Hold Me Closer, Necromancer - Lish McBride [33]
Douglas sighed. “Yes. Yes, you are like me.” He scanned the crowd, which was thinning out a little as the weather continued to lean toward the worse. “Look at me, Sam.”
“I am looking at you.”
“Not with your eyes.” He turned to me and grabbed my chin. His hands were cold and dry, and I didn’t like them on my skin one bit. “Now, close your eyes.”
I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to, but I didn’t have another option.
“Now look.” He let go of my chin.
Douglas’s order didn’t make any sense at all. And yet, my mind automatically obeyed. Something in my head opened up and spilled out, which sounds gross, but it wasn’t. Whatever had just happened felt good, like my mind was a man stretching after a long plane ride cramped in a seat where a kid was kicking him from behind. My sight poured out and spread. I could see, really see, like echolocation but with a boost. I cast around with it. I saw a kid walk past me with a balloon; the balloon was a bare outline, but the kid was a walking kaleidoscope of colors. His father held his hand, and I could see him too, but his colors didn’t shift as much as the child’s did. The father’s color bled slowly from one to the next and with less diversity. I wondered what that meant.
My eyes still closed, I turned my head to the right. The flowers and bushes burned green tinged with orange, and the pandas shifted colors like the kid with the balloon. Wait. Not all the pandas.
“There’s something wrong with one of the pandas,” I said, eyes still closed. I watched, but the panda didn’t shift colors at all. He was cast entirely in shadow except for one small spark of incandescent blue in the upper left of his chest. There’s no way that could be a good thing. Next to the flowers, the bushes, the passing people, the panda looked…wrong. Like a tear, an empty hole into space.
“Yes,” Douglas said. “I know.”
My head turned toward Douglas, like in a horror movie. You shout at the screen, “Don’t look! Run!” but no one ever listens. Douglas didn’t look like the panda, but I could tell they were linked to each other. Douglas glowed that same icy blue, but instead of all that empty dark space, his blue was broken up with shifting, swirling lines of blacks, grays, silvers. What the hell?
I felt like I might throw up if I kept looking, so I tore my vision away and put my head in my hands to re orient and slow things down—to regain myself. Big freaking mistake. My hands, my arms, my legs, were all coated in that blue, like a layer of radioactive dust. My gut tightened and my jaw clenched. Why wasn’t I like all the other freaky tie-dye people who kept walking past? Where were my other colors? Once past that initial layer of blue, there was nothing. Not even the darkness. Just a hazy blur that blocked out the colors of the bench and the flowers around me. Like the panda, it felt wrong. Not the same kind of wrong, but wrong nonetheless.
I opened my eyes. Light, colors, sound, all came back in a blaring wave. My head hurt from the sudden onslaught, and I felt dizzy. I never wanted to close my eyes again.
“What just happened?” I kept my gaze directed toward the ground while I tried to regain myself.
“You looked into the heart of things, into the pulse of the world.”
I bit back a retort. Telling Douglas that he sounded like the deep-voiced announcer from a daytime soap opera wouldn’t help anyone.
“Why don’t I look like everyone else?” I asked.
“Because you’re not like everyone else, Sam. Necromancers are linked to death. The underworld, the spirit world, whichever particular appellation you choose to give it, you are one of the ties that binds this world to that.”
“But I don’t look like you, either.”
Douglas didn’t answer. The silence stretched out, and I figured he wasn’t going to answer that. Okay. Try again. Douglas got up and walked over to the enclosure. I followed until I leaned up against the railing. The area had cleared even more