The Reckoning (7 page)

“A
RE YOU GIRLS OKAY
?” the man asked.

Tori nodded. “I think so.”

“Wh-what was that?” I said. “An earthquake?”

He nodded. “Seems so. We haven’t had even a tremor in twenty years.”

A young woman in a long leather coat came up behind him. “And we wouldn’t have had one now, if it wasn’t for the quarry reopening last summer.”

“We can’t go pointing fingers until we’re sure,” the man said.

“Oh, I’m sure. There’s a reason those environmentalists wanted to keep it closed, and a reason it shut down in the first place…after the
last
tremors, twenty years ago. Do you think that’s a coincidence? All that digging, knocking around the Teutonic plates. Now look—” She gestured at the chasm
and scowled. “The quarry’s going to have to pay for this.”

“Is everyone okay?” I asked. “I thought I heard a scream.”

“Oh, that was just—” She waved at the casket, still upended on the ground, surrounded by mourners who were all hoping someone else was going to volunteer to return the body. “My great-uncle was being buried today; and when the ground shook, he started bumping around in the coffin, scared the guys, and they dropped it.”

The man cleared his throat, warning her that we didn’t need the gory details, but she carried on.

“The coffin busted open, Uncle Al fell out, the ground shook again, and—” She tried to suppress a snicker. “They thought he was, you know, moving.”

“Eww,” Tori said. “I’d have screamed, too.”

“Anyway,” the man cut in, “I see your grandmother wants you girls in the car. I don’t blame her. Mother Nature might not be done with us yet.”

We thanked them and headed to the parking lot, Margaret still keeping pace twenty feet behind us.

“Teutonic plates?” Tori said. “Do they bury German pottery with the dead around here?”

I had to laugh at that, but it was a bit shaky.

She continued, “To cause an earthquake the
tectonic
plates need a fault line, which are, like, on the other side of the country.”

“It sounded good. And that’s all that matters. Derek
and Simon say that’s what people do if they see supernatural stuff—make up a logical explanation. If you didn’t know about necromancers and you saw what just happened, what would you think? A freak earthquake? Or someone raising the dead?”

“True. Still, Teutonic plates?”

This time I sat in the back with Tori. When we reached the highway, Margaret finally spoke.

“Who taught you to do that, Chloe?” she said.

“What?”

Her eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. “Who taught you to raise the dead?”

“N-no one. I—I’ve never even met another necromancer before you.” Not exactly true. I’d briefly met the ghost of one, but he hadn’t been much help.

“Did the Edison Group give you books? Manuals?”

“J-just a history book that I—I skimmed through a bit. Th-there wasn’t anything on rituals.”

A moment of silence as she studied me through the mirror. “You were trying to make a point, weren’t you, Chloe?”

“Wh-what?”

“I said you couldn’t raise the dead; you proved you could. You visualized returning a soul—”

“No!” My stutter fell away. “Return a ghost to a rotting corpse to make a point? I’d
never
do that. I was doing exactly what you asked—trying to pull that spirit through. I was
summoning. But if I do that with bodies around, I can raise the dead. That’s what I tried to tell you.”

She drove for a minute, the silence heavy. Then her gaze rose to the mirror again, meeting mine.

“You’re telling me you can raise the dead simply by summoning?”

“Yes.”

“My God,” she whispered, staring at me. “What have they done?”

Hearing her words and seeing her expression, I knew Derek had been right last night. I’d just done something worse than raising the dead—I’d confirmed her worst fears about us.

When we got to the house, Andrew was the only one around. Margaret called him into the kitchen, closing the door behind them.

There wasn’t much point in shutting that door. Margaret didn’t yell, but her voice took on a strident note that echoed through the house.

The upshot of her tirade was that I was the devil’s spawn and should be locked up in a tower before I unleashed hordes of the living dead to slaughter them all in their sleep. Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but not by much.

Tori smacked open the kitchen door and marched in, with me close behind. “Excuse me. Who took the genetically modified necromancer into the cemetery?”

Andrew turned to her. “Tori, please. We don’t need—”

“Chloe didn’t want to go there. Did Margaret tell you that? Did she tell you we warned her that Chloe could raise the dead? That I’d seen it? That she didn’t believe us?”

I swore I could see sparks flying from Tori’s fingertips as she waved her hands.

“Did she tell you Chloe asked over and over to stop? That Margaret
made
her keep going? Even after Chloe raised a dead squirrel, Margaret forced her to keep summoning.”

“I did not force—”

“You told her she’d trapped a ghost between dimensions.”

“All right,” Andrew said. “Clearly, we need to discuss—”

“Oh, we need to discuss a lot of things,” Margaret said.

Andrew shooed us out. As soon as we were gone, the fight started up again. Tori and I listened outside the door.

“We weren’t prepared,” Margaret said. “Not at all.”

“Then we need to
get
prepared.”

“She split open the ground, Andrew! The very earth opened to free the dead. It—it—” She took a deep, ragged breath. “It was like something out of the old stories my grandfather used to tell. Terrible stories that gave me nightmares about necromancers so powerful they could raise entire cemeteries of the dead.”

I remembered what the demi-demon said.
You called to your friend and the shades of a thousand dead answered,
winging their way back to their rotted shells. A thousand corpses ready to become a thousand zombies. A vast army of the dead for you to control.

“She can raise the dead at fifteen,” Margaret continued. “Without training. Without ritual. Without intention.”

“Then she has to learn how to—”

“Do you know what Victoria told Gwen? She’s never learned a single spell, but she can cast them. If she sees it, she can do it. No training. No incantations. Naturally, we thought she was telling stories, but now—”

She sucked in air. “We can’t handle this. I know they’re just children, and what has happened to them is terrible and tragic. But the greater tragedy would be to tell them they can expect to lead normal lives.”

“Lower your voice,” Andrew said.

“Why? So you can keep assuring them everything will be all right? It won’t. Those children are going to need to be monitored for their entire lives. It’s only going to get worse.”

Tori tugged me away. “She knows what happened was her fault, so she’s covering her butt as fast as she can. We don’t need to listen to this.”

She was right. Margaret had screwed up and she’d been scared. She wasn’t the kind of person who could easily accept either, so she had to lay the blame elsewhere—make us out to be so bad that she couldn’t have been expected to control the situation.

And yet…

These were our allies. Our only allies. We knew that Margaret and Russell had already been second-guessing Andrew’s decision to take us in. Now I’d given them exactly the ammunition they needed.

T
ORI AND
I
WERE
heading for the stairs when I heard the thud of heavy footfalls. I hoped it was Simon. Prayed it was. But I knew it wasn’t. I turned to see Derek bearing down on us, scowling.

“I’ll handle him,” Tori said.

“I’ve got it.” I raised my voice as he drew near. “We had a problem—”

“I heard.” He parked himself three feet in front of me, like he was trying not to loom, but it didn’t matter. Derek could loom from across a room.

“Then you also heard it wasn’t her fault,” Tori said.

He didn’t even glance at her, the full weight of that scowl pinning me. “Did you summon in a cemetery?”

“Yes, I did.”

“You knew that was a problem?”

“Yes, I did.”

“She didn’t have a choice,” Tori said.

“She always has a choice. She can say no.”

“I tried,” I said.

“You can’t
try
to say no. Either you do or you don’t.” He lowered his voice, some of the fury evaporating, but the hard edge lingering. “It’s not enough to say the word, Chloe. You need to follow through and that’s the part you can’t seem to manage.”

“Whoa,” Tori said. “You’re out of line.”

“He has a point,” I murmured.

“What? You—” She struggled for a word. “Don’t put up with that, Chloe. I don’t care how big or how smart he is, he has no right to talk to you that way. You did your best.”

I’d allowed myself to be pushed into something I’d known was wrong.

“What do you think they’re talking about in there?” he said. “How to help us control our powers?”

“We know what they’re talking about, Derek. And I know what I did. Exactly what you warned us against last night. I gave everyone who doesn’t want to help us a reason not to.”

He opened his mouth. Closed it. You’d think that I’d get some credit for realizing this before he told me. But he had a point to make; and all I’d done was throw up a temporary obstacle, one that barely checked his speed before he barreled right through it.

“The word is
no
, Chloe.
No
, I will not do that.
No
, I don’t
think it’s safe. And if you push me, well, sorry, but I just can’t seem to summon right now.”

“I—”

“What if they asked me how strong I was? Do you think I’d walk in there and pick up the sofa for them?”

“That’s not what I was trying—”

“But it’s what you did. You gave them a full-out demonstration of just how powerful you are, and now they’re going to be wondering if the Edison Group had the right idea, locking us away—even killing us.”

“Oh, come on,” Tori said. “They wouldn’t—”

“Are you sure?”

I shook my head. “If you believed that, Derek, you wouldn’t still be here. You’d be upstairs with Simon, packing his bag for him.”

“Yeah? And where would I go? The Edison Group tracked us to Andrew’s cottage and we still have no idea how they managed it. And what did they do to us there? Ask us to come along nicely? Fire a few tranquilizer darts? No, they shot at us. Bullets. We’re stuck here, Chloe.”

“Whatever happened today, she didn’t do it on purpose,” Tori said.

His jaw worked, then he spun on Tori. “Why are you suddenly defending her? Trying to win her over for a reason?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t trust you, Tori.”

“Um, yeah, I got that message loud and clear long ago.”

Simon appeared in the doorway behind Tori and Derek. He waved to me and mouthed “run while you can.”

Not a bad idea. I snuck around them and zipped out the door to where Simon waited. Then I glanced back at Tori.

“Don’t worry about her,” he said. “Probably the most fun she’s had in days.” He led me into the next room. “Sadly, I can’t say the same for Derek, and as soon as he stops arguing long enough to notice you’re gone—”

“Hey!” Derek called. “Where are you two going?”

Simon took my elbow and steered me at a jog through the house as Derek’s footsteps pounded behind us. Simon kept going until we were outside.

He led me to a garden bench and we sat. I glanced toward the house.

“Relax. He won’t pull that crap in front of me.”

He eased back on the bench, arm going around my shoulders, gaze slanting my way, checking to make sure of his welcome. I moved closer and he smiled.

“Okay, so what happened with your lesson?” he said. “I know it wasn’t good, but I missed the details.”

I told him, and when I was done, he shook his head. “What was she
thinking
? Taking you to a cemetery for necromancy lessons?”

That was exactly what I wanted to hear, but I knew this was the easy way out. Blame someone else, like Margaret had done. Yes, she’d played her part, but so had I.

Derek was right. I should have refused. I had to take
responsibility, even if it meant saying no to an authority figure, because I was the authority on me.

“Do you like ice cream?”

“What?”

Simon smiled. “That got your attention.”

“Sorry, I was just—”

“Worrying. Which is why I’m taking you out for ice cream. Derek and I went for a jog earlier and saw a service station about a half-mile that way.” He pointed. “There was a sign for ice cream in the window, so that’s where we’re going after dinner.”

“I don’t think they’re going to let me go anywhere now.”

“We’ll see. So…? Yes? It’s not exactly what I had in mind for a first date, but we’re kinda stuck here and I’m kinda tired of waiting.”

“D-date?”

He glanced over. “Is that okay?”

“Sure. Yes. Definitely.” My cheeks heated. “Okay, let’s try that again, with a little less enthusiasm.”

He grinned. “Enthusiasm is good. It’s a date then. I’ll talk to Andrew.”

I was about to go on my first date. Not just my first date with Simon. My first date ever. I wasn’t telling him that of course. Sure, he’d be cool with it, probably joke about the pressure. Being fifteen before my first date wasn’t that weird, but it felt weird, like being fifteen before my first period, and
I certainly hadn’t told anyone about
that
.

A date, with Simon. I’d agreed quickly enough, but after we went inside for lunch, I realized what I’d done.

It felt like standing at those cemetery gates again: my gut was telling me this was a really, really bad idea. Dating while on the run for our lives? Dating one of the guys I was on the run
with
? What if it went badly? How would we—?

But it wouldn’t go badly. It was Simon and everything would be okay.

I just had to relax. Unfortunately, lunch didn’t help with that.

Margaret was gone, but she must have told Russell what happened, and he’d swooped in like a vulture, hoping to catch us in some terrible display of uncontrollable power.

Andrew should have shown him the door. He didn’t, probably thinking it was better to let him see that we were just normal kids. But it made all of us miserable, me most of all, feeling Russell’s gaze on me as I struggled to eat, that faint look of distaste on his face. The kid who can raise the dead. The necromancer freak.

After lunch, I fled to my room. Simon tried to lure me out, but I said I was tired and joked that I didn’t want to fall asleep on our date. Around three, Derek rapped on the door, calling a gruff “You should come out. Simon’s worried.” When I said I was napping, he went silent and I thought I heard him sigh and scuff his feet, like he wanted to say something else, so I got up and went to the door, planning to walk out and say,
“Oh, I didn’t know you were still here.”

I’d hoped he did have something to say. Not an apology for chewing me out—that would be expecting too much—but an excuse to talk to him about what had happened at the cemetery, consider our options if things got worse…

Mostly I just wanted him to stop being mad at me and go back to being the other Derek, the guy I could talk to, could confide in. But when I opened the door, the hall was empty. I went back to bed.