Page 38 of The Girl Who Only Died Once

No other piece of equipment—her bag must be beyond the twist and turn in the mine wall —just the gun and her scarf. The scarf is neatly folded, creases pressed, and the gun shines in the beam of her flashlight.

That. That’s a trap.

She steps over the threshold, sticking to the edge of the antechamber, keeping her eyes on the gun.

It’s her scarf, the one she kept on her after all those years, obviously cleaned of any dust and blood.

And there has to be a trap on it. Has to. Some lure, some way of tracking her, something that’ll happen if she grapples for it. It’s too neat, it’s too convenient, it’s too useful.

Even from afar, she can tell her enchantments are still in place, untouched. It would still shoot through demons, shoot through shields, everything.

And it has to be a trap.

Swallowing hard, Chloe pulls out her phone, and even where she had signal just a few steps outside, there’s nothing.

Her friends would tell her it’s a trap as well.

So Chloe skirts around the gun, the weapon, towards the back wall, swinging the penlight over it.

It’s perfectly flattened sandstone rock, sleekly carved to a sheen with such precision that a spellweaver must’ve labored over it for ages, but a thin seam collects dust, like they couldn’t get everything to perfection.

A power tool and some time could’ve gotten it there.

Instead of scoffing, she just grips her pocketknife, running her fingers down the seam in the wall. Sandstone isn’t meant to be this polished, it damages the structural integrity of thecrystals, but the college isn’t known for sacrificing beauty for function.

She presses into the seam, flakes of sand crumble against her fingertip, pattering onto the floor. Sure, if given enough inspiration, Chloe could probably do something with the grains, but stuff that small is rarely terribly useful.

In between one moment and the next, gold blooms across the surface, as her knife digs into something critical, fanning it out before the door, where it glimmers before settling into a handprint shape of gold dust to the side of the seam, two thirds up the wall.

Chloe wouldn’t have been able to see that before.

Her mind shies away from it, ever so slightly, of thinking of it head on.

But it’s human magic, obviously so, some alert spell left there by the creator of the place, showing where things have been touched.

“And it’s not our demon buddy,” Chloe mutters, then presses her hand in the exact same place, reaching up well over her head to do so. Her palm is much smaller than the handprint there, but a bare trace of a tingle sparks up against her skin, before the door groans, twisting on its axis.

Chloe takes a step back, the door completing its turn, but the pen light doesn’t pierce the darkness behind it.

Chloe thumps the penlight on her leg and increases the brightness, but it still doesn’t shine beyond the doorway.

Which means it’s hiding something, some sort of concealment.

Another illusion spell.

Chloe bends over and grabs a handful of the flaking sandstone, then tosses it into the room.

It vanishes the moment it crosses the threshold, but no sound of it hitting the ground meets their ears.

So. Another trap.

Chloe tosses a glance back to the gun, then shines the penlight onto the piece of paper. The demon’s coordinates are still thousands of kilometers away, unmoving.

Which means she just needs to take down this spell and go inside.

It’s the same sort of danger that she felt staring at Alette, right before she died. It’s the same sort of danger she felt, peering over the edge of the platform in the locking pits, about to knowingly descend back into her worst nightmare.

And Chloe’s dealt with danger before.

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