Page 44 of The Girl Who Only Died Once

“Like I asked,” Killian starts, “did you sleep?”

Chloe opens her mouth to speak, then closes it, blinking rapidly at the Band-Aid, then at the glowing eyes and shifting double image in front of her.

He obviously doesn’t feel the same need to fill the conversation as she does.

“You knocked me out for like thirteen hours,” Chloe replies, and it’s weaker than she would want. “I can do a lot on twelve hours of sleep.”

His eyes narrow, and Chloe tries to shake out the bandage again, but it doesn’t react.

“I saw the vault door,” he says, and somehow, his voice is dangerously quiet, dangerous in the way that sends all of Chloe’s alarm bells ringing. “I know the structure of those, that would have taken an extraordinary amount of power, and then breaking the traps would take out most magicians, and there are rings under your eyes. Have you slept?”

“Locks are my specialty,” Chloe protests, “and traps are easy.”

He raises an eyebrow at her, like he’s still expecting an answer.

“Apparently, when you’re raised from the dead, it’s hard to sleep for a while.”

His brows flash up for a split second, the terror evident on his double features, before he sighs, rolling his eyes.

“That’s what I thought,” he mutters, then reaches out and presses his thumb into her forehead.

Chloe recoils back, her shoulder blades hitting the wall, before black rushes into her vision.

Sure, she fights it, gritting her teeth, digging into the wall with her fingers. He’s knocked her out before, it’s a familiar sensation, but…

He wins again.

12

This time, when Chloe blinks her eyes open and sees a blank popcorn ceiling, she’s pissed.

She seethes, staring up at the shadows the texture casts, long in the afternoon sun, and she has no way of knowing which afternoon it could be.

Her mouth tastes foul, like something crawled into it and died, and the pit in her stomach tells her it’s been far too long since the breakfast back at the hotel with that strange man. Her limbs weigh heavily against her, like even moving would take too much effort.

He did it again. The demon fucking knocked her out, the moment she was a bit too inconvenient.

Someone had, at some point, thrown a blanket over her, and it’s scratchy to the point of oversensitizing against her arms and the bandages on her wrist.

Bandages.

She lifts her hand, inspecting it. The gouges ache, some sort of distant sort of itch of new healing, but the bandages are clean and pristine white.

Which means not only was she bandaged while unconscious, she was almost certainly re-bandaged.

“That fucker,” Chloe says aloud. She’s not the most prone to swearing, but some situations call for it.

There’s a shift of movement in the room, and she flops her head over, despite her vision swimming.

It’s a different room than he knocked her out in, it’s not the hotel room back in Jerome Arizona, and the bright white snow outside the window tells her she’s probably hundreds if not thousands of miles away from where she last was.

There’s demon magic everywhere, red and black twisted into protections, as if written on the walls in one continuous motion. Every spare bit of clean white wall is covered in it in small, cramped writing, tying in safety and calm and comfort.

It’s a bit excessive.

And her backpack leans neatly against the side table, also meticulously cleaned.

Instead, the room gives the overall impression of frugal neatness. The carpet is cleaned, if ratty, and the furniture is a few decades out of date, and she can barely catch a glimpse of a kitchenette through the hallway. A pair of bright purple shoes are off to one side, too big to be child sized but too small to belong to an adult, like someone kicked them off and left them where they fell. The skull from before—she thinks it’s the skull from before—sits on top of a few papers on the counter, like a morbid paperweight.

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