Revenant

TWENTY-TWO

The kitchen proved a difficult place to summon Amélia. It had probably been a room she rarely frequented when alive—the realm of domestic servants, not the lady of the house. Carlos was becoming frustrated, when Rafa come into the room behind us. He caught her, pinning her in place near the stove with the same word and gesture he’d used the night before. She looked alarmed but didn’t fight.

He leaned close to Rafa. “Who is the lady of this house?” Carlos asked her.

Rafa was confused. “Sua espousa, meu senhor.”

“My wife?”

“Sim. Ela é minha bisavó.” Rafa seemed to find the whole conversation odd and she frowned at him. “Por que você está tão cruel com ela? Por que você trouxe essas pessoas—”

Carlos moved his hand in front of her as if he were brushing her speech aside and Rafa fell instantly silent. He looked at Quinton and me, standing on the other side of the old wooden kitchen table. “In Rafa’s temporacline, Amélia is the mistress of the house. She resists coming when I call her, using the power Rafa has given her as leverage. She has no such strength in other versions of the house.”

“But we aren’t as safe,” I said.

“True. But if we move swiftly, we can capture Amélia and escape before Griffin, Rui, and Purlis can get past the gate.”

“That’s assuming they haven’t been busily working their way in while we’ve been hanging out with Rafa,” Quinton said.

“They have, but I have a little control over how fast they come. It will be sufficient, so long as we are swift,” Carlos said.

“Do you have something to catch her in?” I asked. “I’ve done this before, but I had to have a reflective container.”

“I need no such object.”

Carlos started to gesture as if he would dismiss the temporacline and Rafa with it, but Quinton threw up one hand. “Wait! What about the estate? If it still exists, it might be the perfect place to hide, since only Rafa ties any of us to it and she’s a ghost.”

“Rui is not above torturing the dead for information. Though without her bones in hand, it will be more difficult for him.”

“Then we’ll take her with us, too.”

Carlos gave him a narrow, assessing look. “For a man who distrusts and despises me, you seem to have high expectations of my abilities.”

“I trust you. I just don’t like you much. And I know better than to underestimate your skills. Snatching two ghosts out of the ether instead of just one isn’t going to be any sort of difficulty for you.”

Carlos looked at me and raised an eyebrow. “Birds of a feather.”

“Hey!” I objected.

Carlos offered a thin, unfriendly smile. “It is not quite as simple as you believe, but, indeed, it’s no hardship. However, her temporacline may collapse as soon as I take her and we’ll have less time in which to move.”

We both nodded. He turned back to Rafa and removed whatever magical gag he’d placed on her.

She let out a stream of indignant words while Carlos waited for her to stop. It didn’t take long for her to wind down.

“Where is Amélia’s estate?” he asked.

Rafa blinked as if surprised and replied in rapid Portuguese, gesturing as though giving directions I couldn’t begin to follow. Carlos scowled, but Quinton nodded the whole time. When she was done, she smiled at Carlos as if he’d just paid her a dazzling compliment.

He bowed to her. “Perdoe-me,” he muttered. Then he swept his hand through her as if grabbing a coat off a rack.

She was solid in the temporacline we occupied. For a moment her form resisted, and she gasped in surprise and pain as his hand ripped into her. Then she collapsed into a shape of silver mist and pale blue sparks that Carlos gathered into his fist, rolling the ghostly steam into a small wisp he thrust into the chest pocket of his shirt.

The house shuddered around us as Carlos collected the remnant of Rafa. The kitchen seemed to waver and grow icy, then flush into searing heat and a flash of harsh yellow light as the house settled back into the normal time frame. Cold white mist rolled across the floor. Shrieking, scrabbling, and pounding shook the front of the house, resonating through the structure and reflecting off the garden wall in waves of sound and magical force. The Grey shivered silver and green with every blow.

Quinton was a little shaken, but he looked around, assessing the situation. “That’s not another earthquake.”

“No,” Carlos said. “Our guests have grown impatient. Are you both ready to leave as soon as this is done?”

“Not quite,” Quinton said. “I can’t risk leaving the laptop where Dad can recover it. Can you do without me while I go get it?”

“We can, but bring everything you’ll need and be sure the tower door is closed and the lock engaged. Meet us in the cellar.”

“Will do.” Quinton bolted out of the room and I could hear him running at full pelt across the foyer and up the stairs.

Carlos looked at me. I shrugged. “I travel light. What I need is in my pockets. Remember—I came with nothing.” I blessed the habit by which I’d stowed my ID and cash in the pockets of unfamiliar clothes as I dressed.

“Good. Catch Amélia when she arrives. She won’t be as easy to take as Rafa. She knows me better.”

He glanced at my hand and seemed about to ask me to extend it, but then he chuckled in his throat and looked down at his own hand. He picked up one of the kitchen knives and pricked his left index finger. Very fast, he wrote something on the kitchen table in his blood and drew something from his shirt that was black and shining darkly through the Grey. It was the Lâmina que Consome as Almas—a black blade he had killed for and nearly been destroyed by, later. He let fall a single red drop of his blood onto the knife and the blade rang as he slammed his palm down on the table over the words he had scrawled there.

“Come, Amélia Maria Desidéria Leitão e Sousa de Neves Ataíde. You have no choice.”

She appeared with a screech of fury and flew at him before I could lay a hand into her energetic substance. “Monstro!”

He batted her aside and I caught a few fingers into her chilly tangle of ghost-stuff. She strained against my hold, toward Carlos as if she meant to strike him, and her words made hollow echoes in my mind, heard and only partially understood in the confusing fog of her fury.

“Monster?” Carlos said. “First you save me, then you revile me. Dear wife, you’re more interesting than I realized.”

“Deixa a minha filha em paz. Deixa!” Let my daughter go. . . .

“Your daughter? Rafa? Impossible. Many-times-great-granddaughter, perhaps . . .”

She fell back a short distance, her shade quivering in the shaking house as the tension between her energetic form and my crooked fingers eased. “Minha neta . . .” My grandchild . . .

“By whom? By whom did you have a child that begat still more children, little wife?”

“Você! Por causa de você, Carlos, a minha grande maldição, e o meu grande amor . . .” By you, Carlos, my curse, my beloved . . . Her voice trailed away and she tried to withdraw as if ashamed or appalled at what she’d said. I held her where she was, though I longed to let her go.

“You never told me,” Carlos said, the air around him waxing hot and red with his anger.

“Eu temia que você faria. . . .” I feared what you would do. . . .

“As well you should have. I took you against your will, forced you—” He seemed almost pleased to remind her of the things he’d done to hurt her and drive her away.

Amélia shrugged. “Forcei você a fazê-lo.” I made you do it.

He roared at her.

The house rattled and Quinton skidded through the door with his bag over his shoulder. “No more time, folks—the storm troopers have arrived!”

Carlos cursed, but his fury dissipated as suddenly as it had come and he drew his hand over Amélia’s phantom face. “Sleep.” Then he slipped the point of the Lâmina into the swirl of her ghostly fabric. I yanked my hands away, feeling the tool’s hunger as it cut. Carlos twisted the ghost’s substance onto the blade like thread on a spindle. The knife drank Amélia in until no sign of her remained.

I backed toward the door as he pulled a match from the box near the stove and lit the smear of blood across the table’s surface on fire.

Then he turned to us, the black blade still in his hand. “Why are you standing still? Run!”

We bolted out the door, but Carlos didn’t follow immediately. I turned to see why.

Griffin had skittered into the hall, her black heels clattering on the tiles. She stopped as she saw Carlos and gaped for a split second before making a flinging gesture at him.

A rattling swirl of ivory and black whirled toward him. Carlos flicked the Lâmina through it and the spell fell apart, littering the floor with white grit.

Griffin jolted backward, spitting, “Why can’t I kill you, you bastard? You should be dead!”

Silent, Carlos sprang toward her, the gleaming blackness of the blade thrust forward in a blur that sliced into Griffin’s chest almost faster than I could follow. Her mouth fell open in shock as his hand pushed wrist-deep under the arch of her ribs. I gagged.

Carlos leaned close, as if he would kiss her, and murmured words that seemed to settle on Griffin like dust. She writhed, smoke rising around her. He yanked his arm back, tearing something pulsing and dripping blood from her chest.

I doubled over in an agony of reflected death as Griffin collapsed to the floor, blood and dark vapor pouring from the hole in her torso. She blinked twice, her mouth working like that of a fish out of water. Then she was still and I could barely breathe from the shock of her death as it moved through me.

Rui ran through the archway with a fleetness that belied his age and stopped, taking in the body and the blood on the floor with a strange gleam in his eye. He raised his head to look at us, his gaze narrowed, as if he was trying to decide which was more important: catching us or dismembering his dead student.

Before he could move farther, Carlos flung Griffin’s heart at the bone mage’s head and whirled back to drag me to my feet and across the hall to the cellar door.

He slammed it closed behind us, muttering swift, barbed words that sparked and sealed themselves across the door.

We fled down the cellar stairs, snuffing candles as we went, tumbling and staggering down to the cool, dry darkness of the rooms below where Quinton waited in a foment of impatience and worry. Carlos led us through the last door and bolted it behind himself once again before showing us the concealed door on the other side. Beyond the odd little portal, a narrow tunnel sloped upward toward the castle that lay on the summit, dreaming in the sun. We stepped inside, Carlos pausing again to work some more complicated spell at the threshold of the secret door, and then we began up the steep stone passage.

The house echoed behind us with the sound of Rui’s rage.

By the time we emerged on the far side of the hill near the castle wall, we could no longer feel or hear the shuddering of the house, but there was a new sound in the air. The chatter of morning tourists on the castle ramparts above us was louder than it should have been, breaking into shouts and sudden squeals as a shadow passed over with a sound of leathery wings. Housewives on the terraced streets below looked up and screamed. Seabirds cruised through the blue sky above, letting distant cries into the air perfumed with the river and the scent of Lisbon’s streets and moved aside in the sudden rush of air as a churning, dark mass of wings, eyes, and streaming cloud-stuff that looked like tentacles dove from above. It spread in my vision, obscuring most of the sky in inky green horror.

Quinton had stopped just within the concealment of shrubs and trees that covered the mouth of our escape tunnel. “What in three kinds of hell is that?”

Carlos tilted his head. In the slanting light through the shrubs there was no sign of the gore that had splattered him as Griffin died. “Someone’s nightmare. Rui brought his dreamspinner along.”

“So he or she can do more than raise weak drachen,” I said. “Is it dangerous or just an illusion?”

“Even an illusion can be dangerous, but this one is weak. A dreamspinner’s work is always stronger in shadow and night than in daylight,” Carlos replied.

“We’ve seen some of his work in the daylight before on this trip,” I reminded him.

“True, but this one is decaying already. It won’t last more than a few minutes longer.”

“Why bother with it, then?” I asked.

“I suspect he’s as pleased with the diversion and fright it’s creating as with any practical aspect.”

“But can we afford to wait for it to dissipate?” Quinton asked. “How much time do you think we’ve bought ourselves?”

“Perhaps three hours,” Carlos said.

“Well, I guess we’ve got a few minutes to wait, whether we like it or not,” Quinton said. “I’m thinking that if we split up and get far from here before they get free from the house, we might improve that lead. How long do you think it will take Rui and Griffin to catch up?”

“Griffin will not be catching up, which may remove Rui from the equation for a day while he deals with her remains. If our trail goes cold here, it could be two or three more days before he and your father find other ways to track us. If the estate proves to be remote enough, we may confound their efforts completely—when we reach it.”

“And you don’t know what they still need to make their Hell Dragon?”

“We know they still need the bones of a child. They may require the bones of a repentant thief, among others. If the bones are touched by power, the strength of their spell is greater, and the same is true if the bones serve more than one purpose. Rui will take some of those from Griffin, but he will find them unsatisfactory. Your niece would have sufficed, but they have lost her. They will look elsewhere for their woman’s bones, once they realize Griffin’s are tainted. Without knowing precisely what’s already been taken from the ossuaries and whom they’ve killed, I can’t know what’s still wanting. The recent damage has all been in Lisbon or in the south along the Algarve. There are ossuaries in the Alentejo—the most important is the Capela dos Ossos in the church of Saint Francis, in Évora where the skeleton of a child hangs in chains, but there are two more in the area. One at Campo Maior and another at Monforte, both to the northeast. They are more likely to find their woman’s bones and their thief at one of those.”

The boiling cloud of wings and tentacles turned in the sky, growing smaller and thinner. “I think it’s fading out,” I said.

“Good,” Quinton replied. “The sooner it’s gone, the sooner we go. If we split up here, they’ll have to decide who’s more important to chase after and that will tell us what they’re most worried about—you or us.” Carlos looked dubious while Quinton continued. “I know where the estate is from what she said and since you have Rafa . . .”

It was hard to credit, but Carlos appeared uncertain. Since we’d arrived, I’d seen him use magic as casually as if it cost nothing; he’d called the nevoacria without any apparent effort. He was on his home turf, one of the most powerful mages I’d ever met, and yet he hesitated. But nothing was as he remembered and he currently existed in a more fragile state than he’d experienced in nearly three hundred years. Now he faced traveling alone in daylight, which had become as foreign to him as living on the moon. For five years I’d thought of him as invincible, infallible, but now he wasn’t. His aura had changed so profoundly in the past twenty-four hours that I could no longer read it, but I could see it shift and contract around him. Was it possible Carlos was overwhelmed and didn’t want to part company with us for reasons that had nothing to do with practicality or safety?

“What of Blaine?” Carlos asked.

“I always know where Quinton is—or at least which direction—if I concentrate hard enough,” I said, laying my hand on my chest for a moment to touch the point of our paranormal connection. “I’ll just head northeast until I find him.”

Both men frowned at me, but they didn’t have any more choice than I did. “It’s nearly gone,” I noted, watching the nightmare spark and thin in the air before it swirled and dove for the ground. “Are we agreed on a plan?”

Their replies were drowned in the shrieks of the people on the castle rampart as the dreamspinner’s work plunged toward them, in its last act.

“It would be unwise for us to travel farther together,” Carlos conceded. “I will go through Évora and then find my way to the estate. I will meet you both there.”

He stepped out into the sun and walked toward the castle, just another slightly dusty tourist—not a sign of bloody murder left on his skin or clothes. I watched him until Quinton pulled me the other way—there was only one other direction to go on the road below us and no way up or down without wings. We’d have to walk together for a few minutes.

“He’ll be all right. He’s the baddest badass in Portugal.”

“I’m not sure about that,” I said as we walked down the north slope of the hill and away from Carlos and the Castelo São Jorge. “He’s vulnerable—mortal, at least temporarily—and this isn’t the same Lisbon he’s used to anymore.”

“He’s still more dangerous than six of anyone else put together. He stopped Griffin, didn’t he? She wasn’t a pushover.”

“He ripped her heart out.”

“Good for him. No one better deserved the loss of a major organ. You don’t see Carlos as others do, Harper. No one who doesn’t have a death wish is going to mess with him.”

“Those aren’t the people I’m worried about. What if Rui and your father catch him?”

“They won’t—if he doesn’t have to watch out for us, he has more options about how to stymie Rui than we do. We’re a detriment to him at this stage. Besides, who would you bet on in that fight? The apprentice or the master? Seriously.”

Even in my uncertainty and the lingering ache in my chest from Griffin’s death, I had to give him that point. “How do you think they found us?” I asked.

“Taxi driver.”

“What taxi driver?”

“You didn’t notice? Down at the end of the block where the street turns, there was a taxi parked. The same cab you and Carlos came home in.”

“I can’t believe I missed it.”

“You were both in pretty bad shape last night, so it’s not that surprising. And don’t kick yourself about not having identified the driver as a villain. Dad and Rui just did what the cops would do—they checked for anyone who fit your or Carlos’s description. My dad’s seen you both before, but we got lucky, because the old man wasn’t quite prepared to see Carlos at all, much less running around in daylight. They knew he survived, but Griffin obviously didn’t stay to see the finale. I guess Carlos was right about her vanity being her downfall.”

“I’m just afraid we’re throwing him to the wolves. And after what I did to keep him alive.” I had to trot to keep up with Quinton’s agitated pace.

“Rui and my dad won’t want any of us alive to stop them. They both know how dangerous Carlos is to their plans and Dad can’t risk having me on the loose for similar reasons. And while my father may not be sure what you are even if Rui’s told him—and he strikes me as the sort who likes to keep a few cards hidden at all times—he knows you’re not normal. With or without me, you’re a wild card far too dangerous to leave in someone else’s hands. We’re all running from the wolves, now. I’m frankly worried about whoever may be with Dad aside from Carlos’s dearest enemy. I can’t plan for what I don’t know. On the upside, Dad’s not going to be moving very fast with that leg.”

“On the downside, when we’re talking about bone mages, I’m more concerned about where his original leg is now. It happened before he took Soraia, so it’s not a substitute for her. . . .”

“I’m trying not to think about that.”

“Maybe you should.”

We both shut up and jogged on down the hill. At the first corner we came to, Quinton stopped, gave me a quick kiss, and turned aside, taking the other road and leaving me to my own devices.

I had no doubt about my ability to find my own way—strange city or not, figuring things out was my forte—but I was still worried and other bits of my mind continued pursuing the calculus of destruction and the unacknowledged weight of fear.