Page 95 of The Girl Who Inherits the Dead

“Even I saw that gold flash,” Chloe says, muted, and Delina winces. “That could’ve killed you if he was a bit less skilled.”

“None of that was due to skill,” Maison says, finally, and even his voice is raw. “I couldn’t control anything.”

The words settle in the clearing like a bomb.

“Congrats,” Gurlien mutters, finally. “You’ll have to practice at something for once in your life.”

Maison refusesto let go of her hand, even when they’re all inside back in the warmth, and Delina’s not about to make him.

He hasn’t spoken since the clearing, and he’s shivering, even though his skin is warm enough that he should be fine, and that alone makes Delina shoo him into her bedroom and shut the door behind them, despite Gurlien’s token protest.

“Sit,” she orders, pointing at the bed, and he does, even though there’s no compulsion behind her words. “Scan me. Do that energy reading thing you did before. See that I’m okay.”

He just gazes up at her, his face pinched.

“Please?” Delina hazards, and there’s a ghost of a smile, gone too soon.

“I’d rather not do anything right now,” he says, wan, but he swipes a thumb across her palm. “I could’ve killed you.”

She doesn’t quite know how to rebut that, or how close she came to actually dying, so she sits next to him instead.

Ever so slightly, he leans against her, shoulder to shoulder.

“Good to know that I can’t compel you still,” Delina says, staring down at the baby blue carpet. “I didn’t want that to last forever.”

“It would only last until you took the string off,” Maison replies. “It would’ve fallen off in eighty-two minutes.”

“Precise,” Delina says, and he shrugs, still against her. “Gut instinct?”

“Yeah,” he replies. “It was just something I knew. I don’t know how I knew, but I knew.”

“Weird,” Delina comments, half because it is and half because she didn’t know what else to say. “Well…sorry for that whole fiasco. Definitely wouldn’t have tried to pull the death if I knew that was gonna happen.”

“If I knew that would happen, I would’ve been prepared, and would have told you to order me to not hurt you as soon as it was tied,” Maison says, full of frustration, like this was a foreseeable event. Like they could’ve anticipated this. “If I knew, I would’ve made sure you couldn’t get hurt, I would’ve attempted to control the…” he mimes teleporting with his hands. “I would’ve been able to actually do something.”

“That’s not fair to yourself,” Delina says, and he sighs, rubbing his face. “If you haven’t had access to a part of yourself your entire life, how were you to know how to control it?”

It’s a bit too real for her.

“Okay, point,” he says. “I don’t like that I hurt you.”

“I feel fine,” she burst out, breaking the contact to face him, still sitting on the bed. “I feel fine, I got dizzy for like a second, but I’m not in any pain, I’m not even that cold.”

“Of course you’re not,” Maison replies, as if that’s the point. “What do you think Demons take?”

It’s not something she’s thought of before. “Energy, I guess?”

“They take pain,” he says, and his voice breaks again. “They take pain, until the pain takes from your body and you die.”

“Well, that’s grim,” Delina responds, then glances down at her hands.

Of course everything had to be complicated once more. Of course there couldn’t be an easy part of her magic, there couldn’t be an easy to process emotional moment. Of course her heart hurts at his upset, after all the drama, and she still wants to push herself to fix it, somehow.

And that’s not even processing the kiss, right before all of this happened.

“All my life, they’ve tried to get me to go full demon, and you manage it by accident in an afternoon,” Maison says, and it’s barely past lunchtime so she rolls her eyes a bit at that. “How the hell is it that you’re just blowing by all the metrics that have made up my entire life?”

“Do you think it was the necromancer or the bond thingy?” Delina asks, unable to stop herself from wondering which parts of all of this is because of that bond.

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