Chapter 13
13
D espite his attempts to scare her, Delina’s back to feeling hollow by the time Maison takes down the bubble, one thread at a time, and she sits against the wall of the shell of the church, watching him.
After a few minutes of inspecting, then spraying over the circle to invalidate it, Chloe sits next to her, watching as well. Gurlien is inspecting Maison’s work as close as he dares, and the pinched off expression is back on Maison’s face.
She hates that expression. Always has.
“Can you see all the gold?” Delina asks, after a few minutes of silence, shifting against the damp concrete.
“Not easily,” Chloe responds, muted. “That bubble? Yeah. They train us pretty early to see those.”
They watch for a few moments, as more and more of the threads disappear back to the ribbon on the street, and the gut punch of death lessens.
“So Necromancer?” Delina asks, and Chloe nods. “Is he telling the truth about the danger or is he trying to control me?”
“Oh, he is absolutely not exaggerating the danger,” Chloe says, stretching out her legs. Her feet are back in the boots, pinching at her toes. “I have no clue how we’re going to teach you control without bringing down an actual demon.” She glances, sidelong, to Delina, her brown eyes serious behind her glasses. “At least with Freddy here, he can absolutely do some defense, but I don’t know if he could stand up to an actual demon.”
“I still feel like I’m missing a massive piece of this puzzle,” Delina admits, even though ignorant is the worst thing she could be. “You three were raised in it.”
“Eh, Freddy and Gurlien were raised in it, they found me when I was like twelve,” Chloe says, chewing on her lip. “Turns out, when you transform a Bunsen burner into a padlock in the middle of your eighth-grade science class, it gets back to people real quick.” She shrugs, digging in the backpack. “Still feel the dead?”
“Ugh,” Delina responds, but the answer is yes. The bugs and the bones and the small creatures, all neon in the back of her mind, though the wrongness of the bubble is fading into the mist. “So not only did my mom get me the worst power imaginable, I can’t ever use it.”
Chloe tilts her head, her eyes narrowing. “We are still going to have to teach you control,” she says, her voice suddenly calculating, like she took too many lessons from Gurlien, but there’s a flicker of mischief in her face. “I have some ideas. Want to break into the church basement?”
“Why?” Delina asks. Her head still hurts and the bones still itch in her mind.
“She’s just offering because she’s bored,” Gurlien calls over. “There’s nothing in there.”
“You don’t know that!” Chloe calls back, then gives Delina an encouraging smile. “He’s a little correct.”
“No, I’m okay,” Delina replies. “I don’t really want to go digging into anything I can’t tell won’t include dead things.”
Maison insists on her getting a proper lunch and Gurlien retreats to try to call the magicians who know of the other Necromancer, and Chloe takes one look at the two of them and immediately scampers into one of the stores instead.
Delina can’t blame her. If she could get out of the awkward situation, she would.
But instead, she finds herself getting corralled into a cozy booth with shiny maroon leather benches and a table that’s been colored on too many times, and her ex-boyfriend immediately sitting across from her.
“Rule one of magic, of any sort of magic, is you’re going to need way more food than you think you will,” Maison says, as soon as the waitress swings two waters over to them, and if he’s going to act like this is completely normal than she most definitely is not. “If you think there’s a big chance, you’ll have to do something in a day, bring extra food.”
“Does that explain all your extra granola bars in your car?” Delina asks, prickly, pretending to study the menu extensively. “And in every one of your coat pockets?”
She had thought it a cute quirk.
He nods, relenting at that. “You got attacked far too often for me to not.”
She glares at him over the plasticky menu. “Excuse me?”
“That was the other part of this—” he gestures between the two of them, like it’s a business partnership that she had a say in, “—they wanted me to keep you alive, too, and the moment any of your mother’s enemies found out you existed, they all tried something. All of them.”
“And what, you were the one who had to protect me?” Delina asks, then glares down at the menu. “Sure. Right.”
Even over the menu, she can see Maison pinch the bridge of his nose. “Yes, exactly.”
“I don’t believe you,” Delina informs him, aiming for cold, but her voice breaks anyways. “For all I know you’re just lying again.”
In her pocket, his phone beeps, and the two of them lock eyes.
Because for all the hurt, there’s still all those pictures of his mother on his phone.
“Okay,” Delina says, pulling the phone out again, punching in the code. “Your Human Resource Officer wants to know when you’re returning to, and I quote, ‘the Prescott base.’”
“Jesus Christ,” Maison mutters, then leans over the booth to peer at the message with her. “Type in ‘unknown, target organized trip as a surprise.’”
“Can I text my dad?” she asks, waving his phone at him, and his face twists. “Just let him know all is good, so he doesn’t worry.”
“They absolutely track my texts, I wouldn’t,” Maison says, sighing. “If we had thought ahead, we could’ve established a code, but…”
“Wait, they track your texts?” At his nod, she wrinkles her nose. “Even when you were on your business trips?”
He nods, blankly, then winces.
“When I sent you those…”
“Probably,” he says gingerly.
“Ew!” Delina says. “I don’t want some gross guy from Atlanta to see my nudes!”
He rubs his face. “I don’t think they read every text, just when…when things went wrong? I think?” It’s weak, and he knows it.
“Gross,” Delina informs him, and his lip twitches up into the barest hint of a smile before he gets it under control.
The waitress swings over to take their order, and throughout the entire time, three dots appear on the phone, then disappear, as if the person on the other edge is typing, then decides not to press send.
“We’re going to have to figure that out,” Maison says, leaning forward on his elbows over the table. “What we are going to do with you without…putting my mom in danger.”
Which is another horrible aspect of this.
“Would you have worked for them if your mom wasn’t held?” she asks, and he’s already shaking his head before she finishes.
“Never in a million years,” he says, voice low, like it’s a confession. “The moment they would have let me out of their sight as a teen, I would have run away and never looked back.”
“Never would’ve dated me, never would have moved in with me?” Delina continues, and his jaw twitches. “Probably never even looked at me twice.”
“Delly,” he sighs, then stares out at the tiny cafe, at the single waitress and the only other table with one other person. “One sec.”
With his fingertip, he traces something, some symbol, into the wood of the table, and it glows briefly, before all sound around them slips away.
The waitress still taps her heels against the tile, the other person still folds the daily paper, but no sound reaches Delina’s ears.
“Neat,” Delina says, before she can stop herself. “Will I be able to do that?”
“Probably not,” Maison says dryly. “Maybe if you worked for ages at it, but it’s highly unlikely. Necromancers are, supposedly, one purpose only.”
“Ew,” Delina says, and he cracks a smile, briefly, before it falls. “Just saying, that would’ve been useful in the apartment above the bar.”
“And if I hadn’t been forbidden from doing exactly that, I would have,” Maison replies, and it’s so close to their normal banter that it hurts.
The waitress swoops by with the food, with Maison’s pastrami melt and Delina’s club sandwich.
“Sorry about your mom,” Delina continues, after a few moments of him watching her and her attempting to find the food palatable. “If I had known it would put her in danger or anything I would’ve talked to you first.”
Finally, he nods, his face solemn. “I wish you could meet her,” he says, wistful and a bit sad. “I think you two would get along.”
There’s nothing to be said at that. It’s a nice, pretty statement, the sort of statement she wants to believe but finds it out of her grasp.
The sort of statement she would have treasured before.
They eat in the awful, artificial quiet, until all that’s left is the fries she would usually steal off his plate and the lettuce she picked off.
“Did you ever meet your dad?” Delina asks, finally. “The…demon one?”
“Yes,” Maison says, eager, like the silence broke at him too. “Three times. They weren’t…exactly pleased about my existence.”
She raises an eyebrow at him.
“The College apparently did a hell of a lot of magic on my mom to make it even possible, and apparently not knowing about that ahead of time is annoying for demons.” This, at least, is something he can talk about, and the line in his shoulders relaxes some. “They visited once when I was a teen, trying to figure out if they could do something with me.” Maison briefly cracks a smile, his dimple perfect. “They couldn’t figure anything out, and I tracked them down a few other times with questions before I met you.”
“How?” Delina asks, and it’s a relief to just talk as well. They always talked, about the little and the big things, and the lack of it…hurts.
“Eh, I can do just enough demon junk to figure out the communication lines,” he replies, with a wave of his hand, like that explains everything. “It was the weirdest fucking thing of my life.”
Considering that his life apparently involved keeping her alive from mysterious assassination attempts, that in itself is interesting.
“So demons…possess other bodies to communicate, right? The dead bodies?” Maison says, as if that’s just common knowledge. “First time I met my father, the other person of the genetic mishmash, they were in a female body. Blew my little teenage mind.” It’s so close to how he would tell stories of his workday, back in the condo in Arizona. “Next time, male body. Incredibly confusing. Turns out most demons are like that, not really caring about that aspect of the body they’re in, and the fact that I couldn’t just switch when I got tired of this one absolutely annoyed the shit out of them.”
“So now you just have a gender-neutral parent that’s just out there somewhere?” Delina asks, and if she hadn’t spent the entire morning incredibly aware of dead bones it would be a lot weirder. “Who has no idea how to deal with you?”
“Exactly,” Maison says, and at least he’s treating it like it’s an amusing story, his dimple on his chin. “Any magical person meets me, they always want to know how much I know about my father, like they think I just have them on speed dial.”
“Could…your other parent help with…all this?” Delina asks, gesturing at herself. “Get your mom out so we don’t worry about it, make other demons back off so I’m not in danger?”
“No,” he says, almost before she finished talking. “Because they wouldn’t help, they would kill you, and me asking them not to wouldn’t mean a thing.” The brief, fragile peace of them just chatting shatters, and his face pinches. “I don’t ever want them to find out about you.”
“Okay, scratch that,” Delina says, unnerved, “how about breaking your mom out?”
“She’s warded, demons can’t get in there,” he says. “I asked a while ago, they asked me very politely why I think someone would risk getting trapped for someone they slept with a few decades ago and didn’t bother bonding with.”
“Grim,” Delina says, because it is, and he nods. “So we figure something else out.”
“I have been trying to figure something out for my entire adult life,” Maison informs her, and this, at least, she believes him. “Unless there's some aspect of Necromancy I’m just not aware of, I don’t know.”
The lack of options is annoying, but to be fair, Delina’s only really known about the problem for a few hours.
“So we can ward against demons, for me,” Delina says, and he wavers his hand. “At least so I can learn a little?”
“I mean, that might work, but I don’t like it,” Maison replies. “Professionally speaking, there’s nothing to stop the demon from just waiting until you step out of the wards.”
He would know more about the limitations than her, and even that irks her.
“I have been…wanting to talk to you about this for ages,” he says, almost in a rush. “Find out your perspective, get your ideas, rant about all of this.”
“I’m sure keeping a secret and dating someone because it was a job was so hard on you.” Her throat sticks at saying that.
“Okay, that’s fair,” Maison says, begrudging, and it should feel like she won something, but it doesn’t. “Would you believe me—”
“—No,” Delina interrupts.
Once again, he cracks a smile like he didn’t expect that of her, before he shakes his head. “Okay,” he says, a little bit slower. “I don’t exactly know what to do or say to convince you to trust me of…well, anything…but can I try?”
It’s not what she expected him to say, so she folds her arms as the waitress soundlessly swings by to refill their waters.
He had clearly expected her to say something, so he stares at her, obviously scraping for words.
“Why?” Delina asks, after a horrifically long moment, picking at the remnants of her fries. “I know now, we just have to figure out a way to not get your mom hurt and then you don’t have to deal with me anymore. Why do you care if I believe you?”
“Because five years,” he blurts out, immediately, then he blanches. “Because I don’t…”
She raises an eyebrow at him over the remains of her sandwich, picking out the less than ideal looking lettuce.
“Look, Maison, or Frederick, or—”
“Yeah, don’t call me that,” he interrupts.
“Or whoever you actually are,” Delina pushes on, and there’s still the knot of hurt in her chest, pounding. “I’m not delusional enough to think I’m easy to get along with, even before finding out that my bio-mother is apparently a psychopath. But you don’t have to try now, I don’t have to believe you, you don’t have to pretend to like me.”
He hesitates, watching her from underneath his unfairly long lashes.
“It does explain why you were so willing to stick around when I was awful,” Delina says, poking at the remnants of her sandwich again. If she’s supposed to be hungry after the morning, it hasn’t kicked in yet. “I bet the paycheck helped with that.”
The silence, with that briefly glowing rune, now itches underneath her skin. Something, anything, besides his lack of words would be welcome.
Suddenly, Gurlien sits at the booth right next to Maison, startling them both, and Chloe slides in on Delina’s side.
“The problem with silencing spells is you need to be aware of your environment so you don’t miss something,” Gurlien says, and Maison flinches, like the sudden noise is too much. “We were calling your names from across the shop, you asshole.”
Chloe pokes at the rune, and it glows briefly at her touch. “Why’d you go with this one?”
Outside the table, the world is still silent, still muffled, and Delina has to crane her neck to look out, just to make sure.
“Because people get disgruntled when you start to throw around the word demon all over the place,” Maison says, before something pokes at Delina’s brain.
Something wrong, like something at the base of her neck, brushing against her awareness.
She turns and looks at Chloe, who’s inspecting the rune still, like it says more to her than it does to Delina.
And in her backpack, in a small plastic, airless container like a coffin, wedged between an extra jacket and a thin metal clipboard, is something dead.
Delina breathes out, and it’s the small fly that Maison killed in his bubble, now perfectly preserved in the plastic container. It’s still, entirely motionless, and one of the wings must’ve bent on its fall to the ground.
Chloe finally glances up at her, raising a sharp eyebrow, then shakes her head at her.
Message clear. Don’t talk about it.