Page 121 of The Girl Who Inherits the Dead

Teenage Delina had asked for one, in the midst of a depression spiral fueled by school stress and a lack of friends, but her dad had none. Not even one secreted away, like he had the pager.

“I met her, once,” Maison starts, and she twists to glance at him. “Before…before I knew you. I was sixteen, and she wanted to survey all the ‘viable demon projects.’” He grimaces, and she gets why he didn’t tell her earlier. “She wasn’t terribly impressed with me, as a project goes.”

“From what I know, that’s probably a good thing,” Delina replies, but there’s still so much emotion, so many things in her chest that she cannot give name to. “What was she like?”

He visibly weighs his words. “Cold,” he says, finally, and it’s so different from the pictures in the book on her lap. “You could just…tell that she wasn’t satisfied with her life, that she wanted to be in control of more.”

It’s a somber view of someone who died at the hand of one of her experiments.

“At the time, I was…” Maison shrugs, obviously uncomfortable. “Temperamental? Not the best at control?”

“You were sixteen,” Delina says flatly.

“And everyone thought that by then I would be teleporting around the globe but my grip on demon magic is faint at best,” Maison says, before glancing back up out the window, as if a task would make him feel better. “It wasn’t a great time for me to try to impress someone, that’s for sure.”

“I wasn’t impressing anyone at sixteen, I can assure you that,” Delina says, before her hand smoothes over the fabric book again. “I can’t believe she made this. I can’t believe she kept this.”

Maison doesn’t look at her. Instead, he’s looking at the crib, at the side table, at the room at large.

“She…she really wanted me.”

There’s a moment of quiet, before Maison wraps his arms around her, pulling her into a hug, and she presses her face against his chest.

When this is all over, when everything’s figured out and she’s settled, she’s going to cry. She can feel it, can feel the pressure, detached from herself, in the background. It’s not immediate, it might not even be until she fully relaxes again, but it’ll happen and it’ll be an ugly cry.

After they figure out if they need to hide away, after they rescue Maison’s mom, after she figures out some place to live and exist outside of the College’s control. After they help out Chloe and Gurlien, after they assure everyone’s safety. After the threat to her life, after they figure out how she can get a grasp of her powers without calling someone down on them.

After everything.

“If we have to run from this cabin, I’m going to take this book,” she says, and feels him nod against her.

“I wish I could teleport,” Maison says, and she pulls back enough to raise an eyebrow at him. “It’s…the basics of demon magic, and one that’s always been locked to me. But…it’d be damn useful right now.”

She cracks a smile at him, at the ridiculousness of the sentence, at how wistful it is and how utterly true that it would be incredibly useful at the moment. “There’s still the dead bug in the basement if you really want to,” she informs him, and he rolls his eyes.

The emotions recede, somewhere back into manageable levels, until she’s able to breathe without the knot in her chest.

Before the phone downstairs rings again.

This time, there’s a pop on their end on the phone, and Maison stiffens again, pulling away, his eyes ablaze in red.

“Wha—” Delina starts, before Maison puts a finger up to his lips, gesturing for her to be quiet.

Another click and Maison slowly unfolds himself, silently opening the attic door once more.

Same woman’s voice. “Frederick?”

Chloe hisses through her teeth. “Ma’am, do you need us to call the police?” Still, even with her words, there’s a note of triumph in her voice. “If they’re going to hurt you, I’m sure the police can help.”

“They can’t get to me,” the woman says, and for the first time, something steely enters her voice, like the pitiful pleading is an act. “Tell me where my son is.”

“I don’t know any Fredericks,” Chloe says, and Maison quietly drops himself from the attic, landing lightly on his toes. “Sorry, ma’am.”

This time, the line goes dead on their end.

Maison reaches up to help Delina down, just in time to see Chloe leaning back, her eyes alight.

“I got it,” she says, then swallows. “Toronto.”

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