Page 45 of The Girl Who Only Died Once

And Killian the demon stands, leaning casually against a bare wall, arms crossed and head tilted to watch into the other room.

“Where are we?” Chloe demands, and her head pounds with the words.

“Northwestern Canada,” he responds idly, like the information doesn’t cost anything. “A safe house.”

Ambra’s talked at length about her safe spots, the places that she—and all demons— instinctively run to in times of need or in times of rest, so the concept is not entirely lost on Chloe.

She’s never taken Chloe to any of them and got downright weird when Chloe asked, but she gets the idea.

There are neat strips of magic laid out on the desk, sealed neatly in a shimmering case of power.

Chloe peers at them from the bed. She’s not someone who’s an expert at magical traces, even with her new ability to see demon traces, but something thrums in her gut to say that these are from humans.

Who, she couldn’t even begin to tell.

“How long did you knock me out?” Chloe asks, pushing herself up, but her arms wobble all the same. She shifts so she can lean against the wall, shoving the rest of the blanket off of her.

“You slept,” he emphasizes, “for an additional ten hours longer than I knocked you out.”

“That doesn’t answer my question,” Chloe says, trying and failing to be cheerful about it.

“I aimed for five hours, you shrugged off the compulsive sleep after three and a half.” He’s still watching outside the room, like there’s something out there that takes up more of his attention, and that might be more interesting than anything else. “You must be very powerful.”

“Don’t say that,” Chloe murmurs. “I once burned off my eyebrows because I added one too many molecules to gasoline.”

“That’s a story,” he grumbles.

Instead of trying to say anything else, Chloe pokes at the edge of the bandage, peeling it up. It’s a great job, far better than she would’ve done herself, and she absolutely does not want to give him that credit.

“I have to check in with people,” Chloe says, finally, after he continues to watch the other room like a hawk. “They’d not exactly be happy with me dropping off the face of the earth for thirteen hours.”

“Your electronics are plugged in the bathroom,” he responds idly, like he’s merely reporting normal information. “It was making noise, but I turned it off.”

Chloe didn’t even know demons could do that, but she refuses to feel grateful.

“Fine,” she says, swinging her leaden legs around to the side of the bed and wobbling, which snaps Killian’s attention to her. “Gotcha, thanks for the sleep, don’t do that again.”

“Unless your biology is different from other humans, you’re going to need food and water soon,” he says, and once again, there’s the trace of fear, and Chloe’s not usually one to poke at people’s phobias but she’s real tempted here. “I want to decode my scan today and head out tomorrow, and a completely burned-out alchemist would be useless to me.”

“Thanks,” she shoots at him, then rubs her face again, grabbing at her research bag.

All the scrolls are still there, neatly rolled up, the anti-grime protections she put on it still in place, no trace of human or demon blood whatsoever.

She refuses to feel grateful for that.

“Any food in this safe house?” she asks dryly, letting her fingertips trail on the papery edges of the scrolls. They thrum under her touch, warm and familiar.

“Some,” he replies neutrally. “It’s stocked for someone else’s tastes.”

“What, Demons don’t like peanut butter?” Chloe asks, then rakes her hand through her hair. It’s thoroughly messed up, completely out of its bun, black strands hanging everywhere.

And she’s getting nowhere exchanging barbs with him, so she stands, clutching the backpack to her chest, and stumbles into the bathroom.

It’s tiny, the light yellow and somewhat flickery, but the blue plastic countertop is pristinely clean, the mirror spotless.

Even in the bathroom, along the edge of the mirror, more protections are written in the same cramped hand. Spelling out safety, how people can’t scry in—those ones are new—and how only two people are allowed in through the protections without some sort of modification from him.

So he had to modify it to bring in Chloe.

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