Page 16 of The Girl Who Inherits the Dead

“And me?” Delina asks, finally taking a bite of the PopTart. “What am I?”

“We won’t know until the bio trap, and I don’t pout,” Gurlien breezes in, already wearing a neatly ironed shirt. “I have appropriate emotional reactions to stimuli.”

Chloe and Delina just glance at each other.

“And Dr. Frisse had libraries full of research on how to make someone powerful,” Gurlien continues. “I read the report on you, they locked your magic up because nobody had any clue what she did to you.”

Her dad had said she had a seizure.

“They think something weird,” he continues, like it’s not emotional. “Like she deliberately tried to make you…dangerous. They didn’t want to deal with that, with all the training and guidance and making sure you weren’t a psychopath, so…locked away.”

Delina stares down at her thumb and the silence stretches on.

“Her magic responded to the coffee machine,” Chloe says, instead of anything else.

Gurlien’s eyes light up.

Delina endsup making five cups of coffee while the two of them make a bunch of remarks that might as well be Latin to her, before she shuts herself back in the room without either of them.

The spray-painted circle is still there, tucked neatly in the corner, with no chance of her accidentally stumbling into it.

And she’s here, in a cabin owned by her actual mother, without so much as a basic internet connection, with nobody but two practical strangers for company.

And some sort of nebulous magic she may or may not have.

Her mother wanted her dangerous.

She flops onto the overly soft bed.

So dangerous that an organization she’s never heard of locked it away and sent her minders and boyfriends to keep herhappy. So dangerous that her mother did some weirdness with a P.O. Box instead of picking up the phone and calling her.

So dangerous that her boyfriend of so long had been faking it the entire time to just make sure she didn’t figure anything out.

“Oh, he was never gonna propose,” Delina says aloud to the room, to the exposed wooden beams and the furniture that looks like it was bought to be cutesy. “It was just going to be us living and lying for forever and him never telling me.”

Saying it doesn’t make it feel better.

From outside the room, she hears the cat make a warbled meow, and the soft sound of someone replying to it.

Delina spreads her fingers over the quilt, but her thumb doesn’t react to that, so she sits up, pulling the textbook and the will out of her suitcase and laying it on the bed, before someone raps on the door.

“No,” she calls out.

“I’m just saying we’re gonna drive into town once the weather breaks to get cell connection,” Chloe says, muffled through the wood. “Are you going into the bio-trap right now?”

Delina glances to it. “Not right now.”

“Okay cool.” Footsteps thump away from the door.

The letter gives her nothing else, no new revelations, and the will is even worse, a clinical description of bank accounts and properties and everything else. No hint of the danger, no hint of anything.

She stares back at the completely useless cell phone.

The first number she had put in was her dad’s. The second, Maison.

It says something about her, she decides, laying there on the quilt, that she’s way more torn up about Maison than the possibility of magic. Even after all the bullshit with the coffee machine, even with the pager, it still seems…not real.

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