The Reckoning

And the one who’ll send him back. Now!

I squeezed my eyes shut and imagined the man, a vague figure in a suit. I imagined setting his soul free, sending up an apology with it, releasing him-

“Good,” Tori whispered beside me. “It’s stopped moving. It’s-No, wait. Keep going. Keep-Okay, it stopped.” A pause. “Still stopped.” Her voice was breathless with relief. “You did it.”

Maybe so, but I didn’t open my eyes to check. As Tori went to assess the situation, I kept releasing spirits, picturing people in suits, people in dresses, people of all ages, animal spirits, spirits of every kind; and while I did, I listened, not just for the shouts and shrieks of the living, but the thumps and cracks and scratches of the living dead.

When I opened my eyes, Tori was coming along a path toward me, keeping back from the edge of the crevasse. People lined both sides now, eyeing it warily, waiting for the earth to move. But it didn’t.

“The dead are dead again,” Tori murmured as she came up beside me. “Everything’s quiet.”

Margaret stood along the chasm with the others. When I called to her, she turned slowly, eyes meeting mine, and in them I saw fear. No, not fear. Horror and revulsion.

You aren’t like her. She sees that now, what you are, what you can do, and it scares her. Scares and disgusts.

She waved us back to the car, but didn’t move herself, like she couldn’t bear to walk with me.

“Stupid bitch,” Tori muttered. “Oh, let’s take the necromancer with superpowers to the cemetery. Of course you aren’t going to raise the dead, you silly girl.”

“I’d say I showed her, but I really would have rather not.”

Tori’s laugh quavered. “We should probably get out of here before anyone starts asking questions.”

“Not too fast,” I said. “We don’t want to look like we’re ru

“Right.”

As we walked, we gawked-it would seem weird if we didn’t. We gaped at the crevasse. We squinted up at the sky. We pointed at the fallen casket and whispered, all the while walking as fast as we dared, trying to look like we were as shocked and confused as everyone else.

“Girls!” a man called. “Hold on.”

I turned slowly and saw a middle-aged man bearing down on us. I tried to get Margaret’s attention, tell her we might have trouble, but she was looking the other way, leaving us to deal with it.

Thirteen

“ARE 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.”