Page 100 of The Girl Who Only Died Once

She freezes, staring up at him, the demon’s face half familiar, the hands more like claws, her heart jackhammering in her chest. He’s still, just as much as she is, as if frozen under the weight of her reaction.

“Killian?” she whispers to the fluorescent light and the slick tiles of the room. “Killian.” And he blinks at her, dazed. “Killian, are you okay?”

She’s not sure what she’d do if he wasn’t.

Slowly, he nods.

Black blood drips from the wound in his shoulder, somehow despite the physical form being on the ground, and Chloe reaches out to him, grazing his arm.

He reels back, and her fingertips come away wet.

Her eyes fall back down to the dead body, now so still, before she scrambles back, pushing it off her legs, before he reaches out a clawed hand, flicking it away like one would old clothes.

“Where—”

He holds a finger to his lips—he looks so, so different without a body—before he stands, pulling himself up to his full height.

It’s taller than the body.

Taller and practically thrumming with power.

He inhales, his chest rising and falling, his eyes wholly inhuman, and the power in the room flexes. Glass shatters from a camera in the corner, the tile denting, underneath him.

And one of the walls is just a glass observation wall.

Chloe cranes her neck, staring out at the glass, but it just reflects her back to herself.

Her black hair wisps around her face, her jacket is raggedy, and her Carhartts have seen better days. A splash of demon blood has soaked into one of the sleeves of her flannel, and grit from the rock dust colors the other.

And all she can see in the reflection is the dead body where Killian once was. Not him.

She snaps her attention back to him, to the somewhat incorporeal form, and even without the human body, he seems dazed, blinking rapidly, like he’s struggling to come to grips with something, struggling to understand.

The room is small, barely big enough to pace through, and it’s too similar to the stasis chamber they found Ambra in.

“Was this your cell?” Chloe whispers, and his face spasms, and at least that is familiar. “Killian, are we—”

Fluid, he snaps a shield around her, before jerking a fist up, and the glass wall shatters around them.

Chloe throws up her arms to protect her face, but the glass crashes harmlessly off the shield, warping and black, before Killian grabs her by the arm, hauling her upright.

“We’ll deal with that later,” he replies, grim, his voice just as deep as it was before, and relief surges through Chloe. It shouldn’t, she should be fine, but—

Gunshots snap out at them, sparking harmlessly off a shield, before Killian drags her through the broken glass of the wall, stepping confidently past the wreckage.

It’s the sort of hallway Chloe’s seen in a hundred bases, the sort of hallway she was dragged through, barely conscious, before they threw her in her own prison cell. It’s the sort of hallway they found Ambra in, the sort of hallway with Stella the Wight, the sort of hallway—

She cranes her head and stares at the dead body they left there, the dead body with brown eyes that, startlingly, she never knew.

That moment doesn’t last.

Killian releases her just long enough to sweep his arm down the line of cells, past the observation walls, and fling a snap of demon power into all of them.

And all of them, every single glass wall separating whatever monsters or spirits or prisoners, shatters.

Chloe’s ears pop, the tang of demon power so thick she bites her tongue, before Killian closes his hand around her arm again, pulling her forward.

His claws aren’t digging in, not like the other demon.

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