Her father had done that once—as an experiment. She could remember it, hazy and distant, because she’d watched him in the act of this odd creation. Wet strips of something, carefully threaded through other wet strips. Emma couldn’t believe that it would eventually be able to carry anything.
But it had. It had dried. Her mother still had it, somewhere in the heap of discarded kibble that characterized the Hall kitchen. She shook her head to clear it and then changed her mind. She was Emma Hall. She had had an easy life compared to this man. An easy life compared to his Reyna. An easy life compared to so many unknown lives. Certainly easier than Andrew Copis in his brief four years, easier than Mark, in his less than ten.
She was not here to judge him, no matter how much he deserved it. Lowering her hands, she took a deep breath and exhaled, and as if that were a sign, the ghost solidified in front of her, a yard from where she had chosen to stand.
• • •
• • •
There was no other landscape around him. No other sounds, no other light. There was no color to his clothing, which seemed to have been painted in broad gray brushstrokes. His face was similar; he looked like a storybook ghost. She couldn’t see any hint of his feet. She hadn’t spent all of her life seeing the dead, but she’d seen enough of them to know that they didn’t look like this.
I do not recognize you, he said. His lips moved, but the words were more felt than heard.
“I don’t recognize you either,” Emma replied. “At least not from the outside.” She hesitated as Hall manners struggled with reality—and won anyway. “My name is Emma Hall. I don’t mean to be rude, but . . . most of the dead don’t look like you do.”
No. They would not.
“Is this because of something the Queen did?”
Yes, in part. It is also because of something that I did. He stared at her. One painted hand rose, fingers and palms clear. He lowered it. You should not be here, child.
“I don’t have any choice.”
There is always choice.
Emma shrugged. “Sometimes there’s only one choice to make. I wouldn’t have made the choices you’ve made.”
You do not understand half of the choices I made.
“I wouldn’t make the ones I know you did make.” She exhaled again. “I’m not here to judge you.”
And yet, you judge. It is the nature of mortality. Silence. It was cold, here. It is dangerous to come here in judgment, child. He drifted closer, but he made no attempt to raise a hand again.
Emma did. She reached out to touch him.
Do not—
Her slow scream was all the sound in the world.
EMMA WEPT. For the first time in living memory, she didn’t care who saw her. She wanted to throw up. To curl in on herself, sink through a floor made of the dead, and let them swallow her entirely. She was overwhelmed by Scoros. She had no doubt that was who the stranger had once been. It was who she was, now. Every step she took or attempted to take led her into another fragment of his past. He’d lived far longer than Emma; she could experience bits and pieces of his life until hers naturally ended.
She wasn’t certain he was aware of her at all, and as she walked through the patchwork fabric of his life, she began to lose that awareness as well.
She struggled to remember that she was Emma Hall.
She could feel his anger, his sense of duty, his determination, as if they were her own. And she could feel his revulsion, his growing self-loathing, the lies that he invented and repeated to himself, over and over, in the vain hope that repetition would make them true.
She was good at those. They were already a part of the Hall universe. That and guilt. And the guilt was too much. It was just too damn much. He had developed emotional calluses. He could almost will himself away from his own actions. He could wield knife or fire or soul-fire without so much as flinching—on the outside. But Emma was trapped on the inside, and she was no closer to the information she had wanted from him than when she had set out searching.
She could barely remember what it was.
Pivotal events in his life caught her as she attempted to extricate herself, deadly undertows that pulled her back, again and again. There were so many memories. There were so many atrocities. There was no light, no hope, no joy.
She could shelter, for moments at a time in his humiliation and pain—in his arguments with his mother, for instance, in his guilty sense of relief at his mother’s passing. Relieved or not, he had begged leave to teach that woman the arts of longevity, as it was styled by the Queen, and he had been refused. The Queen had never cared for his mother.
Death had not freed him of maternal conflicts or anger. Short of binding her and silencing her that way, nothing would. An eternity of her regret, her anger, and her abiding contempt awaited him.
And he deserved it.
I did not choose Reyna over family, he said—to his mother, perhaps, or his memory of her—Reyna was my family. She was all I was allowed to keep.
And he’d kept her. He’d kept her safe. He’d offered her comfort. He’d tried to offer her unconditional love—the love of a parent for a very small child. But a small child was not the Queen of the Dead. He’d done everything he could for her and in her name. He had forced himself, had proven himself, over and over.
And she had never trusted love. Not his. Not anyone’s. She’d required proof of love, and when she raged or cried, he offered what she needed. Her tears then stopped and her smile returned—but it never remained there. Her eyes would lose their width, her lips would narrow, her brow would crease; doubt would shadow everything she said or did until he came, once again, to prove that she was the most important thing in his life.
Emma had never been a parent.
She had once wondered—briefly—what it must be like to be the parent of a murderer. She knew now. She didn’t doubt that Reyna was daughter to this nameless man. She couldn’t fathom his love for her, his memories painted her so clearly. She believed that he had loved her, and she hated him for it.
As he hated himself for it.
She could not escape him. Instead, dragged back once again by this brief harmony of thought, she opened her eyes and began to walk toward every single reason the man had for self-loathing. The children had been the start of it but not the end—and not, oh, god, the worst.
• • •
Something pulled at Emma; something tugged her sleeve. She was so accustomed to the man’s life, she thought it another event, another death, another loss, another betrayal—of self, of kin, of belief.
But . . . most of the people in the man’s memories didn’t swear so much. She looked down without thinking—and found that she could look down. For just a minute, her vision wasn’t a captive passenger; her eyes could move in a different direction.
There was nothing tugging at her sleeve. There couldn’t be. She was facing Reyna—the Queen now, to all but the man himself—to report. The Queen met with him alone, dismissing all of her living guards; those guards—Necromancers, but not yet knights—glared at him but obeyed their Queen; they retreated to familiar doors, opened them, and closed them when they had crossed the threshold.
The town hall had long since given way to the opulent heights of bright, domed ceilings that let in clear sky and daylight. Scoros knelt in a room with which Emma was familiar. It had been the last room she had studied so carefully before she had set out on her search.
Emma!
She recognized the voice. She turned again, turned toward the doors, and knew that this was impossible; she was in the man’s memories, and the man, kneeling, could not turn. He did not dare to take any part of his attention from Reyna, the Queen.
So it was not through his eyes that Emma saw the closed door. Not with his ears that she heard her name being called. She tried to move toward the door and failed; she heard the Queen�
��s voice at her back. She didn’t turn, but she didn’t have to; the memories reasserted themselves, and she was once again on her knees before her Queen.
EMMA!
Reaction was involuntary. Something in the voice that was calling her name was so raw with fear that she couldn’t ignore it, couldn’t turn away, couldn’t do anything at all but move toward it. After all she’d seen, all she’d heard, all she’d done, she should have been too numb.
But this voice was not one of Scoros’ voices; it wasn’t a voice he knew or recognized. It was no part of the guilt or shame he carried. It was part of her life, Emma Hall’s life. Chase Loern had come to Toronto, and he’d been pretty pissed off to find out that she wasn’t dead. He wasn’t above sharing that anger. And maybe, if that’s all she knew of him, she wouldn’t have responded.
But he had saved Allison’s life. He loved Allison, and Allison was so much part of the fiber of Emma’s existence, Emma couldn’t remember life before Allison. No matter how much Chase hated Emma, he’d actually had the brains and the perception to see Allison clearly. Anyone who saw her clearly would have to love her.
And that’s what Emma remembered as she turned toward the pain and the fear in Chase’s voice.
She had been anchored in the stranger’s memories, trapped in his viewpoint; she had been a murderer so many times over—even thinking it, she shuddered, twisting away from herself. And of course she couldn’t. She was herself. There was no escape.
“EMMA!”
She did the next best thing. She ran to the closed door. The Queen’s monologue didn’t change; the Queen didn’t move. And the man’s voice, in the few words of reply he could wedge in, didn’t shift either. But they grew distant, blessedly distant, as Chase’s voice grew closer.
She was almost at the door when she felt the ground shift beneath her feet.
And will you abandon your duty?
She almost didn’t recognize the voice; had she not spent subjective months listening to nothing but its shades, its textures, she wouldn’t have. The door was a foot away from Emma’s outstretched hand. In the eye blink before that hand made contact with its surface, the surface shifted shape; it widened, thickened. Grandeur gave way to ugly practicality, vaulted arches gave way to rectangular frame. This was no longer the door to the most important rooms in the citadel.
It was a door to the hidden rooms, to the darkness beneath the opulence. It was a jail door, a dungeon door. The wood was heavy, thick; it was scored and scratched, no doubt from useless attempts at escape.
But it had what the palatial doors lacked: bars. And bars meant space through which Emma could see out. She reached up, gripped the bars, pulled herself toward them. She opened her mouth to speak, but words jammed up behind her teeth, and her throat was already so raw it hurt to speak. She hoped—she really hoped—that she hadn’t actually been screaming in the real world, because she could just imagine what that would do to her friends. To Michael.
And then she forgot the eddies of guilt as she looked between the bars. She’d recognized the voice. She didn’t recognize the person on the other side of this door, and her hands faltered, their grip loosening.
The boy on the other side reached out and grabbed them, curling his hands around and over them. He was maybe fourteen years old; it was hard to tell. His hands were red with blood. Literally red with it. And his hair was that bright red-orange that was so striking. It was also much longer than Chase’s.
“Don’t you dare let go,” he said, voice grim. Fourteen; his voice had already entered adult territory.
“Chase?”
“No, I’m the tooth fairy.” A tooth fairy with a bruised face, a swollen lip. All of the blood—on his clothing, on his face—was scarlet and crimson, and his eyes were almost blue. “What are you staring at?”
“The tooth fairy, apparently.” Her voice was thin and quavering, and she tried to bring it back under control. The words, at least, were the right words.
“And I’ve got something on my face?”
Blood, she thought. She didn’t say it. She wondered, instead, what Chase could see. She didn’t ask. She asked the other question, the bigger one. “Why are you here?”
“To make sure you come back.”
And she remembered that it had been Chase who had pulled her free of a sea of hands and arms that would otherwise have devoured her.
“Fine. How are you here?”
His hands tightened involuntarily; Emma’s tightened as well. She could feel bars, and they had the consistency of metal—but the metal was warm.
He smiled. It was the first time she understood just how much of a defense that smile was. This fourteen-year-old version of the Chase Loern she knew hadn’t mastered it yet; the lips moved in exactly the right way, but the eyes were so bruised and so haunted, they didn’t match. “You know that thing about crying you have?”
“What thing about crying? I don’t mind if people cry—”
“Not other people. You. Allison says you’re very definite on that. Emma Hall does not cry in public.”
“Yes, but—”
“Emma Hall has nothing on Chase Loern in that regard.”
“I’m not—”
“You are, Emma. Look—can you just wake up? You’re scaring the crap out of your friends. Except Amy.”
Emma laughed, or tried to. “Can you?”
“Can I?”
“Wake up, if that’s what you want to call it. Can you?” Voice dipping, she said, “I’ve tried.”
The very modern cursing that had first caught her attention went on for some time. “I’m not leaving without you.”
“Can you?”
“I’m not trying. I’m assuming the answer is yes—but if I wake up, you’re still going to be here, and from the sounds of it, here is not where you want to be.”
Emma shook her head. She didn’t always trust intuition—especially not her own—but she thought she understood why Chase was fourteen. She didn’t understand why he alone seemed to radiate color—maybe it was because he was alive. “I don’t think you can,” she said softly. Certainly.
“Is this some weird Necromantic thing?”
“I don’t know a lot about Necromantic things. No one taught me how to see the dead. No one taught me how to take their hands. Chase—I don’t think you can wake up either. You shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t have come.” Emma was viscerally certain that Chase Loern was just as trapped as she was. Chase Loern, who’d argued for her death, who’d wanted her killed—and who, she was certain, would once have been happy to be the killer.
He shrugged. He didn’t let go of her hands. “Wasn’t my idea,” he finally said. His voice was blurred, thick. But it was his voice.
“Please don’t tell me it was Ally’s.”
He laughed. It was not a happy sound. “It wasn’t Allison’s. She told me I should trust you.”
“She’s always been an optimist.”
He laughed again, and this laugh was less wild, less terrifying. “She’d have to be, wouldn’t she? Can you see any way to open the damn door?”
Emma shook her head. Took a breath and felt it enter distant lungs. Chase had bought her space to think. He’d brought her back to Emma Hall, to her own thoughts, her own pale worries. He was holding her steady, but she wasn’t certain it could last; behind his back, she could see fire. She could hear the sharp snap of something that might—or might not—be gunfire.
She was certain it was not Scoros’ past she was seeing because she wasn’t the one shooting the gun or setting the fire. For the moment, she was herself. She was not passenger—or captive—to experiences she could not change and would never have chosen.
Gunfire didn’t make Chase flinch. She wasn’t certain he could hear what she heard or even see what she saw. He could see her. She could see him. But she saw him as she saw the de
ad—and she was certain Chase wasn’t dead.
“Emma—open your eyes. Your real eyes.”
“My eyes are open.”
He opened his mouth—his bruised, swollen mouth—and shut it again. “Then we are so screwed.”
• • •
Chase looked at the door, which was difficult given the level of his hands. He was afraid to let Emma go. From this side the door didn’t appear to have a lock. Or a door knob. Or a handle. It did not seem designed to allow anyone entry. “Do you remember how you got in?”
A hesitation. “I walked. You?”
“I’m not exactly in—but I walked as well. The citadel’s doing a really fancy impression of Dante’s Hell at the moment.”
“Which level?”
“No fair.”
Emma’s brows rose. Her color—and she had color—was bad, but her expression was almost normal. “What?”
“That was an Allison question.”
The corners of her lips twitched. Her hands were warm. They were the only thing in this grim place that was.
“Is there a handle of any kind on your side?”
“No.”
“You didn’t look.”
Emma’s forehead creased, but confusion—of a certain kind—was better than pain or fear or—he shied away from the last description before it had fully formed. “I didn’t, did I?” Her gaze shifted. Chase tightened his grip on her hands. He wanted to reach between the bars and grab her wrists, but his hands wouldn’t pass between them.
“I think there’s a handle—you need to let go of my hands.”
“No can do.”
She grimaced. “Then you need to let go of one of them.”
He couldn’t say why, not then, not later, but his grip tightened. It was involuntary, and he saw Emma wince. I can’t let go of you, he thought. There was a desperation in it, a frenzy of certainty—and it was informed in all ways by fear. He looked at his hands, tried to get them to obey his commands. They almost seemed to belong to someone else.
Grave Page 27
