Page 49 of The Girl Who Should Be Dead

“Okay yes, spicy food,” Gurlien says, and there’s a hint of a smile on his lips, softening his entire face. “That doesn’t hurt?”

“It burns, but it’s good,” Ambra replies, taking a long drink from the icy water. “Why would you eat food that doesn’t do that?”

“It’s not everyone’s taste.” He eats his food, the smile still around his eyes. “As long as it doesn’t hurt your stomach, eat as much as you can.”

It’s a directive that’s easy to achieve, at least, and she falls silent, mulling over the idea of the high-rise apartment.

It’s hidden from the other apartments, a quick spell twisted around it to stop anyone from remembering it’s there, no matter what documentation it exists on. There’s a bed—no blankets—but a functioning fridge, stove, and pipes.

She hasn’t been there for a few years before the merge, as it’s too populous for her to spend too much time, though the demon who considers it his territory is somewhat friendly.

Or at least not antagonistic. At least not terribly interested in fights and struggles for power.

“I bargained with the demon in the area for a safe space, gave them art in exchange,” Ambra says, after a long moment of almost companionable silence, her eating and him poking at his phone. “Unless something disrupted the power balance there in the last…four years? We should be okay.”

“Demons collect art?” he asks.

“Some do,” she answers. “I guess the same percentage that humans do. Picked the city because they liked the museums.”

“Huh,” he responds eloquently. “Well, that makes sense, with Maison and all.”

She squints at him.

“If you ever spend any time with Maison, he paints excessively,” he continues. “Says that if he hadn’t been born as he was, that he would have gone to art school.”

It’s at odds with the competent fighter and frankly terrifying bond he had with his Necromancer.

His phone beeps again, and it takes Ambra a fewseconds to realize that it’s a softer sound, like he softened it for her, and he prods at the phone.

“When I finish setting up this closed loop, you’re going to take the extra phone,” he says, then rolls his eyes at her wrinkled nose. “That way if we get split up, we can contact you.”

“If we get split up it’s because I’ve been captured,” Ambra shoots back.

“And,” he forges on, “so Maison and Axel can text you directly so I don’t have to play translator.”

“Do I have to?” Ambra asks, and Gurlien briefly grins. “I want to talk to neither of those people.”

“And Axel’s experts,” he says, and Ambra sits up. “For very obvious reasons they don’t want you to talk face to face, but text it could be good.”

“Alright,” she agrees cautiously, falling back to her food, into the silence, as they finish up the meal and Gurlien pays, only stepping outside the diner before she teleports.

The apartment is immediately much warmer, even though storm clouds brew outside the tall windows, and Gurlien still stumbles the moment she releases the grip on his wrist.

“Is Axel any better in text?” she asks, shaking out her hands at the memory of his grilling. “Or is he just as pushy?”

Instead of answering, Gurlien just gulps in breaths, before he half staggers to the bare bed.

The single room apartment is unchanged, of course. No speck of dust, no fold of fabrics, just the empty furniture and light streaming in from the windows.

Her books still cram together on the shelf, the one sign that this isn’t just a model floor.

Her footsteps echo as she crosses the wooden floor to the window, craning her head to see down. They’re far fromthe top floor, but still, people are mostly small dots on the streets below, between shining white piles of plowed snow lining the sidewalks.

“Are there lights in here?” Gurlien asks, and there’s a hint of nerves behind his question, so she flexes her power to the switches, flicking them on all at once.

One bulb crackles, but the other bloom on, flooding the space with warm light.

“Right,” Gurlien says, still unsteady. “When you said studio apartment, I thought much smaller.”

---