Revenant

TWENTY-NINE

The sun was still up when the stifling discomfort of sleeping in clothes and blankets forced me awake. I wasn’t entirely rested, but the feeling that we were already pressing too close to a deadline goaded me. My attempts to get out of bed without waking Quinton were unsuccessful and he caught my good hand.

“No. Please,” he begged. “A few minutes . . .”

“There’s too much we have to—”

“I know. I know,” he said, sitting up and shaking his head in resignation.

Quinton followed me into the bath and we managed to get clean without soaking my stitches or having uncomfortable, hurried sex—my hand still ached and the timing was just too wrong, though the desire lay plain between us. We were both anxious and wound up, but he didn’t press me about his proposal and I didn’t talk about impending doom or the ghosts that seemed to peer from the walls and flow through the rooms like smoke.

The shirt and trousers I’d borrowed from Quinton were dusty and sweat-stained, and I thought it unlikely I’d be much help in the nude—though Quinton probably thought otherwise. As much as I appreciated that, I couldn’t push aside the nettling feeling that there was too much to do and not enough time.

There were noises outdoors and something thumped in the hallway outside. Quinton stuck his head out and talked to Nelia for a moment, then backed into the room with a large, heavy suitcase. He shut the door with his foot and turned around, lugging the case to the bed.

“Nelia—with some prompting from Carlos, I suspect—has unearthed a collection of things left by guests and family. If we’re unlucky, something will fit you.”

“Unlucky?” I repeated.

“Well, unlucky for me, because then you’ll stop pacing around the room in nothing but a towel.”

“I think it would be luckier, since that way you won’t have to watch the pacing part of the equation.”

“It is a little annoying.”

“Let’s see what’s in there.”

The case was stuffed with mismatched clothes and, once again, I had to make do with a blouse and skirt that were both a bit loose-fitting but long enough to cover my midriff and knees as well as all the essential bits. The outfit was comfortable enough and didn’t look too bad once we’d found a belt. The skirt even had pockets, which seemed more common with European than American clothes, the assumption of American designers being that you’d rather look slim than have a convenient place for your keys.

“I’m becoming tired of borrowed clothes,” I grumbled. “I never thought I’d miss my closet more than my truck. At least the sandals are more comfortable than they look.”

“I, for one, am not complaining. You have fantastic legs. Especially when—”

I put my hand over his mouth. “Oh no. Don’t go there.”

He pushed my hand away and kissed me, pulling me in tight to his body. I could feel the tension and desire he was trying to suppress for my sake. “I’m sorry that this is such a bad time, but no matter what clothes you’re wearing—or not wearing—you’re always going to make me feel this way,” he said. “Did I ever tell you that the first time we met, I wanted to take you to bed?”

“Yes.”

“Damn. I thought I was revealing something.”

“Oh, you’re revealing something, all right,” I said. “And if there weren’t bad guys to stop and dragons to slay, I’d be flattered flat onto my back.”

He laughed and let me go. “Then we’d better go slay them.”

I moved and my thigh brushed against him. He bit his lip. “Maybe you’d better go first,” he added.

Downstairs, the house had become busy near the kitchen and a group of long tables had been set under the cork oaks at the end of the driveway. Nelia and the children were coming and going along with several other women and a man who limped, carrying food, wine, and utensils out to the tables.

Trying to stay out of the way, I stepped out onto the terrace around the pool, which was now deserted except for Carlos. He stood at the edge of the drop and watched the bustle from a distance.

“What’s all that?” I asked.

“Dinner for the fieldworkers. The house provides for those who’ve labored during the day. Most of them are local people—about a third are family, the rest neighbors and seasonal workers.”

“Your family . . . ?”

“Yes,” he replied, sounding a little irritated. “I can see the ties, some faint, some stronger. . . . ”

“I don’t understand how you couldn’t have known, couldn’t have felt them. . . .”

“Do you feel every connection in your web of family? Even once you saw it?”

“Only Quinton.”

Carlos nodded with a slight scowl. “I had no such connection to any of them.”

“Are you sure Beatriz and Damiao-Maria were your kids?”

“Yes. While you slept, I spoke with Amélia.”

“So she’s loose.”

He inclined his head a few degrees. “For now.”

We were both quiet for a minute, watching the bustling around the dining tables as other people began arriving, walking across the fields, or driving in to park nearby on the stubble of crops already harvested near the house. Even the ghosts streamed out from the house and wove among the living, remembering the harvest meals they’d eaten under the same trees. I spotted Rafa, but I didn’t recognize any others as more than swirls of white, silver, black, and blue, and the vague mist-shapes of bodies and faces. The man with the limp paused to stare back at us until Nelia grabbed him by the arm and laughingly pulled him along with her to the kitchen. He followed her with a hungry gaze and stumbling feet.

“This is a burden I never wanted,” Carlos said, his low voice making the air near us quiver. “I had thought, as I first saw them, ‘In a very different world, might this have been mine? Might I have been other than what I am?’ But there is no different world in which any of that could be true. There is only this one, where I have descendants only because I raped my wife and I see them only because of you.”

“Me?”

“Yes. I would not stand here, now, if I had not met you. I would not be as I am now if you hadn’t come asking foolish questions and if I had not taken Cameron under my wing because of you. Because you are who you are—not what you are. I have met other Greywalkers—I knew Peter Marsden when I lived in London under the heel of my hate. He is a weak creature, compared to you, and driven mad by what he is.”

“Marsden is twice the Greywalker I am.”

“And half the man. Less than half the woman.”

I laughed a little at that, but it didn’t distract Carlos from his strange humor that seemed to balance on the razor’s edge between anger and awe.

“I saw it when you first looked at me and wanted to run away, but you didn’t because you were more worried for the safety of a foolhardy, loyal boy than you were for yourself. Your compassion, your sense of justice and righteousness, your ridiculous bravery—I’ve laughed at you over them, goaded, and pricked you about them, but they are what fascinated me from the first. They are what keep you from falling into madness and make you superior to all the others of your kind. Until that night, I would have killed a creeping, questioning fool like you out of hand. A lamb walking into a lion’s den gets eaten and I am a vicious, ever-hungry lion. But you shone like a star and I wanted to see what you would do, strange creature, if I told you the truth.”

“And I went outside and threw up.”

“That may be, but from that moment, my life—my unlife—began to change. Before I met you, I had only one emotion: hate. And only one desire: vengeance. You destroyed them. And rather than having nothing, I had everything—including a student I didn’t want, whose only ability is his charm. You challenged me and I discovered I was still curious, still passionate about something other than my desire to see Edward destroyed. Then you made a proposal that no one had ever made before.”

“I did?”

“Yes. You suggested that even a vampire who had no ability with magic might still exert pressure upon it, because we exist as magical creatures. That through one such as me or Mara Danziger it might be directed, rather than passive. And you were correct. It is that which makes Cameron the better leader—because of your suggestion I trained him to enhance what is natural in him. My fascination with you grew and other things became less important. I ceased to see myself only as the creature that Lenoir and Edward had made me. The rift between Edward and me seemed smaller, less . . . worthy of my energies. Every question you brought to me challenged me and whetted my desire for knowledge and greater consequence as nothing had in centuries. Cameron was hopeless as a mage, but as a leader, he is passionate, mindful, and fair, and determined to make us all better than we were—which he learned from you.”

I had fought—usually in blind ignorance, fear, and fury—to wrest my fate from the control of others and do something better with what I had become. Cameron had been led to it. “You don’t give yourself enough credit,” I murmured.

“I promise you, I am neither decent nor humane and my passions are far too dark to be reflected in what Cameron has become. Except for one. In both of us, there is a high regard for you.”

“Oh no . . . not that . . .”

“No, not that. Not what you feel for your husband-in-soul—whose true name is almost too painful to utter—not even lust.”

“Are you making fun of my beloved He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Called-After-His-Father?”

Carlos curled his lip in disdain at my attempt to derail the uncomfortable conversation. “Perhaps. Your empathy, your foolish, irresponsible compassion, even for walking horrors like Ian Markine, drew me to watch you, to help you, even when I wanted to take your light from you. That is why I did not kill him and it is why I broke his mind. You believed he should be stopped because you believe—you know by your own action—that there is such a thing as justice even if it isn’t what the laws of man would prescribe. You imagined he could be saved, made whole, because of your burning, beautiful compassion, but he would not have stopped in his plans to murder you and all the rest. He intended it—I saw it in him the way you see the fire in the warp and weft of the world. I recognize evil too well. I cared nothing for the fates of the others, but I could not let him live to kill you and I could not let him die and damn you. For its own sake, because it fed my own power, I destroyed him, but because it preserved you, it was a pleasure to drive him mad.”

The emotion that colored his voice then ran over my skin like a caress, a hedonistic thrill more erotic than simple flesh. Shivering, I had to look away and watch the people at the tables as the sun began to slide down in the west, turning the sky to gold.

I watched the limping man catch up to Nelia and turn her around for a kiss, which she returned, laughing. He ran his hand into her hair, which she had let down to tumble in dark curls onto her shoulders. He bent to kiss her again and then pulled back, leaning away, staring at her, his expression changing from ardor to anger. He spoke sharply to her and I couldn’t hear what he said, but the way he leaned toward her and the color of his aura, suddenly flushed red, was enough. Nelia glared back at him. I turned my gaze aside.

I felt Carlos step up close behind me and I winced as the almost-forgotten cold of his aura enclosed me in nauseating discomfort. “I have told you these things because I am falling away,” he whispered. “This gift of yours is flickering out. By Monday night I will be what I was. I will not forget what you gave me and I will not profane it by doing you harm. But if you don’t say yes to your lover’s proposal, I may—”

Quinton walked out of the house and toward us, calling out, “Harper?”

It didn’t take Carlos’s unfinished threat to decide me and I turned toward Quinton, smiling, happy. “Yes!” I called back.

Something shrieked and a whirlwind of mist and malice descended on us. “No! No, no, no!”

Amélia swept between us, throwing Quinton into the pool and pushing him down. “She is not for you!” the ghost screamed into my head.

I winced at the eldritch sound and dove toward the pool.

Carlos spun and plucked me out of the air. “No!”

“She’ll drown him!” I shouted back.

“And you also, if you go in now.”

He reached forward, the jet-black shroud of his aura expanding like wings and folding over us, and yanked Amélia backward by the clawed extension of his power.

She screamed and thrashed in his grip as I dove into the pool and grabbed hold of Quinton. I pulled him up under one arm and kicked for the surface, giving no thought to my injured hand, even as it throbbed and stung. Through the water I could see Carlos holding Amélia down while she continued to fight him.

I broke the surface and gasped for air, squeezing my arm tight around Quinton’s chest as I made for the shallows. He coughed and sputtered, gasped, then kicked and fought me for a moment before he realized I wasn’t the one trying to kill him. I could hear Amélia screaming, her words in Portuguese and echoing in English in my mind, making a clamor that made my head ache.

Quinton got his feet under him and pulled free of my arm. “I got it. I’m all right,” he panted, slogging for the nearest rail.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Yeah, yeah. What the hell was that?”

“Amélia.”

“Still here?”

“Yes, and wants to kill us both.”

“Jesus, everyone wants us dead except us. Go. I’ll get myself out of the pool. You go deal with the ghost.”

I pulled myself out of the water, clumsy with only one good hand, and dripped to where Carlos was struggling with Amélia. She fought and screamed at him, tearing at him with taloned hands, her face distended into a horrifying visage full of fangs—the expression of her rage.

“She is for you! For you! Not for that weak creature! I did this all for you, Carlos—my love, my curse. . . .”

“It is not for you to determine my life, Amélia. You are dead! Your power on Earth is passed,” Carlos said, his voice sharp. He shook her and she diminished, becoming more human-looking, but no less disturbed.

She giggled a shrill, mad sound. “I brought her to you! I gambled your life, my beloved, so she could save you. So you could take her. You should have taken her then! Why did you not make her yours at Carmo?”

“At Carmo?” he asked, and now his voice trembled at the edge of rage. “What had you to do with that, Wife?”

Amélia laughed hysterically, sliding to her knees in front of Carlos as if begging him for something. “I found Lenoir and I spoke with the woman who wanted you dead. I tricked them! They thought they controlled me, but I was the one who turned them to my purpose! They lured you out and tried to kill you, but I knew you could not die. Not my love, my Carlos. And she would save you and you would love her and be happy! I tried to make you happy. I tried to give you a son. I failed and failed and failed. . . .”

Carlos shook his head. “Foolish woman . . . You failed at nothing. Look out there, in the field. Who are those people?”

Amélia turned her head toward the tables under the trees and the diners all stared back. I don’t know what they saw, but it must have been strange, judging by the expressions they turned our way. Carlos sank to one knee beside his wife’s shade and pointed at the family and neighbors. “Who are they?” he repeated.

“Fieldworkers,” Amélia said.

“Look harder.” He placed his hand on her phantom back and beckoned me closer. “Rafa . . .”

Amélia smiled as she saw Rafa. “My granddaughter.”

“And the rest. All your children.”

“My children. Our children.” She broke into sobs. “I loved you and I gave you children, but you never loved me!”

“I am not capable of love.”

“You love her. . . .”

“I do not—I am a monster.” His voice thrummed on the strings of the Grey, resonant, and unbearable. “I raped you and beat you. You died to give me a son and I did not care. I hated you and wished you dead long before that. I would have killed you eventually if you hadn’t the luck to die before I could do it. You deserved better than me. You deserve to be free of me.” He shifted his focus to me for a second. “Hold her.”

I reached for Amélia’s tangled threads as he continued. “And I deserve to be free of you, treacherous bitch.”

I was stunned by his words and barely had my fingers in the knotted gyre of her energy, which sent a sharp, electric pain stabbing into my cut finger and running up my hand like fire, when he pushed his free hand against his own chest and tore away the tiny energetic filament that held them to each other. Amélia shrieked and writhed in my grip. Carlos spat a word at her that coruscated with spikes of obsidian black and bleeding red thorns. Then he plunged his hands into her spectral form, ripping her into shreds with two violent swipes. The hot, bright core of her energy snuffed out and she unraveled in a swift tumble of gleaming threads and a waning cry that dropped to a whisper as she fell apart and then vanished into silence.

She was gone. Still dripping wet, I stared at Carlos, aghast, shivering not from the water, but from shock and the electric feeling that had coursed through me until he tore her apart. I had seen him dissipate ghosts before, but never with such brutality, and I had never felt so much as if a small part of me had been shredded with her.

Carlos closed his eyes, his chest heaving as if his actions had cost him dearly.

“I don’t understand,” I said, rubbing my arms and trying to silence the buzzing sensation touching her had brought on.

He caught his breath, looked up at me, and got back to his feet. He glared out at the family, neighbors, and workers, arrested in their dinner, until they turned their heads and returned to their food. He swung back to me and Quinton, his expression bleak as a wasteland. “She had to be released, but she tried to kill us all and—unlike you, Greywalker—my compassion is limited.”

“Amélia . . . knew Lenoir? The one who made Sergeyev’s box?” Quinton asked, coming to put an arm around my shoulder and hold me close—though for his own sake or mine, I couldn’t guess.

“Yes. My old master. The man who murdered me.”

Carlos walked past us and disappeared into the house. I glanced out at the people in the field, but they conspicuously didn’t look back.

“I think I missed something. What has Lenoir to do with this?”

“I thought—but I never did tell you, did I?”

Quinton gave an exasperated sigh. “Tell me what?”

“The night I went out after him, Carlos had gone to talk to Lenoir’s shade at Carmo and Griffin tried to kill him—that setup appears to have been Amélia’s doing—but how would Amélia know Lenoir? Carlos wouldn’t have introduced them during her lifetime and ghosts don’t usually—”

“Get chummy after death? Yeah, I remember your saying that before. But I don’t think it would be smart of us to ask Carlos about that right now, do you?”

I shook my head.

He looked at me, still rubbing my arms. “Are you all right?”

“Feels like static all over my skin. And I never thought I’d say I feel cold here, but I do.”

“We’d better go in and dry off,” Quinton said.

“Yes,” I replied, turning with him as he led me back toward the house.

Nelia was in the doorway when we reached it. Her eyes were too bright and she smiled at us with a strange feverishness. “I knew it,” she said.

“Knew what?” I asked.

“He is Carlos.”

“You know that’s not possible,” I said.

She smiled and held out some towels, but she didn’t say anything beyond, “Put your clothes in the hall and I’ll dry them for you.” Then she walked away, leaving Quinton and me alone in the salon.

We exchanged a puzzled look and returned to our room, dampened in more than our clothes.