she flinches.

But on the screen, even without him unlocking it, she can read:

AXEL (8:55 PM): She suggests that warm food is always better than cold, and that something ridiculous will get her to eat more than something boring.

“Are you asking your friends how to feed me?” Ambra asks, torn between being amused and absolutely horrified. “And who would Axel refer to as ‘her?’”

Gurlien swoops in to pick up the phone with a clatter. “Iasked how to get you to full power,” he snips, and once again, the glimpse of personality is fascinating. “And all of his suggestions are food and sleep and comfortable things.”

“Who’s ‘she?’” Ambra asks, after a long moment of staring at Gurlien’s fingers as he taps out responses.

“Could they compel you to answer if they get the leash?” he asks languidly, but she doesn’t buy the casualness at all.

“Of course.”

“Then I’m not telling you,” he responds, with barely a flicker of a glance from behind the glasses.

It’s fair, but it still sucks, so Ambra just leans further into the couch, mindlessly eating the candy. It’s not bad, the sweetness a bit overpowering and artificial tasting, but again, not very interesting when one has consumed necromancer recently.

It’s silent again in the small cabin, and she watches as Gurlien flicks a tiny button on the phone, quieting all the piercing beeps, but he continues typing, his eyes speeding over the screen with a quickness that almost astounds Ambra.

Sure, she’s seen humans read, but not that fast.

“You said the other Terese project got killed by a Necromancer,” she starts, after a long lull, and she’s almost surprised at how much her voice has slowed down in the meantime. “But the one at the base—”

“Delina,” Gurlien interrupts.

“Had only been unlocked recently, they said.” She watches him underneath her eyelashes. “So there’s more than one?”

“Yes,” he replies, fast. “For once in history, there are two actual necromancers, and they’re in the same country and around the same age.”

She rests her head against the back of the couch, her eyelids strangely heavy. “Demons must be going nuts.”

He shoots her another glare. “One of them is protected, we don’t know how, but she is. Delina has Maison, and he’s prepared to fight anyone for her.”

“Convenient,” she murmurs, letting her eyes flutter shut, letting them rest for the first time in the day.

With the bright lights of the stasis chamber, closing her eyes didn’t provide much relief, and all since then had been a strange blur of alarms, of strobing lights, so the warm glow of the motor home lamps is soothing. Easily ignorable.

“Okay,” Gurlien mutters, then sighs, pulling out a notebook from a drawer and rattling around for a pen.

She sits up straighter, opening her eyes again.

“Yes, I found this, I’m taking it,” Gurlien says, holding up the cheaply spiral bound book. “It was empty and I need something to take notes on.”

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