Page 43 of The Girl Who Inherits the Dead

She hates that expression. Always has.

“Can you see all the gold?” Delina asks, after a few minutes of silence, shifting against the damp concrete.

“Not easily,” Chloe responds, muted. “That bubble? Yeah. They train us pretty early to see those.”

They watch for a few moments, as more and more of the threads disappear back to the ribbon on the street, and the gut punch of death lessens.

“So Necromancer?” Delina asks, and Chloe nods. “Is he telling the truth about the danger or is he trying to control me?”

“Oh, he is absolutely not exaggerating the danger,” Chloe says, stretching out her legs. Her feet are back in the boots,pinching at her toes. “I have no clue how we’re going to teach you control without bringing down an actual demon.” She glances, sidelong, to Delina, her brown eyes serious behind her glasses. “At least with Freddy here, he can absolutely do some defense, but I don’t know if he could stand up to an actual demon.”

“I still feel like I’m missing a massive piece of this puzzle,” Delina admits, even though ignorant is the worst thing she could be. “You three were raised in it.”

“Eh, Freddy and Gurlien were raised in it, they found me when I was like twelve,” Chloe says, chewing on her lip. “Turns out, when you transform a Bunsen burner into a padlock in the middle of your eighth-grade science class, it gets back to people real quick.” She shrugs, digging in the backpack. “Still feel the dead?”

“Ugh,” Delina responds, but the answer is yes. The bugs and the bones and the small creatures, all neon in the back of her mind, though the wrongness of the bubble is fading into the mist. “So not only did my mom get me the worst power imaginable, I can’t ever use it.”

Chloe tilts her head, her eyes narrowing. “We are still going to have to teach you control,” she says, her voice suddenly calculating, like she took too many lessons from Gurlien, but there’s a flicker of mischief in her face. “I have some ideas. Want to break into the church basement?”

“Why?” Delina asks. Her head still hurts and the bones still itch in her mind.

“She’s just offering because she’s bored,” Gurlien calls over. “There’s nothing in there.”

“You don’t know that!” Chloe calls back, then gives Delina an encouraging smile. “He’s a little correct.”

“No, I’m okay,” Delina replies. “I don’t really want to go digging into anything I can’t tell won’t include dead things.”

Maison insistson her getting a proper lunch and Gurlien retreats to try to call the magicians who know of the other Necromancer, and Chloe takes one look at the two of them and immediately scampers into one of the stores instead.

Delina can’t blame her. If she could get out of the awkward situation, she would.

But instead, she finds herself getting corralled into a cozy booth with shiny maroon leather benches and a table that’s been colored on too many times, and her ex-boyfriend immediately sitting across from her.

“Rule one of magic, of any sort of magic, is you’re going to need way more food than you think you will,” Maison says, as soon as the waitress swings two waters over to them, and if he’s going to act like this is completely normal than she most definitely is not. “If you think there’s a big chance, you’ll have to do something in a day, bring extra food.”

“Does that explain all your extra granola bars in your car?” Delina asks, prickly, pretending to study the menu extensively. “And in every one of your coat pockets?”

She had thought it a cute quirk.

He nods, relenting at that. “You got attacked far too often for me to not.”

She glares at him over the plasticky menu. “Excuse me?”

“That was the other part of this—” he gestures between the two of them, like it’s a business partnership that she had a say in, “—they wanted me to keep you alive, too, and the moment anyof your mother’s enemies found out you existed, they all tried something. All of them.”

“And what, you were the one who had to protect me?” Delina asks, then glares down at the menu. “Sure. Right.”

Even over the menu, she can see Maison pinch the bridge of his nose. “Yes, exactly.”

“I don’t believe you,” Delina informs him, aiming for cold, but her voice breaks anyways. “For all I know you’re just lying again.”

In her pocket, his phone beeps, and the two of them lock eyes.

Because for all the hurt, there’s still all those pictures of his mother on his phone.

“Okay,” Delina says, pulling the phone out again, punching in the code. “Your Human Resource Officer wants to know when you’re returning to, and I quote, ‘the Prescott base.’”

“Jesus Christ,” Maison mutters, then leans over the booth to peer at the message with her. “Type in ‘unknown, target organized trip as a surprise.’”

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