Page 22 of The Girl Who Only Died Once

“Before or after the eighteen emails from your boyfriend?” the second asks dryly, and Chloe shuts her eyes out of annoyance. “Or is he still too busy tracking that hot spellweaver?”

“Fuck off,” the first says idly, like this is a common conversation. “He does not think she’s hot.”

“You sure about that?” Combat Boots asks, before the footsteps clatter down the stairs to the basement.

So they found the basement, that’s for sure. All the research, painstakingly left over from the insane Dr. Frisse, now firmly in the college’s hands.

Delina would be furious.

Careful, Chloe pushes herself up to standing, digging out her supply of batteries from the bedside table.

A flash bang to take out one, steal their car, drive away and get to town before they can find her, grab another car, make her way to Bellevue, call her friends, Ambra can teleport her to the next spot…

“But seriously, Ottawa!” the first voice calls back.

“I don’t belieeeeeve you!” the second answers, muffled from the stairs.

By their voices, they could very easily be younger than Chloe, and that hurts, a bit, too. That the college just continued after she left, hurting more people.

And here she’s going to at least cause temporary harm to one of them.

If the demon was gonna knock her out and leave her someplace, why the hell did he have to leave her someplace so difficult to break out of.

Come to think of it, how did he get past the demon circle Chloe carved into the forest floor, back when they were worried about a demon coming in after Delina? Did all the protections get so destroyed that even that was easy?

Quickly, Chloe taps the battery in her hand, elongating it into a bog-standard military flash bang, the sort used by too many police forces across the country. They’re unpleasant, they might get some hearing damage, but they’ll live.

She pulls out another one, flicking it into the shape of a pepper spray canister, and holds that in her other hand. Ambra had laughed at Chloe when she showed her she could do that, back when they were first back in the compound with them and recovering. Gurlien had called her a show-off, which of course she was, but still.

The footsteps tromp back up the staircase, followed by the familiar clatter of scrolls getting dumped on the table.

“Are we still on the g-h shelf?” the first voice asks, plaintive. “Still?”

“Yes,” Combat Boots says wearily.

Oh, so they’re cataloging, as if Chloe and Gurlien hadn’t done so themselves in their first few months here and left behind a detailed description of each shelf. As if they couldn’t trust their documentation.

Careful, Chloe flattens the flash bang until it’s malleable in her hands, then squeezes her eyes shut.

She doesn’t want to do that.

Which only gives her one other choice.

So she straightens, pushing herself up to standing, and plasters a smile on her face.

She’s absolutely talked her way out of worse scenarios. Talked her way out of trouble, convinced people to let her go, convinced people that the college meant more harm than good. If it’s just two people, two already annoyed people, stuck in a cabin with no cell signal and an overwhelming amount of incomprehensible documents to catalog, she can prey on that, convince them the college lied to them—which it has—and get them to let her walk out of here without trailing.

She wouldn’t have lasted this long outside the college system if she couldn’t.

So, giving herself a chance to count to three, she grips her doorknob like she’s done hundreds of times before, and swings the door open.

Immediately, both people jolt up from sitting. Combat Boots—with a sweet round face and two golden needles in her hands—almost snaps to attention, her back ramrod straight, so close to fear. The first voice—who looks like she’s barely twenty, she stillhas acne—has loups over both eyes, a hunch in her shoulders, and one hand grips one of the scrolls.

“Hi!” Chloe says suddenly, and Combat Boots gapes at her, her mouth open. “There’s actually a full and complete catalog in the Z section, you don’t have to do everything.”

The first one recovers first. “Who are you?” she says, and she taps her hand on the scroll, her fingertips grazing a pencil, and it transforms into a knife, stiletto sharp, like she thinks Chloe won’t notice.

“Well,” Chloe says, and Combat Boots obviously glances past her to check out the room she just left, like she’s expecting more people to appear. “My name is Traci, I lived here for a bit,” she says, then gives them the biggest smile she can muster. “Don’t mind me, I’m just passing through, but thought you’d want the tip!”

---