Touch

by Michelle Sagara

  “Yes. But, Longland, if my home wasn’t perfect, if my family wasn’t flawless, it was a family. I’m human. Sometimes I was frustrated. Sometimes I was lonely. Sometimes I felt like a failure. All of these things are true.”

  “Dad, you weren’t—”

  He give a slight shake of head that meant he wanted to be uninterrupted.

  “But I also felt loved, by my wife and my child. Even when I was failure. Maybe especially then.” He smiled at his daughter, in almost embarrassing gratitude. “I can’t—and won’t—judge you. What I had, you didn’t have. And, yes, I know what you see.”

  “Is it—is it the same? Isn’t it better than what you had?”

  “It’s different.”

  Longland swallowed. In a voice that was painful and at odds with everything she knew about his life, he asked, “Will I be allowed to go anyway?”

  “Yes,” her father said. There was no doubt in his voice.

  Longland turned to Emma. “Could you do it again?”

  For the first time, Emma accepted the fact that Merrick Longland was dead. She’d been told, but the knowledge had been entirely intellectual. Now, it wasn’t. Like her father, like Nathan, he was trapped here. What he wanted was out of reach.

  And it shouldn’t be.

  “I don’t know,” she said, after a long pause.

  When he flinched—which surprised her—she added, “I don’t hate you enough to keep you here.” But she had. She knew she had. If she tried, she could still see the gun pointed at the baby. And at Allison, in whose arms the baby was held.

  “It wasn’t personal,” he told her. “I came here the first time to save your life.”

  She believed him. “Why have you come here a second time?”

  “I don’t know.” When he saw the change in Emma’s expression, he added, “It’s the truth. I was sent here in the company of the Queen’s Knights. I was given no orders beyond that. I was to accompany the Necromancers, and I was to find a way to meet you that wouldn’t be suspicious.”

  “What orders were the Necromancers given?”

  “They’re not to kill you, except at need. They’re here to make certain you arrive in the City of the Dead. The Queen is waiting.”

  “And you—you’re just supposed to talk to me? This isn’t about revenge for what happened to you?”

  “There are whole hours when I forget whose fault my current condition is. I can’t hold on to it when I look toward the light. Revenge doesn’t matter—there’s no way for me to come back.” He hesitated and then said, “And if I could leave this place, I wouldn’t want to come back. Your father’s right. What he had—what he built—I didn’t have. I couldn’t build it. I couldn’t even see it. Maybe that’s why he’s still here.

  “When I first saw you, I saw a pretty, popular girl who had it easy. You had friends. You had potential. You even had a hunter on your side. Until I was found, I had no one. I was nothing. Being dead hasn’t changed that. I was invisible until the Queen’s Knights found me, and I’m invisible now.

  “There’s nothing for me here. Even if the Queen of the Dead were gone and I were free, there’s nothing. You can speak with your father. Short of interrogation, there’s no one who would spend the time—or the power—talking to me.

  “You have everything,” he added. It wasn’t an accusation, but she knew that had he been alive, it would have been. Death changed things. “Everything I wanted was just handed to you.” His voice dropped to a whisper.

  And he could never have it, Emma though dispassionately. For a moment, Merrick Longland was painfully young in her eyes. She knew what he’d been willing to do, while alive. She hated it. At the moment, all she could see was pain. Pain, isolation, and a terrible loneliness. She glanced at her father, who nodded but said nothing.

  “If I could—if I was certain I could—I would open that door again. But the last time—” she shook her head.

  “What? What about the last time?”

  Emma did not want to feel sympathy—or even pity—for Merrick Longland. He was the type of person who justified the concept of Hell. He thought about his own pain but never considered the pain he left in the lives of others.

  But if she had been without a father for over half her life now, the father she’d had had loved her. She’d never doubted it. Who would she be if her father were a different man? What would she be like if she’d had Mark’s mother?

  Dead, probably.

  “Necromantic power requires the dead. It doesn’t necessarily require binding them.”

  He frowned. “That’s not how it works—”

  “It’s not how you’ve been taught,” she replied. “But it is how it works, or can work. My father is free to come and go as he pleases. I don’t know where he is when he’s not with me. I don’t own him. He chooses to stay. But he can give me power if he chooses to.

  “The dead have a choice. That’s the thing you don’t understand—and you’re dead. The dead are people. They’re people trapped inside a giant, icy waiting room, but they’re still people. When I opened the door, I did it for Andrew Copis. And for his mother. She would never have known a moment’s peace if he’d remained trapped here. But it took—it took so many of the dead, and they gave me everything they had.” She exhaled. “The Queen of the Dead has closed the way. I don’t know how. I just know that the power it takes to open the door requires hundreds or thousands of the dead. Maybe more. I stopped counting.”

  He closed his eyes. His lashes were dark and long as they rested against pale skin. He looked alive, to Emma. But then again, so did her father. She felt a peculiar tightness in her throat as she watched him, because she knew that she could touch him and her hands wouldn’t freeze or go numb.

  “If the dead knew,” he whispered, “they would come. You had thousands, but Emma—every person who’s died in the last several centuries would come if you called them.”

  “I don’t know how. How did you find the dead? Did you find them in the hundreds?”

  He shook his head.

  “The Necromancers who are in Toronto—”

  “Two are already dead.”

  “There’s a third?”

  “And a fourth.”

  “Are they also at Emery?”

  “No.” He lifted his chin, straightening his shoulders. “I can teach you.”

  Her father stiffened. Neither he nor Emma misunderstood Longland’s offer. “To bind the dead?” she asked softly.

  “You don’t understand what you can do with that power.”

  “I understand what’s been done with it in the past,” she countered.

  “If you had enough power, you wouldn’t age. You could be immortal. You’re young, now. But in ten years, twenty, you’ll be older. You’ll understand why the gift is valuable, then.”

  She shook her head.

  “I can teach you how to gather,” he said, bending forward, his hands cupped before him as if he were waiting for them to be filled. “You said you need power to free us. I can show you how to gain it.”

  It hadn’t done Longland a lot of good. Emma didn’t point this out. Instead, she said, “If I don’t get back to dinner, my mother’s going to be suspicious. Or worried.”

  “Promise me you’ll try,” he said, catching her by the hand as she turned. She was right. His hand was warm. It felt like a living hand.

  “I promise I’ll try. I want something in return.”

  He stiffened.

  “I want the other two Necromancers.”

  “What will you do with them?”

  Emma looked down at the floor. “You already know,” she said. “I’m not going to the City of the Dead. I’m not going to the Queen’s Court.”

  “She says you have power,” Longland whispered. “If you trained hard
, you could become the Queen of the Dead.”

  “I’m going back to dinner.” She turned, then turned back. “Will she summon you home?”

  “She can order me home,” Longland replied. “But without a Necromancer to create a path, it won’t be instant; I have to travel the way the rest of you do.” He rose. His expression shuttered, becoming smooth and almost lifeless. “Even at the height of my power, I couldn’t have budged that door an inch. Untrained, you did what I couldn’t.” He headed out of the living room and into the hall, where he retrieved his boots and his winter gear.

  “Does the cold affect you?”

  His smile was strange. “I’m always cold. If you mean the weather, the winter, no. I imagine this body feels pain; that the flesh can freeze or burn.” He spoke of it as if it were entirely separate from him.

  “But—isn’t it better than being dead?” She hated the hope in her voice, because she knew it was foolish. It was wrong. But it hovered there anyway. If Nathan were like Longland, she could touch him. Nathan could touch her. There wouldn’t be pain and numbness.

  “Emma, I am dead. Clothed in flesh or no, there’s nothing that can change that.” He turned and left the living room; Emma followed after taking one deep breath. She thanked him for coming, apologized in advance for Amy, and otherwise spoke as if he were the teacher he’d claimed to be.

  She wasn’t certain her mother was listening. But she wasn’t certain she wasn’t, either; the dining room had fallen momentarily silent.

  * * *

  After she’d shut the door, she leaned against the wall, her head tilted toward the ceiling.

  “Em.”

  For a long moment, she couldn’t speak. Her throat was too tight. “I’m fine,” she told him softly. It was a Hall variant on fine. To stop her father from worrying about her, she said, “Do you think we can trust him?”

  “He strikes me as a boy who’s always focused on what he wants, to the exclusion of everything else.”

  “And he wants to escape?”

  Her father shook his head. “It’s not escape. He is standing outside his home in a snowstorm. He doesn’t have the key, and the door is locked. He can peer in through the window; he can knock at the door. He can scream. He can’t enter. But he has the right to be there. I think it’s the only thing he wants, now. I think, as long as you’re working toward that, he will do everything he can to help you.”

  “But he was sent here by the Queen of the Dead.”

  “Yes, Em. Do you understand why?”

  She swallowed. Shook her head.

  Halls did not accuse each other of lying. They respected each other’s privacy. Her father was concerned enough to ask; he wasn’t concerned enough to break Hall family rules. Not when he’d worked so hard in the early years to establish them.

  “I have to get back to dinner.”

  “Jon is worried.”

  “Jon? I was thinking about Mom.”

  Her father’s smile was brief. “She’s not naturally as suspicious as Jon appears to be.”

  Emma turned, and then turned again. “Dad, you’re really okay with this?”

  “I am far less worried about your mother and Jon than I am about you,” he replied. It was a very Hall answer.

  * * *

  She thought a lot about death at dinner, where the dead weren’t. And she thought a lot about life, as well, watching her mother, watching Jon tease her mother. He never excluded Emma; she chose to step back, and he acknowledged it. It was subtle. Emma wasn’t used to subtle adults. Most of the adults in her daily life were teachers, and subtlety was generally a lost cause on the student body.

  But she thought her father was right: Jon was suspicious of Longland. He was suspicious, but he mostly kept it to himself because in the end, it wasn’t his house, and she wasn’t his daughter. He was willing to follow her mother’s lead. Emma was polite, because she could be and still be preoccupied. If her mother noticed, she left it alone, and when dinner was done and cleanup started, Jon actually helped. He was better at washing dishes than her mom, which was a disloyal thought, but also true.

  But even helping, he didn’t seem particularly eager to please; the dishes were dirty, he’d eaten, and he therefore helped clean up. It seemed natural, although her mother tried to shoo him out of the kitchen three times on the grounds that he was a guest. He pointed out that a decent guest helped out.

  Given that Emma had been told exactly this for most of her life, she found the disagreement amusing. She held on to that because there were now two things she had to face that she desperately wanted to avoid.

  One of them was waiting in her bedroom when the dishes were done and she could retreat to give her mother some privacy.

  Mark was sitting at her desk in front of her computer. “How is it,” she asked, as her father also materialized to one side of that desk, “that he can use the computer?”

  Her father shrugged. “I don’t know. Before you ask, I don’t know how I can, either.”

  “That’s not like you.”

  “Not knowing?”

  “Not caring enough to know.”

  “When I was alive, knowledge made a difference. Knowing how things work now doesn’t give me the ability to fix any of them.”

  “Dad—”

  Mark turned in the chair. The chair didn’t turn with him. “Are you finished dinner, now?”

  Emma surrendered. “Yes. And the cleanup. You’ll have to give me a few minutes to get my dog ready for a walk.” She fished her phone out of a pocket and hit the speed dial. “Eric?”

  “Emma?”

  “I’m about to go take my dog for a walk.”

  “Where?”

  She glanced at her father. “Where does Mark live? Can I walk there?”

  “We can walk,” Mark began.

  “Dead people don’t take as long to walk between places as living ones,” her father told him. To his daughter, he added, “But it’s not that far.”

  It couldn’t be. Not and be close to the ravine. Mark had said his mother had taken him for a walk, not a drive. “My dad says it’s within easy walking distance.”

  “You’re taking Mark home.”

  “I’m going home with him, yes.”

  “To do what, Emma?”

  “I honestly don’t know.” She hesitated and then added, “Merrick Longland paid me a visit during dinner.”

  There was a long, silent beat. “Tonight?”

  “Yes. He left about an hour ago.”

  “What did he want?”

  She exhaled. “He wanted me to force the door open again, the way I did for Andrew Copis.”

  Silence. “That’s it?”

  “He was sent here to talk to me. He wasn’t told what he should talk about. He wasn’t sent to aid the Necromancers, but said he arrived with four. Two of them are dead.”

  “The other two?”

  “Not dead but not at the school.”

  “Do you trust him?”

  Did she? “It would be stupid to trust him,” she replied, hedging.

  “But you do.”

  “I trust what he said tonight. If you know of a way to bring the dead back to life, tell me now—because if there is, and that’s what he’s angling for, he’ll lie.”

  “There isn’t.”

  She swallowed. It took her a little longer to dredge up a reply. “He looks alive to me.”

  “He looks alive to anyone living. The dead know the difference. Did he try to tell you—”

  “No. He told me, flat out, that he’s dead. He’s wrapped in a—a construct. It’s like a cage of flesh.”

  Eric exhaled. “He was at least that honest. What did you tell him?”

  “The truth. If I could open that door for him, I’d do it
tomorrow. I’d do it now.”

  “You can’t.”

  “I don’t think I can, no. Every person gathered at the door—every dead person,” she amended, “was willing to give me everything they had on blind faith, and I still only barely managed to pry it open a crack. I’m not sure I could gather that many of the dead together again. And if I did, I think she’d know.”

  “She?”

  “The Queen of the Dead.”

  “Did you tell him how you gathered the dead?”

  “The lantern? No.”

  “Good. Don’t mention it if he doesn’t. Don’t talk about it even if he brings it up.” He exhaled. “Tell me the route you’ll be taking with your dog. I’ll meet you on the way.”

  “I don’t—I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

  “Fine. If you’re not sure, I am. Do the other Necromancers know where you, Allison, or Michael live?”

  Emma hadn’t asked. She’d been so surprised by Longland—and by the rest of the evening—that what should have been the first question out of her mouth had never left it. “I don’t know. I’m sorry—”

  “It’s fine. We’re spread a little thin at the moment, but the old man is out making the rounds, and Margaret’s with him.” He hesitated, then added, “I’ve spoken with Allison. Chase has her back.”

  “Is she okay with that?”

  “She’s not happy about it, no. But she understands what’s at stake. Give me five, and I’ll meet you.”

  CHAPTER

  FOURTEEN

  IT WAS COLD, even for November. Petal was heavy enough to break the thin layer of ice that had formed on the snow on the boulevard. Emma, wearing gloves and holding a scuffed lead, could barely feel her hands; her cheeks were numb. Mark walked to her left, her father, on the street side. Her father made a show of taking steps. Mark trailed in the air, his legs unmoving. The appearance of walking wasn’t necessary in order to move, and he’d discarded it. He was dressed for winter, on the other hand; her father wasn’t.

  Petal’s breath was a constant white mist. It was a wonder his tongue wasn’t frozen. He didn’t look up from his hopeful inspection of the frozen ground until Eric joined them. Eric patted Petal while he nodded to her father and Mark.