Page 6 of The Girl Who Should Be Dead

Ambra believes him, based on the amount of exhaustion and yet still power she saw in the alchemist, so she steps back, giving him a bit of space, as he continues to type out.

The wind creaks through the motor home, and the body shivers in the chill, outside of her control, but she stalks closer to the window in the meager kitchen.

Spiderwebs stretch between the faucet and the sink, but when she gives the sink an experimental twist, the water gushes out, bright and clear.

When she first took the body here, she had laughed in delight that such a run-down place could have such good plumbing, and Ambra hadn’t wanted to tell her that she haddone it with magic. The body had filled a glass with the water, drank from it, and it had been such a contradictory burst of sensations for Ambra that she almost teleported them away instantaneously.

The glass still sits, upside down, in the rack next to the sink, a thin layer of dust along the bottom.

Her kidnappee, Gurlien, taps out on the phone, his face serious, and gets corresponding beeps with every action.

The beeps are less painful with just that bit of distance.

“Did the rest of your team escape?” Ambra asks, still staring down at the dusty glass.

“Yes,” Gurlien answers, curt. “They’re in a safe house, Maison’s mother is recovering, and they’re going to find a hospital for Maison to get his knee checked out.”

Right, because he can’t self-heal.

Ambra scoffs, then stares down at the oozing gut wound, the blood still staining some of her clothing, sticking unpleasantly to her skin.

She pokes at it, and the pain sends edges of black at the periphery of her vision.

The damage cuts through the skin, into one of the secondary organs, but those are easy to fix with enough energy. The body had taken damage before, and she had fixed it then.

Her legs are less steady this time, though, so she sits herself down on the plastic tile and leans her head against the cabinet there, hearing the whisper of the water draining through the pipes.

The tapping of Gurlien’s fingers stops, but she can’t see him from her position. “Ambra?”

“I’m here, just sitting down.” She pokes at the wound again, hissing involuntarily through her teeth, then focuses on the secondary organ, knitting the tissue back into place.

It’s harder to do after the merge, and she hates that, bitterly.

There’s maybe a few minutes of blessed silence, of letting her power focus in on that one little part of her, let it sink into the still breathing physical form she’s stuck in.

Before Gurlien stands, the floor creaking with the movement, and in just a few steps is in front of her.

“What are you doing?”

She didn’t want to have to explain.

“Healing the wound,” she says, after he stares blankly at her, lifting the shirt to show.

The skin is still split, black blood spooling out, but with the absence of the cut in the secondary organ it feels significantly better.

He blanches.

“Don’t be squeamish, your Half Demon was the one who did it,” Ambra says, then pokes at the broken skin again, willing it back into place.

“No, I’m going to be squeamish about that,” he says, his words faint. He’s still looming over her, and it’s too similar to being on an experiment table and looking up at her handlers.

“The body left some changes of clothing in the bedroom,” Ambra mumbles, after a long moment of stitching the skin back into place, indeterminately slow. “Closet by the bed, can you find me something without blood?”

He dashes away, relieving the pressure of the looming, and she exhales, controlled.

Well, not as controlled as it would be in an actually dead body, but as controlled as all of the unconscious spasms this one allowed her.

She hadn’t ever been so aware of blood in other bodies,either. Of it sticking and drying against her skin, pulling on all the tiny hairs all over the body, flaking and tightening against her.

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