Revenant

SEVENTEEN

Traffic had not improved on the way back and since I hadn’t driven the route the first time, I got lost and came toward the city on a different highway. At the outskirts of Lisbon, I had to wait in slow traffic near the air base in Montijo. A modest group of protesters with signs I couldn’t read blocked the road and an equally modest contingent of police was trying to move them out of it. Both groups seemed peaceful enough, but as the demonstrators were pushed away from the road, some of them began shoving back, shouting and hitting at the police with their signs for no reason I could make out. Singly, the cops lost their tempers and their collective, steady push became curt, rough, and finally angry. A dark shape, barely visible in the westering sun, circled over the seething lines of demonstrators and cops, and even though it was difficult to see, everyone ducked as it moved. Someone yelled and, as the dark thing swept away into the sky, the peaceful protest turned into knots of pointless violence scattered along the roadside. I stared at it, rolling down the window and cocking my head to look into the Grey. Another shape moved around the edges of the infant riot, seeming to nip at the cops and protesters like a dog herding sheep. It was made of red energy and silver mist, and where it walked, the violence escalated. This had to be the work of Purlis’s Ghost Division and there was nothing I could do. I closed the window in haste and found a path through the traffic.

The conflict seemed to spread outward like crystal growth and I had to detour several times to get onto the bridge that would deliver me into Lisbon proper. Paranoid that something might have seen me, I took a circuitous route, checking frequently for any kind of paranormal tail. I never saw one, but I took the precaution anyhow and arrived at the house in Alfama after sunset.

Nothing had changed inside since I’d left and that bothered me more than it might under other circumstances. Trying not to imagine the worst, I raced up the stairs to our suite and burst through the door to the sitting room.

No Quinton at the desk. I ran through to the bedroom.

He was sitting cross-legged on the bed with his laptop open in front of him and a pair of long cables running off across the floor. I breathed heavily with relief. He looked up, craning his neck to see me better.

“Hi. Everything OK? Sam and the kids made it all right?”

“Yeah. We made it to the Danzigers’ all right, but it’s going to be a rough road for Sam and the kids. They’ll be OK, though. What about you?”

“I’m fine. I slept like the dead.”

I let that go. “No signs of anything unpleasant in the streets?”

“Uh . . . not up here. There’ve been a few incidents around town today, though. Some disturbance happened at the Banco do Portugal headquarters that the news is vague about and some kind of protest down at Montijo Air Base went wonky.”

“I know—I was there. And so was your father’s band of invisible agitators.”

He frowned a little. “Are you sure?”

“Yes. There was something—a ghost of some kind I think—working the edge of the crowd, making them angry and volatile, and something I could barely see had descended on the protesters and police from the sky, and they all acted like they’d been strafed. After that, it went to hell.”

“Damn it. That sounds like the same sort of thing I saw in Paris. Damn it! I keep missing him,” Quinton snapped, and started to get up.

“Nothing you can do right now,” I said, waving him down. “Tell me what else you found—that may be more important to us than getting a closer look at the wreckage your father’s group is responsible for.”

He frowned. “All right . . . I’ve been working on your bones-in-the-news question.”

“I had an idea on that—or rather, Ben did. Anything about ossuaries? Or bone chapels?”

“Yeah. They weren’t connected by the press or police yet, but there have been a series of vandalizations of small ossuaries here in Portugal—did you know that Portugal has the largest number of extant ossuaries of any country in Europe?”

“No. What does that mean?”

“It means that while there may be bigger, better-known piles of bones in places like Italy and France, there are more of them total and per square mile in Portugal. And with a comparatively small population, that’s a lot of dead bones for every live one running around. It seems to me that would make this country very attractive to bone mages—which could be why Dad is concentrating here at the moment.”

“I agree,” I replied in haste. I still felt wound up from my trip to the house while Quinton seemed to vacillate between anger and a strangely distant curiosity. “What happened with these small ossuaries?”

“Well, over the past few months, there are four ossuaries along the coast in the Algarve that have been vandalized. Algarve is a coastal vacation area that’s very popular with European travelers. Anyhow, bones have been removed, causing the ossuaries to shift or fall in some cases. In another, it was basically a shrine in a wall and someone took the arm off the crucifix, which was pretty obvious. But no one’s been saying the crimes are connected. So far, all the reports read like it’s just a local annoyance and the press is blaming the tourists, but locals are disturbed by it. The ossuaries are old and small, but sacred, and with the other problems in Portugal, it seems like a bad sign.”

“Any idea how many bones have been taken altogether?”

He shook his head. “No. Something’s always missing, but no one is really sure what, except in the case of the crucifix.”

He put the laptop aside and unfolded himself from the bed. He stretched, his spine protesting with a series of pops and snaps and his joints joining in the complaint. He shook himself out and closed the distance between us to put his arms around my waist and kiss me. When I didn’t respond in kind, he gave me a curious look. “Are you all right?”

“I could ask you the same.”

“Why?”

“You just . . . don’t seem like yourself.”

He shook his head as if dismissing my concern. “Probably lingering effects of whatever that was last night. You’re a little prickly yourself.”

I stepped back from him. “I’m sorry. I’m obsessing a bit about these bones and this business with the Ghost Division suddenly popping up. . . . Carlos said he thought he could learn something about what the mages are up to tonight, but I want to give him all of this information before he goes out and does whatever he had in mind.”

“Oh. Well, I think it’s too late. He’s not here.”

“It’s not that late yet. The sun just went down.”

“About forty minutes ago. I almost didn’t hear him leave, but the door up to the tower stairs makes a noise when it passes over the floor. It sounds like someone trying to sweep the tiles with a very stiff broom. I looked out and saw him going down the stairs right after the sun went down.”

I scowled. “He’d have had to sleep in the tower all night. Not very safe.”

“Safe enough, apparently.”

“I wish I knew what he’s up to.”

Quinton pulled me a little closer in a jostling manner and said, “Hey, a guy could get jealous when all you want to talk about is bones and some other man.”

“Carlos isn’t a man. He’s a vampire.”

“That is not my point, Harper.”

I stopped glaring into the wall and turned my attention back to Quinton. His aura was still streaked with green, but at least it was more of an apple color than olive. He frowned at me.

“You’re not joking,” I said. “You’re jealous of Carlos.”

“I wouldn’t call it jealousy. . . . It’s more like . . . preoccupation.”

“There is no point in it. I love you. I spent most of this past year without you because you had other things you needed to pursue. But there’s no one else I want to be with. Not for the moment, or in the situation, or if I can’t do better. No one at all. Ever. And you know it. You know it right here,” I added, touching the bright pink line of energy that always pointed me to him, no matter where he was, no matter how far away.

He winced as I touched it and his energy corona flushed with a flurry of little sparks in green, black, white, and, finally, pink, like a Roman candle. “Ouch.”

I frowned. “That shouldn’t hurt.”

He blinked and shivered. “It doesn’t, exactly. It’s more like the sensation after you pull out a sliver.”

I thought of Amélia’s ghost floating over him as he slept and I felt furious. “Oh, I’m going to kill that interfering little specter twice over.”

“Who?”

“Amélia—Carlos’s dead wife.” I raised my head and looked toward the ceiling, then around the room, just in case I could spot her, but she wasn’t in evidence. “I hope you’re eavesdropping, Amélia, because I don’t want this to be an unfair fight. I’m going to turn you into a pile of sparks and ghost dust and send you back to the ethereal nothingness if I catch you playing with his mind again. So keep your incorporate hands off!”

“Is there something going on that I should know about?” Quinton asked.

“Yet another meddling ghost getting up to nothing good, I’m sure, though why, I don’t know.”

“That’s going around.”

“Oh?”

“Well, aside from this interesting half a conversation, the vandalized ossuaries, and sudden surges of violence that seem to be my dad’s work, this morning someone broke into the tomb of King Sebastian.”

“Who is that and how is it relevant to our problem with the bone mages?”

“You remember I said something about there being people in Portugal who believe in the ‘Sleeping King’—O Desejado—who will return to save the country in its darkest hour? A sort of Arthur figure with a cult built around him?”

“Yeah, a little.”

“That king was Dom Sebastião. He was a bit of a mess. His mother took off soon after he was born so she could be regent of Spain for the remaining twenty years of her life, so he was raised by his grandmother, Catherine of Austria—who was a bit of a hard-ass. He became king at the age of three in 1557. He was Jesuit educated and did a lot of important stuff, like establishing standard measures, reforming civilian and military law, creating medical and science scholarships, abolishing slavery of Brazilian natives, and mandating a school for navigators that taught them math and cosmology. Just that alone increased the number of ships that made it home from their voyages—and that’s a big deal for a seafaring nation. Portugal was an economic powerhouse in the Renaissance largely because of Sebastian. But he was kind of a misogynistic jerk—he never got married, and he was more interested in flouncing off to fight crusades against the Moors in north Africa than having kids or watching out for things back home.

“Anyhow, he was killed at the battle of Alcácer Quibir in 1578, but his body was never found, and he left no direct heir. It was kind of a boondoggle, and an expensive one as well, because Sebastian had borrowed money to do it. Phillip the Second of Spain became king of Portugal, and in 1582 some human remains that he claimed were Sebastian’s were entombed here in Lisbon at the Jerónimos Monastery. But most people were sure the body wasn’t actually his and that led to the idea that Sebastian was still out there somewhere, waiting for the chance to come back and save Portugal. Which he never did. That’s the ‘Sleeping King’ legend. But the tomb is still an important icon of its own and someone—or several someones—broke into it very early this morning.”

“What did they take?” I asked.

“No one knows if anything was taken at all. The body and contents weren’t very well documented and it’s all dust now, anyhow. But I’d be willing to bet—given the way these things work—that the dust of a legend’s bones might be as useful to some people as the bones themselves.”

“So we put a kink in their plans, but not as much as we thought.” But something was nagging me even as I dismissed the case as trivial.

“Assuming that the break-in was perpetrated by our unfriendly neighborhood bone-twiddlers.”

“Not too likely to be the work of an unaffiliated group—what are the odds?” I asked.

“Slim, I agree. So . . . is that the sort of thing Carlos was after? Because there were a few other stories, but they were older and farther afield. Oh, except for one thing that’s not in Carlos’s search, but it kind of gave me the creeps, so I bookmarked it for you.”

He turned the screen in my direction, showing a very short news piece about a man found dead in the quake-damaged area where we’d seen what might have been a drache the day before. “It sounds like the pickpocket you chased down. . . . I’m sorry.”

I stared at the story with its scanty details and bad sketch, asking for information about the deceased—a petty criminal who’d died of a heroin overdose.

“Damn it. I feel like I’m responsible. If I hadn’t given him the money . . .” I said.

“He’d have found it another place. You’re not responsible for his choices.”

“No, but . . . I shouldn’t have. How is it connected . . . ?”

“Maybe it’s not. Not every crime, no matter how appalling, is my father’s fault.”

“No, but there’s something . . .” I muttered, thinking and going over it again. . . . There’d been two priests. . . . No. There’d been three. “Hang on,” I said as my mental pieces fell into place. “The priest this guy robbed was walking with a man in a black suit and clerical collar. They met another man in the same sort of outfit—black suit and clerical collar. An older man. I would swear that it was the same man who was in the middle of the circle last night—Griffin’s master. I didn’t see him well, but the general description and the aura were the same. Even if it wasn’t the same man, it was one of the bone mages—they have a fairly distinctive aura. We were that close to them!”

“How does that make a positive connection to the robbery at Jerónimos?”

“I’m not sure, except that it has to have been them—who else would want to break in to a tomb and disturb the dust of a fake king? But . . . it’s a monastery, isn’t it?”

Quinton was puzzled. “It’s mostly a museum now—but there is a secularized church and members of the old royal family were buried there.”

“Carlos said a lot of the bone mages come from the religious community. They wouldn’t be much noticed coming and going from a church of any kind and in this case, there would have been people in and out all day.”

Quinton took back the laptop and looked at the report again. “Witnesses around the area said they saw a priest near the building about the time the vandalism must have happened, but . . . there are a lot of those in Lisbon.”

“Black suit, clerical collar, old man . . .” I listed.

“Sounds right.”

“No way to prove it, but it has to be the same guy—or another bone mage.”

“I didn’t think they were that common. It’s hard to maintain a low profile when you’ve got a large group.”

“But it’s not a large group. It’s the same thing your dad is doing: He breaks his men up into smaller units and plants them in strategic places. The fact that they have—or had—a bone church here in Lisbon must be significant, but it doesn’t mean they’re high profile.”

“Small, discreet units, spread over Europe?”

“I’m thinking they’re modeled on religious organizations instead of military ones. It’s more likely there’s a handful of chapter houses near significant ossuaries and a moderate number of mages who move around.” I was speculating, but it fit and I spoke as the ideas formed. “Your father has some kind of deal with them—that’s how he got the shrine he brought to Seattle and how he’s been able to continue advancing the Ghost Division after you destroyed his lab. They know how to make those ghost boxes and how to pack a spell into something that allows a mage to use a dissimilar magic—that would be how Griffin produced a Night Dragon when that’s not within her normal powers as a bone mage, according to Carlos. But it’s likely that the Kostní Mágové’s physical resources are thin. Their wealth is in knowledge that your dad wants. But they want something, too. Last year, Carlos implied that they didn’t care about your dad’s goals, but had plans of their own and would use the Ghost Division and your father’s obsession to their own ends. What if this . . . thing they’re making is part of their price for helping your dad?”

“That would imply it’s at least part of their own long-term goal.”

“And therefore worth any price.”

“That doesn’t explain why Dad would give them Soraia.”

“What if they have persuaded him that this thing is useful for his goals as well? Necessary, even? Carlos said . . . What was it . . . ? Something about scorched earth . . .”

Quinton looked grim. “I remember what he said. ‘They will starve and burn Europe to scorched earth.’ They lost Limos, so the starving part’s out, but there’s more than one way to start a fire.”

“All these little actions . . . little horrors—riots, bombings, disease, uprisings—they’re the fire.”

“But if what these guys are building can make it burn faster or hotter, they’re only a spark.”

“That’s got to be what Carlos was after. Can you summarize all these incidents for him? Even the ones you think aren’t as likely to be connected?”

“Yes. I’ll have to start on it right now—it’s a lot of material if I go back over the past eight months.”

“I think you can just stick with what’s happened since you traced your father to Portugal.”

“I hope this helps Carlos figure out what Dad and his cronies are up to.”

“And I hope he shows up soon so we can discuss this business. This just gets worse.”

“It does look pretty bad. But you’ve had dire cases before.”

“They were mostly boring until I got killed.”

“The first time.”

“Actually, it was the second time. Didn’t I mention drowning when I was a teenager?”

Quinton was appalled. “I think I’d remember that conversation and I don’t.”

I blushed with shame. “I’m sorry. I should have said something before now. I think I’m up to death three or four, depending on how you count them.”

Quinton swore. “How many times can you expect to bounce back?”

“I’m not sure, but I think it’s not many—if at all.”

He pulled me into a too-tight embrace. “No more dying, OK?”

“I can’t promise that if you keep squeezing me like a boa.”

He winced and loosened his grip only enough to keep from suffocating me. “I’m sorry. I know you can’t make that promise, but . . . just don’t die for a long time. I want to be an old, grizzled curmudgeon with you.”

“So, you’ve been practicing?” I asked with a grin I didn’t feel, trying to lift the moment out of the deadly track it was heading into.

“I am not a curmudgeon. I’m socially maladroit.”

“You are not maladroit at anything,” I said.

“Oh, you flatterer, you.”

“I’m only trying to get you into bed.”

“Then why are we still standing up?” Quinton made a bad imitation of an evil laugh and dragged me backward onto the bed he’d only just left. Somehow, neither of us landed on the laptop.

“You know, this is going to be really embarrassing if Carlos comes in,” Quinton observed.

“That won’t happen,” I said.

“How can you be sure?”

“If you were more than three hundred years old, would you really want to watch us tumbling around like two squirrels in a knapsack? Besides, I’d kill him.”

“You would never kill a friend.”

“OK, no. But I might threaten him with sunlamps.”

Quinton laughed, which was the most perfect sound I’d heard in eight months. We did our best squirrel impression and unmade the bed in spectacular fashion until I fell asleep, snuggled into the crook of his arm.

I was so tired that I didn’t notice him get up and leave the room a little before ten o’clock. I was startled to wake in an empty bed to the sound of a woman sobbing, the room lit only by the dim glow of the laptop screensaver.

Socorro, ajude-me! Help me! Help me!

It is a concept so universal that the words needed no translation, carried as they were on the throbbing strains of panic. I sat up, looking for the speaker, but the words were in my mind, not in the air, and it took a moment to recognize that the damsel in distress was Amélia.

“What? What do you want now?” I could barely see her, so faint was her manifestation. Even sinking toward the Grey, she remained as transparent as mist. She was in full panic, rushing from side to side in the room, whipping up an uncanny wind by her passage.

Resgata-lo! Carlos precisa de sua ajuda. Ajuda-lo, eu lhe imploro! She spoke so fast, I couldn’t follow the exact words, only that Carlos needed help—a notion that seemed completely ridiculous at first.

But he had needed my help in the past, more than once. As powerful as he was, Carlos was not invincible and with enemies from his past—not to mention the night before—still around and angry, it was possible that even he could be in danger.

I scrambled out of bed and yanked on clothes, clumsy with the dress and flat shoes so unfamiliar compared to my trusty jeans and boots. “Where is he? What’s wrong?” I demanded, wishing I could grab her and make her stop her paranormal pacing. I tried to catch her, but she passed through my hands, even in the Grey, as if she weren’t there.

But she wasn’t. I was in the presence of the impossible: the crisis apparition of a ghost—a woman long dead.

“Amélia!” I shouted at her, exerting my will to force her to pay attention to me, even at a great distance. It made my body ache as if I’d been crushed in a vise. “Amélia, listen to me. Where is he? Where is Carlos?”

Carmo.

“What is that?”

But she was too upset to answer in a way that helped me. I grabbed Quinton’s laptop off the floor and opened a search window, typing in the word as fast as I could and hoping I’d spelled it right.

The Carmo Convent was one of the structures that had remained in ruins after the quake—the broken vaults of the soaring medieval church I’d seen from Rossio. Directions on the map showed the fastest route was to head for Rossio and then go past it, westbound, to the Santa Justa Lift—whatever that was. It was now ten o’clock and the lift closed at eleven. I’d have to run.