Eric snorted. “Good to see you’re still incapable of counting.” He lowered his hands. “Give me a week.”
“A week to do what? She’s not going to get less dangerous in a week!”
“Give me a week, Chase.”
“Fuck that.” Chase started to move, and Eric blocked him.
“Give me a goddamn week, or we can finish what we started the first time we met.”
The silence was profound. They had so much history, these two. They argued like the brothers they technically weren’t, but beneath those arguments they had always shared a single, common goal.
“I’m not going back to the old man,” Chase finally said.
“No. You’re not.”
“Eric, he’ll know. We’re the two best agents he’s got. If we don’t call in, if we don’t tell him the Necromancer is dead, he’ll come himself.”
“I’ll deal with that if it happens.”
“When it happens. What the hell is so special about that girl, anyway?”
“Nothing that would make any difference to you.”
“And what’s going to happen in a week?”
Eric tensed and stepped back slightly, adjusting his stance. Chase saw, and he noted it, drawing himself in as well. “She’s going to try to talk a four-year-old ghost out of the burned-out wreck of his home.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
Chase laughed. “Are you kidding me?”
“No.”
“Does she even know what you are?”
“No. She doesn’t care, either. I can stay away,” he added, “or I can be there; she’s going to try anyway.”
“And you intend to help her.”
“How? I’ve got nothing to help with. She’s already singed her hair,” he added, “and she’s determined to keep going.”
“So you get out of killing her when she dies.”
“Pretty much.”
Chase put his hands down. “You’re taking too many risks.”
It was true. Eric didn’t deny it because he couldn’t. He also didn’t relax his own stance, because he was dealing with Chase.
“I understand why you’re pissed off,” Eric said. “And I understand why she’s a threat. But I would rather she died that way than—”
“Than by your hand.”
“Pretty much. I don’t want to kill her, Chase. I can’t think of the last time that happened.”
“Because, clearly, you were still sane before. Look, buddy, don’t weaken here.” Chase stretched. “I’ll give you the week.” And he held up his pinky.
Eric grimaced. He hated this part.
“Shake on it, pinky shake, or we don’t have a deal.”
“You’re an asshole,” Eric told him.
“Pretty much.” He waited until Eric did, in fact, lock pinkies with him.
“But you know,” Chase added, “You owe me a phone if that one’s broken.”
“I’ll buy you another phone.”
“And there better be someone around here to kill. I don’t like to get dressed up for nothing.”
EMMA, WHO COULD RECOGNIZE an argument-in-the-making when she saw it, had retreated, skirting the stone angel with its ostentatious pedestal and heading toward more familiar markers. Daylight transformed them, as it often did, but Petal didn’t seem to notice. He paused in front of standing wreaths, sniffed his way across the mostly shorn grass, and headed more or less straight to Nathan’s grave.
Emma approached the headstone quietly. It looked so new, compared to many of the others; light glinted over the sheen of perfect, polished stone.
Eric could see the dead. Eric said that the dead didn’t gather in graveyards.
She knelt, slowly, in front of the headstone. Usually she sat farther back, but today she chose to sit within touching distance. She could see her reflection across its surface, broken only by the engraved grooves of letters and numbers.
Her reflection. His name, yes. But she was alone.
Petal padded over and sniffed at her pockets, and she pulled a broken Milk-Bone out and held it in her open palm. He ate it, of course, and then dropped his head into her lap. She smiled and glanced up again. She was alone except for her big, old, stupid dog. On impulse, she wrapped her arms around his neck and hugged him.
Nathan wasn’t here.
But then again, she hadn’t come here for his sake. And it was quiet, in the graveyard. She’d missed that the past few days. She certainly wasn’t going to experience any of it tonight.
Petal’s head rose and reminded her that on some days, quiet was a lost cause. On the other hand, he was a good early-warning system. She stood, straightening her jacket and rearranging the pleats of her skirt, and then turned to see who he was barking at.
She felt both guilty and relieved when it wasn’t Nathan’s mother. Eric, standing about twenty feet away, slid his hands into his pockets, and waited for her to leave the space she’d created for herself here. She did, walking carefully between the headstones.
“Do you think Amy would mind if Chase tagged along tonight?”
“Probably less than you will,” she offered.
Chase laughed.
“If she called the police on him, I’d be grateful.” Eric was smiling.
“If he does anything that would make a police visit worthwhile, there probably won’t be enough of him left to take into custody.”
Chase lifted a hand. “Bored with being talked about in the third person now.”
“Sorry,” Emma said, cheerfully.
“That’s sorry? Try harder.”
“I’ll work on it,” she promised. “I have to get home and get changed. Do you want to meet me back at my place, or do you want me to text you Amy’s address?”
“We’ll meet you at your place,” Chase said cheerfully.
Eric hesitated, then shrugged.
“You gave me a week.”
Chase, sharpening his knife, shrugged. “We can’t afford to lose you, too.”
Eric stiffened. “What happened?”
“The old man sent Else and Brand out hunting. Brand didn’t make it back.”
Else and Brand worked on a different continent. “They found the Necromancer?”
“Yeah. He wasn’t alone.” Metal scraped against stone in a way that was both soothing and dissonant. “Eric—”
Eric started to clean the kitchen.
“Don’t wash anything,” Chase said, putting the knife down.
Eric ignored him.
“You don’t put the cutlery in the water first. Glasses. Glasses first.” He elbowed Eric to the side. “This is your idea of hot water?”
“Chase—”
“You had to choose the only house in the neighborhood without a dishwasher?”
“It was the only one in range for sale.”
Chase ignored this and turned on the hot water. “The old man’s worried,” he said to the rising steam. “I think he’s done with solo hunting assignments for a while.”
“You haven’t talked to him?”
“I gave you a week. And I’m not going to be the one to tell him the Necromancer’s still not dead, and we’re going to a party.”
“Amy’s party,” Eric said, giving up on the washing.
“Where are you going?”
“To get our jackets.” He wasn’t really looking forward to Chase’s reaction when he saw them.
Emma fed and watered Petal before she went foraging in the fridge for something that resembled dinner. Although Emma could cook, and sometimes even enjoyed it, she seldom bothered when it was only herself she was feeding. It was too much like work. And it wasn’t as if there wasn’t going to be food at Amy’s. It was almost 7:00 by the time she headed up the stairs to get changed.
She phoned Allison first. “Hey, Ally, how is Michael getting to Amy’s?”
“Philipa’s picking him up.”
“Isn’t that a little far for her to walk?”
“She’s driving.??
?
Philipa was not, perhaps, the worst driver known to man. She was, however, in the running. “We needed new lampposts anyway. Are his parents coming to get him, or are we supposed to get him home?”
“I told his mother we’d get him home. When are you leaving?”
“I’m not sure. Eric’s meeting me here, and we’ll leave when he shows up. Did you want us to pick you up on the way?”
“Philipa’s also picking me up.”
Emma laughed. “I hope Michael appreciates this.”
“It’s Michael,” Allison replied.
There was a long pause.
“Emma? Em, are you there?”
“Yes,” Emma said softly, “but I have to go. My—my dad’s here.”
Brendan Hall was standing in front of the computer, his arms folded. He didn’t move, but the computer screen blinked on, and the screen began to flicker as windows opened. Emma watched in silence for a moment, the hair on the back of her neck beginning to rise.
“Dad?”
He nodded without turning, and Emma knew what he would be looking at: the Letter Graveyard. The place where anonymous people—or people who used handles like imsocrazy and deathhead666 at any rate—sent letters that would never be read.
Except that these were.
“Sprout,” he said quietly, reading—of course—the letters she had sent him over the years. She tried to remember if anything in them was horribly embarrassing, but she couldn’t.
“I missed you,” she said softly, answering the comment he didn’t—and hopefully wouldn’t—make. “Sometimes it helped. To write. Even if you couldn’t read it.”
“Your mother knew about this?”
“Of course not. She’d just worry. I mean, worry more.” Emma paused and then asked, “Were you always watching?”
“No. Not for the first year. Not really for the second.”
She hesitated. She wanted to touch him. To hug him. But she remembered the cold of his hands, so much like the lantern, and instead curled her fingers into fists and kept them at her sides. “Dad, can I ask you something?”
He sat in her chair, and she turned it so that he was facing her. His eyes were still oddly colored, and they suggested a light that burned beneath the surface of what looked, to Emma, to be perfectly normal skin. There was no translucency to him, nothing to mark him as a ghost, although if she were being truthful, she didn’t want to see him that way. “Ask,” he said, in that quiet father’s voice of his that meant he was serious and paying attention.
“Is it true that after you died, you had nowhere to go?”
The silence was lengthy. In Hall parlance, this usually meant yes.
“Em,” he finally said, “I’m dead. You’re not. You should concern yourself with the living.”
“I concern myself,” she replied tightly, “with the things that concern me. Is it true?”
“What did Eric tell you?”
“Pardon?”
“What did Eric say about this?”
“He told me to ask you, if you want the truth.”
Her father nodded as if this made sense. “Yes.”
She almost laughed, but it would have been a strained laugh; she kept it behind her lips. “So…you’ve been stuck here for almost six years, with nowhere to go?”
“Yes.”
“And what about the others?”
“The others?”
“The other dead people. The other ghosts.”
“There are people,” he told her quietly, “that have been trapped here far longer than I have. I have you,” he added. “I have your mother. I can watch you, sometimes, and see how you’ve grown. How both of you have grown. I’ve never been able to speak with you before, but—your presence here attracts me. It binds me,” he added.
“Binds you?”
“It keeps me here.”
Emma was silent for a few minutes. At length she said, her voice thicker, “What about the others?”
“When the people they knew in life die, there’s nothing to keep them where their lives once were.”
“And they move on?”
He was silent. It was not a good silence.
“Dad, where do they go?”
He rose, as if the chair were confining, but he didn’t turn to face his daughter; instead, he walked to the window. Shaking his head, he let his hands drop. “Emma, can you understand that I don’t want you involved in this if it’s at all possible?”
“No. I’m not eight years old anymore,” she added, feeling slightly defensive. “And I am involved. I can see you. I can talk to you.” She took a deep breath. “I don’t want you to leave,” she said starkly. “I’m selfish enough to be happy that I can still talk with you. It’s been so long.
“But if you’re trapped here, if you’re trapped in this—this half-life, I don’t want that. I want you to be here because you want to be. I don’t want you to be here because you have no place else to go.” She hesitated, then said, “There’s a four-year-old boy who’s trapped in a burning house.”
He did turn his head to look at her then.
“I don’t want him to stay trapped there. He—Eric says his memories are strong enough that he stays in the burning building and strong enough that when I approach the house, it burns me. But he’s four. And I want him to come out of that house. I don’t want him to stay there forever.
“And I’m going to get him out. Don’t even think of trying to talk me out of it.”
His smile was rueful, but she saw the pride in it, and it was brighter, for a moment, than the odd luminescence. “I wouldn’t dream of it, Sprout.”
“But Eric says…if I manage to get him out somehow, he’s still lost. He has nowhere to go. Dad,” she added, her voice dropping to a whisper, “he’s four. I don’t want him to be stuck wandering the streets alone until his mother finally dies. Is that going to happen to him?”
“If he’s lucky,” her father replied. He shoved his hands into his pockets. But he looked at the curtains, and after a moment, Emma crossed the room to open them herself. To let the light in.
“It’s not that we’re not drawn,” he told her. “It’s not that we don’t know where to go when we die. There is a place for us. We can’t get there, but we’re always aware of it.”
“Can’t get there?”
He nodded. “It’s like looking through glass. But it’s not glass; we can’t shatter it. We can’t pass through it.”
Emma folded her arms tightly across her chest. “Where is it?”
“It’s not a geographical location, Em. I can’t pull up Google Maps and point it out.”
“But you could find it?”
“I could find it now. I could find it now without moving.” He rose and made his way to the window that Emma had revealed. “But it’s painful. To see it, to see what I can only describe as light, and to be shut out forever. The dead, especially the newly dead, will often gather there, wailing.”
She didn’t ask her father if that’s what he’d done because she didn’t want to know. Her father had been the pillar of the world with his patience, his quirky humor, his ability to override anger. “If you free your four-year-old, that will be where he’s drawn, if he’s lucky. He won’t see the others,” her father added. “Not immediately. But he’ll linger, for a year or two.”
“It’s got to be better than burning,” she whispered.
“It’s better,” he agreed. But his tone said it’s the same.
“What’s on the other side of the glass?”
“Home,” he replied softly. “Peace. Warmth. I would say love, but I don’t think any one of us can say for certain because we can’t reach it. We’re like moths, Em,” he added.
“And this is lucky?”
He glanced at her, then, and she knew he had come to the end of the words he was willing to share. But she’d lived with him for years. “Dad?”
“Yes?”
“When I touched you in the hospital, Mom could see you.”<
br />
He closed his eyes.
“Why?”
“I won’t answer that either, Em. Don’t ask.”
“Why?”
“Because Eric, if I’m not mistaken, is already having some difficulty with you, and I would like very much that it not get harder for him.”
“For him. Why?”
“Because,” her father said, “he’ll have to kill you, or try, and while I want to see you, I want you to have a life. You’ve only just started,” he added softly.
“But why will he have to kill me?”
“Because he’ll see only what he fears in you. He won’t see what he admires.” Her father lifted one hand. “I can’t judge him,” he added softly. “I can hate him, but I can’t judge him. Don’t touch me. Don’t touch any of the dead.”
“If I don’t touch the child, his mother won’t be able to see him.”
His father looked at her, his expression darkening. But he knew her, knew her far better than Eric did; he said nothing. Instead, he began to fade.
Conversation over.
When Eric came to the door, Petal was already there, barking his lungs out. The Hall household didn’t need an alarm system; they had Petal. On the other hand, alarm systems didn’t require feeding, watering, walking, and endless cleanup.
Emma opened the door and let herself out, locking the door while Petal’s barking deteriorated into a steady, guilt-inducing whine.
“Michael?” Eric asked, and she smiled. He was wearing a gray collared shirt and dark jeans but otherwise looked entirely like himself.
“Allison’s got that taken care of.”
Chase, on the other hand, had decided to go insane. His red hair was a mass of gel, he wore incredibly angular sunglasses, and he wore a tank under a black leather jacket that looked more like studs than coat.
“You,” she told him, “don’t get to tell Eric how to dress.”
He lowered the rim of said glasses. “Thank you. You don’t clean up badly yourself. Are we ready to go?”
“One of us was ready half an hour ago,” Eric told him.
“Two of us,” Emma said helpfully. They headed down the walk to Eric’s car. She stood by the back passenger door, and when the locks clicked, she got in. Chase took the front passenger seat, and Eric got behind the wheel of the car.