Silence (20 page)

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 smal—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 Hal 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 tel 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’l either get lynched or people wil leave realy fast.”

There was a lot of quiet swearing. None of it was Emma’s.

She was stil stuck on the word Necromancer. She headed down the stairs, clinging to the railing; they folowed. 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 helo 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 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 wals, because the people standing there were less likely to accidentaly elbow her or step on her feet.

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

Standing against the far wal 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 wal, 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 al 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 girl. Eric—I don’t understand why you can’t see them. They’re dead.”

Chase closed his eyes, and his shoulders tensed. Eric finaly 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 folowed. 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 wal, 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, “Tel her, Eric.”

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

“Not here.”

“Tel her, or I wil.”

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 actualy helpful.”

They both looked at her.

“You realy 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 fal. 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 wel. “I’m sorry,” she said to the woman, who might as wel have been a statue for al 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 wal 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 “Just let me figure it out.” She touched the chains that bound the woman to the wal; they were puled so tight they had no play at al. 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 metalic, 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 al four of the trapped people shuddered.

She puled 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 kil 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 realy, realy 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.

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 visceraly 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 taler 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 al to folow her, and they nodded again in silence.

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

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

Picking up Alison was a bit of a production that involved literaly lifting Skip and dragging him up to his very messy room first.

Chase and Eric did the heavy moving, and Amy came along to stage-manage. Michael, Alison, and Emma hovered behind the hard work, glancing at each other. Emma’s arms were firmly folded across her chest.

“Bad?” Alison 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 al 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 Connel 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 folow, so she didn’t bother. She did, however, hope that Amy wasn’t as angry as she looked. But she 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 al.

Eric took this moment to tel 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.”

“They weren’t moving,” Michael said. His hands were slightly baled fists at his sides, and his feet didn’t stay in the same spot for more than a few seconds. “No one was moving but Emma and Skip’s friend.”

Emma nodded but continued to speak to Eric. “This is strange for al of us, and we al want explanations. Michael does more than want: he needs them.”

“He doesn’t need these.”

“He doesn’t need these.”

“Yes,” Amy said, quietly coming to the rescue—not that it was needed. “He does. Don’t bother to argue with Em about this. She won’t budge.”

Chase started to speak, and Alison cut him off by simply raising her hand. The funny thing was that Chase actualy paid attention. Alison then added her voice to the discussion. “He’s always processed information differently than the rest of us do— it might be why he wasn’t completely affected by whatever it was Longland did. Because he knows he doesn’t understand some of the same things we do, he needs the explanation; if we don’t give him one, he’l come up with one on his own—one that doesn’t resemble reality.

“Which can be even more frightening than the truth usualy is.

If he knows what’s actualy happening, he can work with it.”

Alison reddened slightly. “Sorry.”

“And he clearly doesn’t mind being talked about in the third person, as if he weren’t here,” Eric observed.

Michael frowned. “But I am here,” he told Eric. “Everyone knows it.”

“Yes?”

“Then they’re not talking about me as if I weren’t here.”