“Yes, thank you.” The Hunter stepped back, into the dirt street and the full blow of the mid-morning sun. Chase followed with reluctance. “I understand.”
“Sir?” The policeman reached out, but didn’t leave the building’s shadow. “We can help—”
“Which way did you say she went?” The Hunter dropped his cigarette and snuffed it into the dust with the heel of his boot.
The young man pointed.
“There, you’ve helped.” With that, the Hunter spun and marched to his car, muttering about who was going to poke their nose into his business next. The car was an old, clunky thing that drunk down petrol and didn’t even have air-conditioning. But it got them out of the small town soon enough.
The Hunter drove in silence, following the road, eyes intent. Chase waited until the older man gave a deep sigh. “A woman.”
Chase looked at him but did not ask. Whatever the Hunter wanted him to know, the Hunter would say.
Chase had learned the Hunter’s quirks quickly, after the weathered, scowling man had taken him away from family and friends. Even got him out of school. All his talk about destiny and the struggle for the future of mankind had impressed his parents well enough. Must have worked on his teachers too.
After two months following the guy around, it would be nice if it had rubbed off on Chase. Would have made things a whole lot easier. But as it was, he couldn’t shake the feeling that this apprenticeship was all one big mistake.
“Not many women Necromancers, not many at all.” With one hand the Hunter riffled through the glove box and found a glass bottle of lukewarm water. He tossed it into the boy’s lap without looking. “Drink, it’s hot out here. Easy to get too dry.”
Chase obeyed, wrinkling his nose at the stifled taste.
“They just don’t have it in them, the need for control that drives a man to raise the dead.” He shook his head as the boy offered the bottle of water. “No, you don’t see many women Necromancers at all, let alone one who would raise so many, so indiscriminately. It doesn’t make sense.”
Dry, orange earth sped along beneath them. Thin trees, bent and drooping, spotted the side of the road. At one point a small flock of emus ran in the distance. Chase watched the sheer monotony of it all and tried not to breathe too loudly. Not while the Hunter was thinking.
“Why would she have them follow her? She’s raised cities and left them there, so why are they following her now? It makes no sense.”
The Hunter braked suddenly and turned off the road. The movement threw Chase against the window, and as he rubbed the bump forming on his forehead, he strained to look out the back. Half a kangaroo hopped beside the trunk of a termite-hollowed tree. Wire wrapped around its tail and snagged on the bark.
It was not struggling to hop along the road, instead it headed into the bush. The way the Hunter was driving. Not on any path, over fallen logs, and hard, cracking dirt.
“No sense at all.”
He hasn’t been dead that long, but it’s hard to recognize him. Guess that’s what the car did. Took off most of his face, and his body doesn’t look the same either. It’s missing something in his back that made him stand straight, so he slouches to the side. His remaining green eye has gone cloudy.
He doesn’t know me.
The old woman sits me in a chair and pushes a plate of rock cakes at me. I just stare at him. He stands at the doorway, hands still raised where he had been holding my shoulders, eye looking straight ahead.
“Eat something, dearie. You’re looking a little thin.”
Finally, I turn to glare at her. Rock cakes and their china plate shatter as I knock them from the table. “Bitch.”
“Now, now.” The old woman smiles, one hand fiddles with a large silver ring on a knobbly finger. “You shouldn’t be speaking to me like that, should you? Or haven’t you learned yet?”
I pull back, fold in on myself like she’s slapped me.
“Have you found what you were looking for?” She collects a small, round stone and strokes it. I feel my back straighten, my knees draw together like a good, polite girl. A great shudder runs through me.
“No. But you know that.” I want to turn around, to point. So I do, but only once she’s put down the stone. “You had him all along.”
The old woman nods. “Convenient, wouldn’t you say?”
“Why would you do that?”
She shakes her head. “Maybe you haven’t learnt anything after all. You came into my house, dearie. You made demands like you owned the place, didn’t you?”
When I don’t respond she glances at the white stone. I nod, but don’t trust myself to speak. I just don’t seem to say the right things. “A dead husband’s quite an ask, even for an old witch like me.”
She cackles her laugh. “You can’t have expected it for free.”
I look down at my knees. The memory is hazy, mixed with alcohol and grief, and dwarfed by weeks of shuffling undead. I remember stumbling up front stairs, somewhat less rundown than the entrance to this house. Slamming an almost empty bottle of vodka—God, I can’t even remember if it had a flavor—on the table. Shouting at her, crying at her. Her little, twisted smile. Yes, I remember that.
She gave me a stone, pretty, shaped like a rose but black. And then she asked her price.
“You knew I couldn’t give it to you.” A life for a life, I guess. But a baby? And someone else’s baby at that, because I had none of my own, and she wasn’t willing to take the risk.
Her eyes sharpen and pin me down like a butterfly on a board. “It was too late by then.” She is disgusted by me; I can see it in the wrinkling of her nose. “And you still used my stone.”
I swallow, and for a second consider standing up. How far would I get if I tipped up the chair and ran for the kitchen door? Before she had time to pick up one of her damned stones?
She collects a stick from the table and runs it over her weathered palm.
I don’t bother, what’s left to fight for anyway? “Yes.” My shoulders sag forward, a little more with each word. “I took it to his grave. I placed it there, like you said. Planted it into the earth, as deep as I could dig. But he didn’t come out. I waited, I waited until they surrounded me and I couldn’t breathe for the smell.” I had pushed my way through a cemetery’s worth of dead to get out of that place, and not even the cold sea spray coming up from the cliffs could clean away the stench. They had watched me, empty eye sockets, sagging skin and gaping, grinning mouths. They followed until I came to the road, until I passed shops and people. Then . . . then they had started to feed.
But never on me.
“There is always a price.”
“My husband had just died, I was drunk—”
She snorts, very unladylike. “Doesn’t give you the right to steal from me.” She looks me up and down, out of the corner of her eye. “So you’ve been walking since then? Coming all the way out here, trying to get away from everyone?”
“Trying to save them.” My mouth tastes like orange dust.
“How very noble.” Sounding bored, she pushes away from the table. Perfume drapes over me as she rests her cold hand on my head. “I wonder how many people died, before you thought to do that.”
She steps back. I raise my head, slowly. Open my eyes and turn to her. Have I been crying? The world between us, between me and him, is wavering.
“Now I just have to decide.” She folds the last flap of a velvet cloth over her stones and places them gently in a white handbag with a faux-gold clip. “If I want to keep him.”