Page 148 of The Girl Who Only Died Once

“I can hear you,” she interrupts, then braces him upright as he almost lists over. “Just you, not myself, not the wind, not this.” She snaps her fingers, and still nothing. “What did you do?”

“I…” Here, he pauses to gasp in a breath again, like the air is still too thin and his lungs are still rebelling, but at least this mind is working once more. “I tore a strip of magic onto myself to break the suppression he had.”

From what Chloe’s gathered from Terese, that’s not comfortable.

“I was holding you, so you weren’t going to die,” he says, and his eyes are back blinking blankly to the sky. “And the moment—the moment—it broke, I teleported.”

“Okay,” Chloe says, and her skin crawls from being unable to hear herself.

“The…too strong of magic, too close, breaking, can do things to humans,” he says, shaking his head then squeezing his eyes shut from what appears to be a spike of nausea. “Temporary,” he adds, helpfully.

Temporary is good. Temporary means she won’t be stuck like this, means she’ll hear her friends’ voices again. Means she’ll hear the click of a lock, the sound of the wind.

“Why can I hear you?” Chloe asks, silent to herself, and her throat closes up on herself.

The research, she needs to get back to it, not sitting in the mud.

“I’m not audible,” he says, almost disgruntled, his eyes still squeezed shut. “Seanna’s at her mother’s. If he broke my defenses, he can…”

There’s too much, and her heart breaks, just a bit, at his obvious pain. At his panic, at his distress.

She knows all too well what it’s like to become suddenly helpless.

Still in the mud, she shifts closer to him, pulling up his head and settling it in her lap, and he curls around her, clutching at Chloe’s middle.

“We need to get her safe,” he says, and tremors run through his shoulders.

“I don’t know for full demons, but abominations are wrecked when they do the death bubble on themselves,” Chloe says, and despite the mud, runs her shaking fingers through his hair.

“Did you just call it a death bubble?” he mumbles.

“I saw one get blood running out of her mouth and eyes with that,” Chloe says, and he squints up at her, like he’s unsure where she’s going with the train of thought. “What do you need to get better?”

“What did she?” he mumbles again. “I assume it’s Ambra?”

“No, she’s too smart to do that,” Chloe says, and he coughs out a laugh. “It stopped another demon from taking her body and then she passed out.”

His shoulders still trembling, his breathing calms down just a bit, and she runs her hand through his hair again, despite the instinct to tell him to get up, to get back to the research, to get back to Seanna.

A gust of wind slams into them, the grass bending over from the force, but Chloe still can’t hear it. Her years in the prairie taught her that wind like that causes a rustle, a dull roar from the accumulation of hundreds of miles of uninterrupted travel.

Without that warning, it takes her breath away.

“Chloe,” he starts, haltingly. “Are you talking about the original Terese?”

Well, there’s that.

“Yeah,” she says, and his face spasms. “She’s nice.”

“Would she and Ambra protect Seanna?”

And in the mud, with the wind stinging at her eyes, Chloe thinks.

“I know she’s vulnerable,” Killian continues, but his eyes flicker to hers and hold. “I know other demons have tried to possess that body. I swear, I swear I will give her protection. I will put a giant line in the sand to forbid anyone from touching her. I will reinforce that base so strongly that Alette can have iron control of who comes in and out. They will have the full force of all my power and all my resources if they take her in until this threat is gone.”

The answer is almost certainly yes. Terese rescued a dog just because she saw it needed help. Alette took everyone in when she didn’t have to. Maison, back when she thought of him only as Freddy and as the aloof and introverted Half Demon, would sit with scared children in silence for hours back at the college.

Ambra would take her in a heartbeat, if only to spite the memory of Seanna’s father.

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