Page 62 of The Girl Who Only Died Once

“Usually works,” Chloe answers, as peppy as possible. “Fuck off, though!”

“Do you trust the schematics?” He forces onwards, completely ignoring her comment. “Are they from a source that could betray us?”

And therein lies the issue. The answer to that is almost always yes, Chloe can count on one hand the number of people she would trust unconditionally.

“About as much as I trust you,” she answers, and he wrinkles his nose at her, like he knows what she means. “Trusting people is overrated. Getting info isn’t.”

She taps the car, and it sputters in response.

He rubs his face, a surprisingly human motion, shutting his eyes.

“So we can go in now, without the information we might need, but with just the two of us knowing,” she summarizes. “Or we find a hotel room nearby and wait. Or we go back to your house and teleport back in thirty six hours. Your choice.”

It burns in her to give that over.

“There’s an anti-teleportation alarm we passed about eighteen miles back,” he says, because of course there is. “Or else I’d just have teleported next door.”

“Right, because the whole ‘never been there before' is a lie, isn’t it?” Chloe asks, then throws the car into reverse. “Guy said there was a chop shop eight miles down the road, chop shops mean cheap motels. This is bullshit.”

He scowls at her, looking strikingly like the other demon, Melekai, that Chloe almost laughs in his face.

CHLOE (12:32 PM): We’ll wait for the info one town over.

15

Chloe was half wrong. There’s no cheap motel, but there is an incredibly weird one less than a hundred feet away from the chop shop, with a fountain of a wolf head and an actual roller coaster that winds around the building. The tracks of the coaster are coated in rust, cobwebs everywhere, and the fountain is a toxic sort of greenish brown, foaming out of the wolf’s mouth.

It’s still about an hour away from the base, but Chloe sits in the car as Killian spools out his power, picking through the rooms with a scan that feels like someone's pushing on her chest, before he nods at her.

“No traps,” he confirms, and Chloe shivers to get rid of the overwhelming power creeping over her. “Eighteen humans currently in the building, last time a Wight stepped foot inside was about four months ago, no demons in years.”

“Not surprising,” Chloe says, chewing on her lip and staring at the fountain. “One, it’s hideous, and two, that anti-teleport trap. How fast can you make it safe?”

He gives her an honest to god dirty look.

“I mean you can stay wherever you want, I just want someplace to wait and not draw attention,” Chloe says. “My research stays with me.”

Of course Killianfollows her in, trailing behind her like a scowling specter, as she checks in, getting a room.

It’s a far bigger hotel than his eighteen human count would suggest, faux wooden beams on the ceiling and a very real stuffed grizzly bear in the corner, next to a felt approximation of forest trees and a plushie gift shop. The bored clerk at the front desk has wolf ears sloppily glued to his ballcap and a bright green polo shirt as he glumly tells her the hours of the buffet and the pool before handing her the key card.

There’s a kid’s climbing wall, a miniature museum of wolf facts, and a twenty-four-hour access ice cream machine, and Chloe gets the distinct feeling that this place would be overrun with families if it was summer and not the ass-crack of frozen winter.

As it is, despite them being the only people in the foyer, Killian shies close to her, glaring daggers at the clerk who has absolutely no idea, before following a step too near as she walks up the two sets of stairs to the room.

“He was staring at your cleavage,” Killian announces, the moment she closes the door behind herself. “And wrote his phone number on the back of the receipt.”

“Gross,” Chloe says, turning it over anyways. “He’s like a decade younger than me.”

The room is, unsurprisingly, forest green and dark wood, with a garish painting of three wolves over the bed, all howling at a hilariously large moon. Silhouettes of trees adorn the walls,sketched on by hand, the quilt has snowflakes stitched into the hems. The sheets and curtains are camo print edged in neon orange, perfect for disguising stains and discolorations.

If the situation had been less dire and the demon less interested in warding the door, Chloe would love it. The preteen Chloe from the middle of corn fields in Ohio would’ve gone feral over it.

She flops onto the bed, and there’s a souvenir T-shirt rolled up on the pillow, watching as Killian sketches rune after rune on the doorframe. A rune to wake them up if someone touched the knob, a rune to stop people from sneaking in, a rune to stop other demons from arriving unannounced, and even more that she’s never seen before.

It’s exhausting to watch.

“So, your kid,” Chloe starts, after a good forty-five minutes of silence, and he jumps, like he forgot she’s laying there. “How is she caught up in all of this?”

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