Revenant

THIRTEEN

I reached Quinton and Soraia as a coil of white mist rose from the bones behind Carlos and the crystal began to sway in his grip. The mist started solidifying into a shape that seemed disturbingly familiar, like a small beast with scales and wings and a mouth full of vicious fangs. The blood and blackness of Carlos’s own power touched and wove into the shape as it came together faster, fleshing the skeleton of the Night Dragon. The silver chain of the pendant began to smoke.

Carlos dropped the crystal as the spectral dragon swooped.

Griffin laughed and sprang forward, more confident in spite of her flagging power. She’d obviously been working all night and, in spite of the venue, she was running out of steam. But she was laughing and it filled me with dread.

Carlos stepped aside, turning, and swiped through the dragon with a gleam of blackness as he crushed the crystal underfoot. I wound my hands into the white mass of Griffin’s spell that held Quinton to the floor and felt for the cold particle that held it in shape. My fingers burned as if I’d touched dry ice and I closed my aching hand around the linchpin of misery, removing it with a long, smooth pull. The spell crumbled into white dust around us and Quinton sucked in a lungful of air tainted with the increasing stench of burning flesh and bone.

As Quinton caught his breath, the nightmare thing that Griffin had unleashed wove through the air, but the blackness Carlos wielded cut its wing and it crashed to the ground, the bones—not pale green like the ones I’d seen before, but black and smoking—rebounding off the floor like hailstones as its borrowed darkness swarmed back to Carlos.

One of the wooden boxes burst into flame and the bones around the room began howling and singing as the heat and smoke rose. The box burned like a fuse and then collapsed. A screaming phantom shot up from the ruined box, arcing toward the ceiling to vanish through the roof. I could hear the distant chime and rattle of scales over silvery bones and feel the cold sweep of the Guardian Beast nearby, collecting the escaped revenant.

Griffin let out a moan, twisting and bending where she stood as if the broken illusions bore her down with them. The threads that linked her to the fallen Night Dragon dragged her to the floor, her burned energy weighing on her now. She raised her arms, and a fragile scaffold of bones arched over her.

I looked at Carlos, who had stooped to sweep up the rods of rutile that had scattered from the crushed crystal. He did not pause to see what had become of us, but gathered to him the fleeing darkness of the Night Dragon and its lines of control that connected it to Griffin, drawing the black shards of enchanted crystal into the baleful energy as if he were spinning yarn. The strand of his spell lengthened in his fingers, writhing around his hands like a snake looking for a place to strike. He caught it and wove it between his fingers like a cat’s cradle, twisting it as he murmured into the void between the filaments of death.

He pulled the intricate weave tighter, and Griffin crumpled with a strangled scream, her shield of bones collapsing and dissolving into the floor. The last of the uncanny light winked out, leaving only the stinking reek of the spreading fire from the fallen bone candles and the bleak glow of Carlos’s power to illuminate the room.

Carlos strode to the altar and yanked the knife from the dead man’s hand. The corpse slumped to the floor in a spill of blood and brains. The white dome at the center of the room dissolved, but of the man who had occupied it there was no sign—only broken bones and dust that fell away into a hole in the floor where the dark void had been. Growling, Carlos returned to stand over Griffin, the trailing pearls of death and darkness thinning and disappearing behind him. “Release the girl and I will let you live. Today. Otherwise . . .” he added, and pulled harder on the filaments woven between his hands so the shape thinned and strained.

Griffin writhed and blanched, gasping. She made a gesture while choking out a few words, and the cage of bones and silver shivered. She clenched her teeth in useless fury.

As Soraia’s wretched prison shuddered, Quinton yanked one side open. It fell apart around her and she let out a thin cry, throwing herself into her uncle’s arms. The blood from her forearm smeared over his back.

As I helped Quinton to his feet, Carlos dropped the fabric of his working onto Griffin’s body and stepped back as she lay like a corpse beneath it. He walked away from her to look down at the remains of the bony tomb that had protected the floating man but now showed only a gaping pit in the floor. “Your aegis of bone allowed him to escape. He was blind to what happened here—which will obscure your failure for now, but Rui will not be pleased when he returns. He shouldn’t have let the beauty of the finish blind him to the essentially shoddy quality of your work, nor to your need to borrow a spell from someone else to hold me at bay. Were I you, I’d be gone before he returned. Not that running will save you. . . .”

“Bastard,” Griffin spat.

Another of the ghost receptacles cracked open in the heat, sending its shrieking, burning ghost into the air in a shock of ethereal cold that made me wince and shudder. Everyone else ignored it. Quinton continued to the door, skirting the flames as he carried Soraia. He was moving more heavily than I had ever seen him.

Carlos bowed to Griffin. “Indeed. If you’re still here when he returns, tell Rui you did your best but failed nonetheless because he’s become as lazy a master as he was a student. He’ll tell you that you never stood a chance against me.”

“Against whom? Who are you that I should accept this . . . humiliation like a good little sport?”

“My name is Carlos, but it will do you no good against me when we meet again—as we will.”

Carlos turned from her and walked toward the door, apparently unconcerned for the fire that I knew could easily destroy him. He never looked to see whether we were behind him. I helped Quinton and Soraia to the door as if I didn’t want to run, screaming, from the place as fast as possible.

Carlos paused at the threshold without turning back, letting us pass him, and then muttered a few words, pushing his hands out to the side in a sweeping gesture. The remaining candelabra exploded in flames, and the dry bones began to burn in the sudden, intense heat. He walked out of the building, allowing the door to swing closed behind him. The sparking, gleaming black energy drained away, fading as he stepped through the doorway to the outside.

Quinton, holding Soraia in his arms, was leaning against the wall of the building, his posture revealing his exhaustion. He stumbled toward me and Carlos, then stopped to set the little girl on the ground. He knelt down, saying, “Can you walk with us, Soraia? We need to go to the car.” He looked ill and unsteady, and I hoped whatever spell Griffin had cast over him had no lingering effects.

The girl nodded, huge-eyed and pale, but I stepped to his side and knelt down. “I can take her,” I said. I held out my arms and the small blood-smeared girl crept into them.

I felt the sickening presence of Carlos beside us and Soraia recoiled in my arms, making a frightened, keening noise in her throat. I patted her back and stood up with her in my arms as he said, “We should go as quickly as possible. The fire will bring attention.”

“This girl is going to need some attention, too. She’s still bleeding.” Soraia continued to hold herself as far from Carlos as she could. “And something’s not right with Quinton, either.”

“I will assist him. Carry the girl to the car—her bleeding is slowing and we must go swiftly. I promise that neither of them will die before we reach safety.”

I jogged as well as I could with forty-five pounds of cringing child in my arms and turned back only once to glance up, watching the flames leap as the misty forms of ghosts flooded the air above the building. Amid the smoke and ghostlight, I could see the twining, sinuous form of the Guardian Beast as it gathered up the stolen souls and herded the spirits back into the Grey.

I turned back and continued to the car, feeling some dark and heavy thing dragging on me through my connection to Quinton. The distance to the car was grueling. I finally put Soraia down in the backseat as Carlos placed Quinton beside her from the other side. Soraia was shivering and I was shaking a bit myself. She looked more like a ghost than a girl.

“May I see your arm?” I asked.

She nodded, staring at me with very wide eyes. “Você é um anjo esquisito,” she whispered as I inspected the long, weeping tracks of the cuts on her arm.

I felt Carlos behind me. “She believes you’re an angel,” he said.

I didn’t look up. “It must be the aura. No angel here, just you and me.” I looked back to her slashed skin. The cuts were bleeding less after being pressed to the cloth of first Quinton’s shirt and then mine, but they were starting again. I looked up at her. “We’re going to take you to your mother, all right?”

She nodded.

“We have to do something about this first, though. Can you be very brave just a little longer?”

Quinton put his arm around her from his side of the car and hugged her. “I know you can, Little Fairy.”

Carlos knelt down beside the open door. She cringed away from him, squirming back against Quinton and gasping in fear while drawing her arms in.

“It’s all right, Soraia,” Quinton said, kissing the top of her head as he held her close to his side. “He’s not going to hurt you. I won’t let him.”

Carlos asked her a question in Portuguese, and I could feel an unusual, warm swell of his glamour enfolding her, sparks of golden light shimmering between them. She still looked frightened, but she nodded, holding out her bleeding arm and shivering. He didn’t smile or attempt to soothe her any further. He only put one of his hands over her arm and bent very low over it, as if he were going to kiss her wrist.

Quinton started to pull Soraia away, but I caught his eye and shook my head. Carlos had done too much to get her back alive to harm her now. He was a vampire—blood and death were his specialties and though we were all pushed to the limit, I wasn’t going to second-guess him.

Soraia blinked sleepily, her head drooping, as Carlos crouched over her. After a minute, he stood, running his fingers up her arm, and stepped away from her, the golden gleam of his glamour extinguished like a candle. He looked even more fatigued than before, but there was no sign of blood on him and her arm, though still marked, was no longer bleeding.

Carlos asked Soraia another question. She nodded drowsily, muttering something and trying to curl up to sleep against Quinton while drawing her arm in against her body. Quinton pulled her into his embrace and she nuzzled his chest, her eyes closing. Carlos and I folded ourselves into the front seats and talked in low voices while I drove.

As I took the little car down the road, I could see the fire and the storm of ghosts above it. “All those dead . . .” I murmured. “I suspect some of them weren’t just spirits they had harvested from somewhere, but ghosts they made themselves.”

“If I’d had more power to draw from, there would have been four more. Perhaps I should have let your spouse-in-soul shoot them. . . . Even with the deaths of two of his acolytes at my disposal, I was at a disadvantage and couldn’t have killed them all in his own temple. Rui will realize that, once he’s back in the world. We couldn’t have fooled him with such a charade, but since Griffin did us the favor of locking him—and his power—away, I was able to convince her I could have destroyed her and her master within their own bastion. She wouldn’t have let the girl go otherwise, and next time, she’ll know better.”

“You faked all that?”

“No. But it was not so overwhelming as it may have appeared. We were lucky that she was only a student. Her master chose to channel the ritual through his own body to control it if she should make a mistake. If he’d had more confidence in her and chosen to take part directly, we would have had to deal with him on his own ground rather than with his cocksure apprentice whose first concern was protecting him. Her shield kept him from turning the tide of this skirmish, and only the deaths of the two lesser priests gave me power enough to make such a show.”

I wanted to curse at him, but I put my attention on more important things. “Priests . . . ?” I thought about the robed men and the perversion of a church they’d died in; I thought about the man in the clerical collar with a strange, violent aura who’d stood in the little plaza below the small white church on the hill. I shuddered, sickened to the core.

He nodded. “Most of the Kostní Mágové are priests, nuns, monks. . . . They are religious fanatics who believe in the allegory of the bones—death in life, the transience of worldly power—but only as a conduit for their own. I am sorry for the pain their deaths caused you, but it was a necessary risk.”

I resisted the urge to punch him for putting me through the agony of their passing—and nearly that of Quinton as well. He gave me a measuring look. “What do you plan to do with the child? It won’t be safe for her to return to her mother.”

“We’ve made arrangements. Quinton and I can handle it from there—if Quinton is still able, that is.”

“I will look after him as well.”

“I’m not sure about your variety of care, Carlos.”

“Without it, he will die.”

I pulled my eyes from the road only long enough to glare at him.

“Griffin’s spell allowed the bones of the dead to draw life from him,” he explained. “I can remove that connection before it kills him. It touched you also, but you’ll heal yourself of it—being what you are. His niece’s injuries can be cured by medicine, but his cannot. We must return to the house.”

“So long as we get everyone into your house without any interference from the ghosts, you can save him?”

Carlos interrupted his nod to frown at me. “The ghosts have caused you a problem?”

It was hard to turn my mind back to the topic of the ghosts in Carlos’s house as I continued to think about Quinton and Soraia, bones and priests, and ghosts imprisoned in boxes the way my first Grey client had been. I shook my scrambled thoughts off and concentrated on the matter of the spirits that haunted Carlos’s house.

“Not a problem so much as a . . . conundrum. When I arrived, I was let out of the box by a woman named Rafa, who used to be the housekeeper until she retired in 1992. She died in 2000. I don’t know why she’s been interfering, but she gave me keys that unlock not just the house, but a particular time frame of the house’s past—Rafa’s time frame. I lost one of the keys and had to get in the old-fashioned way—by knocking—or I never would have been sure what was going on. I haven’t seen her since I relocked the temporacline.”

“I never knew her. . . .”

“Which is kind of weird, because she seemed to know you. She called you ‘Dom Carlos,’ and talked about ‘the family’ as if there were others around, but the only other ghost I’ve had any contact with is another woman—she seems to want something, but I haven’t been able to ask her what. She said ‘I don’t forget,’ but I have no idea what she was referring to. Her name was Amélia. Ring any bells?”

Carlos raised an eyebrow and leaned away from me. He seemed stunned—an emotion I’d never seen on him before.

“Amélia was my wife.”