In the other cases, she’d gone to the dead because she could see them. She could find the binding chains, grasp them, and yank them free. Those chains remained with Emma. She accepted that; Margaret didn’t seem to mind so much.
But . . . she’d seen Margaret first.
She understood—barely—what the circle was meant to accomplish. Understanding the how was beyond her. And she had a queasy feeling that it was the how that would define everything that happened in this city of the dead.
How had she found Andrew Copis? How had she found Mark?
She’d heard them. She’d heard Andrew from halfway across the city, in a crowded classroom. The man she needed to free didn’t have to be here to be found. But to be found, he had to be heard.
• • •
She almost asked him where he was, but she didn’t. Nor did she ask the magar. She stood on the path that ended in wall, knelt, and examined the narrow, placed stones that seemed to continue beyond the wall itself.
Bowing her head, she listened.
• • •
She heard, first, the muted whispers that filled the room and realized that they were always present in the background—just as traffic noises were always present in Toronto. It was a terrible thought; in Toronto, cars were not sentient, and their owners were not trapped in walls or floors or furniture for eternity.
But those voices were not the voices she needed. If she survived, they would be. She swore they would be.
She rose, listening. Eyes closed, she retraced the path to the circle and watched herself, looking in. She was surprised by what she saw: Emma Hall, at rest. She felt separate from herself, enough so that she thought she looked young. Young, isolated, immobile. It wasn’t a pleasant thought.
She opened her eyes—her real eyes.
She could see Michael, Amy, Allison. She could see Chase Loern, Ernest. Petal was in the hidden room, and she was both glad that he was safe, and afraid for him. But if he were here, the engraved circle wouldn’t be much of a barrier for him; he’d lope across and dump his head in her lap and whine. He wanted to be home.
She wanted it as well. And there was only one way to get there.
She closed her eyes again. She listened.
• • •
Cemeteries were places the living gathered. It wasn’t that people didn’t feel grief anywhere else, as Emma well knew. Grief was sharp and unexpected; it could ambush her in the brightest and loudest of places. But in a graveyard, grief was expected, natural. It troubled no one else. It made no awkward pauses, no lurch in conversation. If there were tears, she could cry them.
Sometimes the tears were absent. Sometimes she felt anger instead—and guilt, because Nathan didn’t deserve her anger. He hadn’t committed suicide. He hadn’t chosen to die. He’d intended to drive to her house to pick her up. To spend the afternoon with her.
The afternoon would never come. He was trapped in death—and she was trapped in his death, as well, because he’d been at the heart of her life. She was lucky. He hadn’t been murdered. His death hadn’t been an act of malice.
Lucky? She grimaced. She was lucky because his death had been an accident?
Her anger had no focus. On most days, she didn’t want to find the boys responsible for his death. She didn’t want to make them pay. Had they killed him on purpose, she would have. And she was a Hall. She wouldn’t have acted on it, but the anger, the drive, would have been there.
Instead, she spent evenings in the cemetery with her dog. She could hear the familiar sounds of traffic, the occasional sounds of impatient drivers, the movement of leaves and long, weeping-willow branches. There were no people; she was almost in a world of her own.
The queen’s city was a cemetery.
The walls, the floors, the vast windows, even the furniture—they were graves. But the living didn’t come here for comfort. Not even the Queen. Perhaps especially not the Queen.
Emma wanted to speak to her father. Not Margaret, not the magar, the intimidating old woman who had started this journey. Not even Nathan. She wanted her father, because her father would know how to fix things. He always had.
And her father was in Toronto, in a hospital, watching Toby Simner’s life bleed out.
She shook her head. Her father had been dead for half her life. He couldn’t tell her how to fix things. He hadn’t been able to fix things for her since she’d been just shy of nine. He hadn’t been able to either hold her or offer her comfort.
She heard crying. For a moment, she thought it was her own—but Halls didn’t weep in public, and she was, contained in a circle or no, in public. But the tears resonated with the ones she refused to shed, and instead of denying them, she let them in.
THE STREETS ARE FULL. The old mingle with the young; she glimpses children between the full skirts of young women and old alike. Men bow their heads as she walks past. As they should, she reminds herself: She is the Queen.
Did she build these streets? They seem so long now, so full. They looked smaller, somehow, when they were empty. She thinks she would like to see them full, always full; she thinks she would like to glance out of her windows or down from her grand balconies and be surrounded by faces like these.
She glances at Eric, her hand on his arm. She expects his expression to be neutral, hooded. He is, however, looking at the crowd. He smiles at one or two of the people who catch his eye. She can’t tell who those people are.
She can’t tell if they’re dead or alive.
Eric shouldn’t be able to see the dead.
As she walks beside him, hand on his arm—and his arm is warm, her hand, cold—she thinks, clearly, he shouldn’t be able to see the dead. And she wants, suddenly, to empty the streets of the dead. Because then, Eric won’t see anything that he shouldn’t be able to see.
Eric is not like Reyna. He never was. He didn’t live her life. He hasn’t lived her life for centuries. He couldn’t see the dead. He didn’t really understand them. He understood death—anyone alive in those days did—but he couldn’t see what death sometimes left stranded, left behind.
She doesn’t want to ruin this day.
She doesn’t want to ruin this moment.
But this is not the first time since the day she lost almost everything that Eric has been by her side. She knows what love is. She has always known what love is. She has waited and waited for this day.
He does not look at her with reproach. He doesn’t look at her with anger or disdain. The first time she saw him again, she expected both. She was so relieved to find neither. So relieved and so happy. But relief made her giddy. He is beside her now, yes.
But if he doesn’t look at her with hatred or anger, he doesn’t look at her at all. Instead, he gazes at the sea of faces to either side of this road. He hasn’t aged—of course he hasn’t aged. Neither has she. And it is because of her power that this is true. Their life together as it should have been was interrupted. It was interrupted by hatred and fear and ugly, angry men. She had never done anything wrong. She had never hurt anyone.
She had loved—had meant to love—Eric.
Why did he not understand that? That’s what she thinks, her hand on his arm, the streets of a city she built for him, for them, surrounding them both. Why did he not understand that she loved him?
Does he not understand that she loves him, even now?
Does Eric not love her?
IT WAS A GIRL’S VOICE. A girl’s tears, made nasal because that’s what tears did.
Emma wasn’t searching for a girl, but this voice was the clearest sound in the room. It wasn’t attenuated or distant. It wasn’t stretched, thin, almost impossible to catch. The girl might have been in the room with her, even beside her.
She looked; the sobbing quieted. The room—the Queen’s room—was empty. Emma could see herself. Only herself. She could see her hands, her legs, th
e clothing she’d worn in their run from Necromancers. She could see the path that led from the circle and ended in wall.
She couldn’t see the girl—but the path itself was laid down in the wrong direction. She hesitated, but the hesitation was brief. She turned away from the wall, from the path, and even, in the end, from the circle and went in search of the voice.
She wasn’t certain what she expected to find, but she hadn’t been certain what she’d find when she followed the terrified, broken screams contained in Andrew Copis’ memories, either. She only knew that the visible path was not for her; it wasn’t the right way. There was no path in the direction of the voice.
But there’d been no path the first time, either. Oh, there’d been streets—but they’d been the wrong streets; she’d tried to make Eric drive through a house or two in her rush to reach what she’d heard so clearly. Eric wasn’t driving. He wasn’t here. The protective shell of his car was absent. If Emma wanted to reach her unknown destination, there was only one way to do it.
She walked. The geography of the room began to fade, the walls receding as she approached them. No, not receding exactly; they were still there, immutable edifices of the architecture of death. She could reach out to touch them if she concentrated. But as she listened to the sound of weeping—the sound of grief—they became remote . . . while somehow standing in place.
She inhaled. Her chest rose and fell, a reminder that she was—for the moment—alive. Unlike the dead, she could leave this empty plane; the almost artistically sterile walls were not her prison or her resting place.
And if she encountered fire, it wouldn’t kill her. In theory, nothing would. Only the living could now do that.
• • •
She was surprised to see trees form—trees, tall grass, the sporadic shapes of flowering weeds. She heard—although she couldn’t see—birds; she heard the bark of a distant dog and thought of Petal. There was no road beneath her feet, but as she looked, she saw flattened weeds that implied a rough, unplanned footpath.
She felt sun as she walked. She heard the effect of wind through this memory of living things, because that’s what it was: memory. She wondered, as she walked, if her own death would leave this snapshot, hanging in what she now thought of as ether, if someone searching for the ghost of Emma Hall would hear—or see—the things important to her. Would they find Nathan, smiling or listening or speaking? Would they see the father whose face she remembered now as photographs?
She shook herself. Whatever they might find, it wouldn’t be this. There were no obvious buildings, but as she walked, the sound of moving water—more of a trickle than a roar—laid itself over every other sound. To someone, this had been familiar.
She wondered then if the weeping she heard came from the person she sought. It was high, soft, and very, very nasal—but it was a girl’s voice. It grew louder as she walked, pushing herself through high stalks of dry grass and almost feeling their slap against her arms and legs.
The weeds formed a type of wall, a corner, but they opened up as she reached the bank of a river. No, not a river—a stream, a brook, something winding and narrow. The brook itself seem dominated by rocks of various sizes, but the water was clear.
And like the plants, the earth beneath her feet, the shade of a sky that seemed cloudless, it was gray. The world was, unoriginally she felt, black and white. So, to her own eyes, was she.
She saw the girl. On her knees, legs curled beneath the bulk of her body, arms wrapped around her as if they were the only thing supporting her weight, she had folded into a shape, a closed, furled tenseness, that Emma would ever after think of as the shape of grief.
And it cut her, because she knew it so well. There was no stream, no forest, no wilderness, in which she might have hidden her pain. Only the graveyard, and even there she had not wept. Not for Nathan. Not for her father. She stumbled, righted herself, and stopped moving.
Grief was, had always been, personal. Tears—the tears the Halls did not shed in public—had, in some ways, been more personal than sex. Done right, sex was joy and life, something that grief could never hope to achieve. No—grief was a black hole. If you were caught on the edge of its event horizon, you might never escape.
And she knew then who this girl was. She could armor herself against pity because pity was something she didn’t want, and had never wanted, for herself. But crossing the boundary of privacy that grief demanded was much, much harder. She knew how she would have felt had someone—a total stranger—intruded in a moment like this. She did not want to do that to anyone else.
Not even the Queen of the Dead.
Perhaps especially not the Queen. We want monsters, she thought, frozen a moment by empathy and the bone-deep consideration that had been instilled in her by watching her parents over the years. We want monsters because it means we’re not them.
Mark’s mother had inadvertently killed Mark.
And in the end, in the face of her pain and her guilt, Emma Hall had taken her dead son home, and had left him there. It was what Mark wanted, and she could not, the moment she had seen his mother’s face, do anything else.
But Mark’s mother was not the Queen of the Dead. The Queen of the Dead was a monster. She had murdered Chase Loern’s family. She had created the Necromancers, who were perfectly willing to threaten an infant with death. Emma had no doubt that they would have killed the child. No doubt that they would have murdered Allison. Or Amy or Michael.
All of it could be laid at the feet of this girl—if her feet could be found; they were invisible beneath her.
People do monstrous things. People, not monsters. Her father’s words. Her father, who remained by Toby’s bedside, unseen by the living, waiting to carry word to Emma.
She forced herself to walk; she approached the stream. Water splashed up her boots, dampening her legs. She cast a shadow in the fall of sunlight, and that shadow touched the weeping girl, who did not move. She didn’t seem to notice Emma’s presence at all.
And Emma couldn’t see her face. She could see the crown of her head, her shaking body; she could hear her voice. And she thought she would never forget it; the sound stabbed her, tore at her, almost demanded that she, too, weep.
Her body responded. Her eyes. She felt tears gather, until vision was blurry. She couldn’t force them to stop, and in the end, they rolled down her cheeks—and she let them.
She wasn’t certain what she would have said or done—how did one interact with a memory, after all?—had the man not appeared.
She couldn’t see him; she could see his shadow against the grass. Unlike Emma, the stream, or the weeping girl, he failed to cohere into something solid enough for her eyes to grasp, to interpret. She was certain of his presence because grass wavered as he passed through it.
He had moved through the same grass as Emma, and he had stood—as Emma had done—just behind the thinnest screen of remaining weeds, watching as Emma had watched, caught in the same turmoil: the desire to protect privacy, to protect boundaries, at war with the need to do something—anything—that might help and being uncertain what would help.
But he wasn’t Emma Hall, a stranger who had every reason to hate and fear this pathetic, sobbing girl. He broke through the barrier nature had made for him.
Emma could hear his steps. She could see their impressions in the soft dirt of the dry bank. But she couldn’t see him.
The girl on the banks could, although not immediately; it was hard to see anything with your forehead practically in your lap.
He put his arms around hers—around the clenched shoulders, around the hidden abdomen. This, too, Emma could see—in the line of the girl’s clothing; in the way she tensed and redoubled her efforts to fold into invisibility. Her weeping did not cease; it redoubled, humiliation entering a tone that had, moments before, been pure loss. She struggled; he did not release her.
He di
dn’t speak.
He held on.
He held her as if she were precious and fragile and her pain could somehow be enveloped; he held her as if, by holding her, he could vanquish all pain, all loss. He didn’t ask permission; he didn’t allow her to reject what he offered. He didn’t make the offer of comfort contingent on her at all.
For one brief moment, Emma felt two things: anger.
And envy.
This human, tiny tableau went on and on; she was a mute witness to it. She had been uncertain upon sighting the weeping girl; she had hesitated. She was not uncertain now; now there was no place for Emma Hall. She almost left.
But the water of the stream in which she stood seemed to harden, becoming first ice and then something with even less give. She couldn’t feel the cold; she could feel the insistence that she remain, that it was necessary to remain.
What she witnessed now had happened—if she understood anything—centuries ago. Nothing she could do could change it. But waiting couldn’t change it, either. And any hope of survival lay in change.
Andrew Copis had been trapped by his memories; they had been the whole of his world. But he had trapped himself; nothing existed for Andrew except the fear, the desolate sense of betrayal, and the fire.
The man trapped here had not trapped himself. He had been trapped, bound, hidden. This had been his punishment. She was certain that it was meant to be his punishment.
But as the sobs finally quieted, Emma couldn’t help but wonder how. This was, in the end, a memory in which he had taken a risk—she could feel the whole of the risk, still—and had been rewarded by success. He had offered a rough, complete comfort, and it had been accepted.
She needed to understand why. But understanding wouldn’t come unless she could reach the man—and at the moment, she couldn’t even see him; she could see only that he was present, somehow, and that he had had an effect.
• • •
“Emma’s crying,” Michael said.
Allison nodded. She looked with longing and dread at the circle that separated Emma from the rest of them.
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