Emma nodded but continued to speak to Eric. “This is strange for all of us, and we all want explanations. Michael does more than want: he needs them.”
“He doesn’t need these.”
“Yes,” Amy said, quietly coming to the rescue—not that it was needed. “He does. Don’t bother to argue with Em about this. She won’t budge.”
Chase started to speak, and Allison cut him off by simply raising her hand. The funny thing was that Chase actually paid attention. Allison then added her voice to the discussion. “He’s always processed information differently than the rest of us do—it might be why he wasn’t completely affected by whatever it was Longland did. Because he knows he doesn’t understand some of the same things we do, he needs the explanation; if we don’t give him one, he’ll come up with one on his own—one that doesn’t resemble reality.
“Which can be even more frightening than the truth usually is. If he knows what’s actually happening, he can work with it.” Allison reddened slightly. “Sorry.”
“And he clearly doesn’t mind being talked about in the third person, as if he weren’t here,” Eric observed.
Michael frowned. “But I am here,” he told Eric. “Everyone knows it.”
“Yes?”
“Then they’re not talking about me as if I weren’t here.”
Emma almost felt sorry for Eric. Almost. “He’s staying, Amy’s staying in case you were about to be stupid enough to suggest she leave, and Allison’s staying because I’m going to tell her everything anyway, and it’s just easier not to get who-said-what confused. That about covers our side of things.” She glanced at Allison. “Did you fill Amy in on everything?”
Allison nodded, looking slightly relieved.
“Then we’re good to go with your side of things.”
Eric and Chase glanced at each other; Chase shrugged.
Amy cut in. Given the number of sentences they’d managed to get through uninterrupted, this was more than expected. “What exactly did Longland do to my brother?”
“We’re not sure. Not exactly. Which is to say, we don’t have a good way of explaining how it works. We’ve seen it before,” Eric added, speeding up slightly as Amy opened her mouth, “and as I said, it’s a compulsion. A control.”
“You said he normally wouldn’t do something like this—he’d just make it look like it was Skip’s idea. Skip’s not the brightest guy in the world. This is the type of stupid he might believe could be his own.”
Eric nodded, wary now. Emma liked that, about him. He wasn’t stupid.
“But if he needed to do something in the house, he’d do something worse. Which he clearly did.”
“More or less.” On the other hand, he looked distinctly uncomfortable.
“So Chase and Emma went upstairs to search the house, and Chase came back and pulled you in. What did you find?”
They looked at each other again, and any sympathy Emma felt for either of them evaporated. Michael, however, had stopped fidgeting so badly. She reached out and put a hand on his shoulder.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing upstairs,” Emma interjected. “Chase, you called Longland a Necromancer. Maybe we can start with that.”
AMY TURNED TO LOOK AT EMMA. “A…Necromancer.”
“Pretty much.”
“So…what Allison said about your dad in the hospital—that had something to do with Necromancy?”
Emma frowned. “I don’t think so. I think he’s just dead.”
“Oh. Okay then.”
Emma winced. “Yes, yes, I know it sounds insane.”
“It sounds worse than insane, but at least it hasn’t descended into B-movie badness. Yet. We checked the hedge while you were upstairs; Longland broke a few branches. The grass is mostly okay.”
“How mostly?”
“I think I’ll survive. I’m not sure Skip will, if we don’t have an explanation that won’t get us both thrown into an insane asylum. And no, before you ask, I am not telling my parents about any of this unless they absolutely need to know.” She added, “You haven’t told your mom, have you?”
Emma shook her head.
“Allison?”
“No.”
They all turned to look at Michael. Michael looked mildly confused. “I told my mother about Emma’s dad. Why aren’t you telling your parents?”
“Our parents will worry so much they probably won’t let us out of the house again, except for school,” Emma told him. “What—what did your mother say?”
“Not very much. She asked me not to tell my dad. She told me I must be mistaken. I told her she could ask your mother. Did she?”
“No.” Emma thanked god for small mercies. “But she probably doesn’t want your dad to worry.” Because she doesn’t believe you, and she’s pretty certain he won’t either, Emma thought. This was not, however, something you could say to Michael unless you wanted to upset him.
“When the rest of you have finished, you can tell me when you’d like me to start.”
The girls turned to look at Eric. He lifted his hands in instant surrender.
“Start with Necromancers, if you can’t start with Longland. What, exactly, is a Necromancer, anyway? Some special type of—of dead person?” Emma tried unsuccessfully not to rest her hands on her hips; she was aware that this made her look a little bit too much like her mother. Or an Amy wannabe at this moment.
“No. They’re not dead. They’re very much alive.”
“Alive and something that no one else has ever heard about.”
“Not and survived, no. Possibly not and died; they don’t really feel the need to explain their existence to ordinary people.”
“So…they’re like a secret society?” Amy walked over to the patio furniture, snagged herself a chair, and dragged it back. She sat down.
Chase and Eric exchanged another glance. Chase was clearly torn between finding this hilarious and finding it infuriating, and he hadn’t decided which.
“Ye-es.”
“And people who can see the dead, for whatever reason, are naturally Necromancers?” Emma decided that a chair was a good idea. She did not, however, move.
“No,” Eric said, as Chase said, “Yes.”
“Eric can see the dead. Eric is, I’m assuming, not a Necromancer.”
Silence.
“We all saw your dad,” Michael offered. “I don’t think I’m a Necromancer. Eric, what is a Necromancer? I know what they probably are in D20 rules,” he added, to be helpful.
“They’re not like that. They can’t summon an army of zombies or skeletons. Science will get there first. And no, Michael, you are definitely not a Necromancer. Neither is Mrs. Hall or Allison or the other people who probably saw Emma’s dad.”
“But Emma?” he added, with just a trace of anxiety.
“Emma,” Chase said, while Eric was struggling for words, “is a Necromancer.”
If, as they say, looks could kill, Chase, or what was left of Chase, would have fallen over on the spot. Chase, however, squared his shoulders and met Eric’s furious glance without blinking. “She is,” he said quietly, shoving his hands into his pockets.
“Are you telling this story, or am I?”
“You are, of course. If I were, I wouldn’t have taken this long to get to the damn point.”
Emma thought Eric was going to punch him, and Chase, judging by the way he shifted his stance, thought so too. “Eric,” she said.
He lowered his hands. He didn’t manage to uncurl them.
“I’m a Necromancer?”
The look he gave her made her turn away for a moment. Sometimes you couldn’t look too closely at another person’s pain.
“Yes.”
“And this means you have to—” she broke off, looking at her friends. “Tell me.”
“The headaches weren’t headaches. They weren’t a concussion. Some people have a lot of trouble adjusting to what they see when they’re first coming int
o their power. Your brain builds new channels, new ways of assimilating visual information, but it’s complicated and it hurts. While you’re doing this, you can often hallucinate, hear voices, see things. It’s both painful and confusing, but if you have no guide, if you have no information, those will shut down on their own as your brain learns to ignore the incoming information. It’s almost natural.”
“That’s what you were hoping for.”
He nodded, closed his eyes, turned his face away.
“He knew it was too late,” Chase told her. “He just doesn’t want—”
Eric stepped on his foot, hard.
“What is it that Necromancers can do that makes them so dangerous?” Emma found it easier to ask this of Chase. Possibly because it didn’t seem to hurt him so much to answer, and possibly because he was still recovering from the very necessary stomping.
“You can ask that after tonight?”
She grimaced. “Good point. But—how can they do it?”
“They take their power from the dead.”
“From the dead.” Emma’s eyes widened. “You mean like the dead in the room?”
“Like the dead that are following you, yes.”
Amy said, “Allison, do you see any dead people?”
“No.”
“Michael?”
“No.”
“Okay. Just checking, because neither do I.” Amy shifted in her chair. Emma had to give her this: when she wasn’t in the mood to be impressed, it took a lot to impress her.
“With the dead you have following you,” Chase continued, “you could probably destroy this whole block without blinking and still have power left to go home.”
“I can walk home from here.”
“That’s not the home I was talking about.”
“It’s the only home I have.” But she turned to look at the dead. Because Chase was right. They were following her. She frowned. “Emily,” she whispered.
A fifth ghost appeared, almost shyly. “Yes?”
“Sorry. I—I almost forgot about you, and I wanted to see if you were still here.”
“I can’t leave,” the girl replied.
“Why not?”
“You hold me.”
“Emma,” Amy said sharply, “You are creeping me the hell out. Who are you talking to, exactly?”
Emma grimaced. “I don’t know if this will work,” she said.
Eric said, “Don’t. Em. Don’t.”
But Emma reached out with her hand, palm up, to Emily, who hesitated for just a minute before she reached out and grasped Emma’s hand with her own. Hers was cold. To Emma’s eyes, nothing had changed.
But Amy’s intake and Allison’s soft rush of breath—exhale or inhale, Emma couldn’t tell—told her that things had changed for her friends.
Michael said, “She doesn’t look dead.”
“No. Thank god. I don’t think I could stand to see corpses everywhere. This is Emily Gates. Emily, these are my friends. This is Michael,” she added, because Michael had walked toward Emily. He was tall, certainly taller than Emma, Amy, or Allison.
“Hello,” Michael said quietly. He held out his hand.
Emily looked at it and then shook her head. “I can’t,” she told him.
“Oh.” He let his hand drop. “It’s okay,” he added because she seemed to be unhappy about the admission. “Emma, why can we see her now?”
“I don’t know. But in the hospital—I touched my dad.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“She did,” Eric replied. His voice was very quiet. “But not in a way you could see, not then. Until she touched him, you couldn’t see him.”
“Why does her touch make them visible?”
“It doesn’t. Not exactly. She’s using a very, very small part of their power to make them visible to you. To everyone here.”
Emma’s hand tightened slightly, and then she let go. “Emily, how do I let you go? What am I holding?”
Emily frowned. “I don’t know.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Eric’s voice was rough. “You can’t let them go here, even if you could figure out how to do it. Longland’s still alive, and he’s still out there. You let them go, he’ll probably be able to pick them up again, and we cannot face him when he’s wielding that kind of power. It’s not easy for him to pick up the dead this way. It is not trivial.”
Emma nodded and turned to the other four. She introduced herself, and she received their names. The children were hard for her. They were just too young to be caught up in all of this. Too damn young, she thought, to die.
But they were dead. “Do you want to meet my friends?” she asked them softly.
“Don’t.” Eric again. “Emma—don’t do this.”
Setting her jaw, she touched each by the hand, and she introduced Georges, Catherine, Margaret, and Suzanne, to her friends. She introduced the two women, Margaret and Suzanne, first, and then the children, because she knew what effect they would have on Michael.
Michael liked children, possibly because there was something in children that was not yet entirely fettered by social convention, and he responded to it. Her hands—she introduced Georges and Catherine at the same time—were numb by the time he had finished asking them questions, because he did ask. They answered, slowly at first. But as they talked, they grew more animated, and Michael, forgetting for a moment that they were dead, started to play, to make faces, to try to get them to laugh.
It was heartbreaking to watch him. It was worse to watch them absorb this playfulness, because they wanted it so badly, and this fact was completely obvious to Emma.
It was obvious, Emma thought, glancing at Allison and Amy, to all of them. Allison approached them as well, but she was more reserved. She retreated because Michael was making them laugh, and when they laughed—they didn’t seem dead.
But when Allison turned to Emma, her eyes were filmed with tears that she was trying not to shed. “Em.”
Emma nodded.
“How can we help them?”
“I don’t know.”
“There’s got to be something we can do. Is the little boy in the burned out building like this?”
“I think he would be, if we could get him out of the fire.”
“And if we don’t?”
“He’ll be a four-year-old trapped in a burning building at the moment of his death for decades, if not forever.”
Amy said, “What four-year-old?”
Allison told her.
“You were going to tell me about this, right, Emma?”
Emma shrugged. “It sounded crazy,” she said. “But I probably would have; we need really big, solid ladders, and a car that can carry them, without the parents that would probably insist on coming along.”
“Right. Ladders. Car. Parents out of town. Check.”
“Emma.”
She turned to look at Eric. “Michael, I have to let go of their hands, now. I can’t feel mine at all.”
“Oh. Why?”
“Their hands are very, very cold. It’s like grabbing ice, but without the wet bits.”
“I don’t think they want to go away.”
They didn’t. She knew they didn’t. She managed to nod, but she had to force herself to unclench her jaw. “Eric, I’m using their power?”
“Yes.”
“Does it hurt them?”
“Ask them,” he replied.
“Georges? Catherine?”
They failed to hear her, the way children who are having fun frequently fail to hear the parents who want them to leave the place in which they’re having it.
“I’m going to take that as a no,” Emma told Eric. “I’ll let go when I can’t feel my arms.”
“Emma—”
“Did Longland come here to find me?”
“Yes.”
“How did he know where I was?”
“Probably the same way we did. It’s not exact,” he added, “but the dead…some of the dead know.”
r /> “And he expected me to just pick up and go wherever he wanted me to go.”
“That’s what usually happens.”
Unless you kill the Necromancer first. She wanted to say it, but didn’t. Throwing murder into the mix, while her friends were standing around her, was something she wasn’t up to doing.
“Michael, don’t do that, you’ll get grass stains on those pants.” Emma shook her head, because Michael, like the two six-year-olds, wasn’t really listening.
“And the four in the dance room?”
“They’re amplifiers,” Chase replied. “I think that room was meant to serve as a road.”
“A…road.”
“A road.”
“To where? Hell?”
“Pretty much. That’s not what they call it,” he added.
“What do they call it, and what is it?”
“I don’t know what they call it.”
Emma suppressed a strong and visceral urge to strangle Chase. She probably wouldn’t have managed if she weren’t still holding onto two children who were leeching the heat out of her body by inches. “What do you call it?”
“The City of the Dead.”
“Great. And Longland thought he could just come here, screw around with my friends, and cart me off?”
“He doesn’t know you very well, does he?”
“No, Michael, he certainly doesn’t.” She paused, then said, “If I had gone with him, what would have happened to these four?”
“He would probably have sucked all the power out of them at that point. Creating a road like that takes a lot of power.”
“And this power—if it were gone, what would happen to them?”
Chase just stared at her, as if she were making no sense. “What do you mean, what would happen?”
“What I said. I can try to use smaller words, if it’d help.”
“They’re dead. They’d still be dead.”
“Sucking the power out of them can’t be good for them. They must need it for something. What do they use the power for?”
“How the hell should I know?”
“Eric, I’m going to kill Chase now.”
Eric just looked at her. “Emma—” He exhaled, and then shook his head, lifting his hands as he did. “I give up.”