Hold Me Closer, Necromancer - Lish McBride [63]
“You’re like me,” she said.
I could’ve lied, told her I didn’t know what she was talking about, but it seemed both distasteful and useless. Kevin Hatfield was creating his own little version of hell by having children and surrounding himself with the exact kind of people he despised. And though part of me howled with laughter, the rest of me was kicking it and telling it to shut up. Poor Lilly was as screwed by heredity as I was. Would Kevin continue to ignore it? Or would he get her the training she needed?
“Yes,” I said, “I am like you.”
She frowned at me, an adult expression of concern that seemed at home on her face. “Something’s wrong with your inside, did you know that?”
“Yeah.”
“You should get that fixed,” she said.
“I’m working on it.”
“That’s good,” she said. “Would you like to meet them?” She continued to hold my hand in a cold death grip, completely unconcerned about the whole thing.
“Meet who?”
Lilly pulled me into another room, some sort of play area covered in pastels.
Yanking me over to a small easel, Lilly began to flip pages and tell me about her friends. She introduced me to them like they were important, like she didn’t get to talk about them much. I took a good look at Lilly’s friends. Something seemed off. When Haley was little, she’d drawn our pets, our family, and her friends, which were usually kids we knew or stuffed animals. Lilly’s friends all looked like adults.
I tapped the paper on one in particular. “Lilly, who is this?”
“I don’t know his name,” she said. “I can’t understand him. He talks different.”
She flipped the page and showed me another picture. “He’s nice, though. He talks to me with his hands. I think he used to live here, but his house was like this.” She pointed to a sketch on her paper. Lilly had drawn a pretty decent rendition of a long house.
I didn’t know what kind of curriculum kindergartners got, but I was pretty sure most of them didn’t know what a long house was. Lilly must have known what it looked like because her friend was a long-dead Native American, which would explain why she couldn’t understand him.
“Lilly, can your mom see your friends?”
“No,” she said, “and she doesn’t like to talk about them. It makes her uncomfortable. She calls them imaginary.” Lilly looked me in the eye, her expression pleading. “The Shadow People aren’t imaginary, are they?”
I could tell her they were. Maybe then she’d live a normal life. A normal life where she constantly questioned herself and thought she was crazy. A life where she not only had to hide from everyone around her but also from her own mind, her own senses. Then I thought about what Nick had said to Kevin, about how Lilly needed a guide, how it might be dangerous. Teaching her to hide from what she was wouldn’t keep her out of danger. I was proof of that.
“No, they aren’t imaginary.”
She grinned. Something told me Lilly didn’t do that very oft en.
“Lilly, this may sound weird, but do you think you could get something for me?” She nodded. “I need some of your daddy’s hair, like from one of his hairbrushes or something. Do you think you could do that?”
“Why?”
“I can’t tell you that right now.”
“Will it hurt Daddy?”
“No,” I said, “it won’t.”
She pouted, thinking. “Promise?”
“I promise,” I said, making a little X over my heart. “But we need to keep this between us, okay?”
Elaine came back down with another little girl a few minutes later. She thanked me for staying and entertaining Lilly. I told her Lilly was a great kid, the expected response, but that didn’t make it not true.
Elaine introduced me to Sara, who was only three. Her hair was a pale blond, pulled up in pigtails, one of which was pressed into her mother’s chest as Sara rested her head there. Although shy, Sara’s expression was more open than Lilly’s. I wondered how long it would stay that way. I didn’t shake Sara’s hand. I didn’t need to. From the way Lilly hovered over her baby sister, I knew I’d get the same response, and I didn’t want to scare