Mark said, “You can see me.”
Eric nodded again.
“Are you dead?”
“Do I look dead to you?”
“How am I supposed to tell?” Mark asked. “The dead don’t look dead to me. I don’t look dead. To me. But you can see me.”
“Emma’s not dead,” Eric said quietly. “And she can see you.” Months of talking to Michael had given him some of the tools necessary to talk to Mark, but he wasn’t comfortable. Then again, at the moment neither was Emma. She would have been in other circumstances, even given two dead companions and a half-deaf rottweiler. But with the dead came the living: the Necromancers and their Queen.
“Are you like Emma?”
Eric didn’t hesitate. “No. No one’s like Emma.”
“Emma is a Necromancer.”
Eric winced. “Emma has the latent ability of the Necromancers—but she’s not one of them.”
“Why not?”
“Fair question,” Eric replied. “But I can’t answer it.”
Emma glared as Eric grinned. “Chase would love this conversation.”
“He’d only get half of it.”
“My half, which means he probably wouldn’t be listening to any of it.” She turned to Mark. “Having power is like—like having a knife. You can’t cook without one, but not everyone who owns one uses it to stab someone else. I have the equivalent of a knife. But I want to use it in the kitchen; I don’t want to use it to hurt people.”
“People hurt people,” he said.
“Yes. But mostly by accident.” Mark fell silent, and she mentally kicked herself. She glanced at Eric, who was watching Petal as if the dog were fascinating. Things could have been more awkward, but only with the inclusion of, say, her mother’s new boyfriend.
She followed her father’s subtle lead, but asked Mark if he knew the way home. He frowned and thought about this. “I know,” he finally said, “that I can go there.”
“But not how?”
“The streets look different when you’re dead. They change a bit. They didn’t do that when I was alive. I can’t tell you how to get there because you’re not dead.”
“Could you tell my father?” It didn’t matter, but she found herself asking questions that had nothing to do with the mother waiting at the end of this walk. Partly for his sake and partly for her own.
“He already knows.”
“Can he get there the same way you can?”
Mark considered this. Turning to her father, he asked, “Can you?”
“Yes,” her father replied. “But Emma and Eric can’t. Neither can Petal.”
“Petal is a strange name for a dog.”
“I thought so, but I didn’t choose it.”
Emma, remembering the reason she’d chosen the name, shrugged. It wasn’t the name she would choose now, but he’d grown into the name, or she’d grown attached to it. “I was eight,” she told Mark. “My dad always called me Sprout. I thought Petal was a good name.”
“For a dog?”
“Well, for this one. He doesn’t seem to mind it.” He did perk up, the way he often did when people were talking about him. Mostly because he assumed his name was synonymous with food.
“Is Michael like me?”
“Michael is Michael,” she replied. “You’re Mark. You have some things in common, but you’re not the same person.”
“Michael isn’t happy.”
She closed her eyes briefly. “Michael doesn’t understand what happened to you. I mean, he knows what happened but not why.”
“Me either.”
“When things upset him, he needs to understand why they happened—usually in a lot of detail—or he stays upset. Sometimes we can explain things, but sometimes we can’t. I can’t explain this.” She stopped walking, and remembered: she had promised to take Michael with her when she took Mark home.
But it was late. It was late, and she did not want an upset Michael at the door of the woman who had killed Mark. She hesitated, torn. Eric marked it.
“I told Michael he could come with me.” She considered appearing on Michael’s doorstep at almost ten in the evening, dog in hand. His mother would be worried—and with cause, even if they couldn’t explain it all.
Sometimes, dealing with Michael was hard. If she’d promised Allison and she reneged, Allison would understand why. She might not be happy with the explanation, but she’d understand it. Michael tended to see things as black or white. But he was generally forgiving if there was a reasonable explanation. Or rather, an explanation that seemed reasonable to him.
Emma hesitated again and then said, “We need to take a slight detour.”
* * *
Michael’s mother answered the door, which was about what Emma expected; Michael often failed to register the doorbell when it rang. “I’m really sorry, Mrs. Howe,” Emma said. “But I promised Michael I’d show him something the next time I went, and I’m going now.”
Michael’s mother nodded. She was a mostly practical woman, rounded with years but pragmatic about it; her hair was shot through with gray. Mercy Hall dyed her hair. Emma was certain that when she reached that age, she’d dye her hair as well, but Mrs. Howe’s hair was dark enough that the gray seemed to add shine to it.
“I wouldn’t be here,” Emma continued, “but Michael’s been a little stressed lately, and I didn’t think a broken promise would help him much.”
Michael’s mother knew her son. “Let me get him. Are you—are you going to be long?”
“I hope not. In part, it’ll depend on Michael.”
“And the other part?”
“How long it takes for my hands to freeze off.”
“Well, come in and wait. With luck, he’ll decide to stay in.”
Emma thought it would take more than luck, but agreed. The important part at the moment was that she was in his front hall, having remembered her promise. What he then chose to do with it was out of her hands; if he decided not to accompany her, no guilt accrued on her part.
Michael came thundering down the stairs. He’d never learned the art of walking quietly, and he generally took stairs two at a time in either direction. He wasn’t carrying his computer, but headed for the closet to unearth his coat, his mittens—he disliked gloves—and his scarf. His mother found his misplaced hat and murmured something about stapling it to his forehead.
During this, he spoke very little; he kept peering out the door, as if he might catch a glimpse of Mark, although he knew that without Emma’s intervention—Emma, who was standing alone in his hall—that was impossible.
And Emma knew, from one glance at Michael’s mother, that she was worried. “Eric’s with us,” she said, “and he has a car. If we’re going to be late—I mean, later—I’ll call you.”
“I don’t think I’ve met Eric,” his mother said.
“He’s keeping the car running. He just started Emery this year, but he eats lunch at Michael’s table.”
“And the gaming discussions haven’t driven him off?”
“Not yet.”
“Emma—” She inhaled. “Never mind. Keep an eye on him tonight?”
“Always.”
* * *
Mark was quiet; his silence was not comfortable. Emma was generally comfortable with silence—it was one of the reasons she’d so liked Nathan. He didn’t need her to fill silence in order to be at ease. But this silence was different, and she knew it. It was a veneer over things that couldn’t be said, even if words were roiling beneath it.
She hated Mark’s mother. Hated her, despised her, wanted to see her hauled off to jail to answer for what she’d done. Not just the death, but everything that had led up to it. No one had forced her to become a mother.
But saying this out loud
wouldn’t help Mark. It wouldn’t change anything. Hating his mother had zero effect; it didn’t offer him either comfort or support. She almost reached out to take his hand but remembered that he found touch uncomfortable—at least while he was alive. He was dead, but that didn’t mean what it meant to her father. Or to Nathan.
She inhaled. Exhaled. What did she want from this evening? Why was she quietly following her father’s reluctant lead to take a severely unwanted child home to the mother who had murdered him?
Because the child wanted to go there. This wasn’t about Mark’s mother, in the end; not to Emma. It was about Mark. It was about the dead child. Any mistakes he made here couldn’t harm him further; he’d suffered the worst already.
But his mother had gotten away with murder. When she should have been caring for and about her son, she had abandoned him to die, instead—and no one knew. Everyone thought she was the grieving, bereaved parent. If Emma did nothing, said nothing—where was the justice in that? How was that fair to Mark?
“Emma,” her father said.
She looked up, as apparently her feet had gotten really interesting.
“That’s the house.”
* * *
It was about the same size as the Hall house, and if Emma remembered correctly, it also lacked a father. It didn’t lack siblings, but it lacked anything as fundamental as a mother, in Emma’s opinion. She inhaled, held her breath, and then turned to Mark, who was staring at the front door.
Eric said, quietly, “Are you certain this is wise?”
“I’m certain it’s not,” she replied. “Mark, is my father right? Is that the house?”
Mark nodded, never taking his eyes off the front door. Emma tried to imagine what it would be like to stand in front of her home in the same context. How would she feel if her mother had killed her?
She failed, because she couldn’t imagine it. In her worst nightmares—the ones that involved her mother—her mother had either died or disappeared. She had never tried to kill her.
“You don’t have to do this,” Emma said, aware that she was partly speaking to herself. But the alternative—breaking her word to Mark—had seemed worse. It didn’t seem worse now.
Mark frowned. “I don’t have to do this,” he repeated, as if trying to make sense of the words.
Michael, who couldn’t see Mark, said, “He wants to do this.”
Mark looked at Michael. To Emma he said, “Michael is your friend.” It was a question without the intonation.
“Michael is my friend,” she agreed.
“Why?”
“If you mean why do I like him, there are a bunch of reasons.”
“He’s not normal.”
She hated that word more than she’d ever hated it before. “I’m not normal, either.”
He frowned.
“I’m a Necromancer. I can see—and talk—to the dead. Michael doesn’t hate me just because I can do these things. Michael finds it hard to deal with strangers. He finds it hard to talk to people he doesn’t know. He finds it hard to talk to people he does know if they’re speaking about something he doesn’t really understand. But he’s direct, he’s honest, and if he says he’ll help you, he will. Michael’s easy to trust.”
“Is trust important?”
“Very. At least to me.” Petal shoved his nose into her gloves. She dropped a hand to his head; he was warm enough that she could feel the heat rising off his fur. She should have left him at home. But she’d needed a reasonable excuse to give her mother, and walking the dog was an all-weather, all-season necessity. Mark’s home wasn’t the place for him.
It wasn’t the place for Mark, either.
“Can we talk to my mother now?”
Emma nodded. “It’s late,” she added.
“She’s awake.”
“You’re certain?”
“That’s her window.”
“Awake doesn’t always mean someone will answer the door.”
“She’ll answer the door,” he replied. “Because it might be an emergency. She always answers the phone, too—even when it’s late.”
“Michael, can you stand on my right? Mark will be standing on my left, and I’ll be holding his hand.” She handed Michael Petal’s leash.
Michael nodded, his expression as neutral as Mark’s.
“And I’m chopped liver?” Eric asked, with just the barest trace of humor.
“No. Chopped liver is disgusting.” Emma walked up to Mark’s front door and stood beneath the fake lamp that encased the porch light. She carefully removed her gloves; her fingers were already cold, and her breath came out as mist. “Ready?” she asked, as she held out her left hand.
He smiled. It changed the entire cast of his face.
She reached out with her free hand and pressed the doorbell.
* * *
Mark’s mother was, as Mark predicted, awake. She didn’t answer the door immediately, but the door was thin enough that the thump-thump-thump of feet hitting stairs that little bit too fast could be heard. If she rushed to reach the door, she didn’t rush to open it; it opened slowly, revealing just a thin strip of her face and body. She was wearing rumpled, dark clothing and no makeup; she had probably been ready for sleep.
And it looked like she needed it; the lower half of her eyes were shadowed by dark semicircles, and she was pale. “Can I help you?” she asked, in obvious confusion.
“Yes,” Emma replied. “We found your son.” She lifted his hand, and his mother’s gaze drifted down to his upturned face.
Her hand fell away from the door, which swung inward to reveal a woman who was just a shade taller than Mercy Hall but much, much skinnier. To Emma’s eye, she looked almost anorexic. Her eyes sported such dark circles she looked like she’d been hit in the face.
Emma hated her. But what she felt, for just that moment, wasn’t hatred. Michael moved to stand on the other side of the boy, one step forward, as if to ward off any blows his mother might aim at her child. She didn’t appear to notice. Her eyes were fastened to her son’s silent face.
They rounded, exposing the ring of white around brown irises. The hand that had held the door rose to cover her open mouth. Her knees gave slowly—or she knelt, it was hard to say which. “Mark!” Her hand fell away from her mouth.
Emma looked down to Mark. Her hand was not yet numb enough; it hurt.
“Mark, oh, god, Mark. Where have you been?” She reached out for her son, her palms up and open. Her son took one hesitant step forward, but he was anchored by Emma’s hand.
Mark’s mother moved, fully opening the door. “Mark?”
He looked up at Emma. The questions he wanted to ask had deserted him, as had the rest of his words. Emma swallowed. “Mark,” she said quietly. “Should we go in?”
“Mark?” his mother whispered. She lowered her hands.
“Mom?” A voice called down from the top of the stairs. “Who is it?”
“It’s Mark!”
“Mom,” the voice said, both gently and with apprehension, “it can’t be Mark.” It was an older boy’s voice. Not a teenager’s, but not far off. Emma looked up to see Mark’s brother descend the stairs. He turned and hollered back up. “It’s just a neighbor!” before he caught sight of the door.
He froze, his eyes widening just as his mother’s had. His expression was just as hard to look at. “Mark!” Unlike his mother, he noticed Emma, Michael, and Eric.
He hesitated, the way a child would, which made Emma revise his age downward.
“Hi, Phillip,” Mark said, his eyes just as wide as his brother’s. He lost years—and he looked young for his age to begin with—as he smiled. He had a heartbreakingly open smile.
Phillip looked at Emma. “Let go of his hand,” he told her. “He doesn’t like to be touched.”<
br />
“It’s okay now,” Mark said quietly. “It doesn’t feel bad anymore.”
“Mom,” Phillip said, in a quiet voice, never taking his eyes off his brother. “You’re freezing the house. If we’re going to let them in, let them in and close the door.”
Mark’s mother was still on her knees, but the sound of her older son brought back the rest of the world. She rose—unsteadily—and nodded. “Come in,” she said, as if seeing Emma, Michael, and Eric for the first time. “It doesn’t hurt when she holds your hand?” she asked her son.
Her dead son.
“Not anymore.”
Phillip’s surprise at seeing his brother shifted, as if he could read the truth that no one had yet put into words in his brother’s expression. “Why?” he asked.
“I’m dead,” Mark replied, in a tone that suggested his state was self-evident.
Emma was watching Mark’s mother, although it was hard to look away from Phillip. She saw the moment the woman’s expression shattered, but it had been so fragile to begin with. Eyes that were circled and dark seemed to sink into the hollows made by sharp cheekbones and stretched skin; tears added reflected light to her face—the only light that touched it. This was the face of a murderer, and Emma knew she would never forget it.
This was what her father had been trying to tell her.
Phillip stepped between Mark and his mother—or between Emma and his mother. Emma wasn’t certain which. What she knew was that Phillip was afraid. Afraid and determined.
“You’re dead?” he demanded. “You’re sure?”
“Yes.” He looked at Emma. “Emma heard me. Emma promised she would bring me home. Emma,” he added, before she could stop him, “is a Necromancer.”
* * *
She felt like one as she stood, her arm numb, Mark by her side. His brother was staring, his eyes wide and unblinking; his mother, half-hidden by her older son, was—was weeping.
Emma had wanted monsters. Monsters could kill their own children. And this woman had—but if she was a monster, monsters were broken, shattered, pathetic things that were to be pitied. Emma did not want to pity a murderer. She’d been so angry, listening to Mark. She could stir the ashes of that anger now, but it provided no warmth and no heat.