Page 134 of The Girl Who Only Died Once

The answer is of course she does. She hasn’t had a chance to clean it yet—hasn’t had enough of a moment where she wasn’t either asleep or giving an impromptu tutoring session to a twelve-year-old—but it’s not something she would leave behind.

So she pulls it out, checking the chamber in a smooth idle motion before strapping the holster to her hip.

“Do you want to investigate?” he asks, his voice lowering as he stares into the snow.

Sure enough,the teleporter had laid a trap, neatly disguised under the residue left by his teleportation spell, and Chloe crouches in the snow outside the rickety house, peering at it.

The house is far worse looking from the outside, with a partially caved in attic and a front door that sits uneven in its frame.

If she hadn’t been inside of it, she would’ve thought it abandoned.

The trap reeks of a stored ward, something easily transported, with barbs in it to entrap all sorts of humans and non-human people. Demons and Wights would equally fall to this trap, be stuck in one place, in a constant loop of pain, until they could overpower it.

By her estimation, it would take a Wight a few hours. More than enough time to come along and collect them.

Humans…it could be for forever if they were caught off guard.

Killian stands next to her, completely impervious to the blowing snow settling in her hair as she shines her flashlight against the already partially buried trap.

“They’ll know when I start to take it down,” Chloe warns, “and I can’t reach the trace until I fully complete it.”

“Of course,” Killian mutters, shifting. When she flicks the flashlight to his face, he doesn’t squint. “How fast can you break it?”

Chloe sits back on her haunches, the wind biting into her cheeks. “Thirty seconds. How fast can you read a trace?”

“Near instantly.” But there’s something in his stance, something that belies some more hesitation.

So Chloe trails her finger along the edge of it, letting her mind seep into it.

“This sort takes concentration to keep up,” she murmurs, as the lines reveal themselves to her. “Concentration and energy.”

“What are you suggesting?” he asks, but it’s curious, nothing biting.

“That it’ll weaken—significantly—in three days’ time,” Chloe says, dusting her hand away from it. “The trace will be fainter, harder to parse, but the trap will be…less.”

He hesitates, like he’s debating. Like he’s trying to weigh what is important in this moment, what to pursue.

What math he has to do.

Before he sighs, scuffing his feet against the edge of the trap, a scowl setting on his face.

“This is a trap of urgency,” Chloe says, pushing her hair out of her eyes. Dry snow clings to it, too. “The trap is that they’re betting you want to know now, when things are the freshest.”

“They’re right,” he mutters.

“With a bit of planning I can do a counter trap,” Chloe says, and his eyebrows quirk, just a bit. “Intentionally lay one so that whoever comes sniffing gets locked. Set off theirs from a distance. Find out who it is.”

He leans back, his arms still crossed, but there’s an evaluation there, more analytical than straight angry.

“How much planning?”

33

This time, he teleports them to a warehouse, abandoned in a row of abandoned warehouses, where the sky outside is dark with coal dust and only a few feeble sounds of traffic reach them.

And, more importantly, there’s a full complement of magical components. A spellweaver’s paradise, paint and transporting materials, as well as a too familiar shattered glass cage and a rather rudely disrupted desk.

The whole thing has traces of another human, human wards woven dead into the ground around them, with Killian’s familiar protections written over them.

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