Touch (3 page)

He feels the shock of her palm beneath his. His hand doesn’t pass through hers. Before
he can withdraw, she closes her fingers around his, tightens them. And, god, she is
so
warm.

“Hello, Nathan,” she whispers.

“Hello, Em.”

* * *

There’s so much he wants to say to her. So much he wants to explain. There’s so much
groveling to do, for one. Maybe he’ll start with that. But the words stick on the
right side of his mouth, and as he stares into her eyes, his gaze drifting to her
parted lips, they desert him.

He hugs her, instead. He reaches out, pulls her into his arms, tucks her head beneath
his chin. He’s dead. He’s dead, but he can
feel
her. She smells of shampoo and soap.

He wants to apologize. He doesn’t. He holds her instead, amazed at the warmth of her.
But he always was. They stand together in the darkness until Emma begins to shudder.
He thinks she’s crying, but he pulls back to catch her chin, to pull her face up.

She’s not crying. Oh, she
is
, but she’s not weeping. She’s shivering. She’s shivering as if it’s winter and she’s
caught outside without a coat.

He lets go of her. He feels the loss of her touch as a profound physical pain. He
feels cold again, but this time, the cold is harsh. Isolating. And he understands,
as her eyes widen, as her brows gather in the way they do when something confuses
her, that the warmth he feels—he’s stealing it.

Emma . . . Emma is like the Queen of the Dead. Like her, and nothing at all alike.

I want you there, Nathan. You have an opportunity that very, very few of the dead
will ever have.

Nathan is afraid. Three months ago, Emma was his quiet space—one of the few in which
he could be entirely himself. She knew him. He knew her. He thought he knew her. But
the Emma Hall he fell in love with couldn’t touch the dead.

Emma is a Necromancer.

Petal whines, and Emma glances at the wet nose he’s shoved into her palm. She feeds
him a Milk-Bone, but she tries not to take her eyes off Nathan, as if she’s afraid
he’ll just disappear. Nathan knows the look.

Emma is a Necromancer with a whiny, half-deaf dog. She goes to school. She lives alone
with her mother. She visits her dead boyfriend’s grave. She lives
here
, among the living. And her eyes are still round, and she’s still shivering. And grieving.

“You promised,” she whispers. She’s not smiling. There’s no humor in her voice.

“This is the best I can do.” He almost hugs her again, but balls his hands into fists
instead.

Her face is wet with tears, shining with them. He always hated making her cry. Being
dead hasn’t changed that. He can’t stand so close to her without touching her. He
wants to kiss her. He wants to cup her face in his hands.

He heads toward his grave instead. The wreath of standing flowers is new. The petals
that adorn Emma’s legs—the few she hasn’t managed to brush off—are scattered across
the ground in ones and twos, but the flowers themselves haven’t wilted or dried. He
recognizes his mother’s hand in this. His mother. He closes his eyes.

When he opens them, Emma is standing by his side. She’s still shivering.

“Does my mother come here often?”

“Often enough. I don’t see her. I think she must come after work.”

“You?”

“It’s quiet, here. Good quiet.”

Which isn’t an answer. He doesn’t press. It’s never been hard to talk to Emma before.
It’s hard now. What can you say to your girlfriend when you’re dead? Apologies won’t
cut it, but beyond apologies, there’s not a lot he can offer.

She holds out a hand. Nathan keeps both of his in his pockets. When she says his name,
he shakes his head. “I’m making you cold. I’ll walk you home.”

“I’m not sure I want to be home right now.”

Home, for Nathan, is where Emma is. God, he wants to touch her. He finds it hard to
look at her; she’s always been beautiful, to him. Now, she’s luminescent.

“G
ET YOUR FEET off my dashboard.”

Chase, slumped in the passenger seat, grinned. “What? My boots are clean.” The skin
around his left eye had passed from angry purple to a sallow yellow; it clashed with
his hair. In Eric’s opinion, everything did. “And I’m wearing a seat belt.”

“Seat belts,” Eric said, sliding behind the wheel and adjusting its height, “are supposed
to be worn across the hips, not the ribs. What did the old man say?”

“Long version or short version?”

“Shorter the better.”

“Tell me about it.” Chase’s grin sharpened. “But I had to sit through the long version.
No reason why you should get off easy.”

“I’m driving. Don’t make me fall asleep at the wheel.”

“Couldn’t make your driving any worse.”

Eric pushed a CD into the player.

“You bastard.” Chase was flexible enough to remove his feet from the dash and hit
eject before more than two bars had played. He wasn’t fond of perky singers. Gender
didn’t matter. Eric ignored them, but Chase couldn’t. They were fingernails-against-blackboard
painful to him. “You know I’d rather you stabbed me. In the ear, even.”

“I’m driving or I’d seriously consider it. What did the old man want?”

“We’ve got a problem.”

Eric reached for the CD again. Chase grabbed it and threw it out the window, barely
pausing to open the window first.

“We’ve got three Necromancers, just off the plane. Old man thinks there’s a fourth.”
Chase appeared to consider throwing out the rest of Eric’s collection as well.

“Thinks?”

“Yeah. He can’t pin him down.”

Eric grimaced. “Why does he think there’s a fourth?”

“Margaret insists.”

Shit. “She recognized him.”

“I wasn’t the one questioning her. The old man was in a foul mood. You want to tell
him he’s wrong?” Chase fished in his pocket and pulled out a phone. Eric glanced at
it.

“Driving, remember? When did they get in?”

“Yesterday. We had two addresses; neither was good.”

“They take a cab?”

“Yeah. They were careful,” he added.

Eric swore.

“He also reminds you we’ve got two midterms tomorrow.”

“Midterms? Are you kidding me?”

Chase dangled the phone under Eric’s nose again.

“This is getting unreal.”

“Tell me about it. I’ve got the same midterms, and apparently my marks are crap compared
to yours.” Chase slid his feet back up on the dashboard. “We’ve got two addresses.
Margaret supplied them. We’re supposed to head over to the first one tonight.” He
frowned as he glanced out the window. “Is that Allison?”

Eric glanced at the side mirror. Allison Simner, in a puffy down coat, head bent into
the wind, walked through the crisp November air beside another classmate. “And Michael.”

“Stop the car and let me out.”

“Chase—”

“What? She took notes.”

* * *

Allison walked Michael home after school, as she had done for most of their mutual
school life. It wasn’t that he needed the company or the implied protection of another
person, although he might once have. Now it was just part of their daily routine,
and it was almost peaceful.

But Emma usually joined them. For the past two days, she hadn’t. She’d explained her
absences to Michael, and Michael—given his natural difficulty recognizing subtle social
cues, such as white lies—accepted her yearbook committee excuses at face value. Allison
tried. She wasn’t her mother; worry was not her middle name, maiden name, or, on bad
days, her entire name.

But her mother’s best friend hadn’t developed the ability to see the dead. She hadn’t
been targeted by Necromancers. She hadn’t almost died in a fire that no one else could
see, let alone feel, in an attempt to save a child who was
already
dead.

Allison’s best friend, Emma, had. And it wasn’t just that Emma could see the dead;
if Emma touched ghosts, everyone else could see them, too. They’d learned that the
hard way, at the hospital: Emma had grabbed onto her father’s ghost because she didn’t
want him to leave.

And who could blame her? She hadn’t seen her dad for the eight years he’d been dead.

But Allison had seen him, that night in the hospital. Michael had seen him. Emma’s
mother had seen him. And Eric. Eric had seen him as well. It had been disturbing,
but—being able to see your dad, when he wasn’t dangerous and he didn’t look much different
from the last time you’d seen him—wasn’t inherently scary.

All the stuff that had happened after was.

Well, not Andrew Copis, the child who had died in the fire. And not his grieving mother,
because if Emma wanted or needed to see her dad, Maria Copis was a hundred times worse:
She
needed
to see her son. Emma was willing to walk through fire—literal fire—to help that happen,
and Allison got that. She understood why.

What she didn’t understand were the parts that happened directly afterward: the Necromancers.
Two men and one woman, armed, had stopped their car outside of the house in which
the child had died, gotten out of it, and pulled guns. Allison had been carrying Maria
Copis’ youngest child, a son. They had pointed the gun at the
baby
, and they had dragged Allison to Andrew Copis’ burned-out house—in order to threaten
Emma.

To threaten Emma, and to—to kill Eric and Chase.

Eric and Chase had survived. The Necromancers hadn’t. But it had been so close. And
the death of the Necromancer in charge, Merrick Longland, if he hadn’t lied about
his name, had been anything but fast. Chase had been covered in blood before he’d
stopped stabbing and slashing at him.

Allison didn’t watch horror movies. She found the violence in most of them too intense.
She knew people who loved them, and she’d never understood why. Now she felt as if
she were living on the edge of one. Predictably, she hated it.

She hated it because Michael was trapped on the same edge, and Emma was at the center
of it. Allison could step away. She could turn her back. She could hide under the
figurative bed with her hands over her ears. But if she did that, she was walking
away from Emma. And Emma was no better prepared to be the star of a horror movie than
either of her friends. Allison’s fear was intense, and it made her feel so guilty.

Michael didn’t know how to walk away. Michael didn’t talk about the Necromancers—but
Emma had asked him not to. Allison didn’t talk about them because to talk about them,
she had to think about them.

Then again, when something wasn’t actively distracting her, it was hard not to think
about them.

There had been no new Necromancers, but Chase had made it clear that it was only a
matter of time—and at that, not a lot of it.

* * *

Allison usually walked Michael to his door, where she would wait to say hello to his
mother. As a much younger child, she would then give his mother a report of the school
day; as a teenager she’d continued more or less out of habit. She filled Mrs. Howe
in on the positive or outstanding things, upcoming field trips, or perturbations in
Michael’s schedule.

Allison had avoided that at-the-door conversation for the past couple of weeks.

Michael’s mother, being a mother, was worried about her son, because she knew there
was something wrong. Michael didn’t lie, so he’d told her he couldn’t talk about it.
His mother was not an idiot; she was pretty certain that Emma and Allison had some
idea what was going on.

Allison wasn’t Michael; she could—and on rare occasions did—lie. But she’d never been
great at it, and it left her feeling horrible about herself for weeks afterward. She
did the next best thing—she avoided the questions.

It was only as she was scurrying away from Michael’s driveway, like a criminal, that
Chase caught up with her.

* * *

Chase was almost a head taller than Allison.

Allison had never been tall. Emma was taller and more slender, with straight hair
that fell most of the way down her back. On bad days, Allison envied her and wondered
what Emma saw in her. Emma had a lot of friends.

Stephen Sawoski, in eighth grade, had answered the question. “Pretty girls don’t want
to have pretty friends—they hang around the plain girls ’cause it makes them look
better.” He’d sneered as he said it. Allison could still see his expression if she
tried. She didn’t really avoid it, either, because of what happened next: Emma had
taken her milk, in its wet, box container, opened it, and then poured half of it into
Stephen’s lap.

The expression on his face then was
also
one Allison never forgot.

“If I wanted to hang around ugly people just to look better,” Emma had said to Stephen,
while Allison gaped like a fish out of water, “I’d spend more time with you. Come
on, Allison, Michael’s waiting.”

Allison was plain. It was true. Emma offered, every so often, to help her change that
if she wanted to do the work. But she didn’t. No amount of work would make her look
like Emma. Stephen was obnoxious, but he wasn’t wrong—about the being plain. He was
wrong about the friendship. She held on to that.

She glanced up at Chase.

He smiled. “You took notes,” he said.

“I did. I can email them, if you want them. Biology?”

“And English. You’re heading home?”

She nodded. “I have a pretty boring life.”

“Not recently.”

“I
like
having a pretty boring life.” She started to walk. Chase shortened his stride and
fell in beside her, hands in his jacket’s pockets. Fire had singed his shock of red
hair, and he’d been forced to cut it—but even short, it was the first thing anyone
noticed.

“You really do,” he replied. “Look—things are going to get crazy.”

She didn’t miss a step. “When?”

“Does it matter? You’re not cut out for this shit. You, Michael, the rest of your
friends—you’ve never lived in a war zone.”

She had a pretty good idea of where this conversation was going: straight downhill.
Allison didn’t like confrontation. She didn’t like to argue. Usually, there wasn’t
a lot to argue about. “None of us are cut out for this.”

“Eric and I are.”

Allison nodded agreement and stared at the sidewalk. She was three blocks away from
home.

“Emma’s part of this.”

She shoved her hands into her pockets, which weren’t really built for it, and lowered
her chin. Chase had saved her life. She had to remember that Chase had saved her life.
He’d almost died doing it. What had she done? Nothing. Nothing useful. “Emma didn’t
choose to be part of it.”

“Choice doesn’t matter. She has none.”

Allison started to walk more quickly, not that there was any chance of leaving Chase
behind if he was determined. He was.

“But you do. You’ve got the choice that I didn’t have.”

She stopped walking, her hands sliding out of her pockets to her hips. “And I am
making
a choice.”

It was clear, from his expression, that he thought it was the wrong choice. “You think
you can just duck your collective heads and the bullets will miss.”

“No, I don’t. But I know Emma.”

“Really? I haven’t noticed she’s spending a lot of time with you recently.”

That stung. “I’m her friend, not her cage.”

“You don’t understand how Necromancers work. You don’t understand what they
become
.”

“I understand Emma. Emma is
not
going to become a monster just because you’re afraid of her!” Straight downhill.
Like an avalanche.

“Why don’t you ask her what she’s been doing the past couple of days?”

“Because I trust her. If she wants to tell me, she’ll tell me.”

“And will she tell Michael?”

She could see him switching lanes. She let him do it, too; she was angry.

“If you’re capable of making the decision to put your life on the line, is he? Are
you willing to let him make the same choice?”

“Michael. Is. Not. A. Child.”

“That’s why he needs an entire clique of babysitters?”

“If Michael hadn’t been at Amy’s party, Emma would already be lost. In case you’ve
forgotten, Merrick Longland had us
all
ensnared. None of your party tricks saved either you or Eric!”

“. . . Party tricks?”

“Training. Whatever. Michael wasn’t affected by Longland—but
you
were. And Michael knows it. We all know it. I get that you don’t understand how we
work—but if you try to break it, I’ll—”

He folded his arms across his chest and stared pointedly down at her. “Yes? We’re
finally getting to the good part. You’ll what? Scream at me? Cry?”

She wanted to punch him. Sadly, she’d never punched anyone in her life; if she’d thought
she had any chance of landing one, she might have tried.

Chase saved your life
.
He almost died saving your life
. “Probably both.”

He looked down at the top of her head, and then he laughed. It was almost rueful.
“You understand that I don’t want to see you hurt, right?”

She did. But she also understood that there were all kinds of hurt in life, and he
didn’t count the one that she was most afraid of: losing her best friend. “I have
to go. My mom’s staring out the window.”

“And she’s not going to be happy that her daughter’s shouting at a stranger?”

“No.” She took three deep breaths, because deep breaths always helped. Chase made
her so angry. She’d never met anyone who could make her so angry. Stephen Sawoski
had made her feel ugly, invisible, unwanted—but never angry. Not like this. He’d made
Emma angry though.

And maybe that made sense. Allison wasn’t much good at sticking up for herself. She
never had been, not when it counted. But she could stick up for her friends. She trusted
her instincts where they were concerned.

“Your mom just disappeared,” he told her.

Allison exhaled. “You might as well come to the house,” she told him. “Because if
you don’t, she’s going to come out.”