Page 78 of The Girl Who Inherits the Dead

“Thanks,” Delina responds. “That's helpful.”

“Think of it as a current in a stream, and you’re grabbing some pine needles that are riding along the current,” Maison says, and his gaze feels like fire against her, deep in her stomach.

He looked at her like this when he wanted to fuck her.

She swallows again, and tangles her fingertips against the strip, and his eyes flicker down to her lips before coming back to her eyes.

That one-minute motion is a spotlight to his wants.

It’s strange that he would still look at her like that, now. That he would put on that face when he doesn’t have to, look at her like he still is very much attuned to her body.

Her mouth goes dry.

“Delina?” Chloe asks, startling her so much that she almost drops her tenuous touch on the magic. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” she replies quickly, twisting the magic in her hand as fast as she can, then spreading it apart and snapping it together.

Maison reels back, stumbling but not falling, before he regains his footing. “That wasn’t as powerful that time, do it again.”

His words are back to clinical, like whatever moment never happened.

23

“Hey, just found a locked bunker about twenty miles away through some satellite pics, wanna come?” Chloe asks the next day, when everyone is otherwise peacefully sitting around.

Maison and Delina briefly lock eyes.

“What do you think you’d find?” Maison asks, crossing his arms. “We’re in upstate Washington, you’re not going to find riches and treasures in a bunker.”

“Maybe guns, though,” Chloe responds. “Usually, the abandoned bunkers up here have guns. Sometimes expired food.”

“How do you know it’s abandoned?” Delina asks, curiosity getting the better of her. “And isn’t that…insanely illegal?”

Chloe shrugs at that. “Near as I can tell, nobody has gone in or out in around seven years, that counts as abandoned to me. One time, we found a bunch of hundred-dollar bills and a skeleton.”

Outside of her control, Delina cocks her head.

“No,” Maison replies, cutting her off, which just pushes her into motion.

“Want to make sure you’re not going to run into any skeletons before you get to the front door?” Delina asks, and Chloe answers with a grin.

They drove as faras they could in Chloe’s car, and had to hike in the last mile, and Gurlien complains the entire time.

“I didn’t move out to the middle of nowhere for hiking,” he says, as they tromp through the underbrush. His face is still mottled and bruised, the color mostly faded between a sickly purple and yellowish tone, but it doesn’t hurt him much according to Delina’s brief scans.

Maison, at least, doesn’t complain, just watches the forest around them with a sharp eye.

“How many of these have you found since coming here?” Delina asks. The air is cool against her cheeks and the remnants of frost glitter on the forest floor, but blue sky peeks between the branches of the spruce trees.

“Not nearly as many as I’d like,” Chloe replies cheerfully. “Probably eight or so, this is the closest, though.”

“It’s a miracle you haven’t been caught,” Maison grumbles.

“That’s why I pick the abandoned ones,” Chloe says, turning and hiking backwards while talking to him. “More likely to be old, more likely to not be discovered as broken into. And I don’t steal much.”

“Much,” Gurlien deadpans. “It’s where we got our gun.”

After a few moments of quiet, a phone beeps in Gurlien’s pocket.

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