“I think he’s hungry,” Allison told Emma.
“Which we can’t do anything about right now.”
When Longland finally fell, Emma looked up to the bedroom window. “Maria,” she said quietly, “we’ll get ladders and we’ll get you both down. I think the baby’s hungry, and we’ve lost the diaper bag.”
From high above her head, Emma heard Maria Copis’ laugh. It wasn’t an entirely steady laugh, but there was a thread of genuine amusement in it, along with relief and a touch of hysteria.
Eric had the decency to clean the blood off his hands before he approached them. Chase? Well, he was Chase. And he looked bad; his face was a mess of blisters, and Emma thought it likely other parts of his body—all thankfully hidden by clothing—looked about the same.
“Your poor hair,” she told him softly. “If I were you, I’d do it a favor and just shave it all off.”
He reached up and touched his hair, because his hair, unlike his skin, had simply curled and shriveled.
“Allison,” Chase said, the word a question.
Allison took a deep breath and nodded. “I’m good. I’m,” she added, glancing at Emma, “fine.”
“You?” Eric asked Emma. He moved toward her, standing beside Allison and a little closer. It was a bit strange, but Emma had seen so much strange she didn’t worry much about it.
“I’ll be better once I actually set eyes on the rest of my friends. And the diaper bag,” she added, wincing, as she glanced at the baby. “Oh, and the ladders.”
He shook his head.
“You knew I was there.”
He shoved his hands in his pockets, shrugged. “You got out.”
“I did. Maria and Andrew are still up in Maria’s room.”
“She—”
“It’s complicated. Don’t ask.” Then, taking a breath, she added, “but Andrew is fine, and he’s almost out of the fire. Thank you. And Chase?”
“What?”
“I owe you an apology. You were right.”
He shrugged and glanced at Eric. “Yeah, well. Eric is still one up on me.”
“So, I have a question. If you and Eric were fighting with knives, who shot the other Necromancer?”
Eric and Chase exchanged a glance.
“I did. And now, Eric, and you, young lady with the baby, if you’d care to move out of the way?” An older man, possibly fifty, possibly sixty, was standing about five yards away on the sidewalk. He was dressed in some version of summer casual that had to be decades old, but it suited him, and his clothing was sadly not the most notable thing about him. The gun that he held in his hand was. It was not—yet—pointed at anyone, but Emma stiffened anyway.
She glanced at Eric and saw the expression on his face: this man was the reason he’d moved in so close. Eric was taller than Emma, and broader. “Stay behind me,” he told her, and then he slowly turned.
“Is that the person whose phone calls you keep ignoring?” she whispered.
He laughed. “You ask the strangest questions, Emma. But yes, it is.”
“I’m not sure I’d dare.”
“Eric,” the man said, waving his gun. “Please step aside. And you, young lady.”
“Ally,” Emma whispered, “move.”
“I think he wants to shoot you,” Allison replied, voice flat.
“Oh, probably. At this point, I wouldn’t mind shooting myself.” Raising her voice slightly, she said, “Chase, help Allison find a safer place to stand.”
Chase nodded and reached for Allison’s arm. Allison gave him A Look. Chase ignored it. “I didn’t almost get fried alive,” he told her through gritted teeth, “so you could be shot by the old man. He’ll kill you if he feels he has to,” Chase added. When Allison failed to move, Chase swore. “Allison, let Eric handle it. If anyone can handle the old man, it’s Eric.”
“Allison, please,” Emma whispered. “You’ve got the baby.”
“Chase can hold the baby.”
Silence. “Ally, think about what you just said.”
Allison looked at Chase’s blood covered hands and grimaced.
“Look, go and get Michael and the others. Tell them that everyone’s safe. Well, everyone who wasn’t trying to kill us. And get them to bring the ladders.”
Allison hesitated for just another minute, and then she nodded, and she let Chase lead her away. Chase didn’t return; he went down the street with her, as if he couldn’t quite trust her not to turn back. It was surprising sometimes when Chase wasn’t stupid.
This left just Eric and Emma, standing in the street in front of the house as if it were one giant tombstone, while above the street, Maria and Andrew waited.
Allison and Chase were halfway down the street when the man fired. Allison turned back instantly, and Chase caught her by one arm, spoke something that no one could hear except Allison, and then dragged her down the street.
Emma flinched, instinctively closing her eyes. Eric, however, didn’t move.
The bullet hadn’t hit him; it had struck the poor grass and dug a runnel through it. The older man and Eric watched each other in a silence that lasted long enough for Chase and Allison to turn a corner. And then some.
“Eric,” the man finally said.
“No.”
“You don’t realize what the girl is.”
“I realize, better than you know, who Emma is.”
“And you’re not enspelled.”
“Not more than usual, no.”
“Longland was not the threat that this girl—Emma, you called her?—will be.”
“She has no training.”
The old man looked as if he were about to be sick. He lifted the gun and pointed it at Eric. “She has no training, and she burned a Necromancer alive? And you’re standing there and telling me not to shoot? Eric, what the hell is wrong with you?”
Emma was almost grateful that she couldn’t see Eric’s face. The stench of charred flesh still wafted on the breeze, such as it was, in the street.
Margaret cleared her throat and stepped forward.
The man’s eyes widened. When they narrowed again, his face had lost the look of angry confusion, but the cold fury that replaced it was worse. He would shoot Eric, Emma realized. He would shoot Eric just so he could kill her.
She wanted to be brave enough to step out of Eric’s shadow, to stand exposed, to let herself be shot, because if he was going to shoot her anyway, it would at least save Eric’s life; she had no doubt at all that he could use the gun—she’d seen him blow off the side of a man’s head.
She wanted to be that brave, but she couldn’t. The most she could manage was to peer around Eric, in as much safety as she could.
“Ernest,” Margaret said, in a tone of voice that had made even her most imperious commands seem friendly and mellow by comparison. “If you shoot either Eric or the girl, I will find some way to haunt you horribly for eternity.”
The man’s jaw dropped slightly, and his face lost a trace of the look of deadly, implacable fury that had made him seem so terrifying. “Margaret?” Fury, however, was tempered now by suspicion.
“I admit that I wouldn’t be so drastic if you put a bullet in your Chase, because that boy has no manners, and it would probably do him some good.” Margaret folded her arms.
The man—Ernest—looked past Eric to Emma. He was no longer entirely suspicious, but he was a far cry from friendly. “Let her go,” he said coldly.
Emma cringed. “I don’t know how,” she told him. “I’m not sure how I’m even holding her. She kind of does what she wants.”
Eric, on the other hand, said, “You know Margaret?”
“He does, dear,” Margaret replied. “We were rather close while I was alive, although I admit it was somewhat fraught.”
“Margaret—”
“But not without its rewards. Ernest,” she said, unfolding her arms, and letting them drop to her sides—Margaret not being a woman who seemed to know how to plead, “Emma does hold us. Emma, dea
r, do be good and call out the others. Oh, I see that Georges and Catherine are already here. Give Emily a hand.”
Ernest’s jaw opened very slightly—an old and controlled person’s version of shock—as Emma obeyed Margaret. It was, however, true that Georges and Catherine had already come out. “Emma?” Georges asked, Catherine standing slightly behind him and letting him do the dirty work, as usual.
“Now is not a good time, Georges,” she told him firmly.
Georges practiced the selective deafness of determined children everywhere. “Can we play with Michael now?”
“Michael’s not even here, Georges, and if he were, he’d still be babysitting.”
“Yes, he is.”
“No, he—oh.” She could see them all coming down Rowan Avenue, and in spite of the fact that only Eric stood between her and a madman with a gun, she smiled. “Well,” she said carefully, “we have to wait until Ernest decides he’s not going to shoot me. Or Eric.”
“Andrew would be angry,” Georges told her confidently. “I’m sure he’d burn him up, too.”
“We do not want Andrew to burn anyone else,” Emma told Georges quite severely. “But we need to get Andrew and his mother out of that house first. After they come down, you can play with Michael.”
“Me too?” Catherine asked.
“You too.”
Ernest was staring at the dead in utter confusion.
“You see, Ernest,” Margaret said, in a slightly less frosty tone of voice. “Emma is not a Necromancer.”
“But she killed—”
Margaret shook her head. “No. She was the conduit, no more, and she was the conduit out of her own ignorance.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Margaret—please.” Emma’s life goals had never included blaming a killing on a four-year-old boy. “I could have stopped it. I didn’t.”
“Dear,” she said, annoyed at being interrupted, “you didn’t even know what it was.”
“I knew it was power. I knew it was passing through me. I could have held it in.” She paused, and then she lifted both hands where Margaret could see their open palms; she didn’t have the ferocious dignity of Margaret and didn’t feel that she needed it. “He’s four. The Necromancer had a gun pointed at his baby brother. He saw it, and he was upset.”
“You have a four-year-old Necromancer?” the old man almost shouted. He looked at Eric.
Eric shook his head. “No,” he said, and his shoulders relaxed ever so slightly in Emma’s view, “the four year old is already dead.”
Chase told everyone to stop about thirty yards away. Amy, of course, ignored him entirely. And where Amy went, everyone else followed, tagging along in her wake like intimidated younger siblings. Or like Catherine with Georges.
Ernest paused, the gun hand still steady. “The boy who died in the fire here?”
Eric nodded.
“She bound him?”
“Not exactly.”
“Ernest, if you are not going to shoot, put the gun away. You’re going to scare the other children.” Margaret glanced, significantly, not at Georges and Catherine, but at the rest of Emma’s friends.
Ernest, on the other hand, glanced at the three corpses on the lawn.
Margaret grimaced. “Yes, you have a point, there. Will they bring the ladders, Emma?”
“Skip has one of them. He’s going to get his head bitten off if he’s lost the other one,” she added. “Let’s get Maria down. If,” she added politely, “you’re okay with not shooting us until we at least get someone out of a burning building?”
Since the building was clearly not burning, and the world seemed to have slid sideways on the way to upside down, the man slowly holstered his gun. Which, given the heat of the barrel, struck Emma as either brave or stupid.
Not much about the man suggested stupid, though.
While Chase held the ladder, Eric went up it, and he helped Maria Copis navigate her way down the rungs. She was still clinging tightly to Andrew, who in return was clinging tightly to her, and she was forced to climb with one hand and two feet, which was highly awkward.
Eric did not, however, complain.
“Is it over?” Maria asked Emma as she finally put her second foot down on solid ground.
Ernest was staring at Andrew.
“It’s mostly over,” Emma told her quietly. “I’m sorry about—about the…”
Andrew looked at Emma. “She was going to hurt my brother,” he said, with special emphasis on the last two syllables. That and not a little anxiety.
“Yes, she was,” Emma told him. “You saved your brother’s life.” She smiled at him. “Andrew—”
Maria shook her head and hugged him tightly.
Ernest, however, said, “I can see the boy.”
Allison nodded. “We can all see him, I think.”
“It’s because Maria is holding him,” Emma replied.
“Maria is a Necromancer? Is the entire city full of Necromancers?” Ernest said this, with some heat, to Eric.
“Maria’s not a Necromancer,” Emma replied. “She’s just a very, very determined mother.” Emma looked at Andrew and at Maria, and knew that she wasn’t quite finished here yet.
Maria paused, and then, looking at her red-faced infant, and her slightly worried two year old, she finally set Andrew down. He was less reluctant to go, but he watched her as she took her infant from Allison, sat down on the concrete steps, and began to quietly nurse him.
“He’s hungry,” Andrew said.
“Yes,” Emma told him.
“Emma?”
“Yes, Andrew?”
“Am I dead?”
Maria didn’t look up at the question, but she flinched.
Emma sucked in air and then said, “Yes.”
“Oh.” He turned to look at his mother, his brother, and then his younger sister. “I don’t like the fire,” he finally said.
Emma said nothing. She said nothing when Andrew’s gaze lifted until he was looking up at a point beyond her left shoulder, his eyes widening slightly. While he looked, Emma reached out for Catherine and Georges’ hands, and they came, cold to the touch, appearing in front of Michael.
She let them play with Michael, as much as they could, and Michael, understanding that they needed this, obliged, although he was very, very upset at the dead people. Playing with the children did help, though; it was something he knew, understood, and could do well.
But Emma was cold when at last she told the two very disappointed children that it was time for Michael to rest and time for Emma to do something else.
“What?” Georges asked her quietly.
“Open a door, if I can,” she replied.
Margaret, who had been conversing with Ernest, who seemed to see her regardless of whether or not Emma was actually touching her, looked up at that. Ernest, his conversation broken, looked as well.
“Dear,” Margaret began.
“I have to try,” Emma told the older woman. “How long have you been trapped here?”
“Long enough. It’s the nature of the world, and the nature of the dead.”
“But it wasn’t always.”
Margaret was notably silent.
“What are you talking about, Emma?” Eric asked. He was still keeping a very watchful eye on Ernest, although Emma had long since relaxed.
Emma turned to him. “Andrew. Sort of.” She exhaled. “He’s going to be trapped in empty streets for god only knows how long—and it’s not supposed to be like that.”
“What is it supposed to be like?”
“I don’t know. Heaven. Maybe. But something else. He’s done here. They’re all—” she added, extending an arm to take in the dead who now gathered as if it were a company barbecue, “done here. My dad told me there’s somewhere else they should be able to go.”
Margaret winced and looked away—away from Emma, from Ernest, from Georges and Catherine.
“They can find it from anywhere,” Emma continued.
“But they can’t reach it. It’s closed. It’s blocked.”
“Emma—”
“I want to try to unblock it.”
“You can’t.”
“I might not succeed, but I can try.”
Ernest was staring at her. He turned to look at Eric. Neither of the two said anything, but it wasn’t their permission she wanted, anyway.
She turned to Maria Copis, who, having finished feeding—and changing—her baby, looked desolately at Andrew. Andrew, who was crouched at her feet looking up.
Allison came to take the baby, who was now both clean and asleep, and Maria reached down to pick Andrew up and draw him into her lap. Then, her chin resting on the top of his head, she looked at Emma.
“He’ll be here,” Emma said quietly. “He’ll be trapped here, like all of the dead are trapped.”
“I want more time,” Maria whispered.
“We all do,” Emma whispered back. They were both silent for what seemed like a long time.
But Maria unfolded, still carrying her son. “I heard what you said to Eric. If you do whatever it is you’re going to try, will he—”
“He’ll be able to leave.”
“But to where?”
“Someplace where there’s no pain,” Emma replied. “I haven’t seen it. I don’t know. But my father has. All the dead have. They feel that it’s home—no, more like the ideal of home, a place where they’re wanted, a place where they belong and where they’re loved.”
Andrew said, quietly, sitting in the arms of his mother and still looking up, “I want to go there. I’m dead, Mom.”
His mother closed her eyes and nodded. “I’m so sorry, Drew. I’m sorry.”
But he reached up with one hand and touched her cheek, although he didn’t look away from whatever it was that drew his attention. “I can wait for you, there,” he told her in a faraway voice.
“Will you?”
He nodded. “I’ll wait forever. I’ll wait for Stefan and Catherine, too.”