Page 129 of The Girl Who Inherits the Dead

Most are for her mother, some with brown hair and some with hair gone dramatically gray, all with the same severe expression on her face, all with different names.

There’s one for a pretty dark-haired woman with brown skin and a long braid, her eyes alight with intelligence, and one foran impish young man with skin as smooth as glass and creepily symmetric features.

“Axel and Alette,” Gurlien supplies. “He doesn’t look like that anymore, when he lost his magic, he reverted to his actual appearance.”

“Huh,” Delina says, then pulls out the beautiful leather holster for the gun, oiled and glistening.

Runes are carved into the very leather, decorative and looping, almost a cursive, and Maison swears under his breath.

At her look, he shrugs. “If she had been less insane, she would have been the mind of a generation.”

“Yeah, this is intense,” Chloe says, peering at it, then down at the passports. “She put a ton of protection on these, I’ll have to break them piece by piece to use them.”

“Two days?” Gurlien guesses, and she nods. “Do it while we drive. Maison, you drive with Chloe while she does that, I’ll tutor the rune breaking to Delina today.”

Maison crosses his arms over his chest and stares down at Gurlien.

“I’m a better teacher than you on that and you know it,” Gurlien shoots back, dusting himself off and standing up. “And Chloe’ll be giving off crazy flares while doing those, you can actually mask those.”

36

They pull off at an abandoned rest stop right after sunset, when the sky still glows faintly dark blue, and snow drifts crunch underneath Delina’s boots.

By now, she’s heard of a thousand different ways to break runes and heard the cat meow about as much, so she bounces on her toes once out of the car.

There’s an ache in Maison’s shoulders, but he holds his face carefully impassive as he shakes his hands out. Chloe’s head is pounding from the passports, and Gurlien is about to tear his hair out at how slowly Delina’s learning.

The need to do something she’s actually good at itches underneath her skin.

“Death practice?” she asks Maison as soon as he confirms there’s nobody else at the rest stop, nobody hiding in the bathrooms. “There’s a deer about ten feet into the woods.”

“Good lord,” Gurlien mutters. “Can’t remember a rune larger than a penny, can pinpoint a dead deer in three seconds.”

“Put it into a spreadsheet, maybe I’ll remember them that way,” Delina snips back, and to her horror, Gurlien looks like he’s actually considering it.

Maison coughs out a laugh, before turning around and facing them. “I once put the bill paying rotation into a spreadsheet so she’d pay attention, and it worked.”

“Only after I completely redid it,” Delina shoots at him. “It was horrible.”

Gurlien covers his mouth with his hand for a brief second. “You know, occasionally I forget that you were just completely normal.”

“Rude,” Delina says, before glancing up at Maison.

Maison’s jaw twitches despite the joking, but he exhales out his nose, reaching out and letting his hand rest on Delina’s arm.

“I’ll command you not to hurt me immediately,” Delina says, leaning into the touch, into the comfort.

It’s only been a few hours since she saw him.

“Command me to do something specific this time, too,” Maison says, shaking out his hands again, and it's enough permission that Delina ventures off the little pathway, directly towards the dead deer pulling beneath her gut.

It’s been dead for a while, half its rib cage gone, broken off by scavengers, and the eyes have rotted out of the skull, but the thread of gold remains the same.

There’s snow in its chest cavity, pillowed and soft against the remnants of its lungs. One of its legs is snapped, from before it died, crumpled beneath it.

It’s so involving that Delina barely hears Maison tromp up behind her until he rests a hand on the small of her back.

“It broke its leg then starved to death,” Delina informs him, and he twists his face. “I wouldn’t want to try to bring it back, it’d be too much.”

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