“It is.”
“But it is difficult for me to watch him take his place at your side. Lord Eric is a hunter. He has killed my friends”—Helmi snorted in disgust—“and comrades. He has treated you as if you are an enemy. He is not worthy of you.”
Helmi snorted again.
“Surely,” the disembodied voice said, “that decision is mine, and mine alone, to make.” But some of the anger had drained from the Queen’s voice; it was cool now, but not icy.
“Of course, my Queen. I am being foolish. I am being . . . unworthy.”
“You have never been unworthy,” the Queen replied. “But I do not wish you to waste your time. We are preparing, and I want your counsel.”
“My Queen.” He bowed his head again, and this time he rose. Without a backward glance at the two Necromancers behind him, he strode into the portal.
• • •
“The stupid thing is, she believes him. He’d slit her throat if he thought he’d have any chance of surviving it.”
“She understands jealousy and envy,” Emma replied. “What he said is perfectly believable.”
“It’s not. If it weren’t for her power, he’d find her contemptible. He already does.” She glanced at Emma. “You thought I’d turned Chase in.”
Emma closed her eyes and exhaled. “Yes. I’m sorry.”
“I considered it. Sacrifice Chase, and the rest of you could all get through.” Emma opened her eyes and saw that Helmi was looking down at her hand. At her palm, which was cupped and turned toward her.
“Thank you,” Emma said, and meant it.
“I think like a Necromancer. I think too much like a Necromancer. It’s not comfortable. Be ready. The minute the last Necromancer walks through the portal, you have to be there.”
“The Queen is there. We can’t walk through—”
“The Queen won’t be there once Alraed joins her. She’ll keep an eye on him. She might even attempt to offer him some sign of her renewed favor; the reasons he’s given make sense to her. Eric has been killing her people.” Helmi tilted her head to the side as she looked up at Emma. “Eric probably came here to kill you.”
“He did. We don’t talk about it much; it’s in the past and it upsets Allison.”
“But not you?”
“It doesn’t quite feel real to me—and I guess I’d prefer not to think about it. Whatever might have happened, didn’t. To be honest, I was more upset about my first meeting with your mother.”
“She has that effect on people.” Helmi looked up. “Go. Now.”
• • •
Emma had seen a portal very like this before—on the night Allison had almost been killed. She’d never examined one closely. She approached it from what she assumed was behind, given the direction that Alraed had walked—but this ended up being a bad assumption. The portal had no front and back. From either side it opened into what appeared to be a large, plain room; the walls were lit with torches, and the light they cast was both gloomy and inadequate.
Emma couldn’t see people.
She could, on the other hand, hear shouting. It wasn’t close; it seemed to be receding. Random words caught her attention and faded as she clenched her hands in fists. She was shaking. It wasn’t from the cold.
This was, she thought, the point of no return. She could enter the City of the Dead and leave her friends behind. They’d be safe without her. She glanced back, once. There was enough light in the room on the other side of this tall, standing rip in the air that the night seemed darker; she couldn’t see her friends clearly.
“You want to leave them behind.”
She could, on the other hand, hear Chase. He came from the other side of the road.
“I didn’t think you were going to survive that,” she said quietly. She lifted a hand; it hovered an inch above the surface of the portal.
“I had some concerns as well.” His shrug was pure Chase. “You’re changing the subject.”
She was. She inhaled cold air, exhaled mist. She wanted her friends to be safe. “Would you stay with them?”
So did Chase. “I would—but she has Eric. I’m going.” He hesitated. “Michael’s not wrong. I don’t know how he escaped Longland’s original spell. Neither do Ernest or Margaret. But there’s a decent chance he can do it again.”
“Have you been there? To the City?”
Chase didn’t answer. “I really wanted to hate you.”
“I wasn’t under the impression you were failing.”
He chuckled. “Are you alive?”
“Point taken. If I leave—”
“I am not staying behind with angry Allison. I don’t give a damn about Amy. But if you’re going, you’d better decide quickly; Ernest’s coming.”
She wanted to leave them behind. That was the truth.
But she wanted them to come with her, and that was the truth as well. She balanced between two different types of guilt; she drew another breath. She needed her friends. She’d needed friends when her father had died, even if she hadn’t really understood, at age eight, what death meant. She wasn’t eight, now. She understood death: endless silence, endless absence, utter loss. But she’d needed her friends when Nathan had died, as well—she’d needed them more.
“I’m not you,” she said quietly. “Sometimes I wish I were.”
“You don’t.”
“I don’t want—I don’t want what happened to you. But if I were you, this would be easy.”
“It’s not worth it,” he said, his voice so soft that she glanced to the side to look at his face. “I hated you because I love what Allison represents. But—without you, I would never have found it, never have recognized it. My life is all about loss. And fear. You don’t get to be Chase Loern and have anything that you care about. I’m terrified that she’ll die. Sometimes I can’t breathe through the fear.” He looked away. “Margaret said that you’re not the Queen of the Dead because you have friends and family, and they survived. She doesn’t think you can become the Queen—because of that. Maybe she’s right.”
“She’s right,” Allison said, taking the decision out of both of their hands. How long had they been talking? Emma hadn’t even heard her approach, and it was impossible to walk quietly in this snow. “I think the portal’s beginning to . . . fray.”
• • •
It was.
Emma reached out to touch it and withdrew her hand, frowning. She walked past Allison, leaving her with Chase, and approached the portal’s visible edge. Fraying was exactly the right description; she could almost see liminal threads as they lost cohesion and shape. Without thought, she caught those threads in a mittened hand. Nothing happened.
Her hands were already cold. Worse than cold. They ached. But she pulled off her mittens and shoved them in her pockets, thinking, absurdly, that she had no idea what the weather was like in the City of the Dead—as if this were a class trip or a not entirely welcome family vacation.
The air was bracing; she expected that.
The threads were like ice. She’d expected that as well but had hoped it would be different. They didn’t pass through, or around, her exposed palm; she caught them. They began to glow.
Margaret appeared to her left. Helmi appeared to her right.
“What will she do with Eric?” Emma asked softly.
“Love him,” Margaret replied.
“Does she even understand what that means?”
“No,” Helmi said. “She can’t hurt Eric.”
“She can. She can turn him into another power generator.”
“Do you think that’s much worse than what he has now? After what you’ve said?”
Emma did. But she couldn’t say why or how because she wasn’t dead. She couldn’t see the world as the dead did. “Will my father be able to find me?”
Helmi
’s jaw dropped. She turned to Margaret. “Is she for real?”
Margaret, however, said, “Yes, dear.” To Helmi, she added, “Allison’s younger brother is in the hospital, fighting for his life because of your sister’s actions. Emma’s father is the only information conduit they currently have.”
“Did he—did he come out of hiding too early?”
Emma didn’t understand the dead. She couldn’t imagine that someone centuries old would think to ask that question—and in that tone of voice. She didn’t know if death defined the dead in any way but state. Yet she heard the question clearly—and heard all that lay beneath it, and she thought that maybe the dead were not so easily changed as all that. She held out a hand not to the ancient, dead sister of the Queen of the Dead, but to the little girl who had been murdered by angry, terrified, villagers.
Helmi took it. And, oh, the cold. “You need both your hands,” she said, but so quietly Emma almost missed it. Nor was Emma unkind enough to point out that Helmi was holding her hand regardless.
“I don’t know what I’m doing with one hand,” she told the girl. “But if I do end up needing two, I know you’ll let go.” She caught more of the threads, winding them, by simple motion, more tightly around her palm and her fingers. Cocoons in stories worked like this; the strands shimmered, impossibly delicate.
The more she gathered, the more slowly the portal frayed.
“Go through?” Chase asked.
Emma frowned. “Not yet. There’s something—” She shook her head. “Don’t let me fall?”
“What?”
She closed her eyes.
• • •
In the darkness, there was no road. In the darkness, there were people. In Amy’s house, Longland had bound four; whoever had created this portal had bound two. They weren’t like Margaret had been; they could see her. They could follow her with their eyes.
No, she thought, frowning; they weren’t looking at her. They were looking at Helmi. Helmi, attached by the hand, was visible to Emma, even through closed eyes. Everything about the child was cast in sharp relief. The lines of her hair, her face, her hands and her clothing seemed harder, crisper. Light lent a glow to her eyes.
It was the light that drew the eyes of the two bound to the portal: a woman Margaret’s age, with long, thick dreadlocks that fell down her back and around her shoulders, and a prim man who appeared to be much older and paler.
They could neither move nor speak, but their gaze fell on Helmi.
“It’s not me they’re looking at,” Helmi whispered. She lifted her face and looked up at Emma. Emma was surprised at how much her expression hurt. When Helmi spoke to Longland—or to Alraed—she looked older and harder and just . . . meaner. But right now, hand in Emma’s, she looked as if she needed an anchor, a guardian. She was a child.
She had seen things no child, in any sane world, would ever have to see. She hadn’t come to Emma seeking rescue, not really; she’d come to find Eric. Possibly to torment Eric, she seemed to dislike him so much.
But she had found Emma. She’d found Michael. She had overcome her reluctance and fear for long enough to take the hand Emma offered her. It was literal, yes, the offered hand—but it was also metaphorical, because life could be, and often was, both. Emma’s hand was cold. Emma’s everything was cold. But she made no move to free herself.
Instead, she lifted Helmi’s hand.
“You have to move quickly,” Helmi told her, looking at the two dead people who powered the portal. “They’ll be pulled back. This was never meant to last.”
Emma had once stood, lantern in hand, and asked the names of everyone who approached her. All were dead. But all were human. She didn’t hold the lantern now, and she was afraid to do so, this close to the place where the Queen of the Dead had stood, commanding Alraed. She had no illusions: The Queen of the Dead had more power and far greater experience. Emma had power, but it was a power she didn’t understand. She’d never sneered at good intentions—they were better by far than bad ones, in her opinion—but good intentions here wouldn’t cut it.
And yet.
She couldn’t give up on them. “Come with me,” she said to Helmi, as if Helmi were actually eight, and lost.
She approached the woman first; the woman’s dead eyes seemed to see her, although they didn’t move. No chain bound her, not that Emma could see. Margaret and the others had been bound together, roped in necklace-thin golden light that connected them.
Helmi, however, said, “Their feet.”
Emma knelt. Helmi was right; the binding that held these two in place was anchored, somehow, to the road itself. “Do portals always require an anchor?”
“Yes. Here the road is best. It’s much harder to open a portal without that grounding. Longland could do it. Alraed can. But it’s a huge outlay of power, and it leaves the Necromancer vulnerable should he be attacked.”
“By hunters.”
Helmi nodded. “Or by other Necromancers looking to rise in the ranks. There are other ways to anchor, but those aren’t taught now. They were, once. After she almost died, my sister changed what she taught the Necromancers she gathered.”
“I’ve always wondered how she could find us.”
“But not how Eric could?”
“I don’t think Eric does—I think your mother does. But I can’t imagine your mother helping the Queen of the Dead.” She hesitated for a moment and then said, “I need my hand back for a minute.”
Helmi closed her eyes. Nodded. It took Emma a moment to untangle their fingers, because her hand was numb. The winter air felt warm in comparison, but only briefly. She reached for the delicate chains that bound the woman’s ankle. They were much tighter than the chains that had bound Margaret—and they were colder.
She opened her eyes and crossed the road to examine the chains around the ankle of the man. They were just as tight. Nothing seemed to bind him to the woman across the stretch of the portal.
“Emma?” Ernest’s voice reached Emma as if from a great remove. She shook her head.
“Emma,” Margaret said, her voice much clearer. “If you do not leave soon, you will not be able to follow. There has been some confusion on the other side of the portal; I believe we can take advantage of that confusion—but we must do it soon.”
• • •
Both the man and the woman appeared to be serving as support pillars; the portal stretched between their still, bound forms, rising in a half circle above them. That, too, was collapsing slowly.
Emma frowned, and then, bending until her face was almost touching the dirt covered, flattened snow, she found her way in: a single, slender chain that ran from ankle to road and vanished there. This was short enough it was hard to grasp, but she managed; she could find no other way to pull at the chains that seemed almost a part of their skin.
These chains cut into her fingers as she tugged at them, but as she did, they loosened, falling away from ankles to float almost freely in the air. The man blinked and looked down at her—he had to look down—as she rose. She ran across the road again, back to the woman, looping golden wire around her palm before she did.
The woman was bound to earth the same way the man was; Emma freed her in the same way. Neither moved from the position they’d occupied, but they did move; they seemed to inhale as they noticed their surroundings. They blinked. They turned toward her and toward Helmi.
“I’m Emma,” she told them, voice shaking slightly. “Emma Hall. And I’m sorry, but I need your help.”
THE OLDER MAN SPOKE FIRST. “Where am I?” His accent was thick, but Emma recognized both the words and the confusion in the question.
“You’re a couple of hours outside of Toronto. That’s in Canada,” she added, in case he didn’t know. “It’s winter.” She wanted to ask him where he thought he was, or when he’d last been aware of his surroundings; she didn??
?t. Instead, she turned to Margaret. Margaret spoke to the man quietly, as Emma turned her attention to the woman.
“What would you have of me?” The woman asked, her voice so worn and weary Emma’s initial impulse was to say, Nothing, you’ve done enough. But it wasn’t true; she wanted—she needed—something, and that something was not, in the end, different from what the Necromancers demanded.
“I need you to do what you’ve been doing until my friends and I can reach the—the City of the Dead.”
“It is not someplace you want to be,” the woman answered, with more force and less resignation. “You’re not dead.”
“I’m not, no.”
“All that waits you there is death. It’s where the dead go. It’s where the dead rot.” She looked up, past Emma’s shoulder. Emma thought she would cry. Her lips twisted in a bitter grimace instead, which was better—but not by much. “I won’t help you if it’s my permission you require.”
Margaret came to stand beside the woman. Her expression was frosty; she lost the carefully cultivated look of a matron as she regarded the woman. “She requires permission, but if you will not give it, you will not. Move.”
“Margaret—”
“We do not have time, Emma. Short of agreeing to go with the Queen’s knights, as she calls them, you will never reach the City of the Dead. And if you are accompanied by those knights, you will, in all likelihood, not survive an hour. Nothing you can do—nothing we can do—is effective against the Queen herself at this distance.”
“I opened the door,” Emma said quietly. “And I was nowhere near her at the time.”
“Yes.” Margaret’s expression gentled. “But you could not keep it open. If you truly mean to free the dead, you must go to the Queen.”
Emma looked at the glowing, slender chains around one palm. She reached out and offered her hand to Helmi again, and Helmi took it, even as Emma flinched at the cold.
“Eric will kill her,” Chase said.
Margaret did not reply. The older man, however, said, “Ms. Henney is persuasive. I apologize for my disorientation. It is seldom that I both serve and am left to my own devices and my own form. We are here to anchor the portal. You can see it, yes?”