Page 92 of The Girl Who Only Died Once

“Got it, good, thanks,” Chloe says, the moment his power seeps away from the car, leaving her head swimming, but she pulls the car out of the parking space anyway.

A pedestrian gives her an odd glance, like he too could tell what Killian just sensed.

Killian eyes him as they drive past, but the pedestrian doesn’t seem to notice.

“Probably just noticing how bad this car is,” Chloe says, forcing brightness into her tone. “Everyone else was driving something pretty and this car is not.”

He makes a discomfited noise in the back of his throat, tapping his fingers against his thigh, but gives her the directions she needs, pulling them off the highway, onto gravel roads that grumble into dirt, before she pulls in between two trees on a relatively flat pad of ground, killing her headlights.

Snow lays in grimy piles, which means she’s far from the only person who uses this spot.

“Nobody’s parked here in three days,” Killian supplies, as she opens her mouth to say it. “A magician, one of the scientists, parks here to hike on his breaks, I can feel it.”

It’s perfectly cleared of snow and ice, like the winter didn’t exist out here, and when Chloe cracks the door of the shitty sedan open, the air is warm against her face.

Just outside of the little flat surface, however, snow starts to fall, fluffy in the quickly dimming light. Chloe watches as a snowflake brushes against whatever invisible barrier the magician had placed on the parking spot, and it melts immediately, dripping down to the forest floor.

There’s a small line of ice at the border, too precise to be anything natural.

“Ever think about how many problems we could solve for the world, if only we thought about things besides this?” Chloe murmurs, and Killian arches an eyebrow at her. “How much hunger we could solve, how many people we could defend.”

“They’ve tried that in the past,” Killian replies neutrally, and he’s just in a normal Henley and pants, the cold not bothering him one bit. “It didn’t turn out well.”

“Still,” Chloe says, eyeing the perfect line of ice. “I hate it.”

His other eyebrow raises to match its mate. “So in addition to being insane, you’re also a bleeding heart,” he declares, like it’s fitting more pieces of her into place.

“Hey,” Chloe replies mildly.

“You asked someone to kill you to make your life easier, you don’t get to argue that label,” he says, then grins at her, sudden and wild. “Let's get our next trail and tear this place down.”

His hands flex, and even outside of the car, even outside of any enclosed space, his power floods through her, bolstering her, raising the hair on the back of her neck.

When Chloe had been young, she once broke into a barn two miles off the road, the sort of barn that’s barely visible above the fields of wheat, and found a room full of rusted ammunition. The kind of ammunition only seen in the video games she watchedboys play in the rec center, the kind of ammunition she saw in the grim war documentaries her dad watched while drunk.

And in the middle of it was a land mine from some world war or another, spiky, the joints rusted, but something in Chloe’s gut had told her that with the right nudge, the right bit of pressure, it would take out the barn and the wheat field and everything else around them.

The hair on the back of her neck had risen then, just like it does now.

She shifts her weight between her feet, not quite wanting to move but not able to stand still, to watch the bomb go off without her knowledge.

He catches something in her face, stepping closer and tilting his head at her.

“I’m okay,” Chloe breathes, even though her heart pounds. “Just. A thought got me.”

He inclines his head at her, the motion so familiar from both Ambra and Melekai. “You weren’t kept here, correct?”

“Correct,” she says, and her voice is breathy.

“We can always go and destroy those ones after.”

And she realizes it’s an offer. A fulfillment of a favor. That she’s aiding him in this, he can aid her in hers.

That he could offer that power to her whim.

“The main one was Toronto, but thanks,” she says, then nods up at the squat building, barely visible amongst the winter-dead trees.

Towards the tunnel, black in the fading light.

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