Page 157 of The Girl Who Only Died Once

Chloe raises an eyebrow at him, then crouches down, still keeping in the tree line, as Killian stalks along the edge of the clearing, circling the building.

There’s a broken ward, flickering in and out of her view, a piece of craftsmanship that would have caused Chloe to weep in other situations, now slashed to pieces with the crudest magic imaginable.

Like someone took a flamethrower to a carved wooden gate.

Killian catches her gaze, strides closer, toeing the edge of the slashes, before giving her a confirming nod.

It’s rather small for a facility to be cleared to hold something as valuable as the spirit fox.

And the simple fact that there is no door.

“How deep do you think it goes?” Chloe murmurs, and even despite him being across the clearing, he quirks an eyebrow at her. “This can’t be all of it, there’s not enough.”

“You dig three inches here and you hit water,” he replies at full volume, because he doesn’t have to be wary of things like people overhearing him. “It would require a massive amount of useless energy to stabilize it.”

Chloe’s broke into enough things to know that the best defense is appearing like it would be too much effort to be something important. That the best hidden spots are in plain sight, where nobody would think that it’s worth the effort to hide.

And the college knows that, too.

“Useless energy could practically be their middle name,” Chloe says, flashing him a bright smile that leaves him blinking, before she squints harder at the small, squat building, attempting to filter out the protective wards.

It’s harder than it used to be, but she lets Killian stalk around, only half minding him as he unravels a few spells, as he pokes into the base level defense. Alarm spells ring around theplace—easy—and the mud is annoyingly full of organic material, befuddling Chloe’s usual scans.

But everyone has to be able to get inside the building, which means someone’s left a trace, which means she can re-create it.

And whoever set those spirits as prisoners, whoever slashed up the ward, is somehow most likely still there.

There’s an anti-teleportation ring, meaning that nobody would be able to easily get in that way. No loose bricks, no cracks in the cement, no seams in the roof.

“Chloe,” Killian murmurs, stalking back to next to her. “Something is going wrong.”

She flicks a glance to him, and her gaze sticks. Here, in the dim gloom of the setting sun, he appears more demon than man, hunger lined in every slope of him, and fear etched even deeper.

In that fear is something bone deep that Chloe knows. That Chloe understands. That they’re so close, that the thing they’re looking for could be within their grasp, if only there isn’t something holding them back.

Chloe places her palm on the soft mud of the ground, thinks deeper. The water underneath is sludge, muck, and she tries to follow it with her mind until it hits a solid barrier, impassable and immutable.

So yes. The base goes underground.

An alarm glimmers in her awareness, already set off by someone not them, blaring sadly across the mud, and Chloe pulls herself back, breathing deeply.

Killian stalks back over to her, hauling her up by her shoulder.

“Alarms are already off,” she hisses, and mud drips from her palm. “Alarms are blaring and being ignored.”

Never a good sign.

So Killian jerks his chin towards the building, towards the unmarked surface. “So we go loud.”

It’s an odd echo of Chloe’s time in the Toronto base, when she coached Delina how to cut the stasis wards and all hell broke loose.

Chloe knows how to go loud.

Before she can put words to the idea, Killian clenches his fist and the bricks on the corner of the building—away from the exsanguination ward—explode outwards. Shards of brick pepper into the tree line, dust billowing over the mud, catching in more lines of invisible traps and magic.

Revealing…wreckage.

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