Silence (33 page)

So could Emma, but the fire made it difficult; it was louder.

“Emma, dear,” Margaret began.

Maria said, “Eric and Chase have stopped moving. They’re carrying knives,” she added. “But they’re not approaching Longland.”

“Has he done something to—”

Maria’s breath was sharp and clean as the edge of a knife.

She didn’t speak. She didn’t have to.

Emma rose. She stood, forgetting any warning she had given Maria, because she had to see and had to know. Longland had his hands on Alison, yes, but Alison was struggling because he was also now touching the baby. He frowned and then almost casualy lifted his hand from the infant’s chest and slapped Alison, hard, across the face. Alison staggered, and were it not for his grip, she would have falen.

It would have been a bad fal; she stil held tightly to the child.

Would hold tight until the end of the world—or the end of her life. It was Aly al over. It was why Emma loved her.

She swalowed, and she looked, hard, at Longland. Looked at the two people who stood to either side of him. One was male, and older; the other was female, perhaps Maria’s age, if male, and older; the other was female, perhaps Maria’s age, if that. Emma’s gaze narrowed as she watched them al.

“There’s at least one ghost,” she said out loud. “Maybe two.

Longland doesn’t have one.”

“How can you tel?” Maria asked. Her voice sounded soft— but it wasn’t. It was strained, as if speaking loudly would break it.

“The Necromancers bind the dead somehow, and to me it looks like—like a golden chain. I can’t see the dead, but the links are pulsing,” she added. “They’re using that power.”

“They would have to, dear. Against Eric, in particular, they would have to. Longland must have recognized him at some point.”

Emma shook her head. “He talked to some lady in a mirror.

She recognized him.”

Margaret was utterly, completely silent. Emma would have glanced back, but she couldn’t force herself to look away. She had felt helpless before, but never like this.

“They’l kil Eric,” she said, almost numb. “They’l kil Chase.”

“If Longland has Alison, yes,” Margaret said. In a much gentler voice, she added, “You’ve always had a rather large amount of power on hand, dear.”

“Margaret?” Emma swung away from the window and lifted her hands, palms curved and empty, as if she were begging.

Which was fair; she was about to start.

Margaret turned to confer, briefly, with the other ghosts—al save Brendan Hal, who stood, arms folded, expression watchful. She turned back to Emma. “You know you don’t have watchful. She turned back to Emma. “You know you don’t have to ask,” she began. She lifted an imperious hand when Emma opened her mouth, and Emma snapped it shut again in deference. “But you do ask. It’s the difference,” she said quietly, “between making love and rape.

“We’l let you take you what you need.”

“Georges—”

“He’s not a child, dear. He’s dead.”

“I saw him with Michael,” Emma replied.

Margaret shrugged, a motion that was at once both delicate and crisp. “You know what to do.”

“But I don’t—”

“You don’t know that you know. But you managed to walk the narrow path when you altered Maria’s perception. And you changed very little—in her. What you’ve done to yourself remains to be seen, but that’s for another time. Touch the lines, Emma. Touch al of them.”

“Lines? You mean the chains?”

Margaret nodded.

Emma frowned, and then she turned to Andrew, stil lodged in t h e safety and heaven—for him—of his mother’s arms.

“Andrew,” she said, without looking up at his mother, “there are men outside. I don’t know if you can see them, but they’re— they’re not good men. One of them wants to hurt your baby brother. And he wil hurt us—al of us—if we’re not very careful.”

“Emma—” Maria began, her voice as sharp and cutting as only a mother’s can be when her child is threatened.

only a mother’s can be when her child is threatened.

Emma forced herself to ignore this. “If they try to reach your mom, you need to look at the fire,” she told him.

He buried his face in his mother’s neck, and Emma looked away. “I’m sorry, Andrew,” she said softly. “But the fire—it’s doing what you want it to do, even if you can’t see it, yet. If they come, try—try realy, really, hard.”

She turned back to her ghosts, and this time, when she lifted her hands, she lifted the right one in a loose, grasping fist. From that fist, streaming from her folded palm to the five who now watched her in silence, ran lengths of golden chains. They stretched, as they had the first time she’d seen them, from her hand to their hearts, glowing with a faint luminescence, just as their eyes—al of their eyes—did.

She swalowed.

“Your friends wil die, if you don’t, dear.”

She hesitated, because she knew these lines and their life force, if it could even be caled that given they were dead, were the dividing line. If she did what she must do, she was a Necromancer. What she’d done for Andrew, what she’d done to Maria—it was different, and she knew it.

This? This was using the exact same power that the Necromancers did. It didn’t matter, in the end, why. Al of the Necromancers must have believed they had their reasons, and al of them must have believed those reasons were good reasons, because people were just like that. They could justify anything they did themselves. Things only looked wrong or evil when seen they did themselves. Things only looked wrong or evil when seen from the outside.

She turned to look out the window in desperation. She saw green fire lapping at Eric and Chase and saw it distorting the green-brown of the lawns on the boulevard; she saw Longland, both hands on Alison, and she saw the other two Necromancers, both hands splayed out in the air, as though the fire that surrounded Chase and Eric was coming directly from their hands.

Eric. Chase. Alison.

She didn’t know what had happened to her other friends.

She took a deep breath to steady herself, and then she opened her hand.

“Emma—”

The chains lay against her palms. “I can’t,” she said starkly.

“Not this. But I can break the power they’re using, the way I did with Emily.”

“If you try, he’l kil Alison.”

“If he kils Alison, he’l die.” Emma said nothing else, because there was nothing at al she could say. And as she started to find a handhold on the windowsil, to lever herself up onto it, she felt her hands began to pulse. With warmth. With heat that was both intense and intoxicating.

“You’l do, dear,” Margaret said, her voice a bit deeper.

“You’l do.”

“Margaret!”

“Oh, hush. You’ve said what you had to say, and you even believed it. That’s al we could ask for. Suzanne?”

believed it. That’s al we could ask for. Suzanne?”

“I agree.”

“We would have let you take the power,” she said. “But we can also—like your father—give. Go, dear. Do what you have to do. We’l be with you.”

Because they didn’t have any choice.

The warmth stretched up from her hands, traveling through her arms, her shoulders, and from there into the whole of her body.

She closed her eyes for just a minute because the sensation itself was so powerful it was almost embarrassing.

And when she opened her eyes again, the whole world looked different.

The street was dark, although it was the middle of the day. The sky was an angry red—not the red of sunset or sunrise; it was too deep for that, and there was no other color in the sky. It took a moment to understand why, in that light, the street was so dim.

The grass was gray. The trees were gray. The cars—which were translucent and ghostly—were also gray. Even the clothing they wore—the pants, the shirts, the jackets—were different shades of the same damn color.

Emma pushed herself up into the window’s frame and balanced there a second.

Only the people—Eric, Chase, Alison, Longland and his two companions—looked normal. Even the baby was a dul shade of puce, because he’d woken, and he was not happy about it.

She balanced a moment in the window, looking down at the She balanced a moment in the window, looking down at the smal roof that covered the porch. It wasn’t much of a roof; it covered the door and a few linear feet of concrete, no more. The ladders had been placed beside it, and one had run up to the first window, with only a little difficulty. The second window had been clear. There were no ladders now, however.

She slid out of the window and landed on the roof of the porch so hard that her knees buckled. The smal roof, however, held her weight. She took a deep breath and looked at the street again, now somewhat closer to it. Chase was in pain, and he was breathing hard. Eric’s face was a mask. If it had ever had any expression at al—and it must have, because she remembered his gentle smile so clearly—he’d shed it completely. Emma couldn’t tel if the fire, which stil surrounded him, caused him any pain at al.

He watched Longland as if Longland were the only thing in the street.

“Emma,” Margaret said. Her voice drifted down, carried by a breeze that smeled faintly of cinnamon and clover.

Emma nodded.

“Look at the soul-fire. Look at it carefuly. Longland doesn’t see you yet—but the minute you act, the minute you use power, he wil. Eric has the whole of his attention,” she added.

“Does Eric know I’m here?”

There was a brief hesitation. “Almost certainly,” Margaret finaly admitted.

“But he’s not looking—”

“No, dear, please try to pay attention. If Eric looks here, so “No, dear, please try to pay attention. If Eric looks here, so wil Longland. Eric is a bright boy, and he—and Chase—are buying you time at some cost.”

“But—”

“He’s wiling to trust you. I don’t know why. He’s sensitive enough that he knows there’s a lot of power behind and above him, and if he knows where, he’s almost certainly guessed whose power it is.”

Emma nodded, only partly because it made sense. The other part wanted Margaret to stop with the lecture. She didn’t ask, because the lecture had folowed useful information. Instead, she acted on that information, and she looked with new eyes at green fire.

It was no longer, strictly speaking, green. It wasn’t exactly gray, either; it looked at base like gray, but as she watched it, she realized that it was almost opaline. The colors grew brighter as she watched them, and she realized they were responding, in part, to the movements of the Necromancers, who were concentrating from some distance away on maintaining them.

And when she looked at the Necromancers again, she could see the chains, not as chains but…as the attenuated bodies of the dead. Long, thin, their forms stretched out around the Necromancers, as if they were on a rack; they were pale, as if they’d never seen sunlight—which wasn’t surprising in a ghost, or wouldn’t have been had Emma not seen any.

But as she watched, she saw that the color was being leeched out of them for the sake of that fire.

out of them for the sake of that fire.

She saw, as wel, that the fire was clinging to Chase in a way that it had not yet managed to cling to Eric; that the colors of that fire were attempting to match his skin, his hair, the flush of his cheek. She didn’t know what would happen if they finaly did reach the same hue, but she could guess.

“Ready?” she asked Margaret softly.

Margaret didn’t answer.

Emma grabbed the lip of the porch roof in her hands, held it tight, and lowered herself as far down as she could go. It was awkward; her legs dangled above the concrete steps before she forced her hands to let go. They came, with the addition of a bunch of smal splinters, as she fel the last yard.

When her feet hit the ground, she saw the grass ripple as if it were water and she had just broken its surface. Waves of green traveled out from her feet in fading concentric circles, and when they stiled, the green remained, an odd splotch of color against the gray background.

Longland frowned. She saw that much because she had to look to see if Alison—and the baby—were okay. More than that, she didn’t take time for, because she could see the dead, stretched out now between Necromancers and fire, and she could see which of them powered the fire that was, even now, destroying Chase.

“Emma—what are you—”

Emma reached out. She reached out while standing stil, as she had done with Maria Copis. As she had done the first time, with her father. This time, she felt herself leave her body. It was with her father. This time, she felt herself leave her body. It was not a comfortable feeling; it was work. But the last time, she hadn’t had the power of five of the dead behind her. She wasn’t sure why it made a difference, and didn’t have time to ask.

Instead, she ran—across grass that stil turned green beneath her nonfeet—toward the Necromancers. Toward Longland, who held Alison. She touched Aly’s arm, briefly, brushing it with her fingertips. She whispered two words, I’m sorry, and then she let go and turned to face the Necromancer. The woman. Her hair was a pale gold, and it was wrapped in so many fine braids it looked fake.

But she herself looked young, and strong, and utterly wrong.

Her eyes were not the luminescence of the dead—but they weren’t living eyes, either; they looked as if shadow had pooled permanently where there should have been whites. Emma reached out, not for the Necromancer but for the long, pale form of her dead.

The face of the ghost twisted at an odd angle to look at Emma as she touched him. Him, yes. Beard.