Page 40 of The Girl Who Inherits the Dead

Both Gurlien and Maison remain silent.

“A warning would have been nice, because this is gross.”

Gurlien opens his mouth, as if to answer, but Maison beats him to it.

“She doesn’t know anything, don’t be an ass about it,” he shoots to Gurlien. “Delly —”

“Don’t call me that,” Delina interrupts.

“Delina,” Maison corrects deliberately, “I need you to understand, each time you’re going to try to use any of your magic, you’re going to be in danger.”

“That’s an exaggeration,” Chloe calls out, calmly stepping out of the mess of symbols she has spray painted on the foundation.

“Maybe,” Gurlien interjects.

“There’s that other Necromancer, she’s still alive, and she’s been active for a while now, it’s clearly possible.” Chloe tosses the spray paint in her bag like she’s used to keeping it with her. “Besides, an amplification circle doesn’t mean she raises the dead, just that she can see more. It’s passive, not active, and Necromancers only send up flares when they actively do things.”

Necromancer.

She’s only known about all of this for a few days, but even her cursory knowledge of fantasy books tells her what that means.

But the word clearly, clearly has more meaning to them.

Gurlien rubs his face, like speaking it aloud makes it worse, and Maison sighs—a deep, weary sigh. The sort that usually only happens when he can’t sleep for days.

“Did you know?” Gurlien asks, directed towards Maison. “Did you have any inkling for however long you slept next to her, that she’s someone your father would kill in an instant?”

“What?” Delina asks, as Maison shakes his head. “What do you mean?”

“That’s why necromancers are rare, Demons kill them.” Gurlien crosses his arms to the cold. “This subsect of magical beings that can teleport across the globe and wreak havoc on local power structures…kill necromancers on sight.”

The words hang in the mist, with Maison refusing to look at any of them and the dead bodies lying cold in the ground, and Delina scrapes at her mind for something to say.

“So this circle, it’ll do what?” Delina asks, instead of the fear and the horror and everything else. “Any chance of summoning vampires or any other mythical creature I need to be aware of?”

“No,” Chloe says sunnily. “Don’t touch anything dead though.”

“Cool.” Delina shakes out her hands, approaching the cracked pavement. “At least you’ll talk to me normally. What do I do, what do I look for?”

Chloe seems just as hell bent on not discussing dire things as she is. “Step inside, same prompt as before. The world will be a lot busier, a lot more intense, and whatever you’re getting from the bones will feel a lot more real.”

That doesn’t sound terribly pleasant, but Delina cocks her head at it anyways. “Can you teach me all of these symbols?”

“Gurlien would be better at teaching it,” Chloe says, and Delina’s not going to look back at the two men bent on being dire. “But sure.”

“So all I need to do is avoid raising things from the dead and I’m cool?” Delina asks, and to this, Chloe looks back over to Maison. “Cause I’m pretty okay with not touching dead things.”

And before she can convince herself otherwise, for the second time in only a few days, she steps into a spray-painted circle.

There’s a pause, when nothing happens, before the world blooms once more with gold. Gold dripping from Chloe’s fingertips, gold highlighting in Maison’s hair, gold illuminating Delina’s skin.

“It’s just the everything has gold on it again,” Delina calls out, though she can still see and hear everyone just fine. The world doesn’t shift, the sound of the wind still echoes around her, and the mist still drifts around her hair.

The bones in the ground grow larger in her mind, until it’s almost a physical itch under her skin. Until all she wants to do is dig, claw her fingernails into the dirt, and pull something up.

Even more, beyond the century old bones, there’s a dead mouse in the church, an assortment of dead bugs under the canes of blackberries, and something that might’ve once been a cat but just gives her echoes of terror and cold.

So instead, she just looks towards Maison, and he tucks his chin in, staring at her. His eyes glint red, of course, but every other line in his face and motion in his body is immediately familiar.

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