Page 39 of The Girl Who Inherits the Dead

Delina’s legs shake, and she sits down, hard.

12

It’s not so much that she blacks out as that she comes back and time has moved a bit faster than it should.

She’s sitting on the mossy damp ground, her head balanced on her knees, her vision swimming and shivers going up her arms, even under the rain jacket.

Chloe’s spray painting something on the cracked church foundation, the gold paint sparkling in the mist as she draws something Delina vaguely recognizes as one of the symbols that had been at the cabin before she tore them all down.

It’s elaborate already, so it must’ve taken some time.

Gurlien crouches in front of her, staring too intensely at her, and Maison’s hand rubs Delina’s shoulders.

“Did you pass out or did you get overwhelmed?” Gurlien asks, clinical. “That just looked like overwhelmed to me.”

She blinks at him, then sits upright, twisting to look at Maison.

His face is pinched, his eyes red, but he doesn’t say anything.

“I’m okay,” Delina says, and even without concentrating, there’s the same pull from whatever is in the graves. Like by sensing it at all, she can’t go back to not knowing.

A bug crawls over one of the things, moisture trickling in from above.

“Breathe, it’s okay,” Maison says from behind her, and she takes a big, gulping breath. “Do we need to do the amplification circle?”

“Yes!” Chloe calls over, still spray painting.

“It’s standard procedure,” Gurlien responds, though he too looks conflicted.

“This is two instances of her immediately sensing the dead,” Maison replies, his voice deep. “I don’t want to risk calling something down on us for the sake of scientific propriety.”

Dead.

Delina pushes her damp hair out of her face. One of the gravestones is smaller than the other, and the years carved into the moss-pocketed granite says the person only lived for two years.

Two years, a hundred years ago.

Again, the punch of awareness, an itch along her fingers to reach out, dig into the ground, shove the dirt aside, and grasp.

“Right, because you have such vested interest avoiding another one of you,” Gurlien shoots back.

“Yes!” Maison replies, immediately. “If she tries to bring something back then yes, the chances of a full demon finding her are incredibly high and I don’t want that.”

“Bring it back?” Delina asks, and they both fall silent. “You mean I could…”

“No.” Maison interrupts. “No, you absolutely cannot.”

She shoots him a glance, and his jaw is set.

“You don’t want me to do any of this,” she tells him, and he narrows his eyes at her, flashing red.

“We don’t know if you can bring anything back,” Gurlien says instead. “But trying on century old bones would be a bit of a bad place to start.”

Delina stands, even though she sways, and Maison steadies her immediately.

The bug crawling along one of the bones stills, deep beneath the earth.

“So, what, my mom gave me some sort of zombie powers?” Delina asks, and from her spray-painting Chloe covers a laugh with a cough. “That’s what you guys have been all vague about?”

---