Page 82 of The Girl Who Inherits the Dead

“Oh, I just reverse the changes, it’s super simple,” Chloe responds. “It's a top tier alchemist trick, like day one.”

“Probably day five,” Gurlien corrects.

Chloe shrugs, piecing through the dusty shelves, giving Delina the big impression that she didn’t exactly care what was in the bunker, just that the door was locked. “Oh, hey, a birth certificate, that’ll be useful.”

“What?”

Chloe flashes it at Delina. “Official documents are much easier to change from other official documents, so if we need a new identity this’ll help.” She pauses, her brain skipping. “Did your mom leave you any new identities?”

“Oh my god,” Delina says, as deadpanned as she can, crossing her arms. “How would I know?”

“Probably,” Maison mutters. “What, she had like five.”

“There are safes in most of the properties she left you, there’s a high chance there are a few new identities somewhere in there,” Gurlien replies. “She did too much to ensure you had some safe places to exist, there are almost certainly things we don’t know.”

It’s officially too much for Delina, once more, so with a nod to Maison she turns on her heels and walks back into the muted sunshine of the forest.

The breeze hits her face, cool and welcoming, and Delina sits her ass down on a log, wrapping her arms around herself.

She’s going to have to deal with everything from her mother sooner or later. Every technicality, every location, every house she doesn’t need and every bit of magical lore and research to be found within.

After all this drama, it’s still going to exist, and she’ll have to deal with it.

It’s way more daunting than it should be.

The hinges of the door creak, and Maison follows her out, squinting in the sunlight.

She waves at him that she’s okay, but he steps out anyways, sheltering his eyes.

“You alright?” he asks, and no she’s not, but she shrugs. He rolls his eyes, then sits on a rock across from her. “You’re still a shitty liar.”

“I didn’t even say anything,” she protests.

“Yeah, you didn’t need to,” Maison says, rubbing his scruff. In a few days it’ll be a proper beard, and she’s not sure how she feels about that.

“Is it always like that?” Delina asks, gesturing towards the bunker at his blank face. “Magicians breaking into things, all that weirdness, inherited properties?”

“God no,” Maison says, stretching his legs in front of him, briefly distracting Delina from the conversation. “Well, magicians all have really flexible morality, that’s true, but most are more like normal people with just weird jobs.”

“Oh, I just got lucky,” Delina says, and he wrinkles his nose at her. “Great.”

“Well, at least you’re wealthy now,” he says, then makes a face. “I mean, that came out wrong. At least you don’t have to work anymore?”

She doesn’t know what she’d do with herself without work, but she shrugs again. “It’s weird,” she starts, slow among the birdsong and the still glittering frost, “to think about what it’s going to be after I figure this out.”

His eyes linger on her a bit too long,

24

After that, Delina gets complacent.

Oh, sure, everything she does still has the edge of lurking danger at the back end of it, but even that becomes a bit normal.

Expected.

There’s no new sign of the College, nothing to indicate to them that they’re at all looking for them. No new demon threats, no new dangers in the world around them, and even the dead bird outside of the cabin lessens over time.

Instead, Delina gets to relax. Let her shoulders come down a bit, lean more into the thought work of the magic, into the practices and information. Chloe works with her on basics of defense, Gurlien grills her on histories and theories, and Delina gets a more comfortable grasp of how her mind works with the added sense of…all the dead.

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