Grave

by Michelle Sagara

  Emma.

  “Don’t you use that tone with the girl,” his mother said, before Emma could even think of answering.

  Silence. Surprise.

  She is not controlling you. It was a statement with a hint of question at the end.

  “What do you think?”

  I think I do not understand Emma Hall. You are bound to her. There is at least one other.

  Margaret said nothing.

  “I told the girl she’ll need more.”

  She will. But she does not have the time. I very much fear that Reyna will do to Eric what was done to me.

  “At least then she’d finally have to admit that he’s dead.” Cold, harsh words.

  • • •

  Eric had been dead long before Reyna had become the Queen of the Dead. He’d been dead for centuries, possibly longer. She had built this place for Eric; it was to be their home. She knew this without examining any of Scoros’ memories—or her memories of them.

  How fitting, then, that this was built of the dead; it was built for the dead. Grief and loss and rage and helplessness had entombed a girl scarcely younger than Emma. All of those things, Emma thought, but also a bitter, terrible hope.

  She understood it so well—and hated herself for the understanding—because the door opened and before anyone could think to panic, although both Chase and Ernest were suddenly armed, Nathan ran in.

  HE TURNS TO SHUT THE DOOR BEHIND HIM. There are no bolts or he’d bolt it, for all the good that would do. If the Queen of the Dead seeks these chambers, nothing will prevent her entry. Nothing.

  And he cares now because he sees Emma. She glows so brightly; she is the only thing he sees for one long breath. He is across the room, he is almost at her side, before thought catches up with action. He stops, then, lowering arms he had no intention of raising.

  They’re all here. Michael, Ally, Amy. The only thing that’s missing is the dog. He almost asks. He doesn’t. Emma has turned to face him. She is frozen but burning. He almost can’t see her expression. But when she moves, he doesn’t need to see it.

  He has lowered his arms, and he keeps them by his sides. He wanted—wants—to hold her. But he can’t. Not like this. Maybe she doesn’t see what he is now. Maybe she doesn’t understand. He knows he can touch her and she will not freeze. He will even feel the contact in some fashion.

  But she can see the dead. She’s sensitive to their presence. And he cannot believe that if she holds him, she won’t see what now comprises his body. The dead, the weeping dead, are what she would be holding; he doubts that her actual touch can reach him at all. He wonders if it will help the four who are bound and trapped and almost voiceless.

  She sees him pull up short. She moves.

  He raises a hand, palm out, and she stops. Her eyes widen, her brows drawing briefly together in hurt surprise. He hates it.

  “I can’t touch you,” he tells her, trying—and failing—to keep his voice steady.

  “You have—”

  “I have a body, yes. But Em—it’s not mine. It’s made of . . .” He really does want to hold her. He knows the look on her face. He watches it transform as she does what she always did: finishes the thought so he doesn’t have to put it into words.

  “It’s made of the dead.”

  He nods. “I can control the body almost as if it were actually real. I’m told it even bleeds. But—” He inhales, exhales. “It wouldn’t be me who’d be holding you.”

  “I don’t suppose they volunteered, either.”

  He shudders. It was in this room that he watched the Queen create the cage that houses him. “Em—what are you doing here? How did you get here?” And then, before she can answer, he asks the only question that really matters. “Can you get back home?”

  “Probably.”

  He doesn’t believe her. He can’t. Being dead doesn’t change the fact that he knows her. It’s only been a couple of months—and an eternity. If she’s changed in that time, she hasn’t changed enough to make her doubt invisible. “How?”

  “That’s Ernest’s job,” she replies. “We only have one job, now.” But she looks at him.

  And of course he knows what she doesn’t say. He knows what that job is. He wants to tell her that it’s impossible for her. He knows it’s impossible. Power isn’t knowledge. Knowledge is power. Emma lacks knowledge. But looking at her with the eyes of the dead—his own eyes now and forevermore—he can’t believe it. She is a light, a fire, to equal the Queen’s—the only such light in the citadel.

  The only such light, Nathan suspects, in the world.

  “Where is the Queen?”

  “She’s in the streets outside the citadel, with Eric. They may be arguing. She sent everyone away—dead or living.”

  “Will Eric kill her?” It is a harsh question; it is therefore not Emma’s. Nathan’s eyes glance off Chase’s face. He’s surprised. Ally is beside him, under his right arm, and the question didn’t even make her flinch.

  Nathan can’t answer because he doesn’t know. He knows that in Eric’s position, he would falter—but he can’t conceive of Emma as the Queen of the Dead. If she were?

  If that’s what she must become?

  MICHAEL STARED AT NATHAN. So did Chase. Amy, never one for expressions of shock, nodded once, grimly, before her gaze moved on. It came to rest on Emma. No one did judgment as well as Amy Snitman. Amy Snitman could make a test out of anything—but it was easier for Amy; she never failed. She wasn’t judging yet, but Emma knew this was a test.

  Of course it was. Nathan was here. Nathan looked like Nathan. He was, to her eyes, alive. Even his eyes appeared almost brown. He was wearing very strange clothing, and his hair looked almost ridiculous, but none of that mattered.

  She tried to see him as she saw the dead. She closed her eyes. Why had she never tried this with Eric?

  “Em.” Ally’s voice. And Nathan’s, overlapping it, maybe half a second behind. Emma had just spent a subjective lifetime trapped behind Scoros’ eyes. She’d wondered, until Nathan opened that door, whether or not she would ever be just Emma Hall again.

  The answer was yes.

  Emma had loved Nathan, still loved him, still dreamed of spending her life in his company and the accepting warmth of his many silences. She wanted nothing as much as she wanted that. She wanted Nathan back.

  It was a good dream. It had been the best dream. And it was time to wake up, to live—forever—without it. What was left was what-if, and she’d done that. She would probably continue to do that, in the quiet moments when she came face to face with her loneliness and the empty space where Nathan had once stood.

  In the worst and the darkest of moments, she had wanted to die. Just . . . die. She had never had the courage to kill herself, and, in truth, death and suicide were not the same. Even if they had been, she couldn’t imagine deliberately doing to her mother, and the friends who needed her, what Nathan’s accidental death had done to his.

  But in daydream, death was different. It wasn’t about the loss other people would feel or suffer. It wasn’t about the pain she would cause.

  It was about the pain she would no longer feel—because if she were dead, it would be over. She would never need to feel loss again. She would never have to confront the emptiness, the black hole, that had once been filled by Nathan.

  She had been lucky, she realized, standing an arm’s length away from him. She had been able to see him again, to speak with him again, to tell him all the things that she couldn’t tell his corpse. His mother hadn’t even had that.

  She had been able to hear him tell her, again, that he loved her. But that was all she could have. It wasn’t what she wanted. It wasn’t enough. But it had to be. More was impossible.

  Loving her, not loving her, wanting her, not wanting her—they were all in the past. They were etched in her heart and her mi
nd. They turned joy into pain, over and over again. They turned love into pain. She wasn’t certain she would ever love anyone again—not the way she loved Nathan.

  She wanted love to last forever.

  And this one could—but it could never grow and change. It could no longer sustain her. It could no longer sustain Nathan.

  Nathan was dead.

  She exhaled—she had been holding her breath. With her eyes closed, she could see Nathan clearly. He was wearing the clothing he’d been wearing the day he died—the day he was coming to see her. To pick her up. To take her away from the rest of her life. She’d loved, and still loved, that life—but it was the space they created when they were together that had given her the deepest joy.

  And that was lost to death as well. Lost to Emma. She held out one hand.

  He shook his head, but she didn’t lower that hand.

  “I see it,” she told him. “I see it, now.”

  “See what?”

  “The binding,” she whispered. And she did. It was a slender, golden chain that pulsed with a faint light—as if it were a stretched, attenuated heart. It traveled away from Nathan, into the gray; she couldn’t see the other end of it.

  “Em—”

  “Let me do this one thing.” She couldn’t tell herself that she was doing this for Nathan. She was doing it for herself. If she couldn’t have Nathan back, if she couldn’t have what had been irrevocably lost, she’d be damned if she’d let the Queen of the Dead have what was left.

  He hesitated, his expression drawn; she realized she must be crying—and she didn’t care. Just this once, it didn’t matter. What were tears, after all, but the overflowing of pain when there was just too much of it for one person to contain?

  “I don’t want to touch you,” he said.

  “Yes, you do. You just don’t want them to touch me in your place.”

  “Can you—can you see them?”

  She couldn’t. The only thing she could see with closed eyes was Nathan. She didn’t understand the magic of the Queen’s resurrection. But she was certain that she could reach the dead, if they were sentient, if they were somehow present.

  She was certain of that if nothing else.

  She smiled. She forced herself to smile. He knew, of course. He winced at her expression. “People tell you that love doesn’t die as long as someone remembers,” she said.

  “I always thought that was bullshit.”

  She laughed, a blend of genuine amusement and endless loss. “Me too. Especially after you died. But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if it’s bullshit. It doesn’t matter if love dies with death or if it lasts for eternity. What we had was special, but it’s over.”

  “Em—”

  “And I don’t want it to be over. I never, ever wanted that. But it is, Nathan. There’s only one thing I can do for you.” She opened her palm. Her arm was steady. “There’s only one thing I can do for me.”

  He drifted closer, as if pulled by main force. Emma hadn’t moved. “I don’t want to let you go,” she whispered.

  He closed the distance, then. He placed his hand in hers. There, here, it didn’t matter. She felt the warmth of his palm as it met hers—but she felt the ice, too. With her free hand, she reached for the golden filament, and as she’d done before, she snapped it.

  It broke cleanly; there was no resistance at all.

  She wanted to hold him. No, that was wrong. She wanted to be held. She wanted to lean into his chest, seek comfort and harbor inside the curve of his arms, rest her forehead against his shoulder. She’d done that before.

  She’d never do it again, and never was almost too much. But too much didn’t matter. Death was. It just was.

  And she understood his hesitation. She could hear—or feel—something that was not quite Nathan in the curve of a palm that mimicked his hand almost perfectly. She understood why he hadn’t opened his arms to her, or touched her at all until she’d practically begged.

  She thought about Merrick Longland. If he had not told her that the body he’d been granted was not actual flesh, that the spirit it now contained was still, and always, dead, would she have believed it? It felt like life.

  Without thought, she stepped into Nathan; without thought, he enclosed her in his arms. He said nothing. Neither did she.

  “Em,” Ally said, at a great remove.

  Emma couldn’t talk. Not while she listened, while she struggled to listen. In his arms, surrounded by him, she could hear attenuated voices more clearly—but not without effort; it took effort. Concentration. She had to try to hear them, and she thought she might never have tried at all if she hadn’t known.

  She wasn’t in Nathan’s arms, now. She knew it. But they felt like his arms. She was certain that if he kissed her now, his lips would feel like his lips. But they weren’t, and wouldn’t be, and she shivered, thinking about it.

  She listened, as she had first listened when they had arrived in a deserted building. And she heard what she had heard then—but it was weaker, softer.

  “Emma?”

  She grimaced. “Michael, Ally—I need you to be quiet for now. I’m trying to hear the voices of the very quiet dead.”

  “Why?” Michael asked.

  “Because Nathan’s body isn’t a body, not like ours. It’s made—it’s made of the dead, like the floor in the townhouse.”

  “You want to free them?”

  “Yes.” One word. A single word.

  “Nathan?”

  “Yes,” Nathan replied. “I want Emma to free them, too.” The borrowed arms tightened, briefly, around Emma. “But—there’s almost nothing left of them, and Emma can’t hear them if there’s any other voice.”

  Silence then.

  HE HASN’T LIED TO EMMA. He won’t.

  But in his arms—in the arms that are not his but look exactly like the arms that once were—she feels like Emma Hall. He remembers the first time he kissed her. He remembers the first time he slid an arm around her shoulder; he remembers the first time he held her. He remembers the nervous desire, the elation, the quiet. He remembers his own heartbeat, and he can hear it now.

  He can hold her. He could kiss her. He doesn’t know what that would feel like, but he suspects it would feel the same.

  He’s no longer certain he would be aware of the cost of it, because in her arms, he can’t hear the dead at all. Their voices are silent, mute; their weeping has banked. And maybe, he tells himself, this is what they want, as well. They want to touch Emma. They want to be with Emma. They want to bask in the warmth of her light, because in that light, they are no longer alone.

  It’s what he wants.

  It’s what he wants more than he’s ever wanted anything.

  If he could ask them, if he could be certain—but no. No. He is dead. He’s dead, and this is not where he should be, because Emma will never live if he’s with her. Emma will never forget.

  He shakes his head and then kisses the top of hers. He’s certain Emma will never forget him. He’s certain his mother will never forget him. None of his friends will forget, either. He’s not sure why that matters now. He’s not, after a moment, certain that it does.

  But he thinks he would give the gift of forgetfulness to his mother, at least, if he had the choice—because then her pain would stop.

  “It’s not just pain,” she whispers. Her voice is so much a whisper it’s hard to catch the aural edges of individual syllables.

  “You haven’t seen her.”

  “I’ve been her, though, in my own way. You gave me so much. You made me happy. And I was happy in a way I’ve never been happy before. I wanted it to last forever. I was—I am—greedy. I wouldn’t feel this pain, and neither would your mother, if you’d never existed at all.”

  “And sometimes that would be the better option?”

  She nods
. She doesn’t lie to him. “I know what happiness is now. I can’t unknow it. I’m afraid I’ll never be happy again.”

  He nods. He knows. But unhappiness is not what he wants for Emma. It’s never been what he’s wanted. It’s not what he wants for himself, either. He looks past Emma, through the walls of the citadel, through the emptiness that must be sky beyond it, and he knows what he does want.

  He wants to leave, because there is no place for him here. He knows—as the dead know—where home is. He knows that he cannot reach it. He knows that Emma is the next best thing—and that’s a terrible thing to think.

  But he feels the warmth of her, the warmth of her light—a light she can’t see herself. And he feels it more strongly as the minutes pass; he feels it become heat but not fire. It does not burn. It does not consume.

  And he understands why he feels it so clearly, so suddenly: Emma is unmaking his body even as she stands in his arms, pressed against his chest, her head bowed, crying. She is setting them free: the four who were called, the four who struggled, the four who were consumed. She is unraveling what was built.

  Soon he will not be able to hold her. Or, he will, but he’ll suck the warmth from her, numb her, freeze her skin.

  He knows that the four didn’t volunteer. He knows they had no choice. He knows, but he thanks them anyway. She untangles them all at once in a flurry of gray, the whole separating instantly into four distinct entities.

  They see her, of course. Nathan can see them clearly: two girls, two boys; their mouths work, but their voices are so quiet even he can’t hear them.

  Emma can. He can see, from her expression, that their voices reach her. He can see that she’s been crying, that she might still be crying, and that it doesn’t matter, now.

  But he hears what she says, and if he could close his eyes, he would. She thanks them. She apologizes for what was done to them—as if it were done for her or somehow at her request—and she thanks them.

  And then she tells them to go. To go and to wait.

  She intends to open the door.