Page 20 of The Girl Who Should Be Dead

“He has a lot of clothes in the other room, if you want to grab some,” Ambra remarks, and she doesn’t have to look at Gurlien to know he blanches. “They’re good quality, he’s a snob.”

“I’m not stealing a dead guy’s clothes,” Gurlien replies faintly, but he studiously wipes the gash with an antibacterial wipe. It’s a clean cut, the edges neat, and unless he does something stupid, it should heal up with just a normal scar.

She eyes him. In all the available skin to view, she can’t see any other significant scars, and it sticks wrong in her that he would have one because of her.

He had been squeamish at the idea of her killing to begin with.

“Do you want to go to the other room?” Ambra asks him, finally, and he pauses in his cleaning to glance at her. “I’m going to make an example of his body, it could be upsetting.”

He stares, his fingertips still against the paper wrapping of the gauze.

“I want Nalissa and Boltiex to think twice before trying,” Ambra continues as gently as she could, but a shiver of pain chokes out her voice before she could finish. “This’ll be the easiest way to.”

Abruptly, he stands, clutching the medical wrapping to his chest, and stomps into the other room.

Leaving her with the dead body once more.

“Okay,” Ambra whispers, before she crouches down next to the corpse.

The legs hate that move, but she forces herself to stay like that, to get some control over the body she’s trapped in.

She seriously doubts she could permanently scare Boltiex away, but Nalissa likes pretty things. Likes comfort and control and ‘vibes,’ as the body once put it.

So time to thoroughly mess up the ‘vibes’ of the bright white room.

Ambra exhales, then funnels herself into the power of the room, as if the very air is hers to flex. As if she could grab it, rip it apart, and leave the entire house a shell.

But there’s a living human just in the other room, so that idea is gone.

“Fine,” she mumbles, then takes the strip of power, small in its scope, and shreds it.

Immediately, the world blooms gold, the bubble breathing out with her, surrounding the dead body. Ambra’s hair flutters in the air, the clothes still on Johnsin’s frame shifting as if in a breeze.

Stepping back, she lets the magic tear into his skin, drawing vicious lines of red, peeling it back. It’s garish, but Nalissa would hate it.

Then, with just barely a thought, she sends a jolt into the bubble, until his bleeding body slumps up, levitating off the ground.

Still limp.

Ambra exhales, taking a few more steps back from the bubble.

If there is ever any indication of a demon, ever any style that anyone would spot, it’s the ripped magic and the bubble surrounding it.

And a dead body hovering in the middle is certainly a message.

“Fuck you,” Ambra whispers, in some weird instinct left behind in the body, then turns on her heel to the other room.

Gurlien’s standing still in the middle of the bedroom, his face pale, and he twitches when he sees her.

She didn’t get any blood on her, so he shouldn’t.

“You done?” he asks, his voice strangled.

“Three dead, two more to go,” she answers.

6

She teleports back to the underground bunker, before Gurlien bitches enough to take him back to the motorhome so he could grab his phone.

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