Grave Read online

  “No,” Amy snapped at Michael. “Just on general principle.”

  All in all, it was better to have Amy’s restless anger aimed at someone who was in a different city. Amy was a lot like her father in that way. Allison had always envied her lack of fear and her ferocious self-confidence. Nothing that had happened in the past month had changed that. Her envy for Skip, however, had taken a nosedive and didn’t look to be coming back, ever.

  Emma stiffened beneath Allison’s arm. Emma, always much more socially adept, could feign both delight and ease when she felt neither, and her expression, while a little more alert, gave nothing away. But her shoulders were tense, her neck, stiffer.

  “Ally,” she said.

  They all turned to face her.

  “Get Chase and Eric.”

  “Ernest, too?”

  She nodded.

  Michael was the only person present who asked, “Why?”

  “I think—I think we’re going to have visitors.”

  ALLISON LEFT THE LIVING ROOM before Emma had finished answering Michael’s hushed question.

  “Is Longland necessary as well?” Amy asked.

  “If he’s not part of this? Yes. But—I’m not certain he’s not.” Emma didn’t look at Amy as she spoke. “So wait until Chase gets here and take him with you if you’re going to find him.” Amy didn’t reply; that didn’t bother Emma. Amy pretty much did what she felt was the right thing to do in any given situation, and anyone else’s opinion was—unless asked for—superfluous.

  “Emma?” Michael said, his voice closer than Amy’s. “What are you looking at?”

  “A dead child,” she replied.

  • • •

  The child was between the ages of eight and ten, to Emma’s eye; it was hard to tell because her expression was at odds with her age: It felt cold and ancient. Framed by dark hair that trailed down the side of her face in ringlets—with ribbons, no less—her skin was pale; she wore clothing that would have looked at home on the set of a period piece in which the director was not concerned with accuracy.

  She should have looked cute. She didn’t. Her smile—and she did smile—was slow to come, and when it did, it hardened an expression that hadn’t been youthful to begin with.

  “There really isn’t much point in calling everyone to you,” she told Emma. “They’ll just die more quickly. But Eric is here, isn’t he?” She paused and looked around the room, her snub nose wrinkling in disdain. It was the first expression that somehow matched her apparent age.

  “Emma?” Michael asked.

  Emma knew she could make ghosts visible by touching them. She so did not want to touch this one. She opened her mouth to say as much.

  “Your companion’s not a Necromancer,” the girl said. There was a hint of question in the words, none of it friendly.

  “No.”

  “And the loud girl?”

  “No.”

  “The fat one?”

  Emma folded her arms and stood. For a moment, she felt as if she were eight years old again, the desire to say, you take that back right now was so visceral.

  “Do they serve you?”

  “They’re my friends.”

  The child snorted, and this sound also aligned with her apparent age. “You’re a Necromancer. You don’t have any friends.” But she frowned for a moment, her forehead creasing. “You are a Necromancer, right?”

  “That’s not what I call myself, no.”

  “She is,” Margaret Henney said.

  Emma turned. So did Michael. Petal was too busy starving-to-death to do more than lift his head.

  The girl’s eyes widened. “Margaret.”

  “Helmi,” Margaret replied. She turned to Emma. “We need to move, Emma. We need to move quickly.”

  “It won’t help,” Helmi said, staring first at Margaret and then—to Emma’s surprise—at Michael. “They’ll be here soon.” She sauntered over to the fireplace and then turned to look at Michael again, her brow creased in faint confusion.

  “What have you done?” Margaret demanded, in her most intimidating angry school teacher voice. Clearly, that voice was only effective on people who had lives to lose.

  “The Queen ordered me to find Eric,” she replied. “If I were you, I’d run. She won’t be happy to see you.”

  “She’s coming in person?” Margaret’s voice was a bare whisper.

  “Who knows? She told me to find him. I found him.”

  Michael rose as well. “Margaret, what should we do?”

  “Gather anything you absolutely need right now. We may not have time to come back for it.”

  “Tell him to wait,” Helmi demanded.

  Neither Margaret nor Emma appeared to have heard her.

  “Tell him to wait,” the girl said again, “and maybe I’ll help you.”

  • • •

  “Michael. Wait,” Emma said.

  “Emma, dear, we really don’t have time for this. I’ve spoken to Ernest, but if Helmi is here, the Queen—or her knights—will follow. We need to be away before they arrive.”

  Michael froze in the doorway. He turned back, his eyes darting between Emma and Margaret. Helmi’s forehead creased; she looked at Michael and watched as he stood, indecisive, in the door.

  “Ask him,” Helmi told Emma, in the same imperious tone. “Ask him why he can see Margaret but not me.”

  “I can answer that,” Emma said. “And I will. But let Michael go and get his stuff. Sorry, Michael.”

  Michael shot through the door and bounded up the stairs. He didn’t weigh much, but he had never had a light step; he sounded like panicked thunder.

  “Margaret can make herself visible to the living if she wants.”

  Helmi’s small hands found her hips and rested there, in fists. She clearly did not believe a word Emma was saying. Emma would have found this annoying in other circumstances—no one liked being called a liar, even silently—but the air was getting colder by the second.

  “And how exactly can she do that?” The child’s voice dripped condescension.

  “Emma is not precisely accurate. I can’t,” Margaret said, surrendering. The look she sent in Emma’s direction, though brief, was pointed. She did not approve of any conversation with this particular dead person. “Not on my own.”

  Helmi turned to Emma, then. “She’s yours?”

  Emma said, “No.”

  But Margaret said, “Yes.”

  “Which one is it?” Helmi’s fists tightened.

  “I am not bound to Emma the way the dead are bound to Necromancers,” Margaret said. “But I serve her while I have any choice or any say in the matter.”

  “Why?” The mask was off the child’s face; the anger, the pain, the sense of betrayal were entirely exposed. It made her look younger. It made her look, for a moment, the age she had been when she died.

  “Look at her,” Margaret said.

  “I am.”

  “What do you see, Helmi?”

  “You know what I see. It’s what you see.”

  “No,” was Margaret’s surprisingly gentle reply. “It’s not. Emma is not using my power. I am indirectly using hers.”

  • • •

  The words made some sort of sense to the Queen’s younger sister; they appeared to make more sense to her than they had made—and did make—to Emma.

  “There is no point demanding explanations from Emma—she doesn’t have them.”

  “She—she’s giving you power?”

  “Yes. She broke the binding that held me to Longland. She didn’t realize what she was doing, at the time. Nor did I. But I understood it afterward, in a way that Emma cannot. I am dead. She is alive.”

  “Is this true?” Helmi asked. She asked it of Emma; her voice had dropped until it was almost a whisper. Her han
ds were bunched in her skirts, as if anchored there.

  Once again, it was Margaret who answered. “I don’t like to do it—but the choice is mine. If I leave, she can’t force me to return if I have no desire to do so. If I choose to remain unseen by the living, she does not force me to appear. I am here because . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  Helmi’s glare had slackened, her narrowed eyes losing the sharp points of their edges as they shifted position. “Can they—can they touch you?”

  Margaret shook her head. “What Emma gives is not what the Queen of the Dead gives. She cannot make me more than I am; she gives me the ability to be all that I am.”

  “How?”

  “Helmi—”

  “Tell me how,” she said, voice low enough it sounded like an adult voice. Margaret appeared to be thinking; Helmi was not patient.

  As Michael came thundering down the steps, Helmi turned to Emma. “Is it true,” she asked, in the same low, intense voice, “that you opened the door?”

  Emma saw some of Longland in this dead child. “Yes.”

  “How?”

  Emma glanced at Margaret. Margaret did not come to her rescue. “I’m sorry,” she said, the intense irritation at the girl’s attitude evaporating, “but I don’t know. The dead came to me, and they gave me permission to use their power to open the door. I needed all of it. I could only barely move the door, and it took pretty much everything they had.”

  • • •

  “And that’s enough of that,” Eric said. He had entered the room; Allison was behind him.

  Helmi turned to face him. If Emma expected triumph or sneering, Helmi ran counter to expectation. “Do you know what she did?” She was, on the other hand, still demanding.

  “Yes. And I know she won’t survive to do it again if they find her.”

  “Tell me.”

  “We don’t have time, Helmi. If you’ve told her—or her knights—where we are, we need to move.”

  “If you don’t answer, I’ll just follow you until I know where you’re going and tell her the new location. I don’t have to tell her anything if I don’t want to. You should know that well enough by now. If I told her everything, you’d never have escaped in the first place.” She folded her arms.

  Emma turned to Eric. “You recognize her?”

  He didn’t answer the question. To Emma, he said, “Allison and Amy are ready. It’s just you and Petal.”

  “Is it true? Can she follow us and return to tell the Queen where we are?”

  “Not as easily—”

  “Yes,” Helmi said. “It used to be harder. I’ve had practice. I’ve had nothing but practice.” The words were laced with bitterness and resentment.

  To Emma, Eric said, “Yes, she can follow us. She can leave for the City of the Dead and return almost instantly to the location she left from. But it is not trivial for the dead to navigate among the living; there are memories of streets and roads and fields and ancient homesteads that seem just as real to the dead as the streets you walk every day to get to school do to you. If there were a Necromancer here, he could build a kind of circuit that would serve as a beacon to her, but there isn’t one.”

  “Longland is here,” Helmi replied.

  “Longland,” Eric snapped back, “is dead. The dead—no matter what they were in life—can’t be Necromancers. He might look alive to you, but he’s just as dead as we are.”

  “But the Queen says—”

  “The Queen has said many, many, things. You never used to believe most of them. Why have you started now?”

  Emma understood why. It was always easy to believe the things you wanted to believe, because they gave you hope.

  Helmi started to shout back, but no words come out. After a brittle and unexpected pause, she said, “So, Nathan was right.”

  • • •

  “What did you say?” Emma found herself across the room and in arm’s reach of the child before she could think about moving.

  This did not terrify the child. “So you do know Nathan.”

  “I know Nathan.”

  The intake of breath in the room—and just outside of it—was sharp enough to cut. Of course it was. Only Emma—and the rest of the dead—could hear Nathan’s name until Emma spoke it.

  “Nathan is in the citadel. But don’t worry—you’ll be there soon.”

  “Emma,” Eric said. He might have said more, but Amy appeared with Chase and Longland; Ernest was nowhere in sight. Amy was dressed for winter: coat, boots, scarf; her gloves were in her hands, her earmuffs looped over her right arm. “We have to leave. We have to leave now.”

  Longland’s curt, sharp curse could be heard over Eric’s steadier voice.

  “Merrick Longland,” the girl said, turning only her head toward him.

  “Lady Helmi,” he replied. He astonished everyone in the room by bowing. Even Emma. Only Helmi seemed to expect this as her due.

  “Why are you here?” she asked.

  “I was captured in a failed attempt to assassinate the red-haired boy and his companion.” He spoke smoothly and without inflection, separating himself from Amy. Chase stood between Longland and everyone else, knives in hand. He was angry.

  “You haven’t escaped.”

  “I haven’t had time, Lady. We have only just arrived. And I did not think that escape in this empty wasteland would be helpful to our cause. I have no transport. I was not allowed to return to my dwelling; I have no mirror and no easy method of communication. But I am the Queen’s, and bound to her; I trusted she would find me.”

  Helmi snorted. “She hasn’t. Well, not yet.”

  “May I ask why you are here, Lady?”

  “She sent me. She asked me to come.”

  “To what end?”

  “To find Eric. She knows where I am now, and her knights are coming.”

  • • •

  Allison caught Chase by the elbow and held on with white-knuckled hands. Chase didn’t take his eyes off Longland, so he couldn’t see Ally’s expression. But he didn’t stab Longland or slit his throat. Emma wasn’t certain how she felt about that, either.

  “Ernest has the car ready,” Margaret said.

  “Michael, Ally, Amy,” Emma said. “Go.”

  “I’ve got my car running,” Amy added. “But I think we’re all supposed to leave that way. Now,” she added.

  Helmi stared at all of them.

  “I assume Margaret can follow on her own.”

  “And Longland?”

  “Leave him here,” Amy said.

  “No.” Everyone looked to Emma, who added, “Michael, can you grab Petal, too?”

  “Em, if the Queen can track Longland—”

  “But she didn’t. She tracked Helmi.”

  “Who?”

  “The dead child.”

  “Fine. We all leave,” Amy said, folding her arms. “Don’t even think of staying behind.”

  • • •

  The hall was a flurry of coats and boots and too many people in too small a space.

  “The road isn’t safe,” Helmi said, watching them all. She seemed almost surprised at the words that had escaped her small mouth, but she didn’t withdraw them; she stared at Emma.

  Everyone who could hear her stopped moving. Everyone who couldn’t noticed the lack of motion. Amy, who was worried, compressed her lips. “Emma.”

  Emma then turned to Helmi. Swallowing because her throat was dry in a way that couldn’t be blamed on cold winter air alone, Emma held out her left hand. Helmi stared at it as if it were a dead fish. But she also stared at it as if she were starving, and the fish wasn’t dead enough to be poisonous. She reached out and placed her right hand in Emma’s left. Emma felt instant, searing cold. It was far, far worse than touching Mark had been.

  But Helmi’s eyes�
�Helmi’s dead, oddly colorless eyes—widened and blazed with light. For a brief instant, her eyes looked almost brown, almost living. Ribbons fell out of her hair, and ringlets fell with them; the hair itself straightened into a fine, waving fall around her shoulders and back.

  She looked up. The dead didn’t cry; Helmi’s eyes seemed filmed with tears she couldn’t, therefore, shed. “It hurts,” she whispered.

  Emma’s brows folded together; she tried to withdraw her hand, but the girl tightened her hold on it. “I’m sorry—it’s never hurt anyone else—”

  Helmi shook her head. Her clothing went the way of her hair, falling into something simpler and baggier, the sleeves too long and rolled up at the wrists. Her feet were bare. Her eyes were bruised.

  “Helmi,” Margaret said, voice sharp.

  Emma shook her head. “Let her be, Margaret.”

  “Helmi is older than any of the dead you have ever met,” Margaret countered, once again using the angry teacher voice. “She has perfect control of her appearance; she can take on the face and the features she chooses, down to the last detail. It is not necessary that she show you—”

  “Please. Let it go.”

  Blood trickled from the corner of Helmi’s lips; those lips had swollen. The whole of the left side of her face had become bruised; the blood that fell from her mouth began to almost pour. None of it touched Emma; none of it reached the floor. Emma looked.

  Looked, and stopped. She was staring at a livid, gaping wound in the child’s chest. No, not one—three. She dragged her gaze away and was not surprised to see a fourth wound, across the child’s throat.

  “Helmi.”

  Emma was not afraid for anyone in the room but Michael, oddly enough. Michael and Allison. They could see Helmi, because she held Helmi’s hand. What she had, by holding that hand, agreed to bear witness to, they might also witness. Helmi was not kind.

  “This is how you died,” Emma told the dead girl. Her voice was steady, because Helmi was already dead. Knowing how she’d died might make Emma ill—but it changed precisely nothing. Helmi had been killed. Had Helmi died of—of scarlet fever instead, she would still be dead.

  Still trapped here, where all memory seemed, at the moment, to be pain.

  “Em,” Ally said. “What are you talking about?”