Page 8 of The Girl Who Should Be Dead

At least he’s not panicking anymore. At least this house has nobody else sniffing around, no other safety concerns. There’s running water and a bed—two things important to humans—and the ambient temperature isn’t too far outside of comfort.

The phone beeps in his pocket, and she flinches again.

“Do you have a plan?” he asks, after a long moment of scrolling over whatever messages he has.

She generally doesn’t, never was one to craft elaborate schemes. Some demons excel at them, some spend their entire lives in one stratagem after another, but that usually bores her.

But.

After all that time in stasis, after all that time doingnothing but pace, without the body or any other company, sure gave her time to think. All the times she was brought out, the leash choking her throat, all gave her ideas. All the experiments, all the humans looming over her and making decisions, ensured that her mind had been locked on too few of things.

Another strange sensation crawls over her, this one not wholly unwelcome.

“There’s three more handlers still alive,” she says, lifting her chin, watching him as he nonchalantly eats food she had purchased for the body, inhabiting the space that nobody else had. “Two dead, three more to go.”

3

Gurlien stares at her, wholly unimpressed, and it’s more interesting of an expression than she thought it would be.

“You described three of the highest profile members of the College,” Gurlien starts, and he’s not wrong, “and you want to just waltz in and kill them?”

“Oh, no,” Ambra says, a fission of disgust going through her. “I never want to step foot in any of their bases ever again.”

“Oh, okay, that’s good, that makes it easier,” he replies sarcastically, and it’s far more interesting than him faking being bored. “You want to find three highly paranoid, highly secure individuals and off them?”

“They all have houses, they all have other places they live. They all have apartments in multiple cities, labs in weird parts of the world. They shop, they consume food, they leave footprints.”

He says nothing, his eyebrows raised, until he finishes the bar he’s eating and carefully folds up the wrapper, creasing the foil in precise lines.

“You can’t talk, you broke into their base to save an old lady,” Ambra preempts, when he opens his mouth to speak. “That’s infinitely more insane than ambushing some individuals in places they aren’t expecting it.”

“It’s not just some individuals, all of them could kill either of us—”

She scoffs at that.

“—could kill me with barely any effort, and they knew me.” He sets the carefully folded piece of foil aside. “And apparently, they could control you, easily.”

“That’s why you’re here,” she interrupts, gesturing with the leash again, and he stares down at his wrist, like he gets some feedback with it. “You stop them from doing that, I kill them, then I’m…”

Her mind blanks out at that, for a few seconds, like the concept is just as foreign to her as the stasis chambers once were.

“Then I can do whatever I want,” she finishes. “Figure out how long I’ll live like this, be away from humans, hide from other demons. Simple.”

“Simple,” he echoes, brows still raised.

It, of course, isn’t simple at all.

“So besides murder,” Gurlien starts, “did you have any concrete plans?”

“Not terribly,” Ambra replies. “It wasn’t like I knew a rescue was coming today.”

Or that the people letting her go were people she’s faced in battle. Or that there would be someone so perfect for the leash.

Or that another of her handlers would be dead.

“Korhonen was the one I was most concerned about,” she says, and he blinks, like it’s a change of subject. “He’s the fastest out of all of them, so thank you for that.”

Gurlien swallows, before staring out the window.

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