Page 44 of The Girl Who Inherits the Dead

“Can I text my dad?” she asks, waving his phone at him, and his face twists. “Just let him know all is good, so he doesn’t worry.”

“They absolutely track my texts, I wouldn’t,” Maison says, sighing. “If we had thought ahead, we could’ve established a code, but…”

“Wait, they track your texts?” At his nod, she wrinkles her nose. “Even when you were on your business trips?”

He nods, blankly, then winces.

“When I sent you those…”

“Probably,” he says gingerly.

“Ew!” Delina says. “I don’t want some gross guy from Atlanta to see my nudes!”

He rubs his face. “I don’t think they read every text, just when…when things went wrong? I think?” It’s weak, and he knows it.

“Gross,” Delina informs him, and his lip twitches up into the barest hint of a smile before he gets it under control.

The waitress swings over to take their order, and throughout the entire time, three dots appear on the phone, then disappear, as if the person on the other edge is typing, then decides not to press send.

“We’re going to have to figure that out,” Maison says, leaning forward on his elbows over the table. “What we are going to do with you without…putting my mom in danger.”

Which is another horrible aspect of this.

“Would you have worked for them if your mom wasn’t held?” she asks, and he’s already shaking his head before she finishes.

“Never in a million years,” he says, voice low, like it’s a confession. “The moment they would have let me out of their sight as a teen, I would have run away and never looked back.”

“Never would’ve dated me, never would have moved in with me?” Delina continues, and his jaw twitches. “Probably never even looked at me twice.”

“Delly,” he sighs, then stares out at the tiny cafe, at the single waitress and the only other table with one other person. “One sec.”

With his fingertip, he traces something, some symbol, into the wood of the table, and it glows briefly, before all sound around them slips away.

The waitress still taps her heels against the tile, the other person still folds the daily paper, but no sound reaches Delina’s ears.

“Neat,” Delina says, before she can stop herself. “Will I be able to do that?”

“Probably not,” Maison says dryly. “Maybe if you worked for ages at it, but it’s highly unlikely. Necromancers are, supposedly, one purpose only.”

“Ew,” Delina says, and he cracks a smile, briefly, before it falls. “Just saying, that would’ve been useful in the apartment above the bar.”

“And if I hadn’t been forbidden from doing exactly that, I would have,” Maison replies, and it’s so close to their normal banter that it hurts.

The waitress swoops by with the food, with Maison’s pastrami melt and Delina’s club sandwich.

“Sorry about your mom,” Delina continues, after a few moments of him watching her and her attempting to find the food palatable. “If I had known it would put her in danger or anything I would’ve talked to you first.”

Finally, he nods, his face solemn. “I wish you could meet her,” he says, wistful and a bit sad. “I think you two would get along.”

There’s nothing to be said at that. It’s a nice, pretty statement, the sort of statement she wants to believe but finds it out of her grasp.

The sort of statement she would have treasured before.

They eat in the awful, artificial quiet, until all that’s left is the fries she would usually steal off his plate and the lettuce she picked off.

“Did you ever meet your dad?” Delina asks, finally. “The…demon one?”

“Yes,” Maison says, eager, like the silence broke at him too. “Three times. They weren’t…exactly pleased about my existence.”

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