Page 42 of The Girl Who Only Died Once

Even though Chloe’s been teleported a few times thanks to Ambra, the shock of being suddenly somewhere else hits her like a slap across the face, and she staggers, her knees buckling.

The demon’s grip on her wrist is the only thing keeping her upright.

“Were you tracking the gun or the bag?” he demands, and Chloe’s head spins.

He took her to some small nook, some abandoned cabin where hot air blows through the cracks in the window and light streams across the white walls, and it’s so much brighter than the cave with the blood and the cave and…

He sighs, an incredibly human action, before gently releasing her wrist.

Chloe scrambles backwards, and she’s still clutching the bag to her chest, the weight of it some sort of strange comfort, as her mind spins off.

The door to the single room cabin hangs off its hinges, swinging open in the wind, and outside there’s nothing but white sand and scrub brush and pebbles. No road, no thrum of cars orairplanes, nothing. A sink sits in one corner, and a cot is pushed into the other, a single hot pad on a table.

All in all, a very easy prison to break out of, but the lack of infrastructure outside makes Chloe shiver.

It’s a prison all the same.

The demon in front of her crosses his arms, expectant.

“I’m not telling you,” Chloe answers honestly, then, “is your name Killian?”

A frown line appears on his forehead, but he nods.

“I was trying to negotiate with that demon, I was trying to convince them, I didn’t want to kill them, I swear,” Chloe babbles, and he raises an eyebrow. “They grabbed me and I panicked. No murder intended.”

“If I could have operated the gun, I would have shot them myself,” Killian says, voice neutral. “But they protected themselves in that circle and nothing I could do could get through that.”

Chloe hadn’t known that the alchemy they put on the gun had done that, but it’s not the most surprising thing about her day.

“Was that cage where they kept…her?” she asks, and her voice lilts upwards, outside her control. “It was horrible, why—”

“Yes,” Killian cuts her off.

“Okay,” Chloe says, then takes a big, gulping breath of air, her stomach souring at the thought of the spirit fox being behind the rusted metal bars.

And she has to get out, somehow. Her current situation is just as important, and if she can’t get herself under her control then she can’t help her friend at all.

“Okay,” Chloe repeats, after another big breath, then tilts her wrist so she can stare at it, at the blood that’s still dripping down onto the dull gray tile. She’s gonna need some first aid, some antibacterial, maybe another tetanus shot, some bandages…

“Did you sleep?” the demon says, completely derailing her thoughts. “It’s been over thirty hours since the Wight scried me, did you sleep at all for that?”

“That’s not important,” Chloe replies automatically, and if she could be sure the demon wouldn’t grab the bag out of her hands, she would set it down, transform the meager first aid kit into something she can use, but she can’t trust that he wouldn’t take the opportunity and leave her there. “I should get back, take me back, I’m not going to get in your way.”

“Give me your cipher for the research and I will,” Killian says, a tremor so faint in his voice that she might’ve missed it.

“So you couldn’t read it,” Chloe ventures, and even though she knows her work, even though she’s the one that tied all the pieces together, it’s a little validation. “No. My research stays with me.”

He regards her, standing back, and it’s almost comical how much taller this body is than Chloe, she has to tilt her head up to keep an eye on him.

“You don’t know the next place to go,” he says, and the same confidence she’s starting to get back makes its way into his voice as well, as he lifts his chin. “You don’t know the next place to go, unless you scan the cage—”

Chloe shudders at the memory of the blood seeping from it.

“—then you are at the same dead end I am.” His brows raise, like he’s somehow got something on her.

Still, the nagging feeling that he’s terrified somehow worms its way back into her thoughts.

She can’t get back, not easily, not without knowing where they are and not without some form of transportation, and he can’t go forward.

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