Page 156 of The Girl Who Only Died Once

“Describe it to me.”

She tries not to squint at it, as if looking directly at it would cause it to disappear. “Something iridescent, something watching.” She blinks, fast, the hair on the back of her arms prickling.

He straightens, all at once back into the stance of a warrior, as if the soft moment didn’t happen, and his chin lifts.

“It’s…” Chloe trails off, and when she breathes out again, she could swear she could taste it. “That’s not any surveillance I’ve ever seen.”

“Good,” Killian replies, silky low. “That man must’ve manipulated the local spirits into the protection. Bound it to be a sentry, unable to rest, unable to do anything but observe and sound an alarm.”

Chloe doesn’t know exactly what that means, but the same flicker of light hits the edge of her vision again.

“So another thing to break out,” she replies, a little well of horror inside of her. “Another little stake in this.”

“Your capacity for mercy will never cease to amaze me,” he murmurs, then raises his hand and….

The branches of the forest around them creak, the leaves of the birch trees rustling, and Killian’s power creeps along the mud of the floor, swirling around Chloe’s ankles and seeping into the moss and the loam.

On the edge of her hearing, there’s a soft sound, almost a squeak, before something akin to a sigh and Killian lowers his fist.

“There,” he says, and the easy relaxation is gone. “It’s asleep, and it’ll stay that way until long after we’ve left.”

Chloe hadn’t heard any alarm, but still she shivers.

“Freeing it would absolutely set off alarms right now,” he says, but there’s something solemn in his tone. “So it’ll sleep, and either wake up free or wake up without any knowledge we were here.”

The woods don’t quite look so pretty anymore, the shadows deepening, the world almost tilting.

“I thought this was Zoel’s territory,” Chloe says, rubbing her arms.

“Even he wouldn’t get this close unless one of his people got taken,” Killian says, almost brusk. “He may be backed by the heir to the Frisse knowledge and base, but he’s not stupid to go against a force that could imprison him just as easily.”

“I guess it’s useless to say that’s ghastly, right?” Chloe says, attempting a smile to him, but in the dimming light his face is carved of stone.

It’s easy, suspiciously easy. Even with the warning spirits, there should be far more traps.

Far more things to stop them than just rows of muddy trees.

“What do you think,” Chloe murmurs, as they pass yet another spot where it’d be damn convenient to lay up a trap with nothing there. “Lazy or was our path fully cleared?”

Killian’s lips twitch, like he wants to find her funny, but the situation is too dire. “I don’t know which is worse.”

He hasto knock out three more spirits by the time the sun has set, and when they get to the last one Chloe can barely make out a suggestion of a child’s form lying prone in the mud.

The base has no outside lights, no way to predict how close they are, until very suddenly the rows of trees end, revealing a small clearing with a squat brick building in the middle.

Killian twists his hand, something subtle, and a thin sheen of a shield warps around Chloe.

There’s no windows, no doors, and the roof is one solid sheet of metal with no creases, and Killian’s brows furrow as he observes it. The building halfway lilts to the side, not on a foundation, the loam slowly destabilizing it. No security cameras, no obvious forms of surveillance.

And yet, it’s meticulously clean, no weeds or sprouts or blackberry brambles in the clearing. No grass, no pad of concrete, nothing.

Wards and traps flicker at the edge of Chloe’s awareness, sunk into the mud around, the biggest indicator that there’s an active presence here.

They’d be simple to break, now that she can see them, relying more on people striding over them without awareness than any deep complexity.

“That one will send someone into hypovolemic shock,” Chloe murmurs, pointing to the mud. “There’s a reversal spell in the brickwork, but they’d have to know where to look.”

“Don’t even try it,” he murmurs back.

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