Page 19 of The Girl Who Should Be Dead

“She’s lying,” Gurlien says, and now desperation coats his voice. “I would never—”

“Sure you wouldn’t,” Johnsin says, smooth, turning his back to Ambra. “Of course not.”

“I don’t—”

With only a moment of warning, one Ambra only barely sees, barely gets out a quick inhale, Johnsin drops the physical control of Ambra, twisting his hands into the very fabric of the magic in the room, snapping out an attack towards Gurlien.

Ambra reels to the side, her vision blacking out and leaving her aimless for a split second, before she gets her feet underneath herself and braces.

Gurlien yells, something choked out, and everything snaps back into the laser focus of panic.

There’s blood, sprayed finely over the slick white furniture, and Gurlien clutches at his arm, and Johnsin’s already winding the strip of magic around his hand for another attack.

It’s the arm with the leash. Johnsin’s trying to get it off him.

Ambra jerks forward, the pain edging around her view, and Johnsin snaps the leash taut with nary a thought.

And in between one moment in the next, his eyes widewith something resembling terror, Gurlien grapples for the leash tied on his wrist and yanks.

Yanks just hard enough to stagger Johnsin, breaking his concentration on her, and Ambra whips that around, her power flooding back into her control.

She gets a bare glimpse of the white of Johnsin’s eyes, a flash of terror, before she clutches her fist into the magic.

And snaps his neck.

Snapping necks is her favorite way to kill someone.

There’s no gore, there’s no confusion, just between one moment and the next the person is no more.

For a split second, there’s nothing, no sound, before he slumps to the ground, dead before he hits the tile.

Gurlien recoils back at the wet sound of Johnsin’s body against the slick white floor, and he’s panting, his chest heaving up and down.

“How—” he manages out, before he clutches at his forearm again, at the bloody gash Johnsin left in his attempt. “What?”

Ambra rolls her shoulder back and almost blacks out from the pain again, blinking out against it.

“He keeps bandages in the second drawer of the coffee table,” she manages, before coughing again, spitting some blood onto the slick tile. “The gauze should be sterile, he hated infections.”

“What the fuck,” Gurlien whispers, and she turns her eyes to him.

Besides the gash on his arm, he’s unharmed, though his pulse jumps at his throat, almost derailing Ambra’s attention.

“Why the hell did he keep sterile gauze in his living room?”

“Do you really want to know that answer?” Ambra asks,curious, and he’s already shaking his head. “This wasn’t the first time he did that pain surge on me.”

“Jesus Christ,” Gurlien mutters, and mechanically, he sits on the white couch, yanking open the drawer.

Sure enough, antibiotics, saline, and perfectly sealed paper packets of gauze sit in perfectly organized clear plastic containers.

Gurlien paws through them, and there’s blood all over the hoodie, enough that Ambra knows the body would’ve been upset to see, so she examines Johnsin’s corpse instead.

Every spark that made him threatening, every bit of control and malice, all gone, leaving behind a completely normal human corpse.

Ambra nudges him with her foot, and the body is still warm. If she could switch bodies into that dead one, she would, just for the satisfaction of controlling him instead of the other way around.

But instead, she’s still in this one, and her shoulders slump with exhaustion from the pain, her nerves still firing wrong all down her spine.

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