Chapter 18

18

L ater that night, long after the sun sets and the wind starts whistling through the chimney and everyone else has gone to sleep, Delina lays awake on the giant bed, alone.

There are a hundred reasons for her to still be awake, she knows this, but the most annoying by far is the dead fly still in the basement below.

She could make a map of the basement, merely by the location of the fly.

Sure, the others are sorta in her awareness. Chloe fast asleep, unmoving. Gurlien a black hole of no magic, tossing and turning. The cat pacing up and down the hall like a patrol, tail flicking right and left.

And Maison sitting up in his bed, down the hall from Chloe, skin still pulling at his injuries.

Delina's breath catches in her throat at the sudden knowledge that she's not the only person awake, and quickly lets her mind flash back to the dead fly, to the bird still outside.

There's a bug crawling over the bird, small, it's many feet leaving tiny pinpricks of sensation over the one exposed bone, sending echoes of shivers down Delina's back.

"Yeah, I can tell when you do that," Maison speaks from the door to the bedroom.

Delina briefly contemplates pretending to be asleep, before she sighs, tossing off the blankets and sitting up.

He's silhouetted against the doorway, in a soft T-shirt and his sweatpants, his hair sticking up in the back.

"Well, you can go back to sleep, I'll work hard at not accidentally scanning you," Delina says, though her pulse flutters against the skin of her neck.

"Eh, I wasn't sleeping well," Maison says with a half-shrug. "Bit hard to in a strange bed, completely forgetting the fact that I, you know, died."

And her heart hurts all over again, at the casual conversation after midnight. Like it's just another sleepless night with the two of them chatting, like nothing has changed and she still trusted him.

Slow, she clicks on the aged lamp on the bedside table, casting a warm glow across the baby blue carpet and the floral quilt.

There are circles under Maison's eyes, a vivid reminder that they're not in undergrad anymore and all-nighters can be a bit rough.

"Dead bug too distracting to you?" Maison asks, leaning against the door frame. "I know other late bloomers, when they become aware, get driven nuts by their powers until they get used to it."

"That would've been good for my mom to include in her letter," Delina says and Maison smiles. Actually smiles, like she's the only person in the world and nobody else matters.

It catches in her throat.

"Do you want hot chocolate?" Maison asks, going for the jugular and offering her favorite late-night drink. "I can make a few mugs."

"Sure," Delina says, before she can stop herself, before she can think it's a bad idea.

She pulls on a sweatshirt by the time he returns, and by then she's had enough time to steel up her spine and shore up her defenses.

One look from him, still sleep rumpled, threatens to tear them right down again.

"Here," he says, setting it on the bedside table, before he sits next to her on top of the quilt, smoothing his hand over the wrinkles They're not touching, but all it would take is a twitch of her hand to grasp his. "They didn't have the type with the marshmallows, but at least it wasn't the fat free stuff."

With all the turmoil of the day, with the ache still in his chest, she doesn't know how to respond to that.

"How's the lungs?" she asks, after a long stretch of just sipping hot chocolate in the warm light.

It's a wan attempt at conversation, she can tell they ache, less so than a few hours ago but still enough to tug at her awareness.

He offers her a crooked smile, before ducking his head. "I'll be okay."

By now, she doesn't think the wound is going to tear open again, that the artery will stay in place, but the anxiety of it still tugs at her mind.

"You realize if you lie to me about that, I can tell now," she says, aiming for arch and coming off a bit pathetic.

Her hair is still a mess, the bags full of hair supplies and snacks most likely still on the blacktop behind the Target, but she pushes it away from her face anyways.

"Well, it's not comfy," he replies, wry. "But most likely better than being dead, can't imagine anyone like me would have a great time in an afterlife."

She blinks at him, and the light from the lamp cast deep shadows in the room around them. "Is there an afterlife?"

"Nobody really knows," he says, with a wistfulness that's almost like homesickness.

"They told me that there were some other people who had been raised who were, you know, dead for longer than a minute, they might know?" Delina ventures, and he cracks a smile. "Pretty sure you wouldn't even have had the chance to figure that out, your eyes were still open and everything."

He flinches, and she wishes she could pull the words back.

But then, there's so many words she doesn't know how to even begin to say, the confusing mess of emotions sitting behind her breastbone leaving a knot behind her throat.

Because she had panicked, it's true. She had panicked and instead of letting him die, immediately did something that everyone had decried as foolish. Because just moments before, he had looked at her and smiled when she talked about wine.

"Oh, I've made a mess of things, haven't I?" Delina says, watching as the dust mites cast shadows over the baby blue carpet.

"Well," Maison says delicately, taking the time to sip from his own mug of hot chocolate in an obvious stalling movement. "I think Korhonen carries the bigger blame than you, personally. I've known him since I was eight," he turns to her, still sitting there on the quilt, "Since I was eight, and he had no problems with striking me."

It's entirely not what she means, but she nods.

"I've had drinks with him and his wife, and he just…was completely okay with killing me."

In all her angst, all of her exhaustion, Delina didn't factor in the betrayal side of it for him. That it's not just the injury, it's from someone he knows, someone he used to trust.

"And now, I did everything they asked for my entire life, and it's…they're still going to take it out on Mom." He looks down at his hands, and somewhere in the last few hours he had obviously taken the time to clean the blood from under his fingernails. "Even if they still think I'm dead. Which I still can't wrap my head around."

Before she can stop herself, Delina puts her hand on his arm, and he cuts off, inhaling suddenly.

"I'm sorry," she says, and means it.

He searches her face for something in the dim, warm light, and she doesn't know if he finds it.

"I probably shouldn't have come in here just to rant," he mumbles, wrapping his own hands around the mug, and his fingers tremble, just a bit. "You should absolutely be getting some sleep."

"I dunno, I had a pretty good nap in the middle of the day," Delina says, and gets a hint of the dimple. "You know. Sometimes I just don't sleep."

It's true, though less frequent than it used to be, and he nods. Because of course he knows, he would lay beside her on those long nights, a hair's breadth away from her, so she can see his chest rise and fall even when sleep evaded her.

"Maybe those other people have a support group?" Delina says, and he huffs out a weak laugh. "I dunno, Gurlien said one of them had been dead for like fifteen hours, that could be something."

She still has her hand on his arm, she realizes distantly, right on the edge of his sleep shirt, at the creases that came from packing, and the smart thing to do would be to lean away. To go back to drinking the hot chocolate and then pretend to fall asleep again, and let her ex-boyfriend go back to whatever it is he should be doing.

But in the warm light of the lamp, all those ‘shoulds' seem awfully far away.

"I don't know how to navigate this," he says, voice softer than the quilt. "I don't know what to do right now, and so much of my life has had a clear purpose and set of rules to follow, and now…" for a long moment, he doesn't speak, before he sets down the mug of hot chocolate and rubs his face again. "Sorry."

The apology carries some weight, something unsaid, something bigger than the whole room, and it hangs in the air between them.

"So for once in your life, you're not beholden to just doing what they want you to do," Delina says, and he blinks, like it's not something he's considered. "You don't have to behave, you don't have to toe the line, the worst has happened."

He's still, barely breathing.

"You've betrayed them, you tried to stop them, nothing you do right now will convince them otherwise, right?" she continues, and he gives her the most minute of nods. "Then you can do what you want. Live your life how you want, do whatever reckless thing that crosses your mind. Move where you want, do whatever magic you want, fall in love with whomever you want." The moment is crystalline silent, not even a stir of air through the entire house except what is between the two of them. "You can do anything."

He looks down, away, his lashes casting shadows over his cheekbones.

"You don't even have to stay here if you don't want to," Delina says, and though she knows that would be the good option, that would be the healthy option for both of them, the words are bitter in her mouth. "You can go anywhere, forget that this chapter of your life ever happened."

"I don't want to," he says, finally, swallowing.

"Okay," Delina says, and he smiles at her, heartbreaking in its beauty.

Slowly, telegraphing his motions, he shifts, lifting his hand to tuck a wayward strand of her hair behind her ear, like he used to do when she needed some touch but couldn't ask for it.

"May I ask you some things?" His voice dips down, low, as if to not wake the other two people in the house, even though Delina can tell with merely a thought that they're still asleep.

She nods, swallowing, and he cradles her chin.

"Why'd you bring me back?"

Once more, the words hang between them, and Delina can't parse what's the right thing to say. Can't sift through her options and find what's correct, what's smart, and what's accurate, all thoughts mishmashing together in her mind.

"Because five years?" she says, her voice lilting up, and she knows, the moment she says them, that they're too honest. Too honest and too ill advised.

His face is unreadable, like stone.

"I mean, also I panicked," Delina says, hoping for a joke. "I don't know how your magic demon bullshit worked but it was pretty intense for me all of the sudden, and—"

He swipes his thumb against her cheek, cutting off her words, and to her horror she realizes that she had let tears fall for the second time that day.

She jerks herself back, yanking a tissue from the box on the nightstand and wiping the tears away. "Sorry," she says, though if you held a gun to her head she couldn't tell you what she was apologizing for. "It's been…it's been a day."

He leans back as well, crossing his arms. "I've seen you cry already today, you don't have to apologize."

"Obviously," she snips back, then presses the heels of her hands into her eyes, flopping backwards on the bed. "I hate that everything I do now is complicated."

The bed dips down, the familiar weight of him laying next to her, not touching her. They're still on top of the quilt, they're still both fully dressed, but she feels fully naked. Naked and vulnerable.

"I'll try not to send you into any more moral quandaries," he says, and she smiles, briefly, still shutting her eyes against the world. "And I wouldn't say everything but…yeah bringing someone back from the dead is pretty complicated."

"Not to mention it's you." She exhales, finally blinking her eyes up to the exposed wooden beams of the ceiling. "First person I tried to bring back, first anything I tried to bring back—"

"Please don't try anything else," he interrupts, and she leans her head over to give him a glare, but they're so close, flopped on the bed, that the retort just evaporates from her mind.

It's no different from when they were first dating, in those first few months, before they really knew what to expect from each other. When everything was tentative and everything was unknown. When sometimes he seemed so skittish around her, she had no idea what to do.

It makes sense, in retrospect, the nerves from him. If he messed up, the looming threat to his mother was always behind him.

But here, with his lashes casting shadows on his cheeks and his hair messy and his lungs still aching against her mind, she finds herself without words.

He's content to let her blink up at him, watching her intently with his grey eyes so familiar.

"Why are your eyes only red some of the time?" she asks, instead of all the emotions clogging through her. All she would have to do to kiss him is shift forward, ever so slightly, and all he would have to do is drape an arm over her and so many things could happen.

"You shouldn't see that outside of circles," he replies, but there's a half smile lurking in his expression. "Maybe it's a Necromancer thing."

"Weird," she says, but doesn't move away.

His eyes flicker down to her lips, only a brief second, so short she might've imagined it.

"You really should sleep," he says, also staying exactly where he is. "We'll deal with all the complications and everything tomorrow."

"Sure, that sounds responsible," she says, and he laughs, quiet, before he sits up and clicks the lamp off, stealing the warm glow away, so the only illumination is the filtered moonlight through the floral curtains, before settling down next to her.

Not touching, not holding her, but she can hear the rise and fall of his breath and see the vague silhouette of his jawline in the shadows.

Tentative, she reaches out, tangling her hand in his, and he grips her back.