Page 140 of The Girl Who Only Died Once

GURLIEN (12:41 PM): Everyone accounted for in the Frisse base.

GURLIEN (12:42 PM): They’re saying everyone in the Atlanta Base is dead.

Chloe exhales, squeezing her eyes shut, showing Killian her phone. He doesn’t look at it, his eyes still focused on her.

“Fuck,” Killian mutters, and a laugh pushes its way out of Chloe, completely out of her control.

“Yeah,” Chloe says. “Fuck.”

34

After a brief stop at the safe house to set the trap, Killian whirls her away out west, stopping underneath a snowy spruce tree and a scent so familiar Chloe gets homesick.

But he tugs them into a cave—barely an alcove—and her ears pop with the now usual surge of passing through demon wards.

They’re older than his usual, and he immediately futzes with them, but the air is starkly warmer than outside of it.

“Where are we?” Chloe asks, staring out at the rather unpleasant sleet pelting the trees.

It’s so close to the beginning of winter weather..

“Mountains above Auburn,” he mutters, spreading his hand across the shield, and glimmers of power swirls at his touch, beautiful, imbedding into the barrier and bubbling up to reinforce it.

“Did every demon have a place up here?” Chloe asks, shuffling back and sitting on the cold rock that’s roughly cut to resemble a bench. “Isn’t this entire mountain range full of Wights?”

He sighs and shakes his head, but the beginning of a smile is on his lips. “There’s the main line of the coast about thirty miles north. It draws us, just as it draws Wights and spirits and ghosts.”

And humans, to a lesser degree, with most of the ley lines leading near ports or cities or wherever people come together.

“Plus, good camouflage,” he continues. “This close, one small fluctuation of power goes unnoticed. There’s so much energy in the very air it masks everything.” Another brief smile, and she gets to see it. “I think this is how the first Necromancer stayed so safe.”

“Oh, I know the answer to that,” Chloe immediately says, tucking her hands underneath her legs to possibly warm them from the chill.

“We all knew she existed,” he continues, raising an eyebrow. “We could see everything across the world, whenever she flexed. Nobody could pinpoint her down.”

“Fascinating,” Chloe says, and he wrinkles his nose at her. “I’m sure Lyra would love to know that.”

This time, he rolls his eyes at her, before he flicks a hand towards the ceiling of the little alcove and light glows, some sort of invisible, flickering fire, filling the stones with warmth.

Chloe must’ve sighed, for he offers her a slightly apologetic smile.

She cranes her neck up, just like she used to do when sitting outside the cabin when they first got to it, when they were first determining how to live there and the trees seemed forbiddingly huge to Chloe.

If they’re so close to the line, then they’re within an hour of the cabin. At least. Maybe less, depending on where they are in the mountains. Less than an hour away from the place she called home, the place she settled for among the longest of her time outside of the college. The place she existed, where shesharpened skills, learned how to tromp around in the woods and live with another person.

He glances back at her, giving her a funny little smile. “Close to home?”

“Apparently,” Chloe says, and the longing creeping into her voice surprises even her. “It’s…it was a place where I could just be.”

Just existing is a luxury for people like her.

He tilts his head, the almost universal demon body language for considering. “When we’re all done, I’ll get it for you.”

“Get it?” Chloe asks, before her commonsense kicks back in. “Oh, it’s super compromised, they know where it is now, it’s on their maps, there’s no going back from that.”

He shrugs one shoulder. “Sure there is.”

“No, if they know of it, then…” she trails off as he grins smugly at her. “Demon bullshit?”

---