Page 18 of The Girl Who Should Be Dead

“Did she work real hard at convincing you she was a person?” Her voice speaks, and it hurts to have them forced through her throat, after all the screaming and the tightness. “She does that.”

Gurlien’s pale, his hair firmly out of place after the teleportation, and the too short pajamas and hoodie stick out in all the slick white tile. Even though he showered, there’s still a bruise on the underside of his jaw from whatever trials he had gone through in the base before they let her go.

“How hooked into the communications are you?” Johnsin asks, casually flipping the knife in his hand, and Gurlien doesn’t stop staring at Ambra, fully spooked.

“Not very,” he replies automatically. “I hear rumors.”

“And did this one tell you what happened just yesterday?”

Ambra attempts to stare over at Johnsin, but he doesn’t let her move her eyes, keeping her focus on Gurlien.

“She definitely didn’t tell me anything,” Gurlien replies, and Ambra blinks.

That’s also the truth, but this time it's misleading.

Idly, Johnsin tugs against the leash, and all at once, all her nerves ignite. Flame up, the pain whitening out her vision and sealing her lungs and weakening her spine and —

She can’t move. Can’t do anything from her passive position, standing next to Johnsin and observing Gurlien.

Johnsin doesn’t let her knees buckle. Doesn’t let her sag over, doesn’t let her lose control of her body and fall to the ground.

“The entire Toronto base is gone,” Ambra’s voice says, perfectly even, despite the agony. “Years of experiments, monsters held there for decades if not centuries, all released. Took us this long to realize this one was one of them.”

Always with a flare for the dramatic, Johnsin makes Ambra examine her own hand, as if the motion doesn’t feel like her bones shatter in place.

Gurlien wets his lips again, and she can see the calculations flying through his eyes. “What are you doing to her?”

“What?” Johnsin blurts out, stopping the casual knife flipping. “I’m just holding her in place.”

Gurlien’s brow furrows, as if he very much doesn’t buy that. “You’re doing something.” He takes a step forward, keeping his hands up, very much not grasping at the leash.

“Oh, she got you really convinced she’s a person, didn’t she?” Johnsin says, twisting his fingers around Ambra’s leash, a telltale sign he’s about to do something. “Demons do that, right up there with Wights, pretending to be human.”

Gurlien flinches, like it’s a personal attack, and Johnsin’s lips curve up into a smirk.

Again, he knows something Ambra doesn’t.

“Anyways, I heard you were exiled somewhere up north or something, how’d you end up getting kidnapped by a demon we buried in Toronto?”

He loosens up something in the leash, some sort of split concentration, and Ambra exhales, pushing the trapped air out of her lungs, past the agony and the rawness of her throat. Everything still bites of pain, tearing teeth into the nerves of the body, but if she could breathe…

How did you find him?” Johnsin asks, turning back to Ambra and…

Tangling his fingers in the leash, compels her.

The words spring, unbidden, without her consent, and she struggles with them for a few moments, her teeth cutting into her own cheek, before, “He freed me from the stasis.”

Johnsin nods at her, as if she gets some sort of pleasure from the acknowledgement. “Good girl.”

She twitches her hands out, but he catches her, smoothing out her body back to the peaceful stance.

Gurlien makes a choked off sound, something between horror and anger.

“And how did he get to the stasis chambers?”

Again, the same pull, and she digs in, tries to pull herself out of it. “He had a necromancer, a Half Demon, and an alchemist.”

Johnsin’s face twitches in some sort of surprise.

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