Page 27 of The Girl Who Should Be Dead

“If you have a way to sever the leashes, all of them, that would be preferable to me tracking them down and killing them.”

Gurlien gives her another minute nod, like that’s a good thing to say.

“The more interactions with them, the bigger chance they take me in,” Ambra continues, then shivers again, even though the heater is quite nice. “I don’t ever want to go there again.”

“Good, we’re on the same page,” Axel replies cheerily. “Question two, are you in pain?”

“Yes,” Ambra replies immediately, without any thought, and Axel writes that down.

“Johnsin was horrific,” Gurlien says, and there’s frustration coating his voice, frustration she can’t quite pick out. “I told you, there was torture.”

“Rich coming from you,” Axel shoots back, and Ambra’s absolutely going to get all of this story out of Gurlien later, but the door clacks open again, with a waiter carrying a tray full of food.

“Y’all sure you don’t want to come inside?” the waiter asks, placing a plate directly in front of Ambra first, thendistributing the food to the rest of the table. “It’s going to snow in a bit.”

“We’re fine,” Gurlien answers, and the waiter nods, setting down silverware and napkins, then leaving.

It’s an extraordinary amount of food, the plate piled high with some sort of bread product covered in butter, with eggs and crispy meat to the side, and way more than Ambra thinks anyone could ever eat.

She blinks over to Gurlien, who’s giving her the most bland expression over his glasses.

“I think that face answers question five,” Axel says, cheerful.

“I ate last night,” Ambra says to Gurlien, who obviously ordered it for her. “Two of those pastry things. Two.”

“And human bodies need more food than that,” Gurlien shoots back, then picks up his own fork. “You’ll be better equipped to resist Nalissa if you have enough energy.”

“And this is an unreasonable amount,” Ambra retorts, but pokes at the crispy meat anyways. It breaks off in her fingers, so she eats it and it’s…surprisingly salty, according to the words that spring up unbidden to her mind.

In all of her memories, she’s not entirely certain she tasted something like it. The body preferred vegetables, eating bowls of leafy lettuce with very little taste or mugs of soup with more potatoes than Ambra thought feasible.

“Humans need around 1200-2000 calories a day,” Gurlien recites, as if out of a textbook, and she pauses her next bite to stare at him. “When exporting large amounts of energy—which magic is, thank you very much—they need to increase that amount drastically.”

“That can’t be sustainable,” Ambra says, though the textbook bit is clearly entertaining. “And that’s way too large of a target to be at all useful.”

Across the table, Axel’s watching them, a funny sort of smile on his face, before he shakes his head, scooting his plate over to the side just enough to have the notebook out.

“Question three, what happened to your human?”

Ambra freezes, and the friendly expression drops from Axel’s face, revealing something without a trace of mirth.

All of her senses, all of her alerts fire off, but it’s nothing. He’s just a dud in front of her, and Gurlien’s there, but it’s as if she’s being attacked.

“It’s a simple question.” Axel sits back, crossing his arms.

Ambra swallows, her throat raw from the lack of screaming the day before.

Gurlien turns in his chair to watch Ambra, and there’s something in his eyes, something closer to warmth, but it does nothing to eliminate the threat in front of her.

“She died,” Ambra says, finally, after the moment stretches on far longer than it should.

Even saying it like that hurts.

“You sure about that?” As if this conversation costs him nothing, Axel sips at his coffee. “Are you absolutely, one hundred percent sure of that?”

“Yes,” Ambra replies, small.

“How long into this process did she die?”

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