The Reckoning

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.”

“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.