Touch (23 page)

Leslie began to weep. Mark reached out to touch her, the movement awkward and hesitant,
as if he seldom offered comfort to anyone. His hand passed through her, of course.

“And it was my fault,” Mark continued. “I didn’t do anything on purpose. But—it was
my fault.”

His mother was shaking her head. “It wasn’t—it was me. It’s always been me. I’m not
strong enough—”

“But it will be better now,” he continued, and Emma realized he was
still
trying to offer comfort. “Because now I’m not here all the time. Jonas could come
back.”

“Jonas,” Susan said, in a voice that was both ice and fire, “is
never
coming back. I’ll stab him in his sleep. Through his eyes.”

“Susan—” Phillip began.

She turned an unquelled murderous gaze on her brother, who thought better of the correction
and fell silent.

“And your boss—”

“Mark,” Emma said gently. “Your mother was having the worst day ever. If she could
take it all back, if you could
be here
and be alive, it would suddenly be the best day ever.” And she realized, murder or
no, accident or no, it was the truth. It wasn’t what she’d expected to find when she’d
knocked on Mark’s door. But it was true.

“Yes, but then she would have bad days again. The same bad days.”

And that, Emma thought, was the truth as well.

“You lied to the police,” Mark continued, his voice dropping as if lying to the police
were the larger crime.

His mother nodded. “I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t tell them that I—that
I killed you.”

“But you didn’t mean to kill me.”

“Baby, sometimes what you mean to do doesn’t matter. If telling the truth would have
brought you back, I would’ve told them the truth. Telling the truth would’ve landed
me in jail. I would have lost the job, possibly the house, and Phillip and Susan would
have had nowhere to go.” She blew her nose and straightened her shoulders. “I’m sorry,
Mark.”

Mark smiled. It was genuine, and even peaceful. “Then it’s okay,” he told his mother.
As if he were a child. As if apologies somehow made everything better. Emma only vaguely
remembered being that child; it seemed so far away. He turned to Emma. “I would like
to stay here.”

“Can he?” his mother asked.

Emma nodded. She couldn’t tell his mother there was nowhere else for him to go. She
didn’t want to explain the complications the dead faced to someone for whom life was
probably not a whole lot better. “He won’t be able to talk to you. You won’t be able
to actually see him unless I’m here.”

“Yes, we will,” Susan said. “He can play Tetris!” she shoved her hands through her
brother’s chest, laughed, wiggled her fingers and then said, “Come on. Phillip!”

Phillip rose. He turned, hugged his mother that little bit too tightly, and then allowed
himself to be dragged off by his sister and the once again invisible ghost of the
brother whose absence had haunted this house since his death.

N
ECROMANCERS CAN SEE THE DEAD, but they have to be looking. Emma hasn’t been looking.
She hasn’t seen Nathan once tonight at Mark Rayner’s house. Nathan has done nothing
to make himself visible, though. It’s a trick he’s learned, and he didn’t learn it
the hard way—which would be the way Emma’s father did.

The dead don’t always see each other, either. Mark would never have seen Emma’s father
without some prompting on Emma’s part. Mark doesn’t see Nathan.

Emma’s father does. He says nothing, does nothing, makes no sign. He’s never interfered
in their relationship, not when Nathan was alive and not now. But he’s worried.

And he should be.

Emma brought Mark home. Nathan didn’t want her to do it; neither did her father. Eric
was practically spitting bullets. People don’t think of Emma as strong. No, that’s
not true—Allison does. But mostly, they think of Emma as
nice
, as if nice implied weakness. Truth is, Emma is kind. She hates to cause pain. All
that Hall guilt works like a tunnel; she can’t climb the walls and doesn’t even see
them most days.

She saw them tonight. She saw them, but she’d made a promise to a child. The fact
that he was dead didn’t matter. Or maybe, Nathan thinks, it mattered more. She was
terrified, but the promise was more important than the dread. Emma doesn’t generally
make promises. But it won’t stop her from making promises like this one. Emma sees
the dead as people. She sees the living as people. The dividing line is so thin, Nathan
wonders if she’s consciously aware it exists.

He doesn’t have the right to be proud of her; he didn’t raise her, he didn’t guide
her, he didn’t shape her. He spent the happiest months of his life by her side—but
she was already herself.

Emma was afraid. She came anyway.

Nathan knows how angry she was when she arrived. He understands how much she hated
Mark’s mother before she’d even approached his front door. He felt the same way.

But what happened in the living room of Mark’s home wasn’t about anger or hate. It
was about fear, and failure, and love; it was about loss, about the way pain can cause
the losses people most fear.

Nathan goes upstairs to where Phillip and Susan are bunched around Mark’s computer,
watching the screen come to life as if it were a bridge between the living and the
dead. Nathan can see Mark; his siblings can’t, but they know he’s there.

Mark, however, isn’t aware of Nathan.

Emma isn’t, either. Nathan knows when to leave her alone. It’s harder, though. She
was his world while he was with her—but there were always things to do when she needed
space for thought. Now there’s almost nothing.

“You shouldn’t be here.”

Nathan turns. He doesn’t recognize the voice. He doesn’t recognize the woman it belongs
to. But something about her tone and the texture of her words makes it feel like the
heart of winter in this small room.

Mark looks up, frowning. He looks through Nathan. He doesn’t look past the old woman.

To Nathan’s surprise, she smiles at Mark, the many lines around her lips and eyes
transforming her expression. She doesn’t look terrifying when she smiles.

“I live here,” Mark says.

“In a manner of speaking,” Nathan adds.

“And this is my room,” Mark continues, soldiering on.

“Yes, of course it is. But I wasn’t speaking to you.”

Mark’s frown deepens. “They can’t hear you.”

The old woman pins Nathan down with a wordless glare that manages to make clear exactly
what she wants him to do. He steps through the bedroom door as Mark begins an explanation
of Tetris to a woman who was probably chiseling stone tablets when she was his age.

It’s no surprise that it takes her a while to finally join him in the hall.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she says again, as the smile falls away from her face, leaving
only the ancient behind.

“I don’t have anywhere else I need to be.”

If she has a sense of humor, she’s not sharing it. “She sent you.”

Nathan says nothing.

“She sent you to Emma.”

“Does—does Emma know?”

“I don’t know. Young girls in love are often blind and willful.”

It’s a typical thing for the old and bitter to say, but there’s an edge to her voice
that implies personal experience. “Were you?”

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.