Page 20 of The Girl Who Inherits the Dead

In between one moment and the next, before she can tell herself that this is a bad idea, Delina throws her shoulder into the car door and strides out into the unpleasantness.

Rain immediately soaks through her shoes, squishing in her socks, but she stomps over to the stone branch.

Even despite the chill, Chloe’s breathing hard, twin splotches of red on her cheeks.

“You just did that?” Delina asks, stooping down and picking up a chunk of stone.

It even has the same pattern of tree bark as all the spruce up here.

“It shouldn’t be this hard,” Chloe grumps, which is again, not the point. “I should be able to just transform it and sweep it out of the way.”

Delina turns it over in her hand, brushing her thumb against it, and it snaps at her, staticky.

Chloe straightens, blinking through the rain sheeting down on them, her eyes wide. “That’s just from the one rune?” she yells, and it’s almost difficult to hear her through the weather.

“Yeah,” Delina says, staring at the stone. The stone that, completely and inarguably, used to be relatively alive wood.

Chloe sighs, staring at the tree, then back at Delina. “There’s no way I can do this entire thing,” she says, like it’s a moral failing and not incredibly fucking intense that she turned tree into stone right in front of them. “We can try to walk out there, but it’s a twenty-minute walk from here to signal.”

“Yeah, no,” Delina says, peering at the stone.

Dimly, she’s aware of Chloe stomping over and repeating the same to Gurlien, but this…this is even stranger. Despite the coffee machine, despite the pager, she’s holding something in her hands that used to be something completely fucking different.

And Maison is some flavor of this fucked up too and never told her.

She kicks at one of stones near her foot, sending it skittering along the pavement.

The tree trunk towers above her, even on its side, branches splaying out every which way. It’s a pine type tree, the type not common in Arizona but seemingly everywhere here, and even in the pouring rain it’s fragrant.

The needles are still vividly green.

She stares at it, at yet another barrier in figuring things out. Yet another thing in the way of her actively figuring out who Maison actually is, what they need to do to prepare, everything.

“Fuck this,” she says in the pouring rain, then walks back to the car.

She streamspast the rune circle painted on the front porch, unlocking the door with the same key with the red ribbon, throwing her shoulder into the door until it tumbles open.

“How…” Gurlien mutters, before both he and Chloe sidestep it to get in the house.

Delina pays him no attention, instead dumping her uselessly soaked rain jacket on the bench next to the door, shucking off her shoes, before she whirls and faces them.

“I’m going to ask just one question, and I want you two to answer plainly,” she says, and they both give her a wide-eyed look. “Am I in any danger if I step in that stupid circle of paint?”

“Bio-traps aren’t stupid, they require an insane amount of knowledge and precision,” Gurlien starts.

“Maybe,” Chloe interrupts. “We don’t know what it does, just that it’s locked to one person or bloodline. What,” she directs that to Gurlien, “that’s what she asked.”

“Could Lutes, or Fred, or whatever his name actually is lift that tree?” Delina asks, pointing back in the vague direction of that road.

“Devin probably couldn’t,” Gurlien answers. “It’d be child’s play for Frederick, and Lutes could get around it.”

“Devin could,” Chloe argues. “He had no problems with barriers in school.”

“Right,” Delina says, ire seeping into her. “You two went to school with all these people.”

She glowers at them as Gurlien uses an honest-to-god satellite phone to radio in for road clearing, and Delina’s practically vibrating from the frustration of all of it.

Chloe throws herself on the couch, disrupting the cat who skitters under the armchair. She had been silent the entire drive back, her face as stormy as the weather outside.

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