Silence: Book One of The Queen of the Dead Read online

  Skip’s room had never been off limits in the opinion of anyone but Skip, and none of the girls took him seriously anyway. Since Skip barely noticed his closet—and evidence of this could be seen by the shirts and the pants that were nowhere near it, and should have been—she relaxed and let them both poke around.

  “Clean,” Chase said.

  “In a manner of speaking,” Eric added.

  The room that had been Merrick’s was one of four guest rooms. It was almost self-contained, in that it had a bathroom, a small study, and a very large bedroom (certainly larger than any of the rooms in the Hall household) behind a set of off-white double doors. It had a walk-in closet as well. The only thing it lacked was a kitchen. They approached this room with care—enough care that Eric caught Emma’s arm as she reached for the doorknob and pulled her back.

  “Let Chase open it.”

  “Why me?”

  Eric glared, but Chase was—mostly—grinning. They really were like brothers. Chase opened the doors that led to the guest room. The rooms were empty, which was more or less what they expected. They weren’t entirely tidy, but given that they’d been occupied by a so-called friend of Skip’s, Emma didn’t expect tidy.

  The bathroom had the usual things in it—toothbrush, electric razor, deodorant. It had a mirror that was not nearly as dramatic as the one in the hall bathroom, but Emma hesitated at the doorway just in case. Chase, however, didn’t seem worried. Eric was that type of quiet that doesn’t let much out into the world; she couldn’t tell if he was worried or not.

  The bathroom was clean. The bedroom contained one very large suitcase and one carry-on bag; the bed was made.

  “Was he planning to stay a while?” Eric asked.

  Emma shrugged. “I didn’t ask,” she replied. “But Amy takes something that size on day trips.” In case it wasn’t clear, she indicated the large suitcase. “Longland looked like he was a bit of a clothes horse, so it might mean nothing.”

  Eric tried to open the suitcase. It was locked. So was the carry-on.

  “Chase?”

  “This,” Chase told Emma, “is what we call job security.” He opened both suitcases, using what looked like long wires.

  “Can you unlock doors that way as well?”

  “Not easily. A baby could do this, though. At least a baby not named Eric.”

  The carry-on was full of books. And two large chocolate bars. They were not, however, good chocolate, which said something. Chase pocketed them anyway, which also said something. She looked at the books as Chase lifted them out of the bag.

  Eric had opened the larger suitcase. It was, not surprisingly, full of clothing. But this clothing? It was almost like studying geological strata. The first layer? Shirts. One T-shirt, one sweatshirt. Underwear and socks could be found under two pairs of gray pants. No jeans. But beneath the expected layer of clothing? The unexpected.

  “What is that?” Emma asked. She had assumed it was either a jacket or a very heavy shirt, but it just kept unfolding as Eric drew it out of the suitcase. In the end, it was a dress. No. Not a dress. A robe.

  “Looks like a robe to me,” Chase said.

  “Seriously?” She reached out for a fold of the draping cloth and saw that it was not quite gray, as it had first seemed. It was a slate blue, embroidered lightly in curling fronds of gray. Gold thread decorated the sleeves and the hem.

  “Eric?”

  Eric nodded at Chase.

  “What, they have a uniform?” Emma asked.

  “Not exactly. But my guess? This wasn’t meant for his use.”

  “Whose, then?”

  “Yours.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there’s another one. Look.”

  She reached into the suitcase and pulled out a robe that was similar in cut. It was, however, rust red. She held it against her shoulders and watched the hems flap around in folds across the ground. “I think I like the red better.”

  As a joke, it fell flat. Chase glanced at her and then at Eric; Eric deliberately didn’t meet his gaze.

  Emma’s hands, still clutching red cloth, became fists. She looked at the two of them, and if Eric was avoiding Chase’s gaze, he was also avoiding hers. Chase followed suit.

  “Guys.”

  They both looked at her, then. “Can we just stop this right now? You know things you aren’t telling me, and they’re about me. You know what I’m facing, and I don’t. Tell me.”

  They exchanged a glance, and Chase shrugged. Eric took a breath, held it for a little too long, and exhaled. “Let’s keep on looking.”

  “Eric.”

  “Emma—”

  “At least explain this.” She lifted the robe. “These aren’t exactly what you or I would call everyday wear. They’re not formal, either. I could put that on,” she added, pointing to the slate blue robe, “if I were playing a priest in a badly staged school play.”

  He nodded.

  “I could not put it on and just blend in here, for any value of here that didn’t include Amy’s Halloween party.”

  “Amy has Halloween parties?” Chase asked. Eric hit him.

  “Your point?” Eric asked Emma.

  “My point is that I couldn’t wear this anywhere here. If I was meant to wear this, where exactly was I supposed to go?”

  “Emma—”

  “Was I meant to go where she is?”

  Eric flinched. “No,” he said, almost too softly. “Never that, Emma.”

  But Chase said, “God, Eric.”

  Eric looked at Chase and said, No. But without the sound.

  “Idiot. She’s right. She’s absolutely right. Eric, wake the hell up.”

  Eric was silent. Chase turned to Emma. “Find us a big room,” he told her.

  “How big?”

  “Damn it, just—big.”

  She bit her lip and nodded. “Come on. There’s one up here, and there’re two downstairs that might do. They don’t look as big when they’re full of people.”

  She led them to the master bedroom. It was at the end of the hall, it was fronted by the largest doors on the second floor, and it had always had an invisible sign across it saying: Keep out or Amy might kill you. Not that this had always worked.

  Tonight was one of those nights when fear of Amy was not as strong as fear of the utterly nameless future that included Chase, Eric, and a man who could suddenly turn the entire backyard into an eerie blaze of silent white and green fire. She opened the doors.

  To either side of the doors were large, walk-in closets; beyond those, mirrored vanities with small—for this house—sinks and very large counters. There were also two bathrooms, one beside each vanity. Emma passed between the mirrors and grimaced, but the mirrors were just mirrors. She headed on into the depth of the bedroom. The bed, which was so huge that it would not have fit around the bend in the stairs in the Hall household, looked tiny.

  Chase scoped the room out with care, and Emma watched him with growing unease. “Nothing,” he told Eric.

  “You’re sure?”

  Chase nodded and then looked at Emma. “Emma,” he said quietly, “have Amy clear the house out.”

  She stared at him. “Chase, it’s barely nine o’clock. You want me to tell her to kick everyone out now?”

  He said nothing.

  Eric, understanding Emma’s problem, said, “Let’s check it out. The noise and the people won’t get in the way if we’re looking.”

  “No. Only if the Necromancer comes back.”

  Necromancer. Emma stared at Chase for a long moment and then turned and headed toward the stairs. “It’s one of two rooms,” she managed to say. Necromancer.

  “Any chance any one of those rooms is empty?”

  “Depends. If you get the DJ to put on the wrong damn music, he’ll either get lynched or people will leave really fast.”

  There was a lot of quiet swearing. None of it was Emma’s. She was still stuck on the word Necromancer. She headed down the stairs, clinging to t
he railing; they followed. She turned one sharp right at the end of the stairs, and came up against the expected press of bodies; this slowed their progress by a lot. This time, however, Eric didn’t just grab her arm and drag her through people.

  He did catch her hand, and he did hold it, but it was probably either that or get left behind. The music got louder, and the talking was now that level of shouting that’s needed just to say hello in a loud room.

  “Chase!” Emma shouted

  “What?” he shouted back.

  “Where?”

  “Go to the back of the room. The DJ.”

  Emma nodded and headed that way. The music got louder; the bass was like a heartbeat—but a lot less welcome—by the time she had made it most of the way there. She’d chosen to try to sidle along the walls, because the people standing there were less likely to accidentally elbow her or step on her feet.

  But she stopped well before she reached the DJ. Eric walked into her. Chase walked into him.

  Standing against the far wall were four people.

  Not a single one of them was alive.

  “Emma?” Eric asked, his mouth close enough to her ear that she felt the words trace her spine. “Emma, what is it?”

  “Can’t you see them?” She lifted her hand and pointed. When Eric failed to answer, she turned—and it was hard—to look at him. His eyes were narrowed, and he was scanning the back wall, but no shifting expression told her that he saw what she could easily see.

  “Chase?” She had to shout this.

  Chase shook his head slowly. He moved closer, which meant that they were all standing on almost the same square foot of floor. “What do you see?”

  Emma didn’t like the words “dead” or “ghost” because they didn’t look like her preconceived notions of either. They were, for one, too solid; there was a faint luminescence around their eyes, and even their skin, but without it, she might have mistaken them for living people.

  Although perhaps not in those clothes. She hesitated, then said, “The dead. There are four, two women, one boy and one girl. Eric—I don’t understand why you can’t see them. They’re dead.”

  Chase closed his eyes, and his shoulders tensed. Eric finally let her go so he could put a hand on one of those shoulders. “Not now, Chase.”

  “Fuck, Eric—” He took a breath, steadied himself. “You can’t see them?”

  Eric shook his head.

  Emma said, quietly, “They’re chained.”

  Eric looked at her. “Chained?” She almost couldn’t hear the word.

  She nodded.

  He swore, but it was background noise, now. She started to walk again, and after a minute, he followed. The DJ shouted something and pointed at the floor, but Emma couldn’t see what he was pointing at. She smiled at him, and he grimaced and shrugged.

  She passed him, reached the wall, and approached the closest of the dead women. She was, Emma thought, a good deal older than her mother—older and stouter. She wore a dress that might have been acceptable business dress twenty or thirty years ago, and her hair, which might once have been a mousy brown, was shot through with gray. She didn’t appear to see Emma, which, since Emma was standing in front her, was a bit disconcerting.

  Emma lifted a hand, waved it in front of her eyes. Nothing.

  She felt Eric’s hand on her shoulder and turned. “They don’t see me. Eric, why are they here?”

  He didn’t answer. But Chase said, brusquely, “Tell her, Eric.”

  “Not here.”

  “Tell her, or I will.”

  Eric reached out and grabbed Chase’s shirt, Chased shoved him, and Emma snorted. “Guys,” she said, through clenched teeth. “While I would love to see you pound each other senseless, it’s not actually helpful.”

  They both looked at her.

  “You really are brothers. I don’t care what you say.” She took a deep breath and stepped up to the woman until she could touch her. Her hand hovered just above the rounded contours of the pale cheek, before she let it fall. It wasn’t—wouldn’t be—like touching her father; it would be like touching a corpse.

  Instead, she looked at the chains. They were slender, golden chains, much like the one Merrick Longland had held. She’d snapped that; she thought she could snap these as well. “I’m sorry,” she said to the woman, who might as well have been a statue for all she seemed to notice.

  “Emma, what are you doing?” Eric asked her.

  “Not trying to strangle Chase,” she replied curtly. The chain was thicker, and she could see that it was like rope and that the woman was bound several times by its length. Those loops disappeared into the wall and emerged out the other side, gleaming faintly. One strand—only one—passed from this woman to the next, and from her to the two children. It seemed to be looped several times around each person.

  “Emma?”

  “Just let me figure it out.” She touched the chains that bound the woman to the wall; they were pulled so tight they had no play at all. Fine. She walked to the woman’s right, and put both hands on the taut, single strand. It was slightly warm, and although it looked metallic, it felt…wet. Slippery. If the chain that had bound Emily Gates had been slippery, Emma hadn’t noticed. That was one of the advantages of adrenaline.

  She tugged at it, and all four of the trapped people shuddered. She pulled her hand back as if she’d just grabbed fire.

  Eric must have seen her expression. But he had come to stand by her side, and he said—and asked—nothing. Chase came to stand on her other side; they were like bookends. Probably better that she was standing between them, though. If they did start pounding on each other here, Amy would kill her later. Amy put great stock in civil behavior when it wasn’t her own.

  But that was people: you could always justify what you chose to do, because you made sense to yourself.

  “I’m really, really sorry,” she said softly, to four people who didn’t seem to be aware she existed. “I’m sorry if this hurts. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  She put her hands on the chain again, both hands this time, and she tried very hard to keep the strongest of the pressure between her hands. She saw the chain stretch and thin, saw the four shudder again, but this time she kept going.

  The chain snapped.

  Eric swore. As the chain unraveled slowly, the women began to blink. They looked at Emma, and Emma exhaled.

  “I see two,” Chase told her. Or Eric; she didn’t look at them.

  “There are two at the end. They’re younger.” She left the slowly waking women and walked to the children. She found the single strand that stretched between them and broke it.

  They blinked, recovering more quickly than either woman had.

  “Are you okay?” she asked the girl. A girl who looked to Emma to be about six years old. She was very viscerally glad that the dead didn’t look like their corpses.

  The girl blinked again and then looked at Emma, her eyes that faint and odd luminescence that seemed to contain no color. She nodded slowly but didn’t speak. Neither did the boy. He was taller than the girl, and his hair was an unruly dark mass that suggested hairbrushes had been no part of his cultural norm; he didn’t, however, look significantly older. Emma worked her way through the slowly building rage their presence here invoked.

  She didn’t reach out to touch them; she lifted her hands and then forced them back down to her sides, remembering what had happened the last time she had touched her father. Four very oddly dressed strangers appearing out of nowhere in the middle of the room was probably not going to cause a big stir in a place this loud and crowded, but if it did, she’d be at the center of it.

  Instead, she asked them all to follow her, and they nodded again in silence.

  “Follow you where?” Eric asked her, as he and Chase fell in behind.

  “Outside. We can check on Skip and pick up Allison as we go.”

  Picking up Allison was a bit of a production that involved literally lifting Skip and dragging h
im up to his very messy room first. Chase and Eric did the heavy moving, and Amy came along to stage-manage. Michael, Allison, and Emma hovered behind the hard work, glancing at each other. Emma’s arms were firmly folded across her chest.

  “Bad?” Allison asked.

  Emma nodded. “And confusing.”

  “More confusing than anything else that’s happened this week?”

  “Good point. Maybe. Certainly not less confusing.” She glanced at Michael. She had expected Michael to be fidgeting—and he was—but he wasn’t yet possessed by the all out frenetic movements that meant he had outlasted his best-before date and needed to be gently nudged home.

  “Michael, do you want to go talk to Oliver and Connell while we figure things out?” Emma asked.

  “No.” He had the slightly vacant expression that meant he was thinking. It was harder to stop him from thinking than to stop a moving subway train by standing in front of it and pushing.

  “Okay, then.”

  Eric, Chase, and Amy descended the stairs. Emma, seeing them coming, headed out to the backyard. It was too much to hope that Amy wouldn’t follow, so she didn’t bother. She did, however, hope that Amy wasn’t as angry as she looked. But she did look angry, and when Amy was that angry, it was very hard not to cringe when she did anything. Like, say, speak. Or look at you.

  When they were safely outside—and this took a few minutes as people approached Amy, saw the look on her face, and hurriedly backpedaled—Amy shut the door and then turned, hands on hips, to glare at them all.

  Eric took this moment to tell Michael, gently, that it would probably be best for him to go inside and join the party. Michael stared at Eric blankly.

  “Emma, help me here.” Eric said, out of the corner of his mouth.

  Emma grimaced. “He’s staying.”

  “I don’t think this is going to be helpful for him.”

  “It’s probably not going to be helpful for me, either.” She exhaled. “He’s not an idiot, Eric. He saw what happened with Longland. He saw more, I’m guessing—I don’t think anyone else was moving until after he hit Longland with the book.”