Page 42 of The Girl Who Inherits the Dead

Maison hates when she turns that tone to him, and his jaw twitches from it, before a hint of the dimple appears.

Like somehow, she answered correctly.

“And this?” Somehow, he digs his fingertips into the ribbon itself, and it shreds apart and…

Detonates.

The pavement underneath him cracks, dust and pebbles floating upwards, his hair lifting in the air. A root beneath the foundation snaps, sudden and green.

A warping, blinding sphere of gold surrounds him, his clothes fluttering around him, and somehow…

Everything in it, everything but him, is dead.

Every bug beneath the surface, every small microorganism she hadn’t even known existed, dead. The root, dead. The fly buzzing around his head hits the cracked pavement, brilliant against her mind.

“Are you okay?” Delina blurts out, completely against her wishes, as Chloe drags Gurlien further away, against the hollowed-out shell of the church.

Maison blinks at her. “Yes?”

“Okay, cause you killed a lot of bugs with that,” Delina says, then, before he can stop her, steps forward and reaches out, tangling her fingers in the warping sphere of gold.

Maison flinches forward, but stops himself.

“That was foolish,” he says, still within the sphere. “Never touch anything magical without knowing what it can do.”

“What, should this hurt me?” Delina shoots back, and the gold threads are warm and pliant against her hand. “Feels like yarn.”

“Oh my god,” Gurlien mutters, barely on the edge of her hearing.

Maison cocks his head at her, eyes narrowed, as she twists a strand of the gold in between her hands. “We need to have a long conversation about basic magical safety,” he says, but there’s something close to wonder in his voice, as she weaves the gold in between her fingers. “But that should not be that easy for you.”

It’s not a rebuke, this time, at least.

“Then why’d you do this?” Delina asks, and even though she’s outside of the amplification circle, the bubble still glows bright.

“Because if you see anyone else but me do this, you need to get out of there,” Maison replies, voice dipping down low. “This is the basis of what demon magic looks like, and if you see this, you’re in danger.”

There’s something serious on his face, something that gives her pause, so she bites back the sarcastic comment, bites back what she wants to say out of hurt.

“Why’d all the bugs die?” she says again, staring down at the dead fly at Maison’s feet.

“Because any living thing—”

“Besides Necromancers! We proved that with the last one!” Gurlien yells over.

“—that’s in here when I do that, dies.” Maison’s eyes glint red, sudden, and her heart jumps. Like she’s looking at a predator. “This isn’t something you mess around with, this isn’t something kind and friendly, this isn’t just a new curiosity for you to chase after. Demons wreak havoc on people around them, they take lives without any respect for it, and any time you use that power, you become a beacon to them.”

She stares down at the ground, at the cracked pavement and the pebbles still stirring in an invisible wind around his feet.

“And to you?” she asks, finding no other words that aren’t hurtful. “Do I look like a beacon to you?”

Surprise filters over his face, before he grins, sudden, foreign and strange. “You do when you do that.”

13

Despite his attempts to scare her, Delina’s back to feeling hollow by the time Maison takes down the bubble, one thread at a time, and she sits against the wall of the shell of the church, watching him.

After a few minutes of inspecting, then spraying over the circle to invalidate it, Chloe sits next to her, watching as well. Gurlien is inspecting Maison’s work as close as he dares, and the pinched off expression is back on Maison’s face.

---