Page 25 of The Girl Who Inherits the Dead

“Here,” Gurlien says, and she can barely hear him, though he crouches down in front of her, holding a pen light in one hand. “Look…me.”

She blinks owlishly at him, and he shines the light into her eyes.

There’s something off about him, too, besides just the darkness around him. His hands are hurting him, somehow she can tell, and there’s something fucked up with the tendon in his left wrist.

She looks to Maison, wordless, and his brows are drawn together. His feet ache, his legs are almost trembling, and there’s a sharp spike of pain in his forehead, even though she can see no injury.

She reaches a hand up and touches the spot on his forehead, but there’s nothing there to suggest anything.

But it still hurts him.

She can feel it in her bones. Some newfound certainty, like a color she’s never seen before, but is suddenly, vividly, there.

Chloe crouches next to Gurlien, and her boots pinch at her toes, annoying but ultimately ignorable.

“Why does your head hurt?” she mumbles, the words mealy in her mouth. “Your head hurts.”

Maison and Gurlien exchange a glance. Maison had been trapped outside, she’s sure of it. She’s sure of it, there was a circle, and—

She leans away, looking past the door to the bedroom. Not a trace of the magic still exists, nothing’s burning on the ground where he had been trapped.

Rain still blows in from the gaping hole, but it’s normal. Completely normal.

The scribbled rune over the top of the doorway’s gone, too.

The golden thread in one of the pillows lays shredded on the floor, like someone had taken a seam ripper to it.

“Okay,” she mumbles, and Maison holds the glass for her to drink again but she pushes him away. “I don’t want to sit on the ground right now.”

They gether to the couch, Maison holding her up like he did when she sprained her ankle, and her skin crawls the entire time. The moment she’s able to support herself on the couch, she jerks out of his grasp, sitting as far away from him as the couch and her swimming head would allow.

The cutesy living room with the cute couch is absolutely coated with gold. Gold dusts the creases in the fabric, the lining of the pillows, and the cracks in the hardwood floor.

Rain blows through the doorway with every gust of wind, and Gurlien and Chloe busy themselves with hanging a heavy blanket over it as Delina sips water and tries to make sense of the world.

Every little bit of protection her mother had written into this place is gone. Every scrawled rune, every carefully placed ward, all of it.

Even without looking, she knows the one sketched on the bathroom wallpaper is gone.

All the little details threaten to overwhelm her, and she shakily sips from the glass, hyper aware of Maison staring at her, sitting next to her on the couch.

“How’d you get inside?” she attempts to say, though the words come out half garbled.

He catches her hand holding the glass, setting it on the table for her, and there’s even rings of gold around the surface of the table, like they too had been collected with condensation on warmer days.

“Don’t worry about it,” Maison says in his attempt to be soothing, and she shoots him a glare. “We’ll talk later, it’s okay.”

“No,” she says, and her voice is loud even to her plugged ears. “I’m not okay, I want to know now.”

From hanging up the blanket, both Gurlien and Chloe look back at her.

There’s dust streaked along Chloe’s face and Gurlien’s hair is firmly out of place.

“How long was I out?” she asks, the attention overwhelming in the silence. Chance the cat jumps on the arm of the couch, sitting upright and staring at her as well.

“About…minutes,” Chloe says, and Delina blinks at her, still missing words.

“Twenty,” Maison murmurs to her, like he can tell she can’t hear that well. “The wards fell, you convulsed, we stabilized you, then you woke up.”

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