Touch

by Michelle Sagara

  “Okay.”

  “He’s not asking me to walk out on my Best Friend; he’s asking me to walk out on my own life. He’s asking me to be so afraid for my own safety that I’m willing to just leave you behind. And I could,” she adds. “But it would change what friendship means—to me—forever. I could never, ever throw my whole heart into it, because if things were too dark or too scary, I’d know, in advance, that I’d be ducking, hiding, and running for cover.

  “It’s not about you, not really. It’s about me. It’s about being able to look myself in the mirror. I’m not five years old anymore. I need to do this—for me. Can you live with that?”

  “I’m not exactly a disinterested observer,” Emma finally manages to say. Nathan knows the tone; she’s close to tears. Emma doesn’t cry in public. Even the good tears, and these would be good.

  He understands what Emma sees in Allison. He understands that Allison mostly doesn’t. He knows that Allison wasn’t happy to see him, and given Eric’s reaction, he’s terrified that she’s right.

  Nathan knows Emma. He knows that Emma’s not nearly as certain as Allison; he knows that Allison’s belief in Emma is way stronger than Emma’s belief in herself. But he could turn it around: Emma’s belief in Allison is stronger than Allison’s belief in herself. They shore each other up when the insecurities bite them.

  They could, if they were different people, break each other down instead.

  “Don’t hate Chase,” Emma says instead. “I can’t. I know you think he doesn’t care about what you need—but Ally, he does care about you. He’s a guy. He’s just got a crappy way of expressing it.”

  Eric clears his throat, loudly, to remind them there’s a captive guy behind the steering wheel of the car.

  “I want to slap him, and I want to spend an hour screaming in his ear, but—I don’t hate him. If I hated him, I wouldn’t care. No, I’d care because I care for you—but I wouldn’t be so angry with him. I don’t know why, but I expect better.”

  Emma laughs. “Having spoken with Chase, I don’t know why either.”

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  THIS EVENING HAD CONTAINED NECROMANCERS, near death, and death; it contained Allison and her anger at Chase—Chase was almost always angry, so his anger in response didn’t matter as much. It contained the difficult non-conversation about Nathan—a conversation Emma was no longer certain she wanted to have.

  But another unexpected surprise was waiting in the driveway of Emma’s house. It was a car. Technically, it was an SUV. The night was too dark for her to tell immediately what color it was, but Emma instantly knew three things: It wasn’t a Hall car, she’d never seen the car before, and the driver wasn’t sitting behind the wheel. Even if her mother had somehow been talked into buying a new car—which they couldn’t really afford at the moment—there’s no way she wouldn’t have spoken to Emma about it first.

  “New car?” Nathan asked, when she’d been staring at the license plate for a little bit too long.

  “No. It’s not ours.” Her left hand was numb. She hadn’t held on to Nathan for most of the evening, but she hadn’t recovered from the early contact, and she rubbed the numb hand absently. She took two steps up the drive, turned, and said, “I’ll see you again tomorrow?”

  He nodded. “I’ll hitch a ride to school in the morning, as long as you promise you won’t make me speak to anyone—I think I still owe Brady some money.”

  She laughed, but the laughter lost ground as she looked at the strange car. “I have to go talk to my mom.”

  He nodded, leaned in closer, and then stopped himself. She wanted to kiss him. She didn’t want to go into the house with blue lips.

  * * *

  The lights were on. It was dark because it was November, not because it was late, although it was closing in on nine o’clock. Petal bounded into the house, his stump wagging in a way that implied he’d been homesick for so long. He couldn’t be hungry—scratch that. He was always hungry, but he couldn’t need food yet; she’d fed him dinner before they left for their disaster of a walk.

  The lights in the living room were on. The lights in the dining room were on—but Emma paused in the arch that led to the dining room because she could actually see the tabletop. The perpetual stacks of paperwork that defined half her mother’s home life had been removed. There were flowers—real flowers—in a slender crystal vase atop a table runner.

  “Okay, Petal,” Emma told her dog. “This is really creeping me out.”

  She looked at this new incarnation of a dining room. It could have walked straight out of Coraline. Clearly this didn’t bother Petal as much as it bothered Emma. Worse, though, was the sudden sound of her mother’s laughter. It came from the kitchen.

  Emma’s mother did not love the kitchen. Some of her friends were foodies, and while Mercy Hall enjoyed eating as much as the next person, she didn’t enjoy the cooking; she often forgot ingredients or petty things like timers. Emma was a better cook than her mother. Brendan Hall had done most of the Hall family’s food preparation in the early years, and he had started teaching Emma.

  But that was undeniably her mother’s laughter, and unless the kitchen had suffered the same transformation as the dining room, she was in the Hall family’s kitchen. Emma hesitated for a long minute and then headed toward the sound of her mother’s voice.

  Mercy Hall was laughing. She was wearing, of all things, a dress, and faint traces of makeup. She looked about ten years younger than she normally did, which wasn’t the shock—although admittedly, it was a bit surprising. The shock was the person who was standing beside her—standing way too close, in Emma’s opinion. She’d never laid eyes on him before, but he was clearly laying eyes on her mother.

  He looked up first. It figured. He also took a step back from her mother, who noticed and looked up as well. “Emma, you’re home late,” she said, the happy, open smile on her face fading into a more familiar expression of concern.

  “We ran into a couple of friends,” Emma said automatically.

  “I was hoping you’d be home a little earlier. I wanted to introduce you to someone.” She turned to the strange man. “This is Jon Madding. Jon, this is my daughter, Emma.”

  Emma tried to dredge up a smile. She might as well have kissed Nathan; her lips felt frozen anyway. She extended a hand as Jon Madding—what kind of a name was Madding, anyway?—stepped forward. He took her hand, shook it; she thought his grip was a little on the weak side. He was taller than average, but sort of balding, and he had a beard. Emma wasn’t all that fond of beards.

  “I’m so pleased to finally meet you,” he said, with a broad smile. “Mercy’s told me a lot about you; you must be so proud of your mother.”

  Emma smiled and nodded. “Oh, I am. So, how did you meet my mom?”

  “At work.”

  “You work in the same office?”

  “No, I work for one of her firm’s clients. But we’ve crossed paths a number of times.” He smiled at Mercy and added, “She’s got a sharp tongue when she’s under a deadline, but she focuses and she gets things done.”

  “Oh, don’t say that to Emma,” Mercy told him, reddening. “She has to live with me; she knows what I’m really like.” She smiled at her daughter. Her smile was more genuine than Emma’s, but because Emma did know her mother, she could see anxiety start to surface.

  Keeping her own Hall standard smile plastered to her face, Emma asked, “How long have you known my mother?”

  “Three years? Four? Mercy?”

  “Four and a half.”

  “Your mother’s never mentioned me? I’m hurt,” he said, laughing.

  “No, my mother’s never mentioned you. I guess she’s been too busy. Speaking of which, I’ve got a ton of homework to do, and I won’t get it done if I don’t start an hour ago.” She turned, stopped,
and turned back. “Nice to meet you, Jon.”

  “Maybe we’ll get a chance to talk on a night you don’t have homework,” he replied, turning back to her mother.

  Emma couldn’t force herself to say something equally pleasant. She headed straight to her room, pausing only to lift her schoolbag from its perch in the hall.

  * * *

  “Em, that was unkind.”

  Her back was against her bedroom door; her eyes were closed. She didn’t want to open them because she knew damn well who was speaking. “What was unkind?”

  Her father was silent, as he often was when disappointed. It had been one of his most effective weapons in the intermittent war that was childhood; she’d forgotten just how much she’d hated it. She forced herself to look at her dad, afraid that she would see pain in his expression. It wasn’t there; there was plenty of disappointment to make up for it, though.

  “You knew,” she said, voice sharpening.

  He said nothing.

  “Dad—you knew she was seeing someone.”

  “Em—”

  “How long has this been going on? How long as she been seeing Jon?”

  “I think that’s a question you’ll have to ask your mother. If it helps, this is the first time she’s brought him home.”

  It didn’t. It didn’t help at all. Petal interrupted the conversation from the other side of the door, mostly by scratching and whining. She managed to pry herself off the door and let him in. He padded pretty much through her father’s ghost and headed straight for the bed.

  “You’re not supposed to let him do that,” her father observed; Petal was rolling in the duvet, having pulled off the counterpane he detested.

  “I have more important things to worry about at the moment. Why won’t you answer the question?”

  “Because,” he replied, folding his arms across his chest, “it’s none of my business.”

  “P-pardon?”

  “It’s none of my business, Em. It’s been eight years. I didn’t come back here to watch Mercy wallow in grief and misery; I came because I wanted to know that you were both okay.”

  A peal of laughter rose in the distance. Mercy’s. If Jon was laughing, his register was too low to carry as far. Emma hated it anyway.

  “Have they—”

  Brendan lifted a hand. “Do not even think of asking me that question. Don’t ask your mother either.”

  “Because it’s none of my business? Dad, in case it escaped your notice, I live here too.”

  “Yes, Emma, but he doesn’t. You didn’t tell your mother everything about Nathan; she didn’t ask. Do her the favor of extending her the same respect.”

  Emma was silent. She was cold. She hadn’t lied; she did have some homework. She sat at her desk, opened her bag, and pulled out her laptop. Flipping it open, she stared at a white, white screen with a menu bar somewhere on top of it.

  Petal whined. He knew she was unhappy because he could clearly hear her side of the argument. He couldn’t hear her dad’s, and that was just as well, since Petal had never been fond of the Disappointment, either.

  “Emma.”

  “I have homework, Dad.”

  “And you’re getting so much of it done.”

  She swiveled in her chair. “What do you want me to say?”

  “Your mom’s dating choices aren’t the only thing in your life at the moment,” he replied. “To my mind, they’re not even the most important.”

  “Thanks.” She bit her lip, staring moodily at her screen.

  “Give him a chance.”

  “I thought you said there were other things to talk about.”

  His silence was heavy, but after a moment he abandoned it. “What happened tonight?”

  * * *

  “Allison nearly died.” She looked down at her hands; they were shaking, and the left was still numb. Her father walked over to her, reached for her hand, and then pulled back with a grimace.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Sometimes I forget.”

  “That you’re dead?”

  He nodded. “If I were alive, I’d be able to help, somehow.”

  But Emma shook her head. “If you were alive, you wouldn’t be in my room, and even if you were, I wouldn’t be talking to you about—about Allison. Or Necromancers. I’d be talking about homework.”

  “Jon wouldn’t be here either.”

  “. . . I know. Dad—”

  “Sorry, that was unfair of me.”

  It bloody well was, but Emma suspected she deserved it. “Two Necromancers came after Ally and me while we were out walking Petal. Dad—they were going to just kill her.”

  He closed his eyes. “I wasn’t there.”

  “No—but you can’t be.”

  “Actually, I pretty much can; I don’t have a lot else on my plate. But Nathan—”

  She swallowed. Looked back at the screen that was only a little less white. It was true. She did want—she did need—some privacy.

  “What happened to the Necromancers?”

  “Eric and Chase killed them.”

  He looked away again. “You were there, for that?”

  She nodded. “I didn’t even mind it at the time.”

  “Emma—”

  “Maybe this is how it starts. I didn’t mind that they’d killed the Necromancers, and the Necromancers are human too. But if they hadn’t, Allison would have died. Chase was pissed. He wants Allison out.”

  “Out?”

  “Of my life. Of danger. I can’t blame him. But if she’s not going to leave me—and she won’t—then I have to be able to do something if it happens again.”

  “You mean you have to learn how to kill.”

  She felt the shock of his words as they settled around her. She wanted to deny it, but she couldn’t. She had no idea how far she’d be willing to go to save the life of someone she loved. She could imagine herself killing someone. But even thinking it, she could hear the sound of a knife hitting flesh and bone, and she almost stopped breathing.

  He watched her, his eyes that noncolor of dead eyes, his expression painfully familiar. After a long moment, he breathed in, like the inverse of a sigh, and the line of his shoulders softened. This time, when he reached for her, he didn’t hesitate, didn’t pull back; he caught both of her hands in his.

  He was so cold.

  And then, for a moment, she was warm.

  She wanted to cry, to tell him she didn’t want or need this, not from him. But the truth was, at this very moment, she felt she did. She wasn’t a child anymore, and she’d been nothing but a child the last time he’d hugged her when she was—as he put it—down. She let him fold her in his arms while she drained something from the touch that went both ways.

  “Remember,” he said, into her hair. “Remember, Emma. What Eric or his friends ask of you, what they think they want—it’s not the only way. It’s their way, but you’re not them.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said, into his chest. “I don’t understand what the Necromancers get out of this. I don’t understand why they do what they do.”

  “No. But you will.” His voice was softer.

  * * *

  In the morning, Jon’s car was not in the drive. Emma knew; it was the first thing she checked when she crawled out of bed. She was grateful for small mercies. Large ones seemed to be beyond her, at the moment.

  Her mother’s door was closed, but that wasn’t a big surprise; her mother and mornings weren’t the best of friends. She wondered if her mother would drag herself out of bed if Jon had stayed, and the thought soured the optimism that lack of his car had produced. She climbed into the shower, hoping to wash the uglier bits of her mood down the drain.

  Getting dressed, making breakfast, and feeding the animal that
was dogging her heels, helped. Making coffee for her mother helped as well, because it was normal.

  Her mother came down the stairs straightening her blouse and holding a pair of nylons in one hand. She looked as bleary-eyed as she normally did, but there was a thinness to her lips that was new. Or rarer, at any rate.

  “Emma,” she said, as she entered the kitchen.

  “Coffee,” her daughter replied, handing her mother a large mug with a chipped handle. “Blueberries are on the table with the granola. There’s milk as well, but we need more.”

  “I’ll get it on the way home from work. Emma—”

  The doorbell rang. Emma had timed breakfast and coffee with a merciless eye toward the very accurate clock because she knew Michael would show up at her door, the way he did every day on the way to school. It was precisely 8:10 in the morning. Emma kissed her mother on the cheek and said, “I’ve got to run, sorry breakfast was late.”

  “Emma—”

  She answered the door; Michael was mobbed by Petal—if one dog didn’t normally constitute a mob, Petal tried really hard to make up for it—and Emma grabbed her hat, her scarf, her gloves.

  Mercy knew better than to start an argument—or a discussion—when Michael was on the clock, as it were. “Will you be in tonight?”

  “Tonight? Did you forget I’m going to Ally’s for dinner?”

  Mercy grimaced. “Clearly.”

  “I won’t be home too late after that. Have a great day at work,” she added, shrugging her shoulders into her coat and heading out the door.

  * * *

  Allison’s mother came to the door to see them off, and she had a very open, very obvious expression of parental worry etched into the corners of her eyes and mouth. Allison kept a cheerful smile more or less fixed to her face as she turned to wave, but to her friends it looked hideously forced; she only relaxed it once they’d turned the corner, which Emma did as quickly as possible.

  “You can stop smiling now. If your face freezes like that, it’s going to be scary.”