Chapter 20

20

I t takes another day and a half of nerves, a day and a half of Maison jumping at each sound, and a day and a half of Delina desperately wanting to be anywhere but the cabin her mother gave her, before Gurlien declares that it's "probably" safe for them to let Delina out of the demon trap.

Delina's barely seen anyone in that day and a half, with Maison steadily avoiding her. She steps into the common room, he disappears down into the basement. She wanders down the stairs, he finds a reason to go back to his room. There have been no more midnight hot chocolates, no more kind but confusing conversations.

Instead, he just acts as if he's going to jump out of his skin whenever she gets close.

Gurlien's mostly kept to himself in the stacks of research, occasionally conferring with Maison, but mostly ignoring everyone else. Chloe's been running around, reinforcing runes and wards, as well as attempting to transform half of their items into things more usable.

It's the most awkward Delina's ever felt, and that's saying something.

"So I take it no going back to that Target," Delina says, bouncing on her feet as everyone shakes their head no.

Everyone's uneasy. Everyone's on edge.

"There's the grocery store one town down, it should have about half of what you need," Chloe says, and she's honest-to-god writing down some sort of math equation in a notebook. "It's about a twenty-five-minute drive if you take the overpass."

"It's next to the brewery," Gurlien says, direct at Maison who blinks owlishly.

It'd be interesting if he wasn't still avoiding her and every attempt she made to talk to him.

"What are the chances you would let me go alone?" Delina asks, and Maison blanches. "I need to be out of this cabin before I throttle one of you."

Chloe glances up at her, skittish, and the back of her neck is still raw. Korhonen had left some unholy amalgamation of a burn and a bruise when gripping her, and ironically, it's still the most painful out of all the collected injuries.

The math equations are all titled ‘defense' on them, so Delina's not going to pry into that.

Gurlien and Maison glance at each other, and a silent battle of wills ensues, one completely foreign to Delina. An eyebrow raised, a twitch of a scowl, a crossing of arms, before Maison stands, definitive, and grabs his jacket from the other room.

"What was that?" Delina asks Gurlien, who fakes another bored expression. "No, that was something, what was that?"

"He's just trying to be an ass, don't worry about it," Chloe chimes in, already hunched back over the notebook.

"Which he?" Delina asks, as Maison strides back in the room, coat thrown over one arm. "If I'm just going to be a burden, you don't have to come."

Maison rubs his chin and he has the beginnings of stubble growing along his jaw, which is further than he's ever let a beard grow before. "That's not it, Chloe, disable the trap?"

Delina drives, this time, and she idles the crappy rental right on the other side of the burned-out line, as Chloe and Maison both inspect it, before the now familiar air shivers in front of the car tires.

Through the windshield, Chloe crosses her arms at Maison, bristling, both of them talking too quietly for Delina to hear in the car, before Chloe stomps back off in the direction of the cabin, the mist swirling behind her.

Maison watches her walk back, a scowl on his face, before he yanks open the car door and sits back down, his hair damp from even that brief time in the mist.

"You don't need to babysit me if it's that big of a deal," Delina says, driving over the remnants of the trap. The back of her neck prickles, like something's going to rain down on them, but nothing happens, just the slow movement of the blackberry canes along the deadened branches.

Maison leans his head over on the neck rest, watching her, like he used to do whenever they drove long distances, whenever they made road trips. "It's not that big of a deal."

"Everything else you're doing suggests otherwise." Delina clutches the steering wheel, before drumming her nails on it. "Am I still glowing or whatever?"

"I'm not a good judge of that," Maison grumbles, and Delina chances a glance away from the gravel road to look at him. "You're fine."

"So what's crawled up your ass the last few days?" She's probably being a bit too rude to him, a bit too mean, but the day and a half of almost ignoring her after such a tender moment in the middle of the night, she can't make herself care.

They pass the broken tree, and the stone chips turned by Chloe are still there, scattered into almost pebbles.

"Would you believe me if I said that things feel incredibly weird for me?" Maison asks, after a long pause.

Things are incredibly weird for everyone right now, but as the car slides through the mist to the paved street, Delina still scowls, before a thought occurs to her.

"Weird like the whole death thing? Is your chest having issues? I should be able to tell, but…"

"Weird like I don't know how to talk to you," Maison interrupts, then sighs. "And yes, the death thing."

"Talk to me about the death thing," Delina demands, a horror itching under her skin. What if she did it wrong, what if it reverses itself, what if the repair work unravels and his artery rips open and his lungs fill up…

"I don't want to talk about the death thing," he says, surly.

"No, tell me, what if I did it wrong, what if something happens, what if—"

"You didn't do it wrong," he interrupts again, and Delina coasts the car to the side of the highway, throwing it into park and turning in her seat to face him. "Delly, I'm fine. Absolutely fine. Stop worrying about it."

They stare at each other, his eyes the same gray as the mists around them.

"If I scan you, would it draw demons?" Delina blurts out.

For a long moment she thinks he's going to refuse to answer, before he crosses his arms. "Don't try to fix anything."

It's enough permission for her, so she slaps her hand against his chest, right where the bolt pierced him, even though his skin stopped hurting a day and a half ago, and exhales.

The artery still holds, healthy and flowing into his heart, as if it had never broken. His lungs are clear, not even a hint of a hitch in their motions. The muscles in his back are together, reknit in her healing and just as strong.

She lets her eyes flutter shut, follows the motion of his blood. It surges up to the brain, back down, perfectly clear of any obstruction.

His shoulder is a bit unhappy, like he slept wrong, and his ankle is annoying him.

"Okay," she says, opening her eyes again, not removing her hand. "Alright, you're okay."

His own eyes glow red, and she flinches.

"Red eyes again," she tells him, nervy, and he blinks, before the color vanishes to the grey again.

"So you can tell when I'm tapping into something demon," he says, like it's a separate side of him, but at least he's talking to her. "I'll hold it back."

"You don't need to." If they were together, actually together, she would curl her fingers around the collar of his Henley, pull him closer, and plant a kiss on his cheek, but as they are she just keeps her palm against his beating heart.

There's something akin to exhaustion thudding against his mind, halfway to a headache.

"You're not sleeping well again," she says, instead of anything else. "Did I interfere with that?"

"You are always the reason I lay awake," Maison replies, and his face pinches off, like he didn't mean to reveal so much. "Gurlien has his theories, I think they're bullshit, he's pulling the rank of actually talking to someone who's been raised before, I think a sample size of two isn't nearly enough."

That sounds like him, at least.

"What does he think?"

Maison's lips thin. "That my mind is unsure how to deal with the fact that I died for a bit so it doesn't want to sleep."

"So like…trauma?" Delina hazards, and he scowls at her. "I dunno, dying is traumatic, it has to be."

"I'm not traumatized," Maison protests, which is absolutely something someone dealing with shit would say. "He thinks it's physiological, not psychology."

"That's still trauma," Delina says, then slowly removes her hand and glancing back at the misty road. "Tell me if things start to feel like they're falling apart."

He obviously bites back a reply to that, like she's said something wrong, before he nods. "I will."

She coasts the car back to driving, merging back onto the empty highway.

"You're doing well with the scanning," Maison says after a few minutes of driving through the mist. "It must be natural for Necromancers."

"Can you do it?" Delina asks, and it's an opportunity to talk, to not be so awkward.

"Not like that, what you're doing is far out of my skill set. I can, at most, tell how much energy you've used and if you're close to empty." Out of the corner of her eye, in the way she's not supposed to look while driving, she sees him shrug. "It's useful in battle."

There's a strange charm to him talking about things he does as battle. Completely out of her image of him as a mild-mannered artist, but somehow completely fitting into the seriousness he sometimes falls into.

Like this is the missing part of him, as well, and now she gets to see it.

And, of course, now that they are completely complicated and broken up but still acting like this.

"You had promised ridiculous stories," Delina says, after they pass the nearest other inhabited house, a small trailer nestled in the woods, a rusted-out car in front.

"Gurlien was right, I was just trying to charm you," Maison says, instead.

"Does that mean you don't have them?"

He's quiet for a few more minutes, until they pass an actual neighborhood of three houses, clustered around what looks like a Christmas tree farm. The paint peels off the sidings of the house and there's tires in the driveway, but the rows of trees are pristine and perfect.

"Do you remember our trip to Phoenix, the time when we got hit by the monsoons and the road back flooded out?" he starts, leaning his head against the window.

Of course she does, it was a pain in the ass, and she missed two days of work before they repaired highway 89.

"Your mother had just lost control of the Terese project, and we didn't know anything, so I was told to take you back to the base—back to home—in no uncertain terms. They could not grasp the idea that a flooded road would prevent it."

He had seemed stressed the entire time, beyond the normal lack of home, and he had paced a line in the carpet of the crappy hotel they ended up stuck in.

"The Terese project pissed off…a lot of people, and whenever that happened, someone almost always sent someone to try to hurt you." It's not where she thought the story was going, so she perks up. "You desperately wanted to go out and have fun in Phoenix, but there was an actual sniper in town, so I had to balance trying to get home over flooded road, my bosses texting me every half hour with either demands to get you someplace else or updates on people your mom pissed off, and you wanting to go to the club. That was ridiculous."

In the end, they had gone to a dive bar after poking their heads into half a dozen lounges, before Maison found one he liked, and he ended up getting trashed on a much too strong margarita that neither of them anticipated, and she had loved it. They had gotten back the next day and it took him a day after that before his hangover was gone.

"Crazy that there was a sniper there," Delina muses, instead of the strange wistfulness of a happy memory of hers being so stressful to him. "That has to be why you picked the bar with no windows."

"Yup," he says, popping the p sound. "And I really didn't mean to get drunk, and you were so pretty in the neon lights and there was a fucking sniper in town searching for you."

He sounds…resigned. Delina hates it.

The pitted highway smoothes out, as they pass a school and an actual grocery store, before cruising into something that approaches a downtown. Flags hang in every storefront, and a few people scurry between stores.

"Considering how I was never sniped, I think you did a good job," Delina says, pulling into a parking space in front of one of the grocery stores.

He gives her a startled look as she climbs out of the car.

"And how I had no clue my life was in danger, that's also pretty impressive." She doesn't know why she's pushing herself to compliment him. Doesn't know why she desperately wants him to know that she appreciates it, appreciates the stress, appreciates the effort. "Glad I didn't get shot or anything."

He squints at her, his eyes briefly flashing red before that too vanishes. "You're welcome?"

She tosses her mess of a ponytail over one shoulder. "Let's get some supplies, see if they have your pretzels."