Page 43 of The Girl Who Only Died Once

“If I die then the research will crumble,” Chloe says quickly. “All way of tracking, everything, gone.”

“Noted,” he says with a nod.

“And you can’t find it anywhere with the college, this is all me,” she says. “They put me in prison for this, you can’t steal it from them either.”

He very obviously weighs her words, finally letting his gaze go to other things in the room, as if observing for the first time where he brought them.

“Someone else had done a reading on the cage, somehow around the demon,” Killian says, and there’s a restless sort of energy to him, like he doesn’t quite fit into the body fully. “The demon told me to mock me. Said they let him.”

“Of course,” Chloe mutters, and his brow twitches.

Chloe eases back, and now that the immediate pressure is gone, the immediate life and death terror, the cuts on her wrist ache, a deep angry throb, and she’s gonna have more scars if she’s not careful.

She takes another step backwards—he’s in between the door and her so she can’t just run out—and kneels down, still gripping the backpack.

This snaps his attention back to her. “What are you doing?”

Not stopping her movement, even though every fiber in her body screams out to, she loops her injured arm through the straps, then slowly unzips the backpack. “Just getting out my first aid kit,” she murmurs, though her heart hammers. “I didn’t know demons without a body could grab someone.”

The focus of his attention drops to her wrist, to the bloody gashes. “They can’t, most people.” It’s a surprising bit of information given without asking for something in return, and Chloe’s been around Ambra long enough to know that she should be wary of unprompted gifts. “I doubt they’ve seen enough Necromancer risen people in their life to know otherwise.”

“Yeah, we’re probably pretty rare,” Chloe babbles, pulling out the neon orange zippered pouch, then with trembling fingerspulling out the sterile wipes. “Any specialty bacteria that could cause infections? Any prion disease or something weird I need to worry about, cause—”

“You’re the second Necromancer risen person I’ve ever encountered,” he interrupts, “and I didn’t injure the other one.”

“Oh, who was it?” Chloe runs with the distraction, tearing open the plastic packaging and flicking the wipe, stretching it and adding to it until it’s large enough for what she needs. “I think I know most of them, they’re my buddies, and—”

“Four hundred years ago,” he says, and she shuts her mouth with a click. “So no, there’s no established care for unfiltered demon flesh injuries.”

There’s almost a hint of sarcasm behind the ever-present stoic fear in his words.

So Chloe just ducks her head, roughly wiping the cuts on her wrist, hissing between her teeth when they sting. Her stomach’s still sour, her head hurts, and her heart pounds unpleasantly through her veins, like she’s moments away from a caffeine crash.

The other demon—Killian, names are important to demons, she’s got to remember that—tilts his head at her, a rather familiar bit of body language from both Ambra and Maison. Even with the terrifying double face behind it, the familiarity is almost reassuring.

But the silence is long, far longer than either of those two would have let it go.

“So we can work together, right?” Chloe babbles, gingerly dabbing at the edge of the worst wound. The edges of her skin are ragged, tinged in black, but the black smears off with the antiseptic wipe.

Almost like the other demon bled into her wounds.

“I’m not gonna be separated from this, you’re not gonna drop me off with the Wights again without the ciphers, I don’t havethe scans, you do.” It’s a terrible idea, of course, and he blinks his reflective eyes at her. “I don’t much care who I’m working with, my goal’s the same, and…”

“You’re volunteering?” he asks, voice dipping low, and Chloe shivers, before she straightens her spine, getting the unconscious response out of her system.

“If we’re going in the same direction, might as well travel together,” she says, as brightly as she can. She’s said the same thing to so many people, convinced so many people to help her out—or receive help—that way. “I can get in and out of demon traps, and unless I’m wrong, there’s gonna be a lot on this hunt. You have a bit more…firepower…than I do.” She waves a hand at him, and to her horror, her fingertips are trembling.

He crosses his arms, still a healthy distance back, so Chloe gingerly pries open the first aid kit, her hand shaking as she pulls out the singular Band-Aid.

It’s hilariously small, meant for a paper cut, so she flicks it to expand it, feeding a bit of power into it, focusing on making it larger, stretching it to fit over the wounds, at least keep them clean until she can have someone look at them, and…

The Band-Aid blurs, but then doesn’t change.

She gapes at it while he just watches her, as she tries again, sinking her mind into the fibers and the plastic.

The air above it blurs feebly, but it doesn’t react.

With a sigh, Killian crouches near her, and she leans back on her heels at the suddenness of his closeness.

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