“Mostly.” Her phone rang. She fished it—quickly—out of her bag because she recognized the ringtone. It was Emma. Or someone who had stolen Emma’s phone.
* * *
“Hey, Ally—are you doing anything after dinner?”
“Studying a bit.”
“Want to come walk a deaf dog with me?”
“Not a random deaf dog, no—but I’ll come for Petal.”
Emma laughed. “He’s the only one I have. Is something wrong?”
“No. Nothing. Want to come pick me up or should I meet you at your place?”
“I’ll head over there. Mom’s not home, so I’ll make something to eat here.” She paused. “I have something to tell you. It’s not a bad thing,” she added quickly, because she knew Allison came from a long line of champion worriers. Petal started to bark in the background. When Petal set up barking, it never stayed in the background.
“I’ll talk to you later,” Allison said.
Chase was apparently still perusing her bookshelves, but Allison wasn’t fooled. “That was Emma?”
She almost didn’t answer. Chase saved your life, but he also probably saved Emma’s. “Yes. She wants to talk—later. You’ve met her dog.”
Chase nodded, putting the book back on the shelf and withdrawing.
“We’re going to walk him. Look, can you sit down? I don’t care where. It’s hard to talk when you’re standing there looking down at me.”
He sat on the edge of the bed—probably because it was the farthest away.
She turned to her computer and found the Biology and English notes he’d asked for. She wasn’t sure they’d do him much good; Chase didn’t really understand how to study. But she sent them to him anyway before she turned.
He was sitting absolutely still, watching her, his elbows on his knees, his hands loosely clasped between them. “I don’t hate Emma,” he said.
“No?”
“Let’s pretend that I believe you. That Emma—the Emma you know—is never going to become another Merrick Longland. She’s never going to learn how to use the power she has. It’s never going to define her.”
This was not a surrender, and Allison knew it; the tone of his voice was too measured for that. But she nodded, waiting.
“They’re not going to leave her alone.” He exhaled, running his hands through his hair. “They know—roughly—where she is. They’ll know exactly where she is, soon.”
This, Allison believed. “How do we stop them?”
He stared at her, his eyes rounding, as if he couldn’t believe the stupidity. “Eric’s spent his entire adult life trying to do just that. So has the old man.”
“Yes, but you’re hunting proto-Necromancers, if I understand anything. You’re stopping their numbers from growing. How do we stop them, period?”
“Kill their Queen,” he replied. He might as well have said, kill their god, given his tone.
She stared at him.
“It’s complicated. I’d say it’s impossible.”
“If we kill their Queen, it stops?”
“If we kill their Queen, the dead are free,” he replied. “Wherever it is the dead go, they’ll go.”
“Andrew Copis—”
“Yes, there’ll always be some who get stuck or trapped. But they won’t stay that way forever, and they won’t be able to hurt anyone who isn’t a Necromancer by birth. But it’s not going to happen.”
She swallowed.
“I don’t think you have it in you to kill. Not yet. Probably not ever. It’s not a problem the Necromancers have.”
“I noticed.”
“Good.” He lifted his chin, exposing his Adam’s apple. “Emma might not have it in her, either. But they won’t stop. So let’s go back to that: Emma is in danger here.”
“And because she’s in danger, I’m in danger.”
He tensed; he heard the edge creep into her voice. She tried to stop her hands from balling into fists, since she wasn’t going to use them anyway.
“If you can’t step away, yes. I know you don’t want to do it. If you were the type of person who could, I probably wouldn’t be here. I mean, here, in this room, in this house. I wouldn’t be having this moronic conversation. I wouldn’t be—” he fell silent, and his expression was so raw, Allison had to look away.
CHAPTER
TWO
CHASE WITH DOWNCAST EYES was probably for the best; the door—which was ajar—swung open, and her mother walked into the room carrying a tray. “I didn’t ask what Chase drinks,” she said apologetically.
Chase shook his head. “I don’t drink when I’m working.”
Her mother laughed, because Chase was grinning. “And I don’t serve alcohol to minors.” She set the tray on the desk beside Allison’s computer, which was conveniently open at a screen full of biology notes.
“I’m going to walk Petal with Em after dinner,” Allison said.
“Make sure you wear a heavier coat. It’s not getting any warmer out there.”
Allison reddened but nodded, and her mother left. “It’s hot chocolate,” she told Chase. “And bagels; there’s jam. And apples.”
“I can see that.” He took his phone out of his pocket. Allison hadn’t heard it ring. He glanced at the screen and grimaced dramatically.
Allison laughed.
“I’m disappointed,” he said, with mock gravity. “You didn’t strike me as someone who mocks the pain of others.”
“You laughed.”
“I did not. And if I did, it’s gallows humor.” He took the mug she handed him and held it cupped in the palms of his hands—something Allison couldn’t do, because the mugs were too hot. He also took the snacks and ate them. He was not a slow eater.
“You didn’t eat lunch?”
“I did. All of mine and half of Eric’s.” He looked around the room again, his expression shifting into neutral. “If it gets bad, we’re going to have to run.” Before she could speak, he said, “Yes, ‘we’ includes Emma.”
Allison was silent. She didn’t want to be left behind. But the future as Chase painted it was grim. If they had to leave the city on short notice—and short could mean none—where were they going to go? What were they going to do?
“I want to go with you, if you go.”
“I know. I don’t want to take you. If it were up to me, we’d already be gone.”
“Where?”
Chase shrugged. “Wherever the old man sends us. He has the wallet. He doesn’t normally hang around for this long—and he doesn’t trust Emma, either.”
“Did the old man train you?”
“Yeah. He and Eric.”
“Could he train us?”
To her surprise, Chase didn’t sneer; he didn’t dismiss the idea out of hand. But he did empty his mug. He was tidy; he placed it back on the tray, along with the empty plate. Allison suspected he would have taken the tray back down to the kitchen if she’d finished as quickly.
She couldn’t. She’d never been good at eating when upset.
Chase didn’t have that problem—but he wouldn’t, would he? All of his life, seen from Allison’s vantage, was nothing but being upset. Any uneasiness Allison felt was probably trivial in comparison. And any pain. “Chase?”
“Yeah?”
“Promise you won’t leave me behind?”
“I can’t. I can promise I won’t kill your best friend unless she deserves it. I can promise to be polite to your mother. I can promise to ask the old man about training you on really short notice. I don’t know why I’d promise any of this—but I will. I can’t promise to drag you out of your home and away from your family just so you can be a fugitive until the day you die.” He ran his hands through his hair again and stood. “Don’t ask.
&n
bsp; “In return, I won’t ask you to promise me that you’ll keep your distance from Emma. I won’t ask you to promise that you’ll warn me when—if—things with Emma start to go downhill.”
“Promise you’ll stop nagging me?”
He sucked in air. “That’s a borderline case. I can only promise to try.” He exhaled again. “If Emma cared about you at all—”
Allison’s expression tightened. “If she cared about me at all, she’d stay as far away from me as possible, is that it? She’d leave me because that was safest for me?”
“Yes.”
“And if that wasn’t what I wanted?”
“If you knew what we face pretty much continuously, you would want it.”
The conversation was, once again, going straight downhill. “Chase, what’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?”
He stared at her for a long moment and then looked down at his phone. “I’ve got to run. Hopefully I won’t see you tonight.” He headed toward the door, then turned back, his brow an oddly broken line across the bridge of his nose.
“The worst thing that’s ever happened to me? Not dying.”
* * *
Not dying.
Allison saw Chase to the door and even saw him out; after he left the house, she watched him from the window, as if she were her mother. His hands were in his pockets, his shoulders hunched slightly against the brisk wind.
She brought the snack tray down to the kitchen, set the table, and ate dinner with her family while Toby grilled her about the redhead she’d brought home.
“Is he your boyfriend?” he asked, in the highly amused, singsong tone that annoyed older sisters the world over.
“No.”
“Mo-om, is he Ally’s boyfriend?”
“Eat your dinner, dear.”
“Allison’s got a boyfriend! Allison’s got a boyfriend!”
“Tobias,” her father said, coming—in one word—to her rescue. He did give Allison the careful once over, but asked none of the questions he was probably thinking.
“Allison is about to be minus a brother,” Allison told the brother in question, through gritted teeth. This had the predictable effect—none. But aside from Michael, which boys had she ever brought home? Nathan, but he’d come with Emma.
She finished dinner in slightly embarrassed silence and retreated to her room. She even picked up a book, but her mind bounced off the words instead of sinking beneath them.
Not dying.
Emma had said that, once, two weeks after Nathan’s death. She hadn’t used the same words, but it didn’t matter. What Chase saw when he chose his words was what Emma saw when she looked into a future that, now and forever, had no Nathan in it.
There had been nothing she could do for Emma, and she’d hated it—fluttering helplessly to one side, uncertain whether or not any comfort she tried to offer would be intrusive or make things worse. She understood Emma’s loss, she understood Emma’s grief—but she’d never known how much room to give. When did giving someone space become abandoning them or ignoring them?
What saved her was understanding that it was Nathan, not Emma, who had died. Allison knew she couldn’t fill the empty, collapsing space that Nathan had left in Emma’s psyche—but Allison wasn’t Nathan. She didn’t have to fill it. She just had to make sure that the space she did occupy in the same psyche was a safe one. It was best-friend territory, not love-of-life territory, but it was important.
Allison had watched Emma withdraw. It wasn’t completely obvious to begin with; Emma went through all the motions. She took care of her appearance, she did all her schoolwork, she spent time at school with her friends, she watched as their relationships began or fell apart. But none of it mattered anymore.
Michael mattered. Allison mattered. Petal mattered.
Why? Because the three of them needed Emma, and she couldn’t just turn and walk away from them.
Nathan was a shadow that could fall, unexpectedly, over any conversation. A line of a dialogue. The punch line to a joke. A piece of familiar clothing on an entirely unfamiliar body. Snatches of music. Even food. Emma would flinch. She always withdrew when it happened, but she didn’t always leave.
Both of Allison’s parents were still alive. So was her brother. The Simner family didn’t have pets, except goldfish, and while burying goldfish had seemed enormously heartbreaking in kindergarten, she knew it didn’t and couldn’t compare. The only death she’d experienced had been her grandfather’s, and she had been younger. Death hadn’t seemed real. Her grandfather hadn’t lived with them. She had come to understand that death meant permanent absence—but it hadn’t shattered her.
She could sometimes hear the echoes of his voice, and pipe smoke pulled his image from her memories, because she’d liked his pipe. Her mother, not so much.
Emma had lost her father and her boyfriend. She’d had eight years to recover from the loss of her father. She’d had less than four months to recover from Nathan. And Allison didn’t lie to herself: Those months were not a recovery. They were a tightrope act, an effort to find and maintain emotional balance when you’d just lost half of yourself.
Now, Emma could see the dead.
She could see the father she’d missed and longed for for half her life. And she knew that if she waited long enough, she could see Nathan as well. There was no balance in that. She could see Nathan. The fact that he was dead and she wasn’t wouldn’t matter. Not yet.
Maybe not ever. Emma’s dad had told her that it took two years for the dead to find their way back to their old homes and old lives. Allison knew Emma. Emma would wait.
The wind was loud beyond the windows, but Emma would be here soon; Allison headed downstairs to get ready.
She was worried. She hadn’t told Chase she was worried, because he wouldn’t understand, and it would only make his suspicions more unreasonable.
* * *
Petal came to the door, dragging Emma behind him; he’d never been clear on the concept of leashes. When he approached a door from the outside, he wagged his stump and bounced up and down, but he didn’t bark. Allison wasn’t Michael; she didn’t have a ready supply of doggie snacks in the house. Petal liked her anyway.
Emma, dressed for the cold, looked nervous. Nervous but happy.
It was a kind of happy Allison recognized, although she hadn’t seen it for four months. She stepped outside, closed the door at her back, and smiled as they headed down the driveway.
I haven’t noticed she’s spending a lot of time with you.
Allison had noticed. Seeing Emma’s expression, seeing the way her gaze slid to her right—Allison was on her left and Petal, as always, was in the lead—she knew why. She knew exactly why. It wasn’t the first time she had come second to Nathan.
But she also knew it hadn’t been two years.
Chase was already suspicious. The old man—Ernest, if she remembered correctly—was suspicious. If Nathan was here only four months after his death, what did that say about Emma?
She bit her lip. It said nothing bad about Emma. Necromancers used some essential part of the dead—Allison hesitated to say “soul”—for power. There was no way Emma would do that to Nathan. Even if she knew how, and she didn’t, Nathan would never become that source.
But he was here. He was here, by her side, and he shouldn’t be.
Well, where should he be? she thought, in some disgust. Emma was happy. It was the troubled happy of early love—anxiety mixed with euphoria. Allison braced herself for Emma’s news, and was surprised when Nathan’s name wasn’t the first thing out of her mouth.
“I don’t understand my mother.”
“My mother gave me a lecture about wearing warm clothing in November. In front of a guest.”
Emma laughed. “It’s different when someone else’s mot
her does it.”
It always was. Mercy Hall could worry at Emma like a pit bull, and Allison never found it embarrassing. Mercy Hall could worry about Allison, and she still didn’t take it personally.
Petal took offense at a raccoon, which diverted Emma’s attention. But she had something to say, and she came back to it, slightly sideways. “Have you talked to your parents?”
Allison was certain her eyes looked liked they were about to fall out of her face.
Emma laughed. “I’ll take that as a no.”
“My mother would never let me out of the house again. Ever. Why? Have you?”
The reply took longer. “I tried to talk to my mother. About my dad.” She glanced at Allison. “She saw him, Ally. We all saw him, the first time.”
“What did she say?”
“The first time? That she had an early morning meeting.”
Mercy Hall was so not a morning person.
“The second time, that she had work to do. It was after dinner. The third time she came right out and said she didn’t want to talk about it because she had nothing to say.”
“She didn’t ask you about . . .”
“Being able to see the dead? No. She asked me nothing. And I don’t understand. I don’t understand why.”
Conversations with Chase went straight downhill. Sometimes they started at a very steep incline. Conversations with Emma were different. They went off the map. But not all terrain off-map was safe. It’s not that Allison and Emma had never had a fight; they’d had a few. But fighting wasn’t what they did. Allison could see the direction this conversation might take. She wanted to avoid it.
“Why doesn’t she want to know?” Emma almost demanded.
“Is she pretending she never saw him?”
Emma frowned. “More or less. She won’t out and out deny it. She just won’t talk. It’s like—like she doesn’t care. Like she doesn’t want to see him.” She shoved her hand—the one that wasn’t holding Petal’s leash—into her pocket and lowered her chin against the wind, in a frustrated, moody silence.
“She doesn’t know about the dead.” Allison spoke because the silence was growing uncomfortable. Most silences with Emma were peaceful. This wasn’t. Allison had known her for long enough to pick up on the difference. “She doesn’t know why she saw her husband. You know. I know. And honestly, Em? Sometimes even I find it disturbing.”