Touch by Michelle Sagara Read Free Book Online Page A

Allison and Emma had never had a fight;
     they’d had a few. But fighting wasn’t what they did. Allison could see the direction
     this conversation might take. She wanted to avoid it.
    “Why doesn’t she want to know?” Emma almost demanded.
    “Is she pretending she never saw him?”
    Emma frowned. “More or less. She won’t out and out deny it. She just won’t talk. It’s
     like—like she doesn’t care. Like she doesn’t
want
to see him.” She shoved her hand—the one that wasn’t holding Petal’s leash—into her
     pocket and lowered her chin against the wind, in a frustrated, moody silence.
    “She doesn’t know about the dead.” Allison spoke because the silence was growing uncomfortable.
     Most silences with Emma were peaceful. This wasn’t. Allison had known her for long
     enough to pick up on the difference. “She doesn’t know why she saw her husband. You
     know. I know. And honestly, Em? Sometimes even I find it disturbing.”
    “But—if she listened. If she listened to me, she could
talk
to my dad. He’s right there, Ally. He still keeps an eye on both of us.”
    “Have you asked your dad?”
    Emma was silent. It was still not the good silence. Petal made enough noise for two.
     Toronto had a
lot
of garbage-raiding raccoons.
    “Do you know what I would have done?” Emma asked.
    Allison looked at her best friend’s face in the streetlight. The outer shell of socially
     adept, polite Emma had cracked.
    “I would have done
anything
. If it’d been me—if I’d been my mother and I’d seen Nathan at the hospital—I would
     have done anything just to be able to talk to him again.”
    “Em, your dad died eight years ago.”
    “And that’s all it takes to forget him? Eight years? He wasn’t just a grade school
     crush, Ally. He was her husband. It’s been eight years for me, too, but
I
wanted to see him. I wanted to talk to him again.”
    When a conversation was going straight downhill, you could still control your descent.
     You could just stop talking. Going off-map sometimes revealed surprising cliffs in
     the conversational landscape. Allison felt the edge of one beneath her feet. She wasn’t
     certain how steep the drop would be.
    “He’s dead. Even if your mother could talk to him again, he’d still be dead. She can’t
     touch him without freezing. She can’t talk to him without you. If you’re there, she
     can’t say any of the personal stuff.”
    “It would still be better than nothing.”
    Allison wasn’t so certain.
    * * *
    “Chase, pay attention.”
    Chase frowned. He didn’t argue; Eric was right. He wasn’t paying attention. Not to
     the streets and the dwindling stream of people getting in the way of their stakeout.
     Not to the cars that were parking on the street, and not to the ones that had slowed
     to leisurely crawls in search of parking.
    He wore three rings, all etched with symbols; one was solid silver, and two had iron
     cores. He passed his hand through the air; nothing wavered. There was no visible distortion.
     He slid his phone out of his pocket.
    “What’s with you?”
    “Checking to make sure you got the right address.” He slid the phone back into his
     jacket pocket, because nothing had changed. They’d been sent to midtown to check out
     two addresses. “We’re up,” he added, as the door to the apartment building swung open.
    * * *
    There were multiple ways to get into a building. Chase had been an electrician, an
     apprentice plumber, a cable technician, a phone technician—in short, one of the invisible
     people who kept things running. It was easiest, when necessary. In countries like
     this, it was mostly necessary. Money opened doors—but only figurative ones.
    He vastly preferred to hunt—and kill—Necromancers in the streets of the city. Any
     city. Buildings were too easy to trap, too easy to bug, too easy to monitor. The Queen
     of the Dead didn’t care much for modern life—and modern life was therefore their