Page 134 of The Girl Who Inherits the Dead

“Delly,” he starts, and she bites back a snap at that, “we’ll switch cars, you’ll drive with me.”

“What, Chloe has to do her passport making and Gurlien is…definitely asleep again,” Delina says, before sighing. “It’s just my brain being mean, it’s no big deal.”

“Sure,” he says, “it isn’t. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make it easier on you.”

In the single yellow light, with the snowflakes settling in his soft brown hair, she finds herself a little bit without words.Like the silence has stolen them from her, like the chill and the flatness of the world robbed her.

He shifts, staring out at the blank black nothingness around them, as Chloe starts the pump working and begins to fill the two cars.

“I thought this would go away,” Delina says, hushing her voice to match the falling snow. “That I wouldn’t be this way now.”

“What, depression?” he asks, almost skeptical. “You’ve had that for what, since you were twelve?”

“Yeah,” Delina says, staring again at the vending machine, before feeding a dollar bill to get a singular bag of chips. “Thought, with the biotrap and actually, you know, knowing more about myself that it’d go away.”

She can feel his eyes on her, heavy.

“Plenty of magicians are depressed,” he says, rubbing the scruff that still hasn’t materialized into a full beard yet. “Magic has…very little to do with brain chemistry, near as they can tell.”

It’s logical, but it still smarts against her hope. “I just thought…”

Her voice breaks, and she screws her face up.

“Hey,” Maison says, resting an arm around her lower back and tugging her in so that her head rests against him. “It’s fine.”

She sighs.

“You didn’t know, you couldn’t have known, it’s okay to be disappointed,” he says, tucking his chin over her hair. “But you don’t have to be alone.”

The vending machine clunks out the bag of chips, and in the snow and the silence, she wrestles with her heart to believe him.

“You would think, with all the weird advancements you guys have, with the changing faces and the free gas and the bringing people back from the dead, that there’d be something already solved.” Her voice sounds whiny, even to her own ears, and sheshuts her eyes against the snow. “I think I’ve been too busy since this happened to actually be depressed.”

He says nothing, just leaning his cheek against her hair, like he always did back in their condo in Prescott, and she buries her face into his shoulder, for that brief little bit of comfort.

Comfort she’s allowed to have.

“Wait,” she says, pulling away just enough to read his expression. “Was the weird bond thing how you were able to know when I was like this?”

He opens his mouth to answer, then closes it.

“And here I thought you were just a good boyfriend,” she says dryly, and he has the gall to roll his eyes.

“I can’t, you know, pick out ‘oh this one is depression’ and ‘this mood is pissed about the weather’ and ‘this one’s because she forgot coffee,’” he says, and she squints at him. “Just general moods. I thought Gurlien was picking a fight with you the entire drive.”

“Nope, just my brain,” Delina replies, then breaks the contact long enough to grab the bag of chips. “I’m okay.”

He huffs out something halfway between a sigh and a laugh, then follows her back to the car.

38

They don’t stop until the sun has risen over the flat farmlands and Gurlien directs them to a lone cabin, hidden behind a windbreak of trees about three miles off the main freeway.

It’s more of a shack than anything else. While the roof stands steady above them, the wind whistles through the slats in the walls and dust piles in the corners, soft and powdery.

“Wait,” Chloe says, as Delina peers inside, and Maison puts out his arm to stop her from stepping inside.

“What is it?” Gurlien says, and the cat is now zipped up in his jacket, creating an odd bulge on his chest.

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