Page 32 of The Girl Who Inherits the Dead

The plastic door slams open, bouncing against the doorframe, and Maison strides in, hair damp and wild, with Gurlien scrambling after him to keep up.

“What did you just do?” Maison demands, and whatever horror or upset he felt earlier is gone from the lines in his shoulder.

“Calm down, I asked her to scan me,” Chloe says mildly.

Maison doesn’t look very calm.

“She succeeded, too,” Chloe says, crossing her arms.

“That didn’t feel like a scan,” Maison says, and he has no leg to stand on, so Delina levels a glare at him.

“It shouldn’t matter to you,” Delina says, arching an eyebrow at him. “Ex, remember?”

Gurlien edges his way past Maison, who’s blocking most of the doorway to peer at Delina.

“Delina,” Gurlien starts, slowly, “do you feel up to a walk around the property?”

After a brief protest from Maison,Delina shakily puts on the magicked rain jacket and this time takes the stupid looking hat, before they all exit out of the plastic door into the night.

It still boggles her mind.

Maison’s quiet, his chin tucked in and his eyes narrowed, and whatever argument is brewing there isn’t going to be good, but she can’t bring herself to care.

Not after he lied to her for five years.

They tromp around the edge of the cabin, and it’s far larger than she thought it would be, reaching back into the forest, a simple gravel pathway around it. Rain beats down overhead, shaking the birch leaves and sending pine needles to the forest floor in the darkness.

There’s still gold out here, but less. It’s on the walls of the cabin, like someone trailed their hand across it while walking, and old footsteps in the gravel, but the rest of the world is thankfully normal.

“Okay,” Gurlien says, once they’re around, facing the vast black open forest behind the cabin. “Tell me what you feel.”

“Irritated,” Delina says, and Chloe giggles behind her.

“I mean through magic,” Gurlien responds, clearly exasperated, like he’s not the one who blacked out that day. “Close your eyes, concentrate, meditate, whatever feels more natural.”

“Just don’t fall over,” Chloe says helpfully. “First time I tried, I fell over.”

Delina eyes her, but Maison shifts, his arms still crossed until he’s right behind her, so she shuts her eyes instead, trying to think past the sensation of rain beating down on the hat.

The wind’s mostly died down, thankfully, and though the leaves shake, they don’t seem distressed. Like the tree is built for this weather.

Cold drips down her cheeks, derailing her thoughts, but she exhales past that, past the wrong sensation that she’s trying to think of something that’s not there. Like reaching towards a missing tooth.

There’s a whisper of something, soft, almost outside of her reach. Like hearing words through a wall, or seeing what might be headlights far away while driving all alone at night.

Her breath puffs up around her, almost palpable in the chill.

“Okay,” Gurlien says, and his wrist is still hurting him. “Without opening your eyes, point where you could tell the dead bird was.”

That’s easy.

Even without her eyes open, there’s something tugging at her behind her belly button, towards the left and deeper in the forest, so she points.

There’s the trademark sound of Maison walking through the underbrush, and though his legs are tired they no longer shake.

She could tell his footsteps anywhere, even without the weird bio-feedback she’s getting from him. He’s brilliant against her awareness, almost outlined, even with her eyes closed.

She breathes out again, reaching out towards the missing thing again, and Chloe’s there as well, a dimmer sort of presence, always moving or twitching, but not nearly as bright as Maison, who almost dominates the environment. Even in the rain and the chill and the dead thing that pulls at her.

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