Grave

by Michelle Sagara

  Her hands still gripped in his, although they had been lowered without the bars to anchor them in place, Emma Hall stepped forward, into his life.

  • • •

  She knew, or thought she knew, what to expect. She had traveled through a shattered map of Scoros’ life, jolted from memory to memory.

  The sky above was dark; moonlight was clear and silver. She saw the dog first and flinched; it was dead, half of its head blown away. Gunshots. Its blood was too dark to be seen as a color. Listening, she heard nothing; her breath was sharp. Had she come too late? Was it over?

  But no. No. She glanced down at her hands and saw them, empty. But she could feel Chase’s hands. Unlike the hands of the dead, they were warm. Chase was here. He didn’t know that Emma was with him. As Emma had been, he was trapped in memory—but it was worse. These memories were his.

  And Emma was herself. She was not chained to Chase. As if she were a grim tourist, she could move through the landscape echoes his life had created.

  She stepped over the poor dog’s body and continued to walk.

  She found a house next; lights could be seen through glass panes in the distance. But the house was not where she needed to go. She moved to the left, to the gravel road that led to the house itself, and she found what she was searching for.

  She saw a man, lying face up, head pointing toward the house. Like the dog, he’d been shot, but unlike the dog, a bullet was not the only thing that had damaged him. She knelt by his side, touched his wrist; her hand passed through it. The death itself did not disturb her—not as it would have done before she had entered the citadel. She had watched two children burn to death.

  She rose, continuing to walk.

  Six people stood at the far end of the gravel path, and three people knelt, arms bound. Chase’s mother, she thought. Mother, sister—and Chase himself. She understood, then, why the Queen’s knights had chosen to congregate on the road; the house wasn’t large, and she wasn’t certain ten people would have fit in the living room or dining room.

  Moonlight glinted off steel—not gun, but knife. The knife had clearly been used. Of the standing figures, five were men of varying ages; one was a woman. Emma recognized her. She was dressed as the Queen and not the girl; she wore an ornate, complicated dress, and her hair was pulled severely above her face and neck. Her hands were gloved, her feet confined by pointed, polished boots. There was no blood on her.

  No one moved as Emma approached. No one seemed capable of moving. No one spoke.

  Emma reached, hesitantly, to touch the man farthest back—the man who had, no doubt, just killed Chase’s father. Her hand passed through his elbow. This was a memory in the same way photographs were: a snapshot through which she had found a way to navigate.

  More than that, she didn’t try. Instead, she walked through the remaining figures, skirting only the Queen of the Dead. She headed straight for Chase, and when she reached him, she knelt. Tears were frozen in tracks along his face, smearing blood; Chase’s cuts were superficial, but his eye had swollen.

  “Chase,” she said, raising hands to cup his face. “I’m sorry. It’s over.”

  His eyes flickered, his expression shifted. He lifted the face she had cupped; his eyes met hers. “Emma.”

  She nodded. “There’s nothing here. Just you. And me.”

  He jerked back, pulling his face from the cradle of her hands, his eyes widening as he struggled to turn. Toward his sister, Emma saw. Time did not begin to wind again; his sister and his mother remained motionless.

  “Kaleigh.”

  The girl didn’t answer.

  “Mom?”

  “They can’t hear you. The only person who is actually here is you.”

  He struggled. He struggled with bound hands and forced himself to his feet. “Save them,” he whispered.

  She understood. And she thought she could; this was not actually happening now. It was very much like the door: a physical object that existed only because she had somehow consented to its existence—as had Chase. When she had consciously refused her consent, the door had dissolved into gray, vanishing as if it had never been real.

  She thought the Queen and her men might be the same, and she wanted—for one visceral moment—to do what he asked. To change the nature of nightmare. To give this boy, who was not yet the Chase she knew, a happier dream. He had done nothing to deserve this, and it was clear that some part of him lived in it, constantly.

  But even thinking it, she knew she couldn’t. He had not deserved it, but it had happened. The dream she could give him was the daydream she had given herself, day after day, week after week. What if Nathan had come by a different route? What if he’d never left home, at all—if she’d called him before he’d reached the door? What if she’d managed to get to the hospital before he was beyond all reach?

  And none of those daydreams, not a single one, could change what had actually happened. Nathan had not deserved to die. Emma had not deserved to lose him. Chase had not deserved to lose his entire family in a single, long night. And all of these things had happened. They could not be made to unhappen.

  “Please, save them,” Chase whispered again.

  And it killed her to hear it, to know that she could change what they both saw here but that it would change nothing.

  Maybe, maybe it would give him the strength to break free. Maybe. She willed herself to believe it; she failed. Swallowing, she said, “I can’t, Chase. They died years ago. You’re not really here, and neither am I. But we have to go back. You have to leave this place.”

  He shook his head, mute. “Untie me.”

  That she could do and did, without ever touching his wrists.

  He rose, pushed past her; she turned, still clinging, in some way, to hands she couldn’t see. He leaped toward the Queen of the Dead, who stood beneath moonlight like the Faerie Queen herself. He passed through her, landed, rose, and charged again. And again.

  Emma changed nothing. Instead, she stood, and she bore witness, and she knew he would hate her for it later. She couldn’t stop herself from crying, but it didn’t matter; no one here would notice. She waited. She didn’t attempt to touch Chase in his youthful frenzy; she didn’t attempt to speak to him, to talk him out of the attempts.

  She had no idea how time passed in the realm of the dead, and even if she had, she wasn’t certain it would have mattered.

  Only when he had exhausted the reserves that drove him, only when he had collapsed on the ground at the knees of his mother and sister, did she attempt to remind him that she was here at all.

  “Chase.”

  He didn’t look up.

  She wanted to apologize—that came naturally to a Hall. She didn’t. Instead, quietly, she said, “The first time I went to the graveyard after the funeral was the hardest. Nathan wasn’t there. I went at night because no one else would be there either. Just me.” She hesitated, because Chase hadn’t moved, and she felt that comparing the two losses was wrong.

  She had no other way to reach him. “He wasn’t there. Of course he wasn’t. His body was, and that shouldn’t have made a difference.” Her voice dropped. “And it didn’t, not then. Nathan wasn’t there. My loss was. My grief. Maybe even a little anger. I spoke to him.” She had never said this to anyone before. Not even Nathan. “I spoke. I wanted him to hear me. I wanted him to know that he would never be forgotten. That he had been loved.

  “There was no answer. Of course there wasn’t.”

  Chase was silent.

  “I believed the dead don’t care. Until Eric arrived, I believed it. I didn’t want to believe it.” She began to move as she spoke. She knelt, briefly, in front of the woman she assumed was his mother; she shifted her position to study the terrified, weeping face of his sister. Younger sister, clearly. Her hair wasn’t the red that Chase’s, even cropped so close to his skull, was. “I wanted
to believe that the dead were there, that they were waiting, that they watched. That they would know.”

  She stood, raising her voice as she headed through the tableau of Queen and knights to the splayed body of Chase’s father. She knelt by his side. Even captured like a 3D picture, the lack of life was pronounced, underlined. In this memory, Chase’s father had already been killed. His face, slack and open-eyed, was broken, literally broken. She tried to imagine what he had looked like in life and failed. She forced herself to try again. While she did, she kept speaking, although Chase had given no hint that he was listening.

  “By the time I knew that that wish had been granted, I understood that even if the dead linger, they don’t linger by their graves. Graveyards hold bodies or ashes but none of the life that defined the person. They’re not meant for the dead. In a strange way, they’re meant for the living. They’re a place where loss is acknowledged, is meant to be acknowledged.

  “Do you ever visit their graves?”

  Chase was silent. But in silence he rose. Emma dared a glance at him, and her eyes remained on his hands, which were clenched fists. He shook his head. No.

  Giving Chase advice was no part of whatever friendship they had. Emma had come as close as she could. She was surprised when Chase chose to join her.

  • • •

  Chase wondered what the dead saw when they looked at Emma Hall. She stood inches away from his father’s corpse. He wouldn’t have been surprised to find her weeping; she had a soft heart. A stupidly, enragingly soft heart.

  There were no tears on her face when she turned toward him. She was pale, her lips were set, her eyes—her eyes almost reminded him of his own, not in color, but in expression. Was she angry?

  Yes, he thought. But not at him. What she offered him was probably pity. He hated that. He didn’t want it. He opened his mouth to say as much—with more words for color—but her words finally penetrated the miasma of his anger and, yes, his terror.

  She was right. Of course she was right. They were dead and would remain dead. She couldn’t save them—no one could. No one could. Thinking it, he turned again to where his mother and sister knelt. He both knew and refused to know; he believed and refused to believe.

  He really had despised Emma. Oh, and feared her. Her life had been so easy, compared to his. Her loss had been pathetic. If his parents had died in a car accident and not like this, he’d be grateful. He had wanted her to see his life. He had wanted her to know it. He had wanted her to suffer his losses because then—

  Then she wouldn’t be Emma Hall, anymore. Maybe she’d be like Chase.

  Death is death. He grimaced. He’d said that before, to himself. He’d said it to others. It was true. Dead was dead. But dying was not death.

  Emma could content herself with the fact that Nathan’s death was not on her hands. He turned to face her again and was surprised to see her hands behind her back. Her eyes were dry, her expression remote. He wasn’t surprised when she began to speak, although everything about her implied a stiff silence.

  “You didn’t kill your family.”

  “You didn’t kill Nathan.”

  She smiled. It was . . . not a happy smile. “No? Had you met the Queen of the Dead before she came here?” Her arm swept out to encompass the road, the house.

  Here, at the heart of the destruction of his life, Chase was not going to offer Emma comfort. He was raw with death, with loss, with the curse of helplessness. He had nothing left for a teenage Necromancer. He shook his head. She waited. “No. No one in my family seemed to recognize her either.”

  “She would have come here no matter what you did?”

  He nodded. Grudging it.

  “Nothing you did would have changed that?”

  “How the hell am I supposed to know?” This was not the direction his thoughts took when he was forced to relive these events.

  She waited. She waited until he said,” . . . No.”

  “The day Nathan died.” She stopped. Blinked.

  To his own surprise, Chase said, “You don’t have to talk about it.” He hadn’t meant to say anything, but he was now afraid Emma would cry, and he’d never been good with tears.

  “The day he died,” she continued, not crying, “he was on his way to see me.”

  It was Chase’s turn to fall silent.

  “He was coming to my house. Coming to pick me up. I liked it when he drove.” She looked down, to the wreckage of Chase’s father, as if it would somehow steady her.

  Death is death. But he couldn’t bring himself to say it out loud because right now, he didn’t believe it. He’d find belief again later. Maybe.

  “I want to go back in time. I want to go back in time and cancel on him. I’d start a big argument if it’d help. I want to go back and tell him to stay home. He was coming to see me. And if he hadn’t, he wouldn’t be dead.” She swallowed. She did not cry. “I know I didn’t kill him. I know it. But I also know he died because he was coming to me.

  “His death was so much better than this. And it was so much worse. Better, because he didn’t have a lot of time to be terrified. Worse because—” She shook her head. “It was a lot of metal crushing a lot of metal, and he—”

  “Emma, stop.”

  “Nothing you could have done—in reality, not in daydream—would have changed what happened here that night. Nothing. Even if you were the Chase Loern you are now, it wouldn’t have changed a thing. There were five Necromancers and the Queen.

  “Me? I could have made one phone call. And you know? I’m good at phone calls. My mother says I spend half my waking life on the phone. There is nothing about a phone call I couldn’t handle. I don’t have to be a Necromancer. I don’t have to be the Queen of the Dead. Do you understand? There’s nothing you could have done to save your family—and everything I could have done to save Nathan.”

  • • •

  Chase stared at her as if he’d never seen her before. Or as if she had sprouted two extra heads.

  The landscape in which they stood began to fade. It was a slow process. The Necromancers vanished first, leaving only their Queen behind, standing in the center of the bodies—dead and living—of Chase’s family. The gravel road dropped out from beneath her feet; the grass, dark with night, sunk into the gray fog. In the distance, he could just make out the corpse of the dog before the fog rolled over it.

  Chase changed as well. His face took on the subtle scars that she knew; his hair shortened into the tight crop he’d adopted after fire had burned patches in the greater length. His clothing changed as well; he wore the studded leather jacket that Amy despised volubly.

  Without thought, he lifted both of his hands; with more thought, and more hesitation, she placed hers in them.

  The land of the dead reasserted itself completely.

  “You know you’re being stupid, right?” Chase asked.

  Emma smiled. Or tried to. “I’m being stupid?”

  “I’ve never claimed to be smart.” He tightened his grip on her hands. Exhaled. “There are no graves. Ernest found me. I didn’t go back, didn’t try to go back, for a year. When I did, I looked for graves. Believe that I looked. There were no graves. There are no graves. My entire family disappeared without a trace. The house was empty.”

  She didn’t ask him if he had tried to go back to it. She doubted very much that he had. “You had friends?”

  “Hard to believe?”

  She shook her head.

  “I guess not. You’re friends with Amy.”

  The smile that pulled from her was more genuine. “She’s a good friend. Just . . . harsh.”

  “She might be—she’s never going to consider me a friend.”

  “Do any of your friends know you’re still alive?”

  Chase shook his head. “You’ve seen what happens to friends of potential Necromancers. Imagi
ne how much worse it would be if they were friends of hunters.”

  “And you had no other family?”

  He shrugged. She’d opened up. She’d given him her guilt—and inasmuch as guilt was a gift, he accepted it. Her hands tightened on his just before he withdrew them. “An aunt. Two uncles. Grandparents. Some cousins. And no, before you ask, none of them know I’m alive, either.”

  She didn’t ask why. She thought she understood.

  She was wrong.

  He did not want to be here. Then again, he never did. “Even if I thought they’d be safe, what could I say? When they ask me why I’m still alive, what excuses do I make? How do I stand there and tell them that their children or their brother or their sister are dead when I’m not?” His voice had risen, which was strange given just how hard it had become to force air through his closing throat.

  Chase, shaking with something that was like rage if you didn’t look too closely, was rooted to the spot by the strength of Emma’s grip. No, not Emma’s. No matter how tightly she clung to his hands, it would be trivial to force her to let go.

  He wasn’t even trying.

  More silence.

  This time, when it was broken, it was not broken by Emma.

  It was almost like hearing his own voice; for one moment, he thought it was. Most of what he’d just told Emma he’d never spoken out loud. He recognized his pain, his loss, his own hatred—and he understood then that if it had guided his life, if it had been aimed at Necromancers and the woman who had ruled them, it had also always been turned inward.

  “It was not your fault. It was not your fault.”

  THE PROCESSION COMES, instantly, to a halt.

  The air is cold, the sky is clear and merciless. It sees what Reyna sees. She lifts an arm; the streets empty. The dead vanish almost instantly; the living—and there are few—take time. Reyna wanted an audience. She wanted witnesses.

  This was to be her moment.

  She looks at Eric’s pale, pale face; he might be carved of alabaster as he stands in the center of the street. Her hand is on his arm; she withdraws it. She wonders—for one brief second—why she is here.