Kelley Armstrong - The Reckoning

“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.

TORI 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.”