Revenant

THIRTY

Carlos met us at the head of the stairs. “Change clothes. We still have work to do tonight.”

“Wait,” I said.

He gave me a cold look.

“Why?”

The thin edge of a razor smile pulled one corner of his mouth, but he didn’t give me the answer I wanted. “Rui will not ask that question if we fail,” he said, and turned away.

“Still as warm and friendly as a crocodile with a toothache,” Quinton observed as the necromancer walked away down the hall.

I found myself scowling and reserved any comment.

“What was that business with Nelia?” Quinton asked as we entered our bedroom. “She’s a little obsessed with our scary companion, I think.”

“She also seems to have a male admirer who isn’t happy about that. If we hadn’t made a scene, I think he would have.”

“Ah, the joys of family dynamics.”

“As if either of us can talk.”

He pressed his lips together and didn’t say anything.

I had to sort through the suitcase of mystery again and find dry clothes, but at least I knew I’d be running around in the dark, so it didn’t matter how presentable they were. I found a dark shirt and a pair of men’s pants that fit a little better than Quinton’s had and were long enough to cover my ankles. It was an inelegant ensemble, but I didn’t care.

A knock came on the door and this time I opened it while Quinton stuffed the unwanted clothes back into the suitcase.

Nelia stood in the hall with a tray. “I thought you would want food before you go out—Carlos has arranged for the car, but he isn’t hungry. And I can take your wet clothes and towels now if you like.”

“Yes, thank you,” I said, accepting the tray and turning to put it down inside the room. Then I picked up our wet things.

I stepped out into the hallway and closed the door, looking around to make sure we were alone before I spoke to her. I dropped the wet clothes to the floor and caught her arm. “Nelia,” I started, “I would avoid Carlos if I were you. Your boyfriend doesn’t seem to like him.”

She made a dismissive shudder and pulled her arm from my loose grip. “Eladio. He can go to the Devil.”

“You seemed fond enough of him an hour ago.”

“He’s a possessive prig. I don’t need another of those in my life. If I must have a man, I’d prefer one who appreciates my wildness as much as my body.” She smirked a little and bent down to pick up the wet clothes, pushing her loose hair back behind her ears. There was a tiny flicker of color along her collarbone that gave off an unnatural gleam when no light from the lamps could strike it. I peered at her through the Grey, unnerved, and saw it: a small red mark like a tiny dagger nestling in the hollow of her collarbone, right where blood would pool as it flowed from a wound high on her neck.

There was no such wound—no sign of one, but there was an odd purple thread in her aura, a subtle thing I had not noticed before and might have missed—like the tiny mark—but doubted I had. Carlos had mentioned a mark by which vampires could recognize those who fed them and to whom they belonged. . . .

I reached out and touched the mark on Nelia’s clavicle. She gasped and stood up, staring at me, eyes bright and startled. Then she shook herself and took half a step away. “What are you doing?”

“I thought I saw something on your neck,” I said.

“You, too? It’s nothing.”

But it wasn’t nothing, not the way it had sparked at my touch and she’d jumped to turn toward me, only to see I wasn’t whom she’d expected. But there was no one in the hall besides me.

“I still think Carlos is not a safe choice for you,” I suggested.

“It’s none of your business, Mrs. Smith.”

“No, but I know him better than you do and he’s not a nice man. I think you saw what happened earlier. Is that someone you want to be close to?”

She gave me a cool look. “It is none of your business,” she repeated, then picked up the laundry and walked away with it.

Of course it wasn’t, and Carlos, for all he was mortal and warm for the moment, was still a vampire and a necromancer—a monster, as he had said, who would return to his undead state by Monday night if we all survived whatever we were going to do between now and Saint Jerome’s Day. Nelia was an adult, old enough to have adult children if she had started young, and old enough to make her own decisions about whom she was going to lend her body to in whatever capacity. But it still gave me a queasy feeling, since she was his granddaughter, however many generations removed. I didn’t want to think about the implications of that kind of consanguinity.

But I was still thinking about it as we drove toward Campo Maior. Night had fallen and the roads were empty. My hand prevented me from driving and I had been a bit surprised that Carlos had chosen to take the wheel.

“You’re a font of the unexpected. I didn’t think you drove,” I had said as we approached the small car that sat in the driveway, dusty from the trip to the house for our use.

“That I do not choose to does not mean that I cannot.” His voice had been chilly and I’d wondered if Nelia had mentioned our conversation to him. “I find the effect of the steel and glass . . . disconcerting.”

It sounded like the flip side of the comfort I took in my truck’s ability to filter out the random energy of the Grey. “You never seem uncomfortable in the Land Rover,” I’d said.

He had given me a sideways glance as he got into the car and closed the door without another word.

Campo Maior lay in a small bulge of the border between Portugal and Spain, surrounded by the sometime enemy on three sides. It was a small city, placed as it was on a hill with a river on one side, and fields that rolled down to Spain on the other. Even from the highway, I could see the rigid shadow of a castle at the top of the hill, its fortified walls like arms reaching for the city beneath a quarter moon. On the outskirts, the area smelled of mown fields, dusty olives, and pigs, which I could hear grunting even in the dark as they moved restlessly in their yards. I imagined that even with the pigs, it was a striking place in the daylight. We passed a large, rambling building bearing a sign for the Delta company, and the odor of coffee reached in through our open windows. We wound up through the town to the second-highest point—the Igreja Matriz de Campo Maior.

The Mother Church of Campo Maior stood in a road that was wide by Portuguese standards, but still narrow by mine, completely surrounded by red-roofed buildings sprouting old-fashioned television antennas like a harvest of metal wheat, gleaming silver in the moonlight. It was another Baroque building with little ornamentation other than the contrast of dressed stone edges against white plastered walls. The edifice was six stories tall and as wide as a city block with a central arch between two square towers that made the massive doors to the sanctuary seem small. I had to crane my neck to look up at the huge structure.

We left the car a block away and walked back, not looking too unusual even after dark, since the town hadn’t gone to bed yet, it being Saturday and only an hour past sunset. Like Borba and Vila Viçosa, the town was white with marble and plaster except for the church itself. A small staircase led up between the massive stone-edged church and a smaller building on the east that was so perfectly white it looked like a house made of sugar and decorated with restrained piping of white frosting around the top, windows, and doorway. Facing the staircase, a delicate black iron grille protected an arched window below a white plaster frieze of leaves and curlicues with the words CAPELA DOS OSSOS painted in neat black lettering between the plasterwork and the top of the window arch. Behind the window, barely lit by a candle from within and streetlight without, rows of white skulls lined the ledge like pies in a macabre bakery. A priest in a long cassock was walking up the stairs ahead of us, one hand clutching a fold of his robe to keep from stepping on his hem, a ring of keys held in the other.

Carlos caught up to him in two long strides and said, “Padre, um momento.”

The priest turned, an expression of mild surprise on his long, bland face. “Sim?”

They spoke for a minute, the priest shaking his head and gesturing to the chapel.

Carlos turned back to us, his eyes gleaming. “The priest says that the chapel is closed—it was broken into and vandalized this morning.”

“What was taken?” I asked.

“I hope we may discover that ourselves.”

He turned back to the priest, who was frowning at us. “I speak a little of English,” the priest said, his voice very soft but carrying down the marble stairs clearly. “What interests you in the bones here?”

Carlos provided an edited version of the truth. “Other ossuaries have been desecrated recently. We wish to discover if there is a pattern to the vandalism.” I could feel the weight of his persuasion bearing on the priest through the Grey. “May we see what happened here?”

The quiet priest narrowed his eyes, resisting Carlos’s magical nudging. “You are from the government?”

“The church. These two have brought reports of such damage in other parts of Europe. We fear the current economic and political stress may be causing anger misdirected at us—at God. It may be nothing,” he said, then added, “But . . .” He spread his hands, as if he were shrugging, but I could see a thin strand of magic pulling between them, growing ugly spikes of compulsion.

I stepped close, tilting Carlos a questioning look. He lifted his eyebrows, giving way to me in silence. I knew from experience that any such spell of Carlos’s tended to do damage and I didn’t see the point in harming the priest just to get a look in his chapel. If the Kostní Mágové had already been here, our only interest was in figuring out what they’d taken so we could guess what they’d go after next.

“Father,” I started, leaning lightly on the Grey—just enough to incline him to like me, “it is an imposition, I know, but while my colleague may have doubts, I don’t. You’ve heard about the ossuaries in the Algarve, I’m sure, and the desecration of the tomb of King Sebastian in Lisbon. But there have been so many others, in Poland, in France, even in Rome itself. We must stop this. We must not let people lose faith when they need it most.”

The priest was taken aback and blinked at me. “Oh. No. I had not heard. You wish to see the damage here?”

“Yes. If you can allow it.”

“Yes. Yes,” he repeated, walking to the chapel door with the keys ready in his hand.

I walked past Carlos, giving him a smug smile.

“Well played,” he muttered.

“Persuasion is my gift,” I whispered back.

Quinton ran up the steps and joined the tail end of our parade, pulling a pad of paper and a pen from his bag as if his job were to record what we discovered. Few people notice or question a secretary.

The priest unlocked the door and we filed through a small vestibule with a drinking fountain, a small counter, and a chair. Then we followed the priest down a short set of steps, into low light and the odor of crumbling mortar, must, and beeswax as he went to the altar to pay his respects to the cross above it. I found my chest tight with an unaccustomed pressure as I stepped into the room. It boiled with ghosts that thronged against me, whispering and sighing, crying, screaming in pain, or moaning in despair. I had to stop and close my eyes, my breathing short and sharp until the feeling eased and the shadows of the jumbled dead made room for me.

I opened my eyes and saw the priest looking up at me, concerned. “Daughter? You are unwell?”

“No. It’s just the chapel. It’s . . . overwhelming. There are so many. . . .” I stood still and looked around. Streetlight and faint moonlight shone through the large round window that took up most of the back wall and through the arched one on the side where we’d entered. The light limned the bones embedded in the mortared walls with silver, while a single fat candle glowed below the crucifix. The priest lit the four wax tapers on the altar, and four more in tall stands beside it, turning the illumination golden.

“Yes,” the priest replied. “You are sensible of them. There are many bones, many bodies. There was an explosion in 1732, then the Spanish siege, the wars, Napoleon. . . . So many in the graveyards . . . Then the cholera in 1765. We built the chapel for them—there were so many taken by the illness—but there are others here. All the bones here wait, as a reminder. We are all bones and all bones are dust. Only the glory of heaven is eternal.”

The room was much smaller within than it had looked from the outside, the walls a foot or more thick from the long bones that had been piled up, ends facing out, and mortared into place. The walls’ bottom third was all covered in skulls, like bizarre wainscoting, and the skulls were protected by thick sheets of clear Plexiglas. Every joint of the walls and the arched ceiling was delineated with lines of skulls. The floor was a smooth mosaic of small colored stones below the wing-like patterns of the bones and skulls that covered the wall surfaces and pillars that supported the roof. Even the ceiling was covered in the bones of arms and ribs, mortared in place like thatching above the shadowed niches and pointed arches made of the smallest bones.

Playing our parts, Carlos, Quinton, and I approached to genuflect and cross ourselves at the altar in the golden light. Only I hesitated, uncomfortable with my deception, wondering if the God of the Old Testament would take exception to the way I did my job. But there was no lightning or thunder, and I turned away to look over the room again.

The priest knelt on one side of the altar and switched on a small electric floodlight that aimed its beam from the floor to the wall above. For a moment, the plain crucifix in front of a Plexiglas-covered bone altar piece was brightly lit, as were the vases of wilting flowers below. Then the priest turned the small light toward a section of the wall that lay farther back, near the rear windows, our shadows huge across it.

I caught my breath, seeing the crumbled section of wall, thick with bones and skulls, but now torn and raked as if by giant claws. I turned in a small circle to see the whole room. There were three niches in total, two on the wall facing the door and one on the door-side wall. It was the niche beside the door that was now empty, hidden from first view in the darkest part of the room by the way the stairs deposited visitors next to the altar, with their backs to the niche. The other two niches were untouched.

The long-faced priest took a taper from the altar and lit a silver oil lamp that hung from the ceiling by silver chains, adding to the golden light that touched the desecrated wall. He returned the candle and stopped near the lamp to look at the damage. “It is profane. The whole skeleton that stood in that niche is gone.”

“A whole skeleton? Of a single individual?” I asked.

The priest shook his head. “I cannot say for certain. This other one has mummified flesh which binds the bones,” he added, pointing to the niche across from the ruined one, “but the one that was taken did not. It is not recorded who the bones were in life.”

“This is terrible,” I said, walking up to the ruined wall and putting out my hands as if I could recall the missing skeleton by touching the place it had stood. The priest laid his hand on the back of mine, stopping my movement as he said, “They are very old and fragile.”

“Of course,” I replied, lowering my hands. How could I talk to the ghost if I couldn’t touch the bones to make a connection to it . . . ? I looked at the priest again. “Could you allow us a moment to confer?” I asked, giving a little more psychic weight to the trust and persuasion I’d already established with him.

He looked uncomfortable, but he nodded as I leaned harder on the compulsion, feeling it like cold quills piercing my skin. “I shall wait in the vestibule,” he offered.

He walked through to the tiny antechamber and sat on the wooden chair at the head of the steps, but he didn’t close the door, keeping a benign eye on us from a respectful distance—or as much distance as the small space allowed. It would have to do. I stood staring at the wall for a moment, awash in ghosts. If only they would cleave to their own bones, this would be easier. I turned toward Carlos and moved close to him, which in such a small room required only a few steps. Quinton followed.

Carlos waited for me to speak, offering nothing. “I have an idea, but it depends on you,” I murmured.

“Go on,” he replied, matching my low tone.

“Can you, without touching the bones, force the ghosts to retreat to, say, their skulls? All of them. At the same time.”

He frowned. “All of them?”

“Yes. The ghost who has no skull to retreat to will remain isolated in the room and then I can hold him while you talk to him and find out what he or she can tell us.”

His frown darkened into a scowl as he thought about it. He turned to look around the room, raising his eyes toward the ceiling. It almost looked like he was praying. He turned his gaze back to me and I shivered. “I can, but not without touching something of the chapel’s bone walls. To control them all will be difficult enough, but to do so with no contact is impossible. Your chance to catch the spirit in question will be short even then.”

“We’ll have to find a way. I know it will take a lot of energy and won’t be easy, but I can manage my end if you can manage yours.”

“I know how it can be done without the priest becoming upset. If you are ready . . . ?”

“Hang on,” said Quinton. “Maybe I can help.”

“You would have to die. That would not do.”

“No. I’m just thinking there might be another way. . . . Is there any reason to keep all these ghosts captive here? Aren’t they . . . kind of miserable? If you can isolate the ones that have bones still here, why can’t you just . . . absorb them? They are dead after all. . . . Then you’d only need to expend enough energy to isolate the first one and the rest will simply replace the energy used for the start cycle. The tricky bit is making sure you don’t suck up the one ghost we need.”

“That I will leave to your beloved.”

Quinton was pleased with himself for the idea and I was certain it wasn’t just because it was clever—Carlos in need of energy could become dangerous and unpredictable, and none of the humans in the area wanted to die to make him feel better.

“But I will need your help,” Carlos added.

Quinton paled. “Mine? What do you want me to do?”

“Pray.”