Page 128 of The Girl Who Only Died Once

“Any idea who this is?” Chloe asks, as the magic begins to settle in place, as it twists into the paper, her eyes straying back to the huddled skeleton. “Any idea who died?”

“It would take your Necromancer to find out,” he murmurs. “Just that she was very afraid.”

Chloe would be too.

“If you call her my Necromancer, there’s a Half Demon who would fight you,” Chloe replies jokingly, but the words are flat amongst all the horror of the room, of the soot on every surface, on the bones still aching with fear.

“I’d win,” he immediately says, then, “I don’t want your Necromancer.”

“We wouldn’t be talking if you did,” Chloe murmurs, staring hard down at her scroll, forcing her eyes to stay on the familiar paper, not at the walls, at the meager amount of protection someone scrabbled to give themselves.

She’s not sure what she would do to protect herself, not without seeing the trap in its entirety, but this would be something close to her worst nightmare.

“Can you get a sample of whatever it is that set this trap?” Chloe asks, and his brows shoot up. “Any idea of who set it, what the trap was, anything like that. I…”

He’s already standing again, the sparks swirling around his feet, and with a few quick motions, utterly destroys any magical trace of the trap, pulling it towards him with a fluency that makes her mouth dry.

It’s far beyond anything she’s seen Maison do, far beyond the intrinsically protective magic Ambra tends to do when she thinks nobody’s watching, and far beyond all the wild power Terese sometimes lets loose.

And he thinks nothing of it, tucking the remnants of it into a pocket in the guard’s pants, before returning to his crouch next to her.

Once, early after they took down the Toronto base, Chloe attempted to make friends, trying so hard to get along with Lyra, and heard her wax briefly poetic of how Melekai was in his prime. It was near incomprehensible in fluency, unimaginably powerful, that Chloe thought Lyra was exaggerating for her benefit.

With this little glimpse of casual motion, Chloe believes it.

And Killian had chosen her.

It takes short work to tie in the trace into the scroll, the magic cheerily cooperating—why wouldn’t it, it couldn’t be burned out with something so mundane as fire—and even less time for Chloe to connect the compass to it.

All the while Killian stares at her, like she’s the mystery of the room.

“You’re beautiful, you know that, right?” he murmurs, and all of the hair on her arms raise. “When you do this, I can’t believe that anyone would be so blind to see it.”

She’s fairly sure there’s soot smudged across her cheeks.

“Not everyone likes competency,” Chloe attempts the joke again, but he just raises an eyebrow at that.

“Then those people are foolish,” he says softly, helping her roll up the scroll and fit it back into her backpack, before gently offering her a hand to standing. “The fact that I was unaware of you for so long…”

The scars and callouses on this hand do nothing to make his touch harsh, and he cradles her palm like she’s something precious.

The Necromancers respond later,when they’re back to Killian’s little house and Chloe’s washed off all of the remnants of soot and horror.

LYRA (8:42 PM): Dead two weeks, I think.

DELINA (8:43 PM): How can you even tell?

LYRA (8:44 PM): Soot falls off bone fast.

Chloe slumps against the bed, with the scratchy blanket, staring at her phone.

LYRA (8:45 PM): Not a good death.

31

The next base comes pre-exploded, a wreckage of charred wooden beams and melted rebar, nestled in the middle of the woods.

It still smolders.

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