Page 52 of The Girl Who Only Died Once

“So most of my demon communications are with an abomination,” she starts, turning the chair so it faces him. It squeaks along the tile. “But do you sleep?”

“Yes,” he replies, still staring up at the ceiling. “Not how humans do, but yes.” His eyes slate over to her, evaluating. “Do the abominations?”

“About as much as humans do,” she answers, figuring it’s neutral enough. “As much as they try to protest otherwise.”

“There’s only four, right?” he asks, and once more there’s the undercurrent of fear. “Just four abominations?”

“Depends on how you would define it,” Chloe says, leaning back against the chair, though her alarm bells ring. Ambra’s spoken about how terrified she is about facing another demon head on, Chloe doesn’t want to betray that. “But I know two. Maybe three, depending how you look at it.”

So there was at least one that nobody knew about. One demon tied into a human body, one demon of questionablesanity that may or may not be a danger, may or may not be in captivity.

Chloe’s heart hurts, a little, at that.

He blinks at her, almost lazily behind the glowing eyes. “Humans should have never attempted to tie them together.”

“Yeah, it doesn’t seem to work out well for anyone,” Chloe agrees.

“The one who died, who tried to destroy the world…I knew them before,” he says, and Chloe doesn’t know why he’s divulging this. “Terese, they called themselves. Young, intelligent, bright eyed, angry, and excitable.”

Chloe’s skin crawls. Terese-the-person is scared, terrified of everything, and terribly powerful, and to hear about the demon side of that equation…

“It made them insane,” Killian continues, like he didn’t notice her sudden fear. “Any sense of their mind, gone. The intelligence, their way of weighing reason, gone. It’s a nightmare.”

“I’ve heard that,” Chloe says, and he lifts his head to squint at her, as if her voice betrayed her.

“And then they died,” he says, and there’s almost a hint of mourning in his words. “Ripped apart by a Necromancer, fully embroiled in petty human dramas and experiments.”

Chloe doesn’t have a response to that, other than that it’s most likely accurate from his point of view. That he wouldn’t see the wake of destruction, the humans left dead in the furious path.

“Which abomination do you know?” he asks, once more eyeing her, like it’s a test.

Chloe folds her hand on the maps to hide her unease. “I’m not sure she’d like me to tell you.”

The corners of his mouth tilt upwards. “I mean the living ones no harm.”

“That’s not been the case with everyone,” Chloe responds, and the sun is setting outside the grand windows, the snow catching in the light of the safe house. “I’m not going to betray trust.”

There’s another miniscule relaxation, like she answered correctly.

“I asked her, she didn’t know your name,” Chloe volunteers, and the hard plastic chair isn’t exactly comfortable, but the crawling up her arms definitely tells her to not go closer.

“It’s not like we share names often,” he replies dryly. Then, with a narrowing of his eyes, he asks, “Why are you a tomb breaker?”

She scoots the chair back a bit.

“It’s not a normal area for young Alchemists to go towards,” he continues, waving his hand back and forth almost lazily, some sort of gestural equivocation. “Spellweavers, sure, if they think that way, but I saw that vault door.”

“Natural proclivity,” Chloe answers, and she knows she had just been almost grilling him, but now the turn of attention has her wrong footed. “Didn’t get discovered by the college until late in life, pre-teens or so.” She shrugs. By then, she had already learned how to lockpick most doors out of sheer boredom in her small drive through town, including the back door to McDonalds and the gas station safe. People had found it utterly adorable when she did it as a tiny black-haired child, less so when she hit the beginnings of puberty and people thought she might be doing it with the intent to actually do some harm.

At that point, discovering her alchemy almost felt like a letdown. That the reason she was so good at something so fun was some innate talent, not her trying hard and working hard to get better.

He wrinkles his nose at her, and it’s so similar to some of Ambra’s expressions that Chloe mentally files it away into an “apparently demon expressions” folder.

“Then they found out I could pick locks and the rest is history,” Chloe continues, when he does the staring thing that both Ambra and Melekai do when they’re waiting for more information and annoyed they’re not getting it. “Bam, immediate classes in breaking locks and traps, super fun for being thirteen when everyone else is learning neat stuff like battle magic and glamours and illusions.”

Killian nods, like the answer satisfies him somewhat, before the door down the hall creaks open.

Immediately, he sits bolt upright, flashing a shield in the doorway to the spartan living room, opaque and warping, before giving her a slightly apologetic wince and teleporting away.

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