Page 132 of The Girl Who Inherits the Dead

They still hadn’t really talked about it.

“Yes,” he says, voice low, and she believes him.

Before his breath hitches, and his hand clamps down on hers.

Around her, the world alights ablaze, his power a brutal red, so bright she can’t see anything else around them.

She gasps, the air ripped from her, but…

Other than her heart pounding, she’s fine.

She takes a moment to breathe, to calm herself, before she tilts her head back up to Maison.

An expression of intense concentration filters over his face, his eyes narrowed, like he’s listening to a wind that only he can hear.

“What is it?” Delina whispers, as if the very magic around her can eavesdrop.

She can’t see Gurlien and Chloe, can’t hear them, nothing.

Maison’s hand gentles on hers, before his eyes flicker down to her, reflecting the light back to her.

Quicker than it happened, the magic falls away, revealing the twilight forest. In a perfect circle around them, all snow and frost is melted, the very pine needles steaming.

He exhales, a slow, controlled sound. “She did another scan,” he says, voice remote. “I masked us.”

Delina blinks out at the circle around them.

“Alrighty,” she says, then slips her finger underneath the rope, untying it with a jerk, and the coils slink off his wrist, slipping into the forest floor.

Maison jerks, blinking hard, and all the normal sensation she gets from him floods back in one motion.

She takes a step back, letting him shake himself back into his body, letting his eyes track over to the destroyed tree, before back to her a little wild.

“That was you masking me?” Delina asks, after a long moment of him staring dumbly at her.

“I…” he shakes himself again, like ridding a particularly strong thought from his mind, before he rubs his face. “Yes. They had her looking for demon activity. Generic scan.” He looks past her, at Gurlien, his face grim. “They have that demon doing blanket scans right now.”

Gurlien and Chloe glance at each other. “Did they find us?”

“She felt there was a demon here,” Maison glances down at Delina. “I showed I was alone.”

It’s all very remote, all very far away, but still, Delina shivers.

“Congrats, you certainly were able to destroy the tree,” Gurlien calls, now gripping Chance hard as the cat tries to wiggle its way inside his jacket out of fear. “Feeling better this time?”

Maison tears his eyes away from Delina, still shell shocked.

“Well, he didn’t hurt her this time,” Chloe says, and she has a fresh rip in her sweater from the cat. She picks at it idly, but her eyes are still sharp. “No gold flash or anything.”

Maison exhales forcefully. “No, I didn’t.”

Delina can’t tell, not quite, how he is, now that his nerves are jangling and his eyes are back to normal, and with a sinking feeling she realizes that it might take years to figure it out. Years to fully understand what he’s going through with each magic change. With each step into a power system that’s been held away from him by the very nature of his biology.

So she tucks herself underneath his arm, pulling him away from the destroyed tree, from the spot of the scan.

He flinches at her sudden touch, before draping his arm around her shoulders, letting himself be steered away, though he cranes his neck to see the remnants of the tree.

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