Page 87 of The Girl Who Inherits the Dead

She wanted to be powerful, but not quite like this.

Carefully setting the stick aside, Delina backs up, until she can sit on a wood stump and still stare at it.

Of course, bringing back this bird would be a bad idea. Would still signal to the demons in the area, and even though they couldn’t get through the trap without Chloe, they could still wait.

But there's something in her own bones that tells her there is something else she could do with it.

“I wish I could fix this,” she whispers to the dead bird in the still chilly air, but of course there’s no response.

Someone to sort out what she’s feeling, what she’s sensing, and what she could actually do.

Of course, she could go and wake up Maison, but that too sounds like a bad idea. When he’s been so uneasy sleeping, to disrupt feels a bit too cruel.

So instead she stands, breathes out, and tries to reach for the ribbon of magic that she knows flows through the area. It takes three tries of squinting through the frosted trees, before she glimpses it, knotted around some bushes. It’s golden, still, and the entire world sheens with that same gold when she looks at it like that, but no matter how hard she tries, the magic won’t fall into her hand like it did with Maison.

Sure, her fingers tingle each time she passes her hand through it, but it’s still tantalizingly far away from her grip.

From the stories Gurlien has told, the other Necromancer is able to do all sorts of things. Use someone’s death to bind a demon, control a demon, blast through their defenses.

And she’s the peaceful one.

With the anger in her heart, right below the hurt and the indignantly of all of this being kept from her, Delina doesn’t want to be peaceful.

Not when she can still feel the slump of Maison, the moment after the attack hit him, every time she closes her eyes.

A bird twitters in the branches above her, and when Delina glances up, there’s the faintest outline of gold where it fluffs its feathers, its heart beating and its lungs still working.

It’s cold, too, but there’s a sort of joy inside of it, at the singing it's letting out, at the sharpness of the air inside. It doesn’t hate the winter, not like she would have thought.

And despite that joy, despite the life above her, Delina’s eyes fall back towards the dead bird.

It shines with the same gold as the ribbon winding through the property.

“Okay,” Delina murmurs, raising an eyebrow at it.

If the other necromancer used something dead to stop someone, to bind someone, then there’s nothing to stop Delina from at least attempting it.

At this point the smart thing to do would be to go get someone else to watch her, to stop her if she did something stupid. But Gurlien would lecture at her, Chloe would chatter, and Maison…

…Maison would probably tell her to stop before she tried, if the last week is any indication.

“Yeah no,” she mumbles, then softly treads over to the dead bird.

It took a lot of conscious effort to raise Maison, a lot of thinking real hard about repairing the damage, about making sure everything is in place correctly, so this time she blanks all of that from her mind. Blanks the idea of stitching the frozen skin back together, of starting the lungs and heart, and just lets herself…think.

Slowly, she settles her hand on the dead bird, on the soft feathers, and instead of the injuries, instead of the clawing need to grasp and bring back, she concentrates on that shining gold inside of it, until it tangles within her fingers, more real and more solid than the strip of magic ever was.

Careful, she stands, and the coil of gold remains in the palm of her hand, leaving the dead bird.

And just like that, she can no longer feel the death in front of her. There’s no more gut punch of awareness, no more itch under her skull, no more snapping of her attention.

“Oh,” she murmurs, staring at the glistening gold.

The plastic door to the cabin slams open, and she doesn’t need to turn to know it’s Maison, clambering out onto the frost with just his socks over his feet.

“What did you just do?” His voice isn’t accusatory, just very, very confused.

She glances over at him, and he’s clearly in his pajamas, his hair sticking up in the back. “Go put shoes on if you’re going to be out here.”

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