Page 12 of The Girl Who Only Died Once

But she’s not here for study, she’s here for clues.

So she steps forward, marveling at the age, but keeps the pen light loosely in her left hand, resting her right on the gun.

There’s a fire spell, cleanly written on the wall, and Chloe skirts around it. Sure, she could probably break it, she’s literally built to destroy such securities, but…

The first time she ever broke a fire spell, she burnt her fingertips so badly it took her months before she could pick a lock again.

Her phone beeps, startling her into a jump.

DELINA (8:03 AM): Wait, did you already leave?

Apparently, she gets signal underground, in the middle of the Northwestern Canadian Forest.

Not wanting to answer, she shoves the phone back into her pocket, silencing it with a flick of her hand. If needed, she can use it as a backup flashlight, but she doesn’t need it adding to any alarms she could be tripping.

Her research reports that her friend was once held in a cage, three floors down into the permafrost, where the cold was just as much a defense as it was a fact of nature.

Does she believe her friend is still there? No. But even a glimpse of the trail can reignite it for her, show her where’s next.

Hollowed out caves pocket the walls, all empty but for dust and the skeletons of old furniture, and Chloe still flickers the pen light into each of them. No sign of her friend, no sign of any other magic signature, and the demon trace continues right on by.

Chloe doesn’t want to rely on a trail left by an unknown demon, but it says something in how single-minded they are, that they’re not distracted by things others would have stopped and investigated.

The rooms are mostly remnants of a hidden office, a place that required a bureaucracy to exist, abandoned for at least a year.

Sure enough, according to her research, at the end of the first hallway, another metal ladder leans out of another trap door, and the trace of demon trails down it, small shimmering marks of where hands gripped the rungs.

Which, according to what she’s gleaned from Ambra in the last few weeks, means the demon is in a physical body. A dead body, but a physical body.

Which means it’ll be easier to communicate with, if needed.

Chloe pats the gun on her hip again, then grips the penlight in her teeth and descends, the rungs of the metal sharply cold against her hands. It creaks, ominously so, but holds her weight as she clings to it.

The next layer is even colder, even darker, and the floor even rougher, like everyone had spent most of the energy on the first floor, where more people would stay.

Dust billows around her feet when she lands on the floor, and a single line of footsteps, glimmering with red, stretch down the hallway.

She tugs the scarf over her mouth against the dust, breathing through the neon orange fabric.

So not only is it just her and the demon, she’s the second person to make this trip in ages. Which suggests that her friend was moved long ago, of course, but not that it’d be so bereft of clues that she can’t find anything.

It also means that this is a new place. A new place without secure enough coordinates that a demon wouldn’t feelcomfortable teleporting into—or couldn’t. Which is another interesting bit of information.

Her phone buzzes in her pocket, despite now being two floors underground, but she ignores it.

The demon’s footsteps pause at another little alcove, as if they scuffled their feet before continuing on, so Ambra hesitates there, tries to see what they see.

There’s a whisper of a different trace of power, crackling and human, like someone sat there and expelled a shit ton of magic, but all that remains is a rib cage, still white and still glistening.

Whatever happened there, they took the skull with them.

“Neat,” Chloe whispers again despite herself. Delina would be able to tell her how long it had been, how exactly the person died, what killed them, but now it’s just a haze of mystery. Sure, she could approximate, given her knowledge of bones and the lack of dust on them, that it was most likely within the last year, but beyond that…

That this underground bunker became a different sort of tomb to someone.

By nature of her inquisitiveness and her specialties, Chloe’s seen a number of dead bodies in her explorations, but rarely are they without the skulls. Rarely are they at a place with so much power expelled, and rarely are they with no trace of anyone else.

“Alright,” Chloe whispers, giving the mysterious dead a small nod, before continuing to follow the footsteps down the hallway.

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