Chapter 14

14

T he fly sticks in the back of her mind the entire drive back, warping and pulling at her thoughts, until she thinks she's going to vibrate out of her skin with the knowledge of it.

Chloe chats like it's nothing big, and whatever she's doing must not be giving off any of the trackable Necromancy vibes because Maison remains calm, though his face is more thoughtful than it usually is.

Normally this is when he'd lock himself in a different room and not emerge until something inconvenient got painted.

The death in the car tugs at her attention, despite all attempts to stop herself from thinking about it, to redirect her mind from obsessing.

It's gross, it's disgusting, and by the time they pass the downed tree and come into view of the tiny cabin, her head pounds and her hands tremble.

Gurlien and Chloe had kept up a steady stream of discussion, of magical terminology and history, but she's retained none of it, and she pushes herself out of the car as fast as she can, barely before the car is off.

Even once past the plasticky door, she can still sense the fly outside, deep in Chloe's backpack. And what's worse, now the dead bird is vivid, brilliant and shimmering with potential.

Delina flops over on the couch, and Chance mrrrs at her, blinking his green eyes at her.

The wing on the dead bird is crumpled beneath it, the feathers bent and its spine broken, and even if she touches it, it would never fly again.

Even if she touches it.

She stares down at the cat, who matches the eye contact.

"I don't want to touch it," she whispers at Chance, who yawns at her, showing all his fangs. "This is the worst."

"What is?" Gurlien asks, striding back into the cabin and shedding his rain gear, and Chloe and Maison file in after him. "I think it's a nice cabin, lack of internet notwithstanding." He gives her a brief, critical glance, then an obvious one to Chloe's backpack as she disappears down the hall with it.

So he knows, too.

"Everything," Delina says, and just by the feel of the dead fly, she knows Chloe turns the corner down the hall, then descends some stairs.

So, the creepy basement.

"I'm also probably fired from my job," Delina says, and Maison snorts out a familiar laugh as he strides into the other room. "That's not fun to think about."

"I've seen your mom's accounts, you never have to work again," Gurlien says, dismissing her concerns with a wave of his hand. "You can spend the rest of your life in far off exotic locales and doing whatever research your heart desires with a fake passport, easy."

"Thanks," Delina says, hopefully as sarcastic as Gurlien's comment, before she pushes herself up, the dead fly almost pulling her to movement. "Because fake passports are definitely not a difficult thing to get."

"Chloe's an alchemist," Maison replies, returning with his small travel paint set tucked underneath his arm. "Give her enough paper to work with and she can get it without any issue."

"How is that not outlawed?" Delina asks, as Maison sits at the cutesy carved kitchen table, rolling out the kit, setting the watercolors to one side in practiced motions.

She's seen him do so a hundred times, on trips out to coffee shops and their yearly vacations.

"What are you doing?" Gurlien asks, finally turning to stare down at Maison. "Those would be shitty for runes, and that paper wouldn't do a thing for any spell keeping." He pokes at Maison's watercolor book, like it'd bite him.

"I want to think some," Maison says, with the infinite patience he only gets when he really wants to yell at someone but is keeping it in. "So I brought this along."

"Is this just…normal paint?" Gurlien says, his face wrinkling. "That's useless."

Maison's gray eyes flicker to Delina, before he goes about ignoring Gurlien.

So they don't know he paints.

They don't know this crucial detail of Maison, part of what makes him him. They don't know that this is the first thing he does when stressed, the first thing he does when happy, the first thing he does when sleep deprived. They grew up next to him, at whatever childhood the College let them have, and Gurlien never knew he painted.

"It's not useless if it helps me think," Maison replies, filling up one of the chipped mugs with water. "Some of us went about developing hobbies outside of magic instead of making it our entire personalities."

The cat watches Maison paint with avid eyes, slowly raising a paw like he's going to bat at the paint brushes before Gurlien scoops down and picks up the cat away from the temptation.

Gurlien rolls his eyes at him. "Some of us had to work for our abilities instead of being granted with unlimited potential just because of how we were born," he rebuts, before glancing up at Delina, then obviously towards the hallway Chloe went down.

Message received. Whatever it is that they want her to do with the dead bug, they don't want Maison to know immediately.

"Well, I'm going to explore this strange cabin my mother left me," Delina says, rolling her eyes performatively at Gurlien. "Have fun arguing."

"Don't touch anything you don't understand, it could be dangerous," Maison calls after her, because of course he does. "Your mother was a lunatic."

The cat pads along behind her, far enough away that she can't pet him, as Delina steps down the dark hallway.

A few steps past three obvious bedrooms, Delina's ears pop and the air abruptly cools.

The wallpaper transforms from the floral everywhere else in the cabin to a gray, clinical shade, something akin to a dentist's office. The baby blue carpet stops, giving way to bare, enameled concrete.

All vestiges of a personality, however cutesy, vanish. All small decorations, all kitsch and Americana, stop.

"Alright," Delina whispers, finding the staircase half by sight and half by the sense of the dead fly. "Grim."

She flips the light on over the stairs, and it's bright and florescent, out of place with the warm lamps of the front rooms and master bedroom.

Clearly her mother wanted to give at least the appearance that this was someplace normal at first.

At the bottom of the stairs, Chloe pokes her head around the corner. "Okay good, it's just you. Gurlien annoying Freddy?"

Delina nods, trailing her hand against the wall, her fingertips tingling.

"Welcome to the real benefit of this place," Chloe says, and she's sitting in a rolling chair, the tile clean. "Underground basement that isn't on the will or the deed to the place."

"All basements are underground," Delina murmurs.

The single room is cavernous, giving vibes halfway between a school library and science room gone wrong. Shelving packed with books and scrolls and papers line every wall, with cardboard boxes holding more scrolls stacked haphazard in every corner.

The middle of the room has a drain in the center, and is completely empty, but for a stack of spray paint off to one side. Stains and smudges of paint mar the enameled concrete, all worn down or washed away or completely harmless.

Along the edges are cold metal tables, like a mortuary, with an array of readings and tech equipment and everything in between.

"So when you said mad scientist, you meant it," Delina says, cautiously sitting in one of the rolling lab chairs next to a table. "What are the chances someone's died in here?"

"Well…" Chloe thinks for a few moments. "Probably higher than we're comfortable with."

The dead fly, still in a tiny plastic container, sits on one of the tables. The small coffin she sensed, the thing keeping all the air out, is nothing but a normal travel pill container.

"So you sensed this within moments of me sitting next to you," Chloe starts, gesturing at it. "Gurlien and I thought it would take you longer."

"It's incredibly obvious," Delina replies on autopilot.

"Good to know," Chloe says. "Rule one of magic, the earlier it is in the process for you to reverse something or the closer it is to the original state, the easier it is. This goes for undoing a spell, for identifying what went wrong, for changing something into something else, and, most likely, bringing something back from the dead."

Bile creeps up Delina's throat, but she nods.

"So while it might be possible for you to raise century old bones, it wouldn't be a good place to start, and you'd probably have significant trouble with it," Chloe continues. "Just like it's far easier for me to transform a sheet of plastic into a door, rather than a tiny slip of plastic wrap. It's closer to what I want it to be."

That almost makes sense.

"We know that the Necromancer currently active was able to raise someone from the dead who had been dead for fourteen hours, and a cat that had been dead for four days. We don't…really want to test you on a person, for obvious reasons."

"So a dead bug."

"A dead bug. Courteously killed instantly, so you don't have to worry about correcting any injuries."

"No, its wings are bent from when it fell," Delina says, and Chloe blinks owlishly at her. "It's…I can tell."

"Alrighty," Chloe says, a little bit more unsteady. "So this is going to be pretty different from all my other experiments, isn't it?"

Delina can't think of anything to say, so she nods.

"I don't want you to raise it, not yet," Chloe says, and Delina's skin crawls. "But we want to record what you can sense from it, so we get a baseline." She sets a quick, simple recorder on the table, the sort you find reporters using on the field. "Can you repeat that?"

Delina does, and Chloe just nods, swinging in the chair.

"Based just by what you're feeling, could you tell me how long it's been dead? Forgetting that you already know."

Delina squints down at the travel pill container.

Time doesn't seem to have passed for the bug, still frozen in the worst moment. There's no blood to cool and nothing for her to gauge.

"Maybe a general sense of hours, but nothing concrete," she says, finally, after the lights overhead buzz. "The bird outside is a few days, at least, if not a week."

Her mind flashes over to it, and there's decay over some of the exposed skin.

"I'm gonna need to learn timelines for things like rigor mortis, aren't I?" Delina quips, though the very idea is awful.

"Can you tell what killed the bug? As clinical as you can, not what you know killed it, but what in its body killed it?" At her owlish look, Chloe sighs. "If it had been squished, the answer would be the organs were compacted. If it had been attacked, it would be because pieces were missing. That sort of thing."

Delina doesn't know enough about fly biology, but she huffs anyway and tries to think.

"Can the answer be the nervous system stopped?" Delina asks, then lets her mind wander back outside. The bird's organs are more clearly defined, easy to read, and there's an echo of another set of talons piercing through the skin, through the ribs and shattering one, and into the lungs. "The bird was attacked by another bird."

"Good," Chloe says, enthusiastic. "That's exactly the sort of thing we're trying to figure out if you can figure out."

It doesn't feel very good, but Delina nods, trying to match the enthusiasm. "This seems useful for murder investigations."

"Oh, true, though it wouldn't hold up in court," Chloe says, off handed, then pauses, deliberate. "We want to see about giving you a space to practice without Freddy knowing immediately."

As if she hadn't figured that out by the secrecy and the attempts to distract him.

"I and Gurlien are firm believers that you cannot control something you don't practice, and without control you'd be a sitting duck. I know you and Freddy…" Chloe visibly flounders. "Well, you have history, but we don't know exactly what his motivations are to keeping you ignorant."

So they think he's still lying about something.

Which makes sense, though it settles inside of her just as wrong as everything else.

"I'm glad he seems to want to keep you alive," Chloe says, which is an understatement, "but without knowing how he intends on reporting this, I don't think we can trust him with anything else but that."

"Yeah," Delina says, and it's a bitter taste.

"And we don't know how much of your necromancy he picks up from you," Chloe continues. "Demons feed off of necromancer power or life source, it's unclear, but that's why they die. As a Half Demon, he might…want some. And that's not even bringing in the sleeping with him part, he could've done something there to make you easier to track."

Delina rubs her face.

"If I were him, I would be working really hard on convincing you that I feel bad and that I still want to be with you," Chloe continues, as if that's not exactly what he had been doing on their lunch. "Try to re-establish a rapport, show that he is this person you knew and loved. Be charming and give you every piece of information. Work real hard at –"

"Got it," Delina interrupts. "Can't trust the ex-boyfriend."

"Yeah." Still, Chloe looks uncomfortable. "We have to keep him here so we can at least monitor his communications."

"So don't piss him off so much he decides to just leave, got it." Still doesn't feel great. "Haven't had this much drama in my life since my sorority days."

"When he's not actively annoying Freddy, Gurlien's going to look up cloaking runes that I can put out, so you can practice safely without him noticing when he's still in the building." Chloe glances up at the ceiling, where the two men are. "Because if this does go south, it'd be good to have him here as some defense."

Her head hurts all over again.

"Okay," Chloe says, obviously still off kilter. "Can you tell me how old the fly is?"

After a good few hours of thinking real hard about a dead bug, Delina's headache has escalated to a respectable migraine.

She begs out of more tests, and leaves Chloe to her notes in the cold basement, and the cat climbs the stairs with her to the much warmer main cabin.

Three paintings dry on the kitchen table, spread out and glistening, and Gurlien has his feet up on the couch as Maison bends over a fourth.

"I assume you found the library?" Gurlien says with a raised eyebrow, glancing up over the edge of the book.

Belatedly, she realizes it's the one her mother left her in the PO box.

"If you can call it that," Delina replies, and the sound of her voice lifts Maison's head.

His hand is well and goodly cramped, and his eyes hurt from squinting.

"Your ex-boyfriend is boring," Gurlien drawls, and it's so obviously to get a rise out of Maison that it's almost funny. "And you put up with him for five years?"

"It's not like I'm a barrel of laughs," Delina replies.

Maison refuses to rise to the bait, instead setting down the paintbrush and shaking out his hand, giving Delina an even glance. "Get enough of your scanning done in this library?"

The paintings on the table are, of course, beautiful. Long aching swipes of watercolor with the impressionistic suggestion of the doorway of the cabin surround the greenery outside, all on a small piece of paper about half the size of a normal letter sheet.

He had done it three times, changing the perspective ever so slightly each time, changing how the piece reads. The emotions, the view, everything.

"Does your hand always hurt when you paint for that long?" Delina asks instead.

He flexes his fingers, rotating his wrist. "It doesn't really hurt."

"Liar," she says, and even though he doesn't smile, his dimple briefly appears. "It's cramped and everything."

"I really need to get ahold of Axel and Alette," Gurlien says from the couch. "See if the pain thing is part of Necromancy or something else."

"Feels like necromancy," Maison replies, almost as an aside. "Same color and everything."

And Chloe's words still echo in her mind about trusting him. About all his knowledge, about what he's telling them, everything.

"So these two know of another Necromancer," Delina says, and Gurlien nods along. "How is your College not breathing down their necks?"

Gurlien raises his hand in almost a jaunty wave. "I happened. They don't want it to happen again."

Maison's eyes sharpen, and she gets the sudden sensation that he's filing that information away. That in the time he's been here, he hadn't learned what happened yet and hadn't asked. "The Necromancer did that?"

"Not at all," Gurlien replies. "I didn't even get to meet her."

Disappointment briefly flashes over Maison's face, barely identifiable, before he masks it. Delina raises an eyebrow at him, and he catches her expression.

Instead of saying anything, he holds out his hand to her, like he always does after painting, and the tips of his fingers are wrinkled from the watercolors. "Seriously though, scanning went okay?"

"Dead things are gross," Delina informs him, definitely not taking his hand, not after the talk with Chloe. "I'd much rather have the making things into other things ability."

"So does every beginning magician," Gurlien interrupts, and Maison slowly withdraws his hand, the hurt quickly replaced by his feigned nonchalance. "Tell me, could you figure out the fly's vascular system?"