Page 59 of The Girl Who Inherits the Dead

And the creeping sensation of the dead fly, still in the plastic pill case on the table.

She pops her eyes open. The dead fly.

The fluorescent lights above her shine, painfully, too much, and she flops her arm over to cover her eyes.

“Delly?”

It’s Maison’s voice, quiet and subdued, and for a few moments her mind rejects it. He had been bleeding, she felt him die, she felt his brain stop and his heart still and everything go wrong.

“Delly, you need to sit up.”

She tilts her head over in the direction of his voice. She’s laying on the bare concrete of the basement, a spray-paintedcircle of gold wide, encompassing almost the entire room. The tables are pushed to the side, the bookcases pressed against the walls, as far away as possible.

Maison’s sitting cross legged, a few good paces away, and his eyes glow red at her.

She glances to the circle, it’s exactly like the one that had been in front of the door when she first got here.

There’s blood still on Maison’s cheek, like he had missed a spot while washing, though he’s pulled on a new shirt and a hoodie somewhere along the line. His lungs ache, bone deep, and the skin across his chest itches and tugs at Delina’s awareness.

“You died,” she says, dumbly, then makes a face at the taste in her mouth, pushing herself up to sitting.

Her head swims, and she blinks through the dizziness.

“Is this a demon thingy?” she asks, pointing to the spray paint. “The trap?”

Maison nods, his expression something awful.

He’s sitting in there with her, which means he can’t leave.

“You’ve been out for about three hours, we got you back here. Gurlien and Chloe are now putting every anti-demon ward on the house they can possibly think of, carving it into the very forest floor.” His voice is still soft, like he’s expecting volume to hurt her. “You are very, very lucky.”

There’s a pallet of water bottles, helpfully put in the circle with them, and Delina makes an aborted motion towards them, before Maison scrambles over, pulling one out and opening it in one smooth action.

“You were dead, though,” Delina says, after a long glug of water. Her own head aches, her fingertips tremble, weak.

His face twists. “Yeah.”

“The…other guy, he did something, he killed you.” The more she says, the further away it feels. “I saw it go through you, you died.”

Maison rubs his face, and there’s still blood underneath his fingernails. “And you’re a necromancer, and you panicked.”

She stares at him for one long moment. “You’re welcome?”

He huffs out an approximation of a laugh, but it hurts the skin on his chest. “You could have died so easily right then, it’s just luck that you’re not dead.”

She crosses her arms, and his fingerprints where he had gripped her and pulled himself in front of her are still there, almost bruises.

They had obviously tried to clean the blood off of her, wiping off her hand, though her shirt still sticks uncomfortably to her skin.

For a long moment, the only sound is the buzzing of the lights overhead.

“You should eat, too,” Maison says, gently. “You put so much power into me your body shut down.”

Food sounds like the opposite of what she wants to do, but he tosses her a pop tart and she rips open the cheap wrapping, her hands shaking.

“Is everyone else in danger?” she asks, her voice smaller than she wants. “Are they okay, too?”

“I don’t think Gurlien’s gonna sleep tonight, his face is one mess of bruising,” Maison reports, “and Chloe is way more twitchy and spooked than she wants to say. But they’re only in danger of being collateral damage, and each ward they put down decreases that possibility.”

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