They were red, sticky, gloved in dried blood.
“Chase?”
“My hands—” He met her gaze. “My hands are—”
She nodded, as if not trusting herself to speak.
He stared at his hands, at her face, framed between them by bars, and last, at the hands he was gripping so tightly his knuckles were white beneath the darkened crimson. “Emma—Emma, your hands—”
“What about my hands?” Her voice was thinner.
They were as red as Chase’s. The blood was newer, and it was slicker; it made her hands slippery. He knew. He was trying to hold on to them. “Emma, can you reach through the bars?”
She didn’t answer. He could see her eyes widen, could see the shift in focus as she looked through him.
“What are you doing?” he demanded.
She didn’t, or couldn’t, answer. He was no longer certain she could hear him, or see him. Or perhaps she could. Perhaps she could see—in this land of the dead and the trapped and the damned—past the Chase Loern she knew.
His hands were red, they were sticky, and as he stared at them, he felt blood fill his mouth, where his teeth had cut his lip. He knew the sensation. It wasn’t the first time it had happened. It wouldn’t be the last.
He told himself this, clinging to her hands, struggling to remember why he’d come here in the first place. What he remembered instead—
No.
But his hands were the wrong hands. He hadn’t noticed it before. They were his hands; they more or less obeyed his commands. But they were, blood regardless, too young. They had no calluses. They had no scars. They were the hands he’d once had when—
NO.
He was frozen in place, hunted, afraid. This fear was the first fear, the worst fear; this was the moment in which he had learned the meaning of the word. He turned, or would have turned; his hands were stuck, clenched in fists, bound.
He could hear the dog. He could hear the faint echoes of his mother’s voice. What’s upsetting him this time?
His father: Probably a raccoon.
No. No, Dad—not a raccoon. Run. Run. RUN.
How many times had he had this nightmare? It ended—it always ended—the same way. There was no hope. There was no chance. There was death, always death. And the only person to survive, the only person to be left behind, was Chase. No matter how hard he struggled. No matter how much he had learned. No matter how old he was or what weapons he carried. Nothing changed.
He could hear them scream. He could watch them die. He could be paralyzed by fear and the belief—the stupid, blind belief—that this could not be happening.
• • •
Emma saw the fire. It was small, but beneath it was kindling, and beneath that, logs piled high, in a rough pyre. Illuminated by its growing light, she could see the shape and outline of a woman. She recognized not the woman but the situation; she had experienced it so often.
The door with no handle, no knob, faded from view, except for the bars around which her hands—and Chase’s—were wrapped. She looked at Chase and saw that he was fading as well, as if he had only been so much scenery, just another part of the nightmares of one dead man.
She tried to call Chase. Tried to shout his name. The name that left her throat was not his. She didn’t recognize it and knew that the throat scraped raw by the force of those syllables was not her own.
Torches flickered, small whispers of flame; they were held by shadows, shades, their voices the only things that were clear and distinct. She could no longer see past them, could not approach them. But she tried.
Something hit her hard, caused her to double over. She had seen this fire before. But not these men, not these women. As the shadows grew sharper, she could see that there were children in the mix, their hands or shirt collars held by parents who otherwise paid them little mind.
“Do you want to die?” The words were a hiss of sound.
“My mother—I have to help my mother!” A hand was over her mouth, muffling most of the words, damping their volume. Were it not for the sound of the crowd, it wouldn’t have worked—but the crowd was jubilant. Loud. Merry, even. It might have been a festival fire.
An old festival, a dark fire, a human sacrifice.
She struggled. She bit. Air rushed into her open mouth.
“Then go. Go and die. There is nothing you can do to save her.”
She staggered. Her knees hit dirt, her hands following.
“Is that the death you want? Is that it? Do you think that’s what your mother wants for you?” Again and again, the words hissed into his ear, his captor—who? Why?—unable to walk away, to let him go.
Her captor.
Her father. No. Not her father. Not Emma Hall’s father. She was with Scoros again. This man was Scoros’ father. She turned to look, to glare, to plead—and the look on his father’s face killed all words. You’re just afraid. If we go—
If we go, we’ll die.
His father’s arms found him again. “We can’t save her.”
He heard the fear in his father’s voice. The helplessness that had never been there before. Against it, in the background, laughter. Laughter and the first scream. And he stood, no longer struggling, as his father lifted him, understanding this one thing about himself: He was a coward.
He valued his life, his survival, more than the life of the woman who had given him life. He would not do anything to save her. He would not lift voice or hand. He would not lift weapon. He would do nothing at all but walk away; he wouldn’t even bury her.
He could not scream. Not out loud. But inside? The scream started then, and it never, ever stopped.
Emma was, and was not, the boy.
Emma could scream.
• • •
The sound shattered Chase.
There was no part of his body that didn’t feel it as a literal, crushing blow; it drove him back in so many ways, staggering was the least of it. His mouth wasn’t open. He could swear it wasn’t open, but he could feel the reverberations of that scream on his lips. He could lift his head, open his mouth, and make the same sound, over and over.
He knew because it was the perfect harmony to his own scream. It was the same cry, the same wordless eruption of noise that had left his own lips at his mother’s death. That was leaving it, even now.
It was not his voice.
He didn’t hate Emma now. Chase Loern was tired, in this moment, of fear and hatred. “Emma!”
The screaming continued; the voice grew hoarse with it, and as it did, it became similar to the voice he recognized as Emma Hall’s. Funny that the sobbing always sounded like her, even if he had never seen her cry.
His hands tightened; they still clutched her hands. He could see them—see her. And he could see the Queen of the Dead. He could see his mother’s body. He could see his father’s, to the left and in the corner. His father had died first.
And he knew, as he used Emma’s scream as an anchor, that they couldn’t be killed or tortured to death more than once. They were already dead. The Queen of the Dead could not kill them again. He struggled to find his own voice, to dislodge the past from it; his throat felt raw.
If he had screamed like that in the real world, Allison was going to kill him. Or kill herself with worry. It was, oddly, a good thought.
It was the only one. He couldn’t save his parents. Emma Hall was not a substitute for them; there was no redemption for him here. But he had come to save Emma; she was not dead, and he did not intend to leave without her.
He wasn’t the same Chase Loern. The naive, shallow boy of memory was dead.
“Don’t take this personally, but if you die here—or worse—it’ll break Allison. I am not leaving without you. Are you afraid that you’re helpless, that you’re powerless? That’s been my life. Do you want to be me?”
• • •
Emma heard Chase. Heard him, turned toward him, struggling to hold on to the thread of his familiar voice amidst the volume of all the other sounds: laughter, screams, shrieks of a glee so obscene it was hard to believe they came from . . . people. Monsters, yes. She knew about monsters. She’d walked through the life of one, watching as he emerged. Seeing his choices, feeling his fear, feeling his love and his desire to protect what was loved.
She understood that he had watched people he cared about die; his thoughts had touched on it before. She had never seen it until now.
She had never seen the thing that had broken him.
But she understood. He was a monster because of monsters. And monsters in this world started out as people, were people. It hadn’t been all that he was, but that didn’t matter; he couldn’t escape the sum of his choices. Death had not freed him. It gave her no comfort to know how much they had tormented him, in life.
She could see the eddies of every monstrous action bleeding into the world, sinking roots in the hearts of other people and growing there.
“Emma! Emma, talk to me. Stop whimpering. It doesn’t impress anyone, and it pisses Amy off.”
She struggled against the imperative of death and death and death; struggled against the memories of the man she had come—she remembered this distantly—to save. To free. The thought of Amy Snitman helped enormously, because Chase was right: Amy would be angry. She did laugh, then. It was tremulous, shaky—it was too close to hysteria. But it wasn’t a scream and it wasn’t a whimper and it wasn’t an endless litany of guilt and self-hatred.
“Tell me what you’re doing.”
She felt his hands once again; they were still locked around hers. Since neither of them were here, that was physically impossible—and she didn’t care. Chase didn’t look like he cared much either—because she could see him. Bruised, young, his eyes far too dark for the rest of his pale face.
She shook her head.
“Tell me,” Chase said, his voice so soft it was more plea than command. Chase was not gentle. That was not part of his oeuvre. But he was trying.
And his voice was so much better than the voices of the crowd. The screaming had stopped—and that was worse for the man whose memories she still inhabited, although until the cries of pain and fear had ceased, he had wished so desperately that they would.
She didn’t have an answer for him. She couldn’t remember for one long, ugly moment. She couldn’t remember because she was paralyzed by the death of her mother.
No. It was not her mother. Mercy Hall was alive, in Toronto, a world or two away. She had to remember that, because if she didn’t, she would never leave this place. “I’m trying to find a man. A dead man.”
“Which one?”
She struggled with the question. Chase knew. Chase should know. He had been there at the beginning. So had she. She tried again. “I’m sitting in the circle.”
Yes.
“I’m in the Queen’s circle. Where it was supposed to be safe.”
“And it’s not.”
Emma grimaced. “Clearly.” She fought, now. Her father did not restrain her; Brendan Hall was dead. She hadn’t failed her mother. She hadn’t walked away without even trying. This pain was not her pain.
And yet it was. It was, now. She could remember this stranger’s life as well as she could remember her own. She took a deep breath, held it, exhaled. She could remember the pain and the ugliness of his life as well as she could remember her own. Her own life had not been painless—but it hadn’t been joyless, either.
She was not the sum of her pain. She was—she had to be—more than that.
“I wasn’t taught how to use the circle,” Emma said.
It wouldn’t have made a difference.
“Chase, your mouth isn’t moving.”
“Not the complaint I usually get.”
Emma was silent for a long beat. She closed her eyes—or tried. It made no difference. “Let go of my hands.”
“I don’t think I can.”
“I’m—I think I’ll be okay.”
“No, I mean I can barely feel my hands.” He tensed.
“Chase?”
“Don’t worry about me. There’s nothing here I haven’t seen before.”
It was the way he said it. It was the fact that he was fourteen—or younger; that he was bleeding, that he was as yet unscarred. She heard a dog barking. From the sounds of it, it was an angry dog—the bark was territorial.
She couldn’t see the dog. Neither could Chase; he was staring at her. But his fingers curled so tightly around Emma’s they were painful. His shoulders tightened as if to ward off blows. His head snapped to the side; Emma couldn’t see what hit him, but she had no doubt that Chase could.
Emma had never asked Chase about his life. She knew he’d lost his family at the hands of the Queen of the Dead; she knew he’d made his life choices because of that loss. And she knew, watching him, that he was just as trapped by those memories as she’d been by the memories of a dead man.
The difference—the big difference—was that these were clearly his own memories. Emma had some hope of separating herself from decisions she would never have made—if she managed to escape. She had a life, and if it wasn’t nearly as long as Scoros’, it was entirely her own.
Chase couldn’t escape his own memories. Not that way.
“Chase. Chase!”
His eyes, unfocused, moved, widening until they were mostly whites. She tried to free one of her hands, but he hadn’t lied—his grip was too tight. The dog’s bark broke; it was loud and then it was nonexistent. No voice had ordered it to shut up.
And she knew, listening to the sudden silence, what would follow. She did not want to see it. She didn’t want to be Chase Loern. She didn’t want to watch her family die—again. But she didn’t want to lose Chase here, either. He’d come to find her. He’d come to bring her back—and if back was to the heart of the Queen’s stronghold, it made no difference.
“Don’t make me do this, Chase. Don’t. Please.”
He didn’t answer. Emma was afraid he wouldn’t. She had no good choices here; no choice at all. And she didn’t know how she was supposed to rifle through the memories of a living person. She heard a man’s voice—adult. She heard a gunshot. Two. A scream, younger, female.
She wasn’t seeing it through Chase’s eyes—but Chase was.
Emma was, and remained, herself. The fear she felt was her own. The hatred—and it was momentary, visceral—was her own as well. Neither would help Chase. She could curse the Queen, curse Reyna. Or she could go back, curse the villagers who had killed Reyna’s family and the man—no, boy—she had loved. She had no doubt, if she searched the citadel, that she would find other people to curse, other people to hate.
And again, it wouldn’t help Chase.
Right here, right now, Chase was like Andrew Copis. He was like Mark. He was trapped, reliving the events that had destroyed his life. And she was standing outside of them, with the desire and the need to help, and no certain way of doing so.
But she had found a way. Both times.
EMMA’S HANDS WERE CURLED TIGHTLY around the bars of the door’s grille. Chase’s hands were clenched over the top of them. She couldn’t shake him loose, and at this point she no longer wanted to try. It wasn’t his hands that were the problem—it was the so-called door, a thick, wooden wall with enough of a hole cut into it that she could see his face.
She was shaking. It wasn’t fear so much as exhaustion. No, she thought, that was a lie. She was afraid. She was afraid for Chase, who mostly hated her but had come anyway. She was afraid for Allison, whose brother lay in a hospital somewhere in Toronto because Allison’s best friend was a Necromancer. She was afraid that Allison, who had never, to her knowledge, had more than a passing crush on anyone, would suffer the sa
me loss that she herself had suffered when Nathan had died.
Toby’s life was not in Emma’s hands.
Chase Loern’s was.
She had let herself be pulled into memory after memory, wandering almost aimlessly in the gray world of the dead, searching when she didn’t know what she was searching for. She had been a passive witness to murder and torture. She’d been too horrified to think; she’d lost all sense of herself in the moment of each memory, struggling to reclaim it when the memory shifted.
She didn’t struggle now. She was Emma Hall.
Chase Loern was not dead. He wasn’t lost and invisible. Emma was not a Necromancer. But she’d been born with the power of one. She accepted it now. The power was meant to be used; she could feel the warmth of it, startling and sudden, as it flowered in hands that had lost all circulation.
The first thing she did was open the door. She didn’t reach for a handle that wasn’t there, because she couldn’t free her hands. Instead, she refused to acknowledge the existence of the door. It wasn’t solid. It wasn’t a memory—or if it was, it wasn’t a memory in which she consented to remain trapped any longer.
The door itself dissolved. Last to go were the bars that had become a kind of anchor; they weren’t necessary. Chase himself was attached to her hands; she didn’t need anything else. She looked at his face, his young face, at his eyes, at his slack jaw, his odd hair. This boy would become the Chase Loern she knew, but he wasn’t there yet.
She couldn’t prevent it happening. She understood that. She hadn’t been able to prevent Andrew Copis’ death either, although she could see exactly how he could have been saved. The fire had killed the four-year-old. The Queen of the Dead had killed Chase’s family. She wondered if the Queen of the Dead had ever used the vast reservoir of her power to attempt to change the past.
Wondered why she even thought it.
But she knew, and she tensed, squaring her shoulders. She did not want to be Chase Loern. She didn’t want to be trapped in his animal fear and fury. But she didn’t want him to be trapped there either. Sometimes all choices were terrible.
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