Page 80 of The Girl Who Should Be Dead

It stings, still.

Gurlien spreads out another one of the maps, another detailed drawing of the catacombs, elongating down into the experimentation rooms.

It’s more detailed than even Ambra knew, more rooms and more storage than she ever saw.

“Just when I think I can’t get more disgusted by them, something else happens, and I’m right back where I was a year ago,” Gurlien mutters, marking with a pencil the placement of a rune, matching it with the map on his phone. “I thought Bianchi would be logical, would jump at the chance to get back at Nalissa, but no, she immediately went for the most hurtful thing.”

“I didn’t even know she knew…Misia’s…name,” Ambra says, forcing the shape of the name past the lump in her throat.

Misia would’ve scoffed at Bianchi, at the cruelty that Gurlien just described. Would’ve smiled at the homeliness of the little cabin in Scotland, would’ve liked the carving on the chair.

Misia would’ve been vastly entertained by the floor full of maps, would’ve appreciated watching someone like Gurlien sketch on them.

Gurlien stills the pencil on the paper. “Does it hurt to say her name?”

Ambra nods, swallowing.

His eyes are unreadable behind his glasses for a long moment, before the pencil starts to move again. “That’s grief,” he says simply, and she watches his hands instead of him, through the silence that follows.

It’sclose to an hour before they speak again, as Gurlien sits back and cracks his neck from hunching over on the floor.

“A year ago, after the spectacular crash of the Terese project, the College sent me to deal with the will of the scientist behind it and check for magical anomalies,” he starts, as if this is any other conversation. “I found a cagey and heartbroken spell weaver, an alchemist who lost his magic, and a series of ley lines so twisted on themselves that they were breaking.”

“Alette and Axel?” Ambra murmurs, and he nods, not looking at her.

“Alette was the beneficiary of the will, but the magic of her aunt’s compound was fragmenting around her and she had no way of repairing it. The demon—Terese—had ripped into the very matrix of power in the region and shredded it to her will, decaying it until entire regions were going dark. It was…perilously close to the main Line through Washington state.”

Having been to that Line, having walked through the pebbly beaches of the bay and sat with the magic coursing through her, it’s hard to imagine it in any other way but strong.

“The College told me I had to stop it before it took down the Line, and that I had to cleanse the Line itself if it got infected.”

“That’s insane,” Ambra replies flatly, and he startles, almost like he didn’t quite realize that she’d have her opinions about this as well. “That’d kill someone who did that. That was a death sentence.”

“They told me two people could do it safely,” he says, and she scoffs at that. “Well, I tried to enlist Alette, sheresisted. She was working with Zoel—not that I knew it at the time—to untangle on her own, got injured a few times, but was far more successful than my monitoring and scans were. I was, to put it mildly, a dick about it.”

This brings the hint of a smile to Ambra’s face, and he shakes his head at her expression.

“I dangled the idea of being able to heal Axel—”

“—no human could, I felt that scar,” Ambra interjected.

“Over Alette, to try to get her cooperation. Here she was, growing a relationship with the Wight community and saving them, and I was telling her she had to choose between killing all of them and getting her best friend his abilities back.” His face twists. “Like I said. Manipulation. You stay in it long enough and you think it’s normal.”

“Ah,” Ambra says.

“Yeah, you’d hate me, too.”

Ambra shrugs, because she doesn’t have a good answer for that.

“They told me the world could end if I let the Ley Line break, that it was all my responsibility, and that I had to do everything to fix it. Then…no backup. No help. No battle mages or healers or experts, just me staying in the compound of a dead scientist with her angry niece and an ever-growing awareness of magic decaying around me, piece by piece.”

It’s a ghastly thought.

“It got worse, until the Ley Line was about to break, and I went down to try to cleanse it alone. It broke, with me in the middle of it.”

Ambra eyes him, because the Ley Line was perfectly healthy when she touched it briefly while in the motor home.

And because Gurlien’s still alive. That would have absolutely ended any human near it.

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