She smiles. Her smile is less barbed than anything else she’s directed his way. “I was young once. A long time ago. All pain was new, then. All grief was sharper, harsher. All loss was the end of everything. But you learn that you survive what seems fatal.”
He can’t imagine her ever being in love. He can’t imagine the courage it would take to love her; she seems so cold and harsh.
“Emma’s seen you.”
Nathan nods.
“When?” The question is cutting.
Nathan shrugs. He doesn’t want to admit that he has trouble keeping track of time, not to this woman. He settles on: “Before tonight.”
The woman falls silent. “Does Emma know,” she finally asks, “why you’re here?”
“I’m here,” he replies, with more heat, “because I want to be here. I want to be with her.”
“You’re here because you were sent here.”
He shrugs. It’s the truth. But so is what he said. “She didn’t tell me why.”
“No?”
It’s one of his biggest fears. It’s not the only one, but being on the other side of death has made most of the others irrelevant. It’s not as restful as it sounds. “If I understand being dead, this is where I would have ended up eventually. Emma said she was waiting.”
“Emma probably didn’t know where to find you,” is the bitter answer. “There’s far too much that girl doesn’t know.”
He slides hands into pockets out of habit; it’s not like they can hold anything else. “How do you know Emma?”
“You ask about your Emma and not your Queen?”
“She’s not my Queen.”
“You don’t call her Queen in her presence?”
Nathan is silent for a moment. “What we call her doesn’t matter. She’s what she is.”
“Oh? And what is that, boy?”
“The Queen of the Dead. She’s an old-style Queen. She might as well be a god.”
“A bitter, small god indeed.”
“A lonely god,” Nathan replies. He’s not certain why. Maybe it’s the empty throne that’s always by her side when she sits in her courtroom. It’s not a lesser chair. It’s not set back. It’s beside hers, and to his eye—to his dead eye—it’s equal. But empty. Always empty. An image of the man she would make King hovers there, but he’s more of a ghost than Nathan or any of the rest of the dead.
The old woman says nothing for a long, long moment. When she speaks, she surprises Nathan. “Tell me about your Emma.”
“She’s not mine.”
The shape of the woman’s brow changes. “Not yours?”
“She’s a person. Romantic words aside, we can’t actually own each other. We can be responsible for another person if the person is a child, but even then, we don’t own them.”
She snorts. “Just the work?”
“Something like that.” He shrugs. He doesn’t like the old woman, but that’s no surprise; she’s hard and bitter.
“Tell me about the Emma you know,” she says, giving ground. That’s surprising.
“Tell me why you want to know,” he counters.
“I took a risk with that girl. I took a risk I’ve never taken.”
“What risk?” he asks, in spite of himself.
She glares at him. “You’ll tell your Queen if she asks. You’ll tell her everything.”
He thinks it’s true. But he’s never tried to hide from her; he’s never tried to lie. He doesn’t argue. Instead, he looks at his feet. When he looks up, she’s watching him, her glance no less harsh but mixed with appraisal.
“You understand what she wanted, sending you here?”
He doesn’t.
“Your Emma sees the living. She sees the dead. She doesn’t understand that they’re not the same. The closest she’s come was this evening, when she brought that boy home.”
Nathan nods.
“She didn’t want to bring him,” the woman continues. “It was a foolish act. I almost told her as much—but I wanted to see how she handled herself. I wanted to see what choices she made, given all of the facts she amassed. Given,” she continued, voice softening, “her anger.”
“Emma has a temper,” Nathan says quietly.
“Yes. She does. But so do we all. Do you understand her anger?”
“Who wouldn’t?”
The old woman nods. “Walk with me, boy.” She drifts through a wall, and Nathan follows because he can’t think of a polite way to say no. Apparently manners still matter, even when he’s dead.
* * *
She doesn’t speak. She doesn’t stop. He’s almost afraid to follow her when the streets bank and end in a jagged line, as if half the city has been cut away by a madman with a gigantic ax. But the line, if jagged, has the quality one finds in dreams. There is no rubble, there are no bodies; there’s just an uneven break.
“It is the memory of a city,” the old woman says. “If you let go of yours, you will see a place that spans all the lives of the people who have ever lived here. You’ll see open fields and plains and heavy forests; you’ll see old log homes and the ghosts of small homes that were destroyed to make way for larger ones. You’ll see streetlamps, streetlights, dirt roads, footpaths—and they overlap, shifting from one step to the next.”
“Sounds like a good way to get lost.”
She nods, as if the words were profound. “But you are lost, all of you. You hold tightly to the lives you once lived, although they’re no longer yours. What do you see now?”
Night. Night sky. Nathan thinks it’s an open plain with edges of mountain or forest, but he can’t tell; it never quite coalesces. He squints, frowning. “Night,” he finally says.
“Just night?”
“There’s not a lot of light here. Maybe it’s because I’m dead.”
“No. It’s outside of your experience, and perhaps that’s as it should be. This,” she added, “is where I stay.” She doesn’t say “where I live.”
“Your Emma can’t see this place yet.”
Yet. Nathan stiffens.
“But when she brought that boy to his mother, she saw the edges of it. She doesn’t realize what she sees. She doesn’t understand what it means; that much is obvious.”
“And you’ll tell me?”
The old woman grimaces. “I’ve been here a long time.” She shakes her head. “Love is a tricky thing. It strengthens us and weakens us; it binds us and it liberates us. It makes us hold on too tightly; it colors everything we see.
“But the dead aren’t bound in the same way.”
Thinking about Mark—never mind Mark, thinking about himself—Nathan shakes his head.
“That boy doesn’t understand that he’s dead. He doesn’t understand what it means. What you saw—what you still see, if I had to guess—he doesn’t see. He would have been lost had Emma not found him. The wonder, to me, is that she did find him.
“Understand that there were always those, among the dead, who were lost. The light that beckons you, that beckons Emma’s father, that devours the young Necromancer—Mark couldn’t see it. He couldn’t leave the literal forest in which he’d been told to wait, and had Emma not found him, he would still be there decades from now. Waiting.”
“Would that have been much worse?”
“In my lifetime, yes. It would have been. In a way that most of the living don’t understand, it would have been a tragedy. Now, there is only tragedy. The Queen of the Dead doesn’t see the dead; she doesn’t serve them. She offers no guidance; she does not lead them home.
“Emma has had no training. She has learned nothing. But she sees. What she did for Mark was forbidden in my time. Not finding him,” she adds. “Not leading him out of the forest. But taking him home.”
“Why?”
/>
“Because we were already feared. The dead do not meet the living if the living can’t see them and speak to them on their own. There have been no guides—not since the Queen of the Dead. Now, those who might learn the art are taught other things. They look inward always; they are strapped and bound by their knowledge of their own lives. They can’t—and won’t—look beyond them.”
“And Emma did.”
“Emma did. Without guidance.”
Nathan shakes his head. “Emma doesn’t judge.”
“We all judge. It’s part of the human condition. But it is not a part of the human condition that serves the guides of the dead well.”
“Is there no hell?”
“I don’t know,” the old woman replies. “But if there were, it would look at lot like this. Life blinkers us. It is difficult to see beyond the walls of our own experiences. Emma is certain that she would never be Mark’s mother. She was angry—she was more than angry—when she arrived. She had already decided what she felt—and thought—of Mark’s mother.
“I don’t know if that’s changed,” the woman adds. “But I do know this: In the end, it didn’t matter. The child mattered. The dead mattered. What she needed to do to ease his transition, she did. She may have wanted justice. She may have wanted retribution. These are natural desires. They are human desires.
“But she chose. And I do not think she was unmoved, in the end, by what she heard. I have put the only power that remained to me in her hands. But I am an old woman. Older by far than you will have the chance to be; older by far than Emma. Fear is a constant companion, and hope is bitter, it is prone to so many failures.
“Emma has now made choices that seem promising to me.” She turned, in the darkness, to face Nathan. “All but one.”
Nathan swallows. “Me.”
“You. You are now the heart of my fear, boy. I understand why she loves you. But I fear what that love presages. You should not be here. She is not ready for you, not yet. She is discovering—against all hope—the limitations of her power.”
“She doesn’t even understand her power yet.”
“You will find that she does. She doesn’t understand how to use it the way the Queen and her people do, but what she did for Mark tonight, they could not do. If she holds to that, she will be the first to do so since the end of all our lines so many years ago; she will be the only person born with her gift that has some hope of unseating the Queen and her Court.
“But what she did for Mark, she could do within the bounds of mortal compassion. What she sees when she sees you is the enormity of her own loss—and the enormity of yours. What she feels for you is tied in all ways to the interior of the life she lived—and wanted. That life is over, boy.”
Nathan says nothing.
“And she has not yet accepted it. Seeing you here, seeing you almost in the flesh, seeing the boy she loved as if he had never died, she won’t accept it. And if she can’t, then there is no hope.”
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
SILENCE.
The silence of cars, of snow against streetlamps. The impersonal sound of wind in branches, the constant friction of leash, the rising white clouds of dog breath. Moonlight. Stars.
Emma looked at the time; it was almost 11:30. She hadn’t lied to Michael’s mother; Eric had brought his car. He just hadn’t driven it to Mark’s house.
“Your mother’s worried about you,” she said to Michael.
“I know.”
“Do you think you’ll be okay now?”
He exhaled and turned to her as if he’d lost ten years. She could see the echo of Mark’s face in his. “I don’t understand people.”
“Do you understand what happened to Mark?”
Michael nodded slowly. “She didn’t mean to kill him.”
“No.”
“But he died anyway.”
“Yes.”
“He shouldn’t have died. It’s not fair.” He closed his eyes and stopped walking; Emma stopped as well. Her hands ached, but some feeling had returned to the one that had been Mark’s anchor. “You’re going to tell me life’s not fair.”
“I don’t have to,” she said, her voice soft. “I don’t need to tell you things you already know.”
Michael’s nod was stiff. “There’s no justice in the natural world.” He said it without bitterness, as if stating fact. “Justice is a human construct.”
“And humans aren’t perfect.” It was an old conversation. Old, familiar, and, tonight, painfully true.
“But if we don’t keep trying, there’s no justice at all.” He inhaled, opened his eyes. “Thank you for taking Mark home. Thank you for taking me with you.”
“I promised,” she said. “But if I don’t get you home, your mother’s not going to be very happy.”
Petal nuzzled Michael’s hand, and Michael turned his attention to the dog. Emma did as well, but the sound of Eric’s phone drew it away.
“Are you going to answer that?” Emma asked.
Eric grimaced; he was already fishing the phone out of a pocket. “I hate these things,” he said, as he looked at the phone. His grimace froze in place. “It’s not the old man.”
Emma froze as well. She glanced at Michael, at Petal, and then back at Eric.
He answered his phone. “Hello?” Pause. “Amy?”
At the sound of Amy’s name, Michael rose, his hand still attached to Petal’s head as an afterthought.
“You’re where? Now?”
Emma fished her own phone out of her jacket pocket; her hands were shaking. It was off. She’d turned the phone off before she’d entered Mark’s house. It took her four tries to turn it on, and as she fumbled, her father appeared by her side.
“Dad—”
“I’ll go to Allison’s,” he told her, understanding the sharp edge of her sudden fear.
“Can you get there—” but he was already gone.
Michael didn’t carry a phone. His mother had tried to give him one. Or, more accurately, three. He’d lost each and every one. Emma checked hers. There were four missed calls, all of them from Amy.
Eric wasn’t doing a lot of speaking—but he was on the phone with Amy, and in general, Amy did the talking when a phone was involved. “Where will you be?” Eric finally asked.
The tone of his voice made Emma want to grab the phone out of his hand.
“No, there were too many people, from the sounds of it, to be Necromancers.” Eric sucked in air. “Yes, they’re capable of hiring people—but it doesn’t generally end well for the people they hire. Look—you’re all right? Your family is—” He inhaled sharply again. Emma couldn’t hear what Amy said, but she could hear Amy.
“Emma and Michael are with me. Emma just turned her phone back on. No, we weren’t someplace where a phone would have—yes, I’ll ask her not to turn it off again until we’re all in the same place. Have you spoken with Allison?
“Okay. Meet us at my place. We’ll head there immediately. Hello?” Apparently, Amy had hung up.
Emma was so cold she felt like warmth would never reach her again. “What happened?”
“We need to get to the car,” Eric replied.
“We need to take Michael home.”
“We can’t.”
“We need to—”
“Phone Michael’s house,” Eric told her, his voice that little bit too tight.
“Emma?” Michael said.
Emma turned to Michael and handed him Petal’s leash. He looked at it as if it were entirely foreign.
“Emma, what happened to Amy?” Michael’s voice was softer.
“Amy is fine,” Eric said, voice tight.
“And my mother?” Michael asked, voice rising at the end.
No, Emma thought.
No, no, no. “I need to go home,” she whispered.
“It won’t help. If your mother is fine—if nothing’s happened—and you go home, it probably won’t stay that way.” Eric stared at his phone and cursed under his breath.
“Where’s Chase?” Emma all but demanded.
“Good question. He’s not answering his phone.”
“I’ll call Allison.”
“She’s not answering her phone, either. Not according to Amy.”
No.
* * *
Emma called Michael’s house. She called before she’d planned out what she might say if someone actually answered the phone. Michael was rigid with anxiety, and because he was, Emma couldn’t afford to be. She almost cried with relief when his mother picked up.
“I’m glad you called,” his mother said. “I was beginning to worry. Someone came to the door to speak with Michael about fifteen minutes after you left.”
“Who?”
“I didn’t recognize him. He said he’s a friend of Michael’s. He left homework for Michael. Michael’s homework,” she added. “He said he’d borrowed it. He apologized for being so late to get it back.”
Emma wanted to tell her to burn it. Most homework was done electronically; it didn’t need to be returned. In person. By a stranger. She covered the mic with her hand. “Your mother’s fine. She’s worried about you,” she added, “but you kind of expect that from mothers.”
“Michael is not going home,” Eric said.
“Michael doesn’t exactly do sleepovers. What do you want me to tell her?”
“Whatever you need to tell her.” He turned to Michael. “Can you talk to her without explaining too much?”
Emma knew the answer, but she looked to Michael anyway. He was less rigid than he had been, his unvoiced visceral fear for his mother’s safety giving way to a more common fear. Michael was not one of nature’s liars. He was practically the anti-liar.
“Are any of us going home?” she asked softly.
“No.” Eric exhaled as they reached his car. “I’m not going to kidnap you. Either of you. You know what’s at stake. You know who your enemies are. If you insist on going home, I can’t stop you. But, Em—I can’t protect all of you either. There are too few of us.”