Page 47 of The Girl Who Only Died Once

“So you’ve met one of the abominations,” he replies, which is rude. “No, not for me.”

“Careful, she’s my friend,” Chloe says cheerfully, and, unless she’s imagining things, Killian…relaxes.

His shoulders drop, the lines of fear disappearing from his forehead, his face smoothing out.

But he doesn’t say anything, no matter how much she squints at him, so she fills the bright orange kettle up with water, sitting it on the stove, because of course the microwave in this kitchen looks ancient and that it would take forever to boil water.

The handle of the kettle sparks at her, additional runes to stop someone from burning their hand on it.

Opening a box of the pocky, she crunches on it as she pulls her phone out again, ignoring all the messages and going straight to Ambra’s contact.

CHLOE (3:07 PM): Do you know another demon named Killian?

AMBRA (3:08 PM): Do you think I exchanged names with other demons frequently?

CHLOE (3:08 PM): Fair.

AMBRA (3:09 PM): I know the names of about three other demons, tops. Solitary creatures, remember?

Of course, now that she’s without the control of the college, Ambra is one of the most social people Chloe knows, always preferring to at least be in the same room with one other person when Gurlien isn’t around, but she’s not going to point that out

“You have a demon’s phone number?” Killian asks, skeptical, like he can read over her shoulder from that far away.

“A few, actually,” Chloe says, blinking up at him and deciding to count Melekai, who has never texted her or called her once. He mostly skulks in the background, anyway.

Again, more miniscule relaxation, this time around his eyes.

“And they let you go on this chase alone?”

“Rude,” Chloe says, chomping on a piece of pocky and hoisting herself to sit on the tile counter, since the counter doesn’t have any runes preventing it. The bandage on her wrist protests the motion, pulling at her skin, but she ignores it.

“I’m not someone that has people willing to come along,” Chloe says, and his brow furrows. “They’ll text, they’re not going to come along.”

Gurlien’s not even texting right now, and she pulled him out of the cult mindset.

“Hmm,” he says.

“Neither of them wants to go to places where the college might be lurking.”

“And they have phones,” he mutters, almost like he’s jealous.

“Turns out there are advantages to being an abomination,” Chloe snips back, even though she’s one hundred percent sure that Ambra would not approve of the statement. “Where’s the next scan leading to?”

In an instant, the relaxation is gone, his shoulders stiffening and the lines appearing back in his forehead, and despite the fact that he’s in a different body than the first time she met him, the expression is the same.

“I can’t decipher,” he says, his voice clipped. “I know it’s somewhere in North America, somewhere east and south of here, but the fox wasn’t held in that cage long enough to give me a proper trail.”

Chloe swallows, the pocky suddenly dust in her mouth. “She should never have been held there,” she says, and her voice wobbles to the point he raises an eyebrow at her. “It’s too small, too claustrophobic, the air circulation was bad.”

He tilts his head at her, like he’s figuring something out, but he definitely doesn’t share it.

“So give me the scan,” Chloe says, and his face twitches. “We have my research, let me find it.”

He nods to the kettle, which is barely starting to steam. “You’d break one trap and fall over.”

“Rude,” Chloe repeats, “do you have any coffee in this weird collection of food?”

“She’s not allowed coffee,” he immediately protests, like that’s unreasonable, before blinking at her like he divulged it to her under duress. “There’s green tea.”

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