Page 79 of The Girl Who Only Died Once

“I need to get one of those for…the child,” Killian murmurs, raising a brow in interest.

“Yeah, well, it’ll also explode if I try to brute force it open,” Chloe says, still using the bedsheet to touch against the slick glass surface. “It’ll send a location ping—like the one I put on mine for teleporting—to whoever’s on the other line and let them know something happened.”

His eyes flicker up to hers, then back down to the phone. “I’ll walk it to the other side of town and destroy it,” he offers. “The explosion won’t hurt me, it’ll send them in the wrong direction from us.”

“They’ll still know something happened,” Chloe says, then rubs her eyes. “Sure. Go ahead. Or hide it under a rock or something. Put it in a store like he dropped it. Let them do a search somewhere else.”

She’s tired. It pulls at her skin and at her eyes, seeping underneath her bones to something deeper. Something worse.

He palms it again, frowning at it, then gives her a wry smile. “All I could tell is it had been altered.”

Makes sense that the demon wouldn’t have the same fluency in it.

Still, he stands, and the bed shifts without him there. “I’ll take it as far away as logical. Stay here, in case they send someone else.”

Chloe swallows down the sudden fear that they might.

“Please,” he protests, seeing her face. “My wards are better than that.”

“Stay safe,” Chloe says, and her own voice is small once more.

19

Chloe tries to sleep, she really does, but her mind is still woefully conscious, buoying above anything resembling rest. Her thoughts spin around the idea of someone spotting her, someone recognizing her; around the walls of the small hotel closing around her, the ward shining bright even when she closes her eyes; around the odd loneliness of being where she is.

She’s been alone, of course, spent months without living with another person several times in her life. Had avoided people who actually knew about her for years after breaking out of prison, and hadn’t really had a stable roommate until she sorta adopted Gurlien and he found them the cabin.

But these few hours, with the lights flicked off and a hotel that creaks more than it should, eat at her, opening up a pit of something she can’t quite see across.

And somehow this bed, the exact same size as her bed back at the cabin, is an overwhelming expanse.

It’s bullshit.

She flips the battery in her hand, flicking it between the penlight and back, casting shadows onto the patternedwallpaper, but it does little to soothe herself, and only pulls at the exhaustion in her mind even further.

She once spent an entire week in an apartment and didn’t see a single other person, and these few hours are almost torture.

She considers texting people, striking up a conversation with her friends, see how Delina and Maison are dealing with the attack, but frustration stays her hand in that as well. Stops her from attempting to reach out. It’s so late where she is that it’s now late back in Northern Washington, late enough at the compound that any sane person would be asleep even there.

She flops over in the bed, right as a scraping sound hits the lock, barely on the edge of her hearing, and she grasps the battery tighter before Killian steps through the door, not even turning on the light.

His footsteps fall quietly on the carpet, like he’s sneaking back in, before he huffs out a breath.

“I was gone for four hours,” he says, still not turning on the light, but crossing over to the window, tracing a finger along the wards. “There isn’t a reason why you shouldn’t be asleep.”

“Don’t knock me out,” Chloe preempts, and she can only see his silhouette against the dim streetlamps shining from the street below.

“Did the necromancy change you that much?”

It’s a weighty, meaty sentence, the sort that people only say when they want to end an argument on a bad note.

“How should I know?” Chloe grumbles, watching his profile in the shadows. It’s a strong profile, one that would flip her heart in other situations.

He hmms in the back of his throat, then twitches the curtains closed again, some small magic flowing from his fingertips in the action, and the room grows even dimmer.

Chloe flicks the battery into a penlight again, and he squints, but she gets an awful sense he’s evaluating her.

“How protective are your abomination friends?” he asks, instead of anything she thought he’d say, sitting back down on the bed next to her. “I’m not talking friendship, have any tried to initiate bonds with you?”

---