Page 86 of The Girl Who Inherits the Dead

“Because I will,” he continues. “I swear I will.”

“I don’t know,” she breathes, and her heart pounds, every part of her body suddenly aware of him, of how close he is.

They had always had chemistry, and she can’t forget that.

“I don’t know,” she says, clearer this time, lifting her chin, attempting to project some sort of control in the situation, even though her hands tremble. “Maybe start by actually teaching me what to do with this?” She slashes her hand towards the red mark in the gravel.

He leans back, and she’s not sure if it’s disappointment or relief in his eyes.

“Will you be able to use this with the defenses?” Delina asks, after a long silence in the mist.

“Yes, Delly, yes I can,” he says, still frustrated. “This is something that way more advanced people have cast far worse, and you managed something like this with your first try.”

She nods at that, unsure what to do. “So when you expected me to be useless in this, you didn’t expect this?”

Finally, there’s a hint of a smile, just a hint, beyond the frustration. “Serves me right for underestimating you,” he replies, then shakes his hands out again. “Training you is gonna be intense.”

She likes that he’s talking about that, despite all the strangeness. “I’ll have to knock you on your ass in the forest some more.”

He bares his teeth at her in a grin, surprising her, before the expression fades into something more clinical. “The next part is demon magic, not human. Watch.”

She nods once more, stepping back.

He eyes where she stands, then, in between one blink and the next, twists the magic in his hands over the red marks on the ground.

Power surges up from the marks, engulfing his hands, and her breath catches in her throat as he deftly, somehow, writes with it in the very air, red and black shimmering in the mist. It coalesces, solid, a warping smoky wall of magic, impenetrable to anything she can see.

All in all it takes only a few seconds, but the power reflects in his eyes and, for a split second, her heart jumps.

This is the Maison her mother called vastly powerful.

Until he smiles at her, releasing the magic in his hands, and abruptly she stops seeing the shining gold, and there’s nothing in the air. Nothing but the uninterrupted mist and the chill.

“Alright,” Delina says, unnerved.

“Anyone who doesn’t know exactly where the cabin is will cross this line, get confused and turn around,” Maison says, dusting off his hands and examining his now-invisible handiwork. “Unless they’re specifically on the lookout for this, it’ll work, and this is an obscure one.”

She swallows down the sudden adrenaline in her system. “Okay.”

25

The next day dawns full of frost, sparkling in the weak morning sunshine, and Delina throws on the magicked jacket once more and tromps outside, her chipped mug of coffee warming her hands.

Sure, they got frost in Prescott, but not like this. Not where every surface glitters with crystals, where every spruce needle catches the light, and the dead bird is…less.

She’s not sure if it’s because she’s getting better or if more time has passed, more bugs crawling, and the hint of moss somewhere along the bones.

Even still, she finds herself wandering over to it and staring down at the small carcass anyways.

It’s…just a bird. There’s the puncture wound, with white bone exposed and shimmering with frost. The black feathers shine, and the eyes are beady and frosted over.

Some bug has been eating at the torn flesh around the wound.

Delina crouches next to it, not touching, but picks up a stick to prod it.

Cold still echoes through it, cold and the last remnant of terror, but less of the gut punch than it was before. There’s something…there…though, and it itches at the back of Delina’s mind, next to the certainty that she could make it fly again.

The ethics of being able to bring something back from the dead are mind boggling, and for a few moments it weighs against her, crouched there in the early morning frost. That somehow with her mother’s letter, she became some sort of wretched arbitrator of life and death. That whoever around her could possibly be raised, based just on her whims.

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