Page 37 of The Girl Who Inherits the Dead

When they had first started dating, Maison had been so obviously twitchy at parties, though that’d calmed down completely after just one year of being with her.

She had just thought he was sheltered before undergrad. Her dad had told her she helped him come out of his shell.

“And then nobody’s seen him for years, we all thought he was doing fancy things in France with research scientists,” Chloe continues. “Which made sense, he’s way more powerful than the average student and he didn’t like us anyways.”

“Nope, just in Arizona,” Delina says. “Working on graphic design in a small town.”

Though who knows how much of the graphic design job was real and how much was just a smokescreen to prevent her from figuring things out.

“And…got it.” Chloe taps a few more beats, then gestures for Delina to glance in. “Carolina Schmidt, kept in cell 82C on the fifth basement of the Atlanta branch.”

The screen is grim, just a diagram of an architect’s drawing, with numbers over way too small of rooms.

“He always had business trips to Atlanta,” Delina says before she can stop herself. “One a month.”

All this time, he was just visiting his mom.

“Here.” Chloe double taps on the diagram, bringing up a too-short paragraph. There’s a small picture of an unsmiling woman, hair gone white, and if Delina squints then she can see the hint of Maison’s nose and eyebrows in her facial features. Her eyes are gray, just close enough Maison’s that it suddenly sends some homesickness through her.

“Carolina Schmidt, age 58, gave birth to half-demon at age 23. Monthly visitation, library use allowed, no research facilities. Must remain warded at all times.”

And then there’s a long string of numbers, completely incomprehensible.

“Those would be the wards placed around her, I think half of those are demon related, don’t know the other ones,” Chloe says, poking at the computer screen, her lips pressed together. “So that part checks out.”

“That’s it, they keep her locked up because she gave birth to him?” Delina asks, sitting back, as Gurlien and Maison walk over, both carrying multiple coffees.

Chloe immediately spins the computer to Gurlien, and Maison only glances at it, before blinking away, his face pinched. He passes a cup to Delina, and though their fingers graze, there’s no snap of whatever magic had happened before.

Gurlien disinterestedly clicks on the computer a few times, though his eyes are sharp. “All this tells us is there’s someone with that name who had a Half Demon,” he says. “Not that it’s you, not that your sob story is correct.”

“I have pictures of me and her on my phone,” Maison replies, his voice tightly controlled. “I don’t even have to touch the phone, I’ll talk her through the check in.”

“They don’t even make you do voice check ins?” Gurlien asks, then glances to Chloe, and they have one of their brief nonverbal arguments.

And the woman had his eyes.

“Alright,” Delina drawls, pulling out the phone and pressing the on button. “Let’s see this.”

“Hey,” Gurlien blurts out, but Maison just sits back, something satisfied glittering in his eyes.

The phone clicks back to life, and his lockscreen is still the picture of them on their third anniversary, when they had driven to the Texas coast and spent the entire weekend getting horrendously sunburned.

“Code is one-zero-zero-eight,” Maison says, and it fits the pattern she always saw him swipe. “Pictures are in the google drive, under the folder titled floral references.” He shrugs, though he watches her like a hawk. “Figured nobody would snoop there.”

Sure enough, picture after picture of Maison and the white-haired lady, one for each month of the year going back ten years. Of him before she knew him, of him when they first started dating. Of him that one time he got his haircut way too short and he looked like a stranger for a month.

“Is that proof enough?” Maison asks, the same shimmering anger underneath his words.

Chloe’s already nodding along, though Gurlien scowls.

“Go in the messages, there’s a contact named Human Resource Director.”

Delina does. Text after text from Maison, all with the date, time, and the words “check-in all good.”

Gurlien hovers over her shoulder, and it feels like an invasion of privacy.

“If you scroll up, you can find one of the last times we traveled and the reason why,” Maison continues. “But type in the ‘day, time, check-in all good,’ then put ‘flew with target to Seattle for surprise.’”

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