Page 34 of The Girl Who Inherits the Dead

This seems to short out his brain. “What?”

“You got through the tree, you can get out.” The microwave beeps, but he’s standing right by it, and she’s not about to skirt by him to get her food. “Why are you still here?”

He rubs his eyes. “Can I answer that after coffee?”

“No,” Delina responds and, for some reason, he smiles just a bit, which makes her blood boil even more. “I own this cabin, apparently, and I want to know why you bothered to stick around.”

He weighs his words, obvious even behind his bleary eyes, for far too long.

“I don’t want a pretty answer, I want the honest answer,” she says, after he doesn’t say anything. “Stop trying to put it into palatable words.”

“Safety, then,” he responds, trying and failing again with the coffee machine. “You’re in danger, I don’t like that, and I’m gonna stick around until you’re not.”

She rolls her eyes, finally skirting around him to get to the still beeping microwave. “I don’t believe you,” she shoots, before taking her frittata and amazing coffee and slamming the door to her bedroom.

She doesn’t emergeuntil she can one hundred percent hear Chloe and Gurlien in the kitchen, and she intentionally makes quite a few shots of espresso for them.

The air of the cabin is charged, but with what she could never tell. Something between eagerness and nerves, between fear and excitement, and all Delina can think about is the dead bird still outside.

Chance the cat is in rare form, batting at everyone’s ankles as they walk by, then meowing pitifully when he inevitably got his claws stuck in Gurlien’s pant leg until he carefully untangled him.

“Okay!” Gurlien says, after the strained conversation comes to a lull and the dishes are put away in the surprisingly modern dishwasher. “Going into town, let's do it.”

Maison’s gaze is once again on Delina, but she ignores him. “I should bring my phone to check in. Tell them everything is fine, nothing to worry about.”

“No,” Gurlien snaps, as Chloe audibly scoffs. “I don’t know the codes anymore, I don’t trust that.”

Maison crosses his arms. “I’m coming, I’m not letting you two assholes be the only protection for this.”

Chloe bristles, but Gurlien waves his hand at that.

“Yes, yes, you’re powerful, we know, that’s not news,” Gurlien replies.

“I’ve worked too hard to separate from them, I’m not letting you blow that up,” Chloe says, and it sounds a bit like a vow. “If I think you’re going to rat us out I will put you in a trap circle.”

Maison spreads his arms, like that’s an insult.

“And I don’t want them to know this place exists,” Gurlien finishes. “The moment they do, then all the research in the basement will belong to them and they’ll bury it.”

“This place has a basement?” Delina interrupts.

“It’s super creepy,” Chloe responds, as an aside.

“I think it’s better that I give them an ‘all clear, this is fine’ than them suddenly wondering why I dropped all communication,” Maison says, and it’s so close to reasonable that Delina squints at him. “The first—and last—time I missed a check in was…not good.”

“When was that?” Delina asks, and he avoids her glance. “No, it was my life, I deserve to know.”

“And what happened to make it ‘not good’,” Gurlien follows up. “Define not good.”

Maison scowls at him. “Delina had a personal emergency,” he reports, “we were out of contact for two days because the mountain had no signal.”

Delina blinks at him for a few seconds. “Do you mean when my dad broke his ankle up at the Horse camp?”

He nods, though Gurlien scoffs.

“They didn’t let me see my mother for three months,” Maison continues, quieter. “They didn’t let her outside of the compound and see the sky for the entire time.”

Chloe and Gurlien recoil back, and Delina stares at him, hard. Maison just scowls, crossing his arms and not looking at any of them.

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