Page 36 of The Girl Who Only Died Once

“Yes,” Chloe says firmly, and she glances at the paper, where the coordinates are still blank. “I’m feeling better, I ate, I…rested…why isn’t it working?” she asks, brandishing the paper to the Wight. “I know myself, I can absolutely do this.”

The Wight doesn’t so much as smile as she exudes an air of smugness. “Do you think I’d tie Wight magic to a human?”

And as easily as before, she taps on the paper, and coordinates bloom anew.

Two sets of them.

Chloe sucks in a breath.

The backpack remains where the demon was last seen, just a few scant kilometers away in the silver mine, and the demon himself is…thousands of kilometers away.

Leaving her research behind.

10

Getting to the mine is the easiest part of all of this. Chloe drives the rickety jeep onto the rocky dry riverbed, following the only set of tire marks embedded in long dried mud. It leads them to a rickety wooden door over a dark damp cave, a few piles of unused mining equipment off to the side, long rusted and abraded away by the wind.

Chloe squints at the entrance, jerking on the parking break with way more effort than it should take, and the very appearance wavers.

“Illusion spell, right?” Chloe asks, and the Wight nods, absolutely impassive in the face of dust. “Human made, looks like a year out from any maintenance, security standard, all that jazz?”

“Is there a security standard?”

“Almost all from the college have the same three components,” Chloe says, throwing her elbow into the door and all but tumbling out onto the pebbles that made up the impromptu parking lot. “Like…see.”

She reaches into the edge of the spell, testing it, and it’s hilariously weak, as if made from a light cotton webbing rather than anything actually secure.

Easy to break.

So she twists her hand in it, shattering the spell, and it unspools outward, transforming the doorstep into a fallout shelter style vault door, complete with a circular locking mechanism.

“So it’s that easy for you?” The Wight scorns, scuffing her toe at the edge of the clean concrete step. “Just grab spells and break them?”

“The standard ones,” Chloe says, wiping off her hands on the pair of alchemied pants. “That,” she jerks her chin at the door, “is gonna be the fun part.”

The Wight glances at the door. “This door has been impassive to us for three decades. You don’t know what you’re going to find beyond that.”

“Excellent,” Chloe replies, then approaches the vault door. “What do you think, 24 bolts? Glass lock protector?”

“What?” the Wight asks, and Chloe’s really good at telling when she’s being annoying, but so close to the next clue and so close to her research makes her heart pound.

“How many people do you think held those keys?”

Chloe approaches. Despite the illusion spell and all the environmental protections those usually allow, there’s a fine layer of dust on the mechanisms, with only a few fingerprints to mar it.

So it’s not commonly used.

And a demon would be able to just teleport inside of it without any issue.

“Eight,” the Wight answers simply. “College lead, three project managers, four assistants.”

“That is far too many,” Chloe murmurs, splaying out her fingers above the metal of the vault door, millimeters from touching it. It buzzes against her skin.

Protected against brute forcing it, any impact energy would reflect back onto the importer in a focalized point, impaling most.

That’s a neat one.

“Doors like this, there should be only one key. Maybe two,” Chloe continues, letting her skin skim along the metal, sun-warmed despite the winter. “It’s almost cruel to have more than that.”

---