Page 130 of The Girl Who Should Be Dead

Alette folds her hands, and the intricate stitching of her coat catches Ambra’s eyes. Even her coat has wards stitched into its hem.

“She’s recovering,” Alette says, picking her words very deliberately, and Ambra nods. “I think it will be an awfully long time before she is okay. She was there for six years.”

Six years is a hell of a lot longer than Ambra had been.

“Still, she said you spoke to her through the walls,” Alette continues, “nobody else there had tried to say anything, so we thank you.”

“Who’s ‘we?’” Ambra asks, then tries to distract herself by taking a bite of the protein bar.

It’s awful.

“Pretty much the entire Wight community of the Pacific Northwest,” Alette replies, and there’s a funny sort of smile on her face, like Ambra’s doing something entirely predictable.

Her phone beeps, and she glances down at it.

Ambra sits with that, with the discomfort at the mention.

“She didn’t…” Ambra starts, the coughs, twisting her face. “She didn’t belong there.”

She phrases it as a statement, but hears the question anyways.

“No,” Alette says, shaking her head. “Not at all.”

It’s even worse. At least Ambra had all the instability and chaos and murdering to her name. An innocent twelve-year-old did not.

“I can talk to her when she’s ready,” Ambra murmurs,thinking of the brief glimpse of them she got while hungover. “If it doesn’t make things worse.”

Alette watches her from behind the golden glasses, as if evaluating. “I’ll tell her that, well, I’ll tell her mother,” she says. “Her mother isn’t letting anyone near her without approval.”

Understandable.

“She wouldn’t even let Zoel talk to her without being there,” Alette continues, and Ambra remembers with a jolt that she has to have a fucking talk with Zoel about Gurlien. “Don’t be surprised if this takes a while.”

“I can be patient,” Ambra lies.

Another beep of the phone.

“Only people awake right now are Axel and T…Axel said that Gurlien is fast asleep.”

Ambra tries to push herself off the bed again, but definitely fails at that.

“Do you want Axel to come up here?”

“That’s a hard no,” Ambra mutters, and Alette’s lip twitches. “Do you trust that? He hates Gurlien.”

“Hate is a strong word,” Alette says, and Ambra just stares flatly at her. “They don’t get along.”

“He was an asshole,” Ambra shoots back, then tries to take another bite of the flavorless bar.

“If he was just an asshole, he would just wake up Gurlien and make him miserable before bringing him up here,” Alette says gently, and Ambra’s suddenly reminded of all the times she went out of her way to not interact with Wights. “Axel doesn’t actually wish harm against Gurlien, they occasionally would get together and commiserate.”

“You mean yell at each other,” Ambra interjects, then puts down the bar for another sip of the water. Every little action pulls at her chest, but even trying to grasp power tosend it to healing slips from her. “They would get together and yell at each other.”

“Alright, so Gurlien has been real honest with you,” Alette comments, pulling open her leather messenger bag and rummaging through it. “I was worried he was just giving you a glorified version of himself.”

“That suggests he likes himself enough to do that,” Ambra replies darkly, and Alette’s eyebrows flash up over the gold rimmed glasses. “He thought I would hate him after hearing the story. I thought he should give himself credit for going into something he thought would kill him.”

Alette pauses, clearly unnerved, and Ambra presses that advantage.

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