Silence (23 page)

Alison just stared at him. After a moment, she said, “I would rather spend eternity wandering up and down an empty street than burning to death without actualy dying. I’m assuming that the same is probably true of a four-year-old.”

Chase stared at her for a moment and then turned to Emma.

“Don’t look at me for support. I’m so much in Alison’s camp we might as wel be sharing a brain.”

“Eric?”

“You can go back if you want; I know enough to know this is going to be hard on you. But I’m staying until this is resolved, one way or the other.”

Chase opened his mouth. Closed it, shoved his hands into his pockets. Opened his mouth again. Emma liked that Chase was always so expressive, except when she didn’t.

Before he could say anything—or before he could figure out which of the many things he was going to say first—a phone rang.

Emma recognized the ring.

“Fuck.” So, apparently, did Eric.

“Are you going to answer that?” Alison asked him.

Emma almost laughed.

“No.”

“No.”

“At this time of night? It could be an emergency.”

“If I answer it, it wil be. Come on, let’s get something to eat.”

Chase shrugged as the phone stopped ringing. They made it to the door before it started ringing again. “You know he’s just going to keep trying.”

“Let him. It’s loud enough inside I won’t hear it.”

“Answer it, Eric.”

“No.”

“If you don’t answer it, he’l just cal me.”

“You don’t have a working phone.”

Chase laughed. “You think of everything.”

“Someone,” Eric said, sliding the door to one side, “has to.”

They dropped Michael off first, swung around to Alison’s house, and then dropped Emma off by her front door. The time was just a little past one-thirty, which in the Hal household was stil within the bounds of “on time.”

Emma stopped by the driver’s window, and Eric opened it.

“Do you have my number?” she asked him.

“No.”

“Do you want it, or do you just want to come by in the morning?”

Chase said something about morning, which Emma pretended not to hear.

“If you come, I’l feed you. I might even feed Chase. I don’t know when Amy wil cal, so you might be cooling your heels for a while.”

a while.”

“Any chance she won’t cal?”

“None.”

“We’l drop by. When’s good?”

“Any time after eight-thirty.” She turned toward the house, stopped, and turned back. “Thanks.”

“For what?”

“For tonight. You can thank Chase, too.”

“You could thank me yourself!”

“Too much trouble,” she said, but she smiled. She was tired, and even the hot and stuffy house hadn’t taken the edge off the chil in her hands. “We need to find Maria Copis, and we need to get her to Rowan Avenue. I don’t think al the ladders in the world are going to help us get that child out if she’s not there.”

“Let us figure out where she went after her house burned down. You get some sleep.”

She nodded, and headed to the front door. The walking, black alarm system was already gearing up on the other side of it.

When the house door had closed on the glimpse of a franticaly barking rottweiler, Chase turned to Eric. “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?”

Eric shrugged. After a moment, he said, “Do you realy want to kil her?”

“I think we should. You didn’t tel her that she’s now carting around more power than most Necromancers could.”

“No.” Eric was restless enough to open the car door; the “No.” Eric was restless enough to open the car door; the lights went on. “They’re not power, to her. There’s no way she’s going to use them.”

“She didn’t even have to try to get the dead to show. She just did it.”

“I know, Chase. I was there, remember?”

“You didn’t warn her about Longland, either.”

“If I had warned her about Longland’s power, she’d’ve figured it out. She’s crazy but she’s not stupid. And warning her wouldn’t give her any useful information.” He looked at Chase, got out of the car.

Chase sighed—audibly—and slid out the other door.

“Do you want to kil her?” Eric asked again.

“Does it matter? I’m not going to try.”

“Yeah, it matters.”

“I think we should.”

“Not an answer, Chase.”

“Asshole.” Chase slammed the car door shut, turned his back, and after a minute, walked around the back of the car and slammed the other door shut as wel. He leaned against the driver’s door, his back to Eric. “I understand why you didn’t.

Kil her, I mean. She seems so normal.”

“Yeah. Normal. Happy. Has friends she actualy cares about who are actualy stil alive. So.”

Chase pushed himself off the car. “You want me to take the first shift, or do you want to take it?”

“Up to you.”

“Up to you.”

Chase detached himself from the car. “I need a new coat.” He glanced at the house and added, “Any chance that dog won’t go insane if I park myself inside?”

“He’s a rottweiler.”

“Figures.”

“You sure you want the first shift?”

“Yeah. I don’t want to go back and hit the radioactive button on the answering machine.”

Eric grimaced. “Fine. I’l be back in four hours.”

“It’l probably take at least that long to wade through the messages.”

“Thanks. Don’t,” he added, “do anything stupid. If Longland does show up here, he’s not going to kil her. He wil, however, kil you without blinking.”

“He’l try.” Chase smiled. Even in the scant light, it wasn’t pleasant. But it was, Eric had to admit, al Chase.

EMMA’S MOTHER HADN’T WAITED UP, which was probably for the best. The lights were off in the house; the only light in the hal was the light that shone in through the little decorative windows in the front door. Emma doused that when she shut off the front door’s light. She stood in the hal, absently patting Petal’s head until her eyes had acclimated to the darkness; the only place it was ever truly dark was the basement.

When everything had become a dark gray, she slid out of her shoes, picked them up by the back straps, and headed up the stairs. The stairs were carpeted, but the house wasn’t exactly new; they creaked as she walked. They creaked as Petal walked, but he jingled anyway. No one in the Hal house could be easily woken up by either sound. Not if they actualy wanted to get sleep, ever.

She made her way to her room, dropped the shoes in front of her closet, and began to fiddle with the straps of her dress. Her hands were cold; she rubbed them together, but it didn’t help.

Bed—and the large, down duvet—might. Petal jumped up on the bed, somewhere near the foot, and waited, his head resting on his forepaws.

“Sorry, Petal. I know it’s late.” She slid out of her dress, grabbed pajamas, slid into them, and sat on the side of the bed, scratching behind his ears.

Something made her look up. It wasn’t sound, exactly, and it wasn’t light—but it caught her as if it were both, and loud and bright.

Her father stood in the center of the room. “Sprout.”

She wanted to get up and run into his arms. She didn’t. She was cold enough, and she knew that there was no warmth waiting. Love, yes, and affection—but also cold. She puled the duvet up and around her shoulders, resting her hands in her lap.

“Dad.” Petal tried to get under the covers as wel, but as he was sitting on the outside of one end, he had no luck.

“Sleep, Em.”

“Why are you here?”

He shook his head and looked out the curtained window.

What he saw, given that the curtains were drawn, she couldn’t tel.

“To see you, Emma. To see that you’re okay.”

She smiled, shivering. “I’m fine,” she told him.

He stared at her and then folded his arms across his chest. If hands-on-the-hips when angry came from her mother, this folding of arms—and raising of one brow—was definitely learned from Brendan Hal.

“You need to let them go, Em.”

She could have pretended to misunderstand him, but that had never gone down wel. “I don’t know how.”

“How did you bind them?”

“I didn’t! They were already bound.”

“I didn’t! They were already bound.”

“They’re bound to you.”

“How do you know?”

“You’re my daughter,” he replied.

His words made her yearn for the days when she was four years old, parents lived forever, and her father knew everything.

The yearning was so strong that she was out of bed and almost across the room before she caught herself and froze. He’d opened his arms as wel, and at the last moment, stepped back, failing to catch her.

“It’s hard, being dead,” he told her, his lips curved in an unfamiliar and bitter smile.

“Is it worse than being alive when the people you love go and die on you?” She stopped speaking and looked away. After a moment, when she could trust her words again, she added, “Sorry, Dad.”

“Nathan?” he asked her softly, and she startled.

“You know about Nathan?”

“Daughter, remember?”

She tried realy, realy hard to believe that he hadn’t seen anything that would embarrass her. Or him.

If he had, he was kind enough not to mention it. But he’d mentioned Nathan. She went back to her bed, puled enough of the duvet free of Petal, who’d begun his midnight sprawl, and wrapped it tightly around herself. “I miss him.

“I keep hoping—I keep wanting—to see him.” She looked at her father, then. Waited until her voice was steady. That took a while. “Just to talk to him. Just to hear him again.” And to a while. “Just to talk to him. Just to hear him again.” And to touch him again, even if her hands numbed at the shock.

“But…what if he’s like the others? What if he’s on some golden leash, and he’s being drained of any power he might have that could—that could bring him back to me?”

“Emma.” Her father started to say more, and stopped.

She was cold, cold, cold. She couldn’t, at this moment, remember what being warm felt like.

“You need to let go of them. At least a couple of them. Chase and Eric didn’t say enough. Maybe because they don’t understand it. I can see it in you, now. It takes power, to hold the dead. If you can’t pul power from them to do it, the bindings take power from you.”

“How do I let go?”

“Unwind the chains, Emma.”

“I broke them.”

“Yes. And no. You couldn’t break them; you grabbed them.

You’re holding them.”

“Oh.” She looked at her hands, at her empty palms. “Dad?”

“Yes?”

“What else can you tel me about being a Necromancer?”

He said nothing.

“What can you tel me about the City of the Dead?”

His arms, which had falen to the sides in his abortive hug, now folded themselves across his chest again; his hand curled, for just a moment, around the bowl of a pipe that he couldn’t smoke. When she had been young, he had caled it his thinking pipe. “Not very much,” he finaly said. “But it’s there.”

pipe. “Not very much,” he finaly said. “But it’s there.”

“Where?”

He lifted an arm, his sleeves creasing slightly, and pointed.

“Give me something I can Google.”

That smile again. She hated it.

“Can the dead at least talk to each other?”

“Some can. It depends.”

“On what?”

“Power, Emma.”

“But Eric and Chase said—”

“They’re not dead.”

She was shivering, and the duvet didn’t help. His arms fel to his sides, and then he walked across the room to the side of her bed and knelt there, as if she were four years old again, and sick, and awake in the middle of a long night.

He touched her forehead with his hand, and his hand passed through her. Or it started to. She reached up and grabbed that hand. And yes, it was cold. But she felt something at the heart of that ice, something that shed warmth the way the sun sheds light.