Revenant

TWELVE

It was nearly midnight when we reached the head of Alta da Eira. Carlos had been busy in his tower while Quinton and I had eaten a desultory supper, done research, and talked about the problem of what to do once we’d recovered Soraia. Just sending her back home with Sam wasn’t safe. Sam and her kids would have to be hidden until this was over and with that in mind, I had called the Danzigers.

Mara answered the phone, and it took a minute or so of excited exclamations and inquiries before I could talk to her about the situation.

“So,” she said, “you’re wanting Ben and Brian and me to drive to Lisbon immediately and help you hide a little girl and her mother from a band of villains? It sounds like old times!”

“I know,” I said, “and I’m sorry about that. I didn’t want to put you in the middle again, but we both thought you would understand this better than most people. Sam isn’t very comfortable with the magic angle, but she and the kids are going to need to be in hiding until the danger’s past or Purlis will just snatch them all.”

Mara gave a short, harsh laugh. “Oh, he won’t be doing that—I’ll make sure of it. And don’t tear yourself down over asking for help—we’re pleased as anything to do it. And it’ll be good to see you both again.”

“We are working with Carlos . . .” I added.

She made a speculative sound. “I might even be glad to see him, if the child’s all right.”

“She’d better be,” I replied in a grim voice.

I made the arrangements and told them where we’d meet them to hand over Soraia, Martim, and Sam for safekeeping. Then Quinton had called Sam and went through much the same thing with her. There would be a lag between the time Sam and Martim arrived and whenever the Danzigers got here, but that couldn’t be helped. We’d have to be vigilant during that period, but once the Danzigers took charge of Sam’s family, I felt reasonably sure they’d be safe. All of them.

We had borrowed a car from the house management company to drive up to Penha de França and now left it at the bend of the road among a lot of other cars parked on the streets around the blocks of apartments that dominated the area, crowded together like convicts in a prison movie. I’d reclaimed my jeans for this job, since they seemed more practical than a skirt, and now we three, dressed in dark clothes, stood in the shadows, facing a long stretch of open nothing between the end of the road and the beginning of the L-shaped group of buildings that housed the car repair. We moved forward with great care, certain that there would be guards, alarms, or charms to keep us at bay. There was a strange, low sound in the air, as of some dread music heard from a great distance.

The sound seemed to attract a pack of dogs that loped toward us from the hillside, cutting off the most direct path to the buildings. There was nothing paranormal about the dogs, but their presence was threatening enough by itself. They barked and yipped when they spotted us, then fell silent as they spread out in an attempt to herd us into a good position for an attack, the ones on the center snarling and yipping to draw our attention away from those moving toward our flanks.

As the dogs spread out, a bright beam of light fell from the lone, square building that stood facing the crook of the L, but no one emerged.

“Motion sensor,” Quinton whispered as the light extinguished again. “They aren’t very worried about scaring off anything more troublesome than a dog. Either the locals know better than to come up here, or there’s something pretty terrible inside.”

I was tempted to drop into the Grey to see what I could spot, but that would take me away from the steadily encroaching dogs. I reminded myself that I didn’t need to go anywhere with Carlos nearby, since he could detect auras of the living or undead as well as I could without withdrawing from the normal world. “How many people in the buildings?” I asked.

“Five,” Carlos replied, puzzled. “I see one with no touch of magic, and the rest are much brighter. There are other things within, however, not living, but not precisely undead. Constructs.”

“Are they all in that little building?”

“Yes. The rest are empty of life, though there may be other things there that aren’t alive.”

“It’s not going to be as easy to approach as it looks. There must be perimeter or door alarms at least. No matter how badass they are, they wouldn’t want anyone just walking in,” Quinton said, watching the dogs as they edged closer. “Once we’re past these dogs, we may have no margin of time to make a surprise entrance.”

Carlos chuckled. “It’s not so difficult if we don’t care that they see us coming.”

“Don’t we? What if they hurt Soraia?”

“They cannot risk doing her any serious harm outside the ceremonial circle—it would taint the bones with fear and pain. If they wished for that, they’d have started already and we’d have heard her screaming by now.”

Quinton shuddered. “You’re just a bundle of joy, aren’t you, Carlos?”

“Not since I was an infant, and likely not then, either.”

“You two can stop now, and do something about these dogs,” I said.

The dogs were only a body length away in front of us, the dog on each side even closer, poised to lunge. The obvious pack leader crouched just a few inches ahead of the rest, teeth bared and a low snarl issuing from its mouth. None of us wanted to resort to Quinton’s gun and the unmistakable noise it would make, but that left us with no other weapons.

Carlos knelt and bowed his head, murmuring and putting his hands near the ground. For a moment, the dogs seemed confused and then the leader leapt.

Carlos spat a word and slammed his palms against the earth. A flame front roared up around us in a flash of light and rushed outward. The dogs yelped and howled, turning and running from the fire that was already dying out.

Carlos rose again to his feet as Quinton muttered, “I think we blew our chance to do this stealthily.”

The door of the little square building in the crook of the L opened and a figure in dark clothes was silhouetted against eerie, flickering light from indoors for just a moment before closing the door and stepping into darkness.

I looked sideways through the Grey to see the man’s energy corona, but there was nothing to see beyond tangles of darkness. “Don’t bother with the gun—whatever that was, it’s not alive.”

“Rush it,” Quinton said.

We all ran forward, separated by no more than an arm’s length. I could see the black tangle of energy that hung on whatever the thing was, moving upright like a man, but making no sound. At first, it seemed not to see us; then it turned and a stray beam of starlight fell across the gleam of white bone where a face should have been. I ran harder and was the first to crash into it, throwing my shoulder into the construct of bone and magic. It dug into me, remnant muscle holding bone together and allowing it to push back. I heard its teeth clack above my head.

“Go, go! I got this one!” I yelled, enveloped in the odor of its rot.

Neither of the men paused, but kept running forward as I fought with the animated skeleton. It had no remains of a soul or life, only the brittle black-and-white magic that held it together, and though it was fierce, it was fragile. I plunged my hand through the arch of its ribs and laid hold of the ice-cold core of the spell that bound it together.

The thing raked at me with its defleshed hands. I ducked my head, losing my grip on the frozen bit of magic that held the thing in form. It brought the memory of its weight with it, and I had to crouch and roll it over my hip as it lunged to grapple with me. It flipped over and hit the ground. I threw myself onto it and clutched through the gap of its ribs, ripping out the icy blackness that animated the thing. It subsided to the ground, parts falling aside as it reverted to death. I winced as the small shred of its demise passed through me like a narrow blade. Whatever had killed the person who used to own these bones, it had been recent, the remnant thread of its dying caught in the tangle of reanimation.

I scrambled to my feet in a moment and ran for the door through which Quinton and Carlos had already disappeared. I stepped into the room and stopped short, my ears filled with an eerie whispering and wailing that wound through a rising and falling chant, bringing a giddy nausea much like what I experienced near Carlos. The people in the room ignored my entrance, continuing with their strange work. I wasn’t sure why they didn’t seem to have seen me.

I looked around. The edges and corners of the room fell into shadow that was thickened by barbed coils of magic. All light came from the center of the room, but stopped abruptly at the edge of the black shroud of energy that seemed to creep like the nevoacria, slowly surrounding the people at the center. At first, the room was so dark outside the circle on my side that I couldn’t see. I tilted my vision toward the Grey and glimpsed Carlos moving around the edge of the room clockwise as Quinton prowled in the other direction beneath the mantle of shadow I was sure Carlos had conjured—it had the feel of his magic to it. Their advance was a slow agony when my own thoughts urged me to run forward, disrupt the scene by force, and take Soraia back immediately. But no matter how it galled, I knew there was a purpose in this careful progress. I crouched to take the moment’s measure. When my hands touched the ground, I felt the chill of death in the rounded shapes of bones rubbed smooth by time.

The single large room of the building seemed to float in light the color of tarnished silver. It appeared to be some kind of bizarre chapel built of skeletal remains. The room was cold and reeked of rot, the weight of vile magic hanging in the air as a choking ivory fog. The walls and floor were covered in carved and painted bones, but the bones were not merely lying or stacked like cordwood; they were assembled into patterns and objects, as if in a gruesome parody of a church. Murals built of skeletal corpses seemed frozen in the midst of some action or another. Massive columns and candelabra of bones and skulls rose from the floor—even the altar and the cross above it were constructed from the bones of the dead. Perhaps a dozen narrow wooden boxes stood against the walls of the room, each no more than eighteen inches tall, wreathed in Grey mist and knotted spells, the polished surfaces reflecting strange illumination.

The light in the room seemed to come partially from the candelabra in which stood macabre tapers of fingers and bones only partially flensed of flesh and dipped in wax. The flesh and fat of the dead burned with a sickening stink and added to the strange silver glow. The floor was a mosaic of stars, crosses, and circles created in tiny bones that ranged from the palest cream, through every shade of brown, to flame-darkened gray and black, all set in white mortar and worn smooth over time. The rest of the uncanny light rose from the largest circle, beaming upward from the floor like cold footlights on a stage in hell.

At the center of the floor, where the shapes of cross, star, and circle overlapped, sat an old man dressed in black, his back to me as he levitated a few feet from the surface on a column of mist reflecting the silvery green light of the circle. His energy corona showed bone-white amid a storm of black and rising spikes of bloody red. I knew I’d seen it before, but I had no focus to spend on remembering where. The mist seemed to hold him in a bubble of moving light that passed through him and made a path from him to the altar and from his right to his left. My eyes followed the illumination.

To his left lay a pile of human bones and on his right sat a cage built of bone and silver metal that took on an oily, iridescent glow when viewed through the Grey. A little girl with black curls looked out through the cage bars. She lay flat with one arm sticking out of her prison as if pointing through the man to the pile of bones on his other side. Her hand lay palm up, exposing the pale, tender skin on the underside. Shallow parallel cuts ran from her elbow to her wrist, weeping blood onto the bone-covered floor. The light seemed to lap at her blood and carry it away in droplets of red that moved toward the floating man.

The little girl whimpered, watching me, then shifted her eyes away to the altar at the front of the room, along the moving path of light. I felt breathless as my own horror tangled with the reflection of Quinton’s rage and anxiety, twisting the paranormal connection between us. The girl must have been Soraia. I fought the desire to run to her, fearing that a wrong move would kill her. I wanted to scream in frustration and anger.

What was Quinton doing about it? I looked to my right, toward the movement I’d detected there when I entered. Quinton had crouched down to the floor in his covering of darkness just a few feet from another man who wore black robes and stood by the three-o’clock position of the circle, holding a large black candle burning in his hand. Both men were perfectly still, looking toward the altar. Quinton was poised for some action while the other man, oblivious to him, seemed mesmerized by the ceremony going on. Quinton glanced toward me as if he knew I was ready to leap, and shook his head with an angry grimace. He didn’t like it any better than I did. Carlos must have told him to wait for something, and we would do so, but I could feel his frustration mixing with my own.

At the front of the room, a tall, slim woman in a narrow black dress and black high heels stood in front of the altar. Her blond hair was streaked with silvery gray, and the lines at the corners of her eyes said she had already seen fifty, but everything else said otherwise. She had picked up an ornate cup from the altar and held it in front of her while murmuring words that twined into the strange sound that occupied the room like another living being. A man, dressed just like the one at the edge of the circle, walked from the shadows and poured red liquid from a matching pitcher into the cup. The gold-colored lining of the cup turned black, and a dark vapor boiled over the rim, swirling into the air in an expanding spiral that wound toward the edges of the room.

As the dark mist touched the carved bones on the walls, they began to sing and wail, the smoke twisting through holes carved in the hollow shafts of arm and leg bones, around the curves of ribs, and through the gaping eye sockets of human skulls.

The woman said something that was drowned in the rising wail of the bone flutes. The greater volume of blood that ran from Soraia’s arm lifted from the floor and flowed swiftly now toward the floating man at the middle of the circle, following the path of light like water in a pipe. As it touched his outstretched right hand, the blood turned to mist that spread over his arm and side, vanishing in the black cloth. The spell moved through him as if he were some kind of conductor. Bones from the pile on his left rose into the air in the moving light, assembling themselves into a skeleton that gained the momentary shape of its former owner.

Sharp memories of death enveloped me in pain as the ghost seemed to fight and resist, spinning in the light, and was then crushed with a screech back into a bundle of white that tumbled across the room to fall into one of the polished wooden boxes on the right side of the circle. The man with the candle walked to the box, closed the lid over the clattering bones, and fastened the latch. Then he murmured over it as he dripped the black wax over the latch until the metal was covered. He pressed a small object against the wax and the remains fell silent.

The song of the bones faded to what it had been before. I caught my breath at the same moment that the woman at the altar seemed to draw hers for the first time in minutes. Her shoulders slumped a little as if they’d been doing this all night. “Now the girl,” she said.

The man with the candle began to walk counterclockwise around the circle as if he were going to change sides. Quinton lunged forward, shedding his cloak of darkness, and wrapped his arms around the man’s shoulders and head, then twisted, using his momentum to add power to the motion.

I didn’t hear the man’s neck break, but the shock of his death knocked me to the ground with a gasp and I fell across the edge of the illuminated circle. The woman screamed in rage. Quinton buckled to the floor with me, caught in the lashing pain by our paranormal connection.

The light from the circle’s edge seemed to burn through me for a moment before it flashed and vanished with a stink of burning hair. I struggled to regain my feet, just inside the circle this time, aching and breathing as raggedly as if I’d been punched in the stomach. I turned to lurch toward Soraia from my knees; however, as the one to break the circle, I was subject to the effect of the bone magic now that I was outside the cloak of Carlos’s protection. The presence of the ghastly bones with all their death hummed in the lingering cloud of power that the mage had raised. The strange magic seemed to stab at my own skeleton with hooked blades, slowing me and pulling me downward.

Carlos had darted across the broken circle, revealed from the shadows, and was reaching for the floating man who was moving as though dazed in his bubble of light. The woman shouted some words and upended the cup on the altar, red liquid flowing in bloody rivulets over the white bones. She snatched the hand of her assistant and drove a knife through it, pinning him to the base of the cup as he screamed in shock. Blood ran down the cup and into the intricate carvings on the altar bones, burning them red.

The floating man plunged to the floor in a clatter of bones and an icy pall of mist enclosed him, seeming to bear him to the floor and hold him there. Carlos smashed his fist against the opaque white shape the steam and bones had taken. His hand rebounded as if the dome had hardened. He roared in anger and turned toward the woman as Quinton ran several steps ahead of me, heading for the cage that held his niece.

The woman spoke rapidly and made a flinging motion in Quinton’s direction. A whirling ivory chain of bone caught him around the legs and upper body, flipping him to the floor with a crash that shook dust from the columns of skulls nearby. He tried to ignore the spell and squirmed toward Soraia’s cage, but he could move only a few inches. He gasped, his face going pale, and he fought to move forward, the labor of his breathing mixing with his niece’s weak sobs and the panting of the man whose hand was transfixed by a dagger.

The woman made another gesture, as if lofting something into the air, and four of the bony figures from the walls began to detach and walk toward us. The first reached me in a moment and snatched for my head with its skeletal hands. I ducked, wincing, and swiped at it, yanking a bone loose from its lower leg and rolling aside. The bone melded to the floor as the walking skeleton fell over me. Its bones rattled against the mosaic of smaller bones, sticking and forming a partial cage around me. Kicking and yanking, I thrashed, breaking the bones as I tried to get back to my feet. The next skeleton didn’t even try to grab me, but threw itself on top of the other, its bones sliding straight down like spears.

I yanked the edge of the Grey and tugged it over me like a shield, isolating myself in the folds as the bones pierced through, shoved aside by the Grey where they hadn’t yet encountered another bone. Then they sealed themselves to the floor or to other bones when they touched at last. The cage was tight and without the edge of the Grey over me, the plunging bones would have gone right through me. I had no desire to see what would happen if they had pushed through my flesh to my own bones. But the bones were brittle with age and I continued to kick and beat at them, making my way out.

The third skeleton crushed itself over Quinton as he crept toward Soraia’s prison, but Quinton rolled, knocking more of the bones aside than I had been able to. The scattered bones hit the floor and made a small obstacle. Quinton was still barely moving, squirming forward by inches, borne down by the spell that enclosed him. I fought to get back to my feet, but it felt like the floor was drawing my own bones down to it and rising was more difficult than it should have been.

The woman took a step away from the altar, satisfied that Quinton and I were no threat now. She picked up a small white object and left her minion still pinned without a single glance of concern. Her expression narrowed and she focused on Carlos, who stood just to the left of the room’s center in a rising shimmer of obsidian light that climbed up his body and wove around him like a dancing chorus of deadly vines. He seemed gigantic, enfolded in the shroud of his power, and the last of the bone constructs sparkled into dust as it touched him. Sparks snapped in the air around him as if he stood at the eye of an electric storm. The woman seemed unfazed, though she did keep her distance from him.

“Well done, Maggie Griffin,” Carlos said. “You saved your master from my wrath. For now.”

She tried to restrain a wince at his knowledge of her name, but if I saw it, Carlos had, too. Instead of replying, she spread her arms and the room shook as the rest of the bony figures on the walls pulled themselves loose from the plaster and stepped onto the floor, animated and enraged. They turned toward Carlos and me, clicking as they began to walk toward us, ignoring Quinton and Soraia. I was barely up when the nearest skeleton swung its arms, clawing at me. I dropped and swept its feet out from under it, but I was sweating with the effort, pulling against the hungry grip of the floor.

The bones scattered, not sticking this time, but now other bone constructs were close enough to grab at me. As I tried to manage the increasing number of fragile assailants, the skeleton I’d just broken began drawing back together. I would have cursed, but I was already breathing too hard to want to waste my breath.

Griffin laughed. “Which of your friends will you save? You can’t possibly manage them both before the bones collect them.”

Carlos crouched on the floor, his hands rising, drawing black tendrils from the ground. Blood ran through the interstices of the bone mosaic, drawn toward him from the altar and from the place Soraia had bled onto the floor. Carlos slammed his palms onto the floor with the same gesture he’d used to frighten the dogs. The room shook and the skeletons shattered, bones tumbling to the ground.

Griffin narrowed her eyes and walked closer to me. I dodged to the side, running as best I could toward Quinton. A bone candelabrum tumbled to the ground, knocking me down and blocking the direct route to my lover and his niece. I shot a glance over my shoulder. Griffin smirked at me and made a clawing, clutching gesture. The floor beneath me heaved, knocking over more of the reeking candelabra. I was enclosed in a ring of fire and burning bones. It wasn’t as much of a barrier to me as it would have been to some, but it looked intimidating and I could feel the floor reaching for me again, tiny ivory spurs cutting through my thin shoes and skin, reaching for my bones. I danced aside, coming perilously close to the flames. I snatched another cold edge of the Grey between myself and the grasping bones, but it meant bending down, which put my face uncomfortably close to them. I could hear the whispers of their song as my Grey shield cut through them.

Carlos rose back to his full height. “Your ideas could not begin to encompass what I can ‘manage.’” He made another gesture, a small thing limned in blackness. The bones of the altar bent, bristling and snatching at her.

Griffin darted forward, startled, as the bones grabbed hold of the man pinned to the altar. He screeched as they touched him and began to pierce his flesh. He yanked his hand back from the cup, dislodging the knife a little as he tried to escape.

The dome of bone around Griffin’s master shivered on the floor.

Carlos smiled.

Griffin spun around, snatched the pitcher from the altar, and bashed it against her minion’s head with killing force, splattering the walls with crimson liquid that stank of sour wine and curdled blood. His skull smashed against the bristling altar and I was on my knees, choking and gasping as his death hit me. She never noticed, her attention focused on the bone shield at the center of the room.

Carlos made another small gesture, empowered by the presence of death as much as I was debilitated by it. The dome around Griffin’s master cracked and shivered.

Griffin put her hand on the bloodied skull of her dying companion and lifted a piece of it away, holding it tight enough to crush in her fist as she muttered under her breath. Hard shafts of white energy bolted upward and then plunged to the floor. For a moment, a black pit yawned around the dome of white in the center of the room, and the bone chapel shook, causing loose finger bones, skulls, and ribs to drop from the ceiling and fall into the hole until the blackness vanished again. Griffin smiled, an unpleasant, cold expression.

She turned and, as the man beside her died, she shoved the knife back down through his hand, repinning the spell to the cup and altar, and the white dome hardened again. But the floor had ceased to grasp for me and, with his passing, the man’s death no longer held me down.

“You are remarkably loyal in spite of your other flaws,” Carlos said, drawing Griffin’s attention back to him as I rolled through the spreading ring of fire and crawled to Quinton and Soraia.

“But this is a waste of effort. You cannot stand against me. Release the girl and I will not dine upon your soul tonight.”

“You really are sure of yourself, aren’t you, Mysterious Stranger?” Griffin replied, but her bravado was a sham, her voice rough as the coruscation of power around her fluttered. She’d burned through a lot of energy, but she wasn’t backing down.

Carlos laughed at her. “You already see that I can send you forth ‘to shoreless space, to wander its limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever. . . .’” Carlos pulled the broken crystal pendant from his pocket and held it up in the strange light of the room. “Even your master, swaddled in his shroud of bones, isn’t safe from me.”

Griffin twitched. “You threaten us with that?” she said, faking a laugh as she pointed at the pendant, moving her other hand to the side and out of his view. “It’s broken. You know that you’ll never get that little girl out of there without my say-so—which I won’t give if you harm him. And if you kill me, she’ll remain locked in that cage forever with your friends dead beside her, just more bones for our temple.”

There wasn’t going to be much of a temple left, I thought, as the flames continued spreading.