Revenant

TWO

I thought I wasn’t supposed to wake up yet—surely we hadn’t reached Lisbon? My broken sense of time and my helplessness were frustrating and there seemed to be nothing I could do about being awake. I was supposed to be playing dead until after we arrived in Portugal, and I doubted that I was going to pass muster at customs if I was breathing. I slid my hands up, unable to push the box open, feeling an unfamiliar cloth and strapping holding me down as I brushed against my clothes. Or rather, not my clothes. I couldn’t see in the dark, but I could tell by the feel that I wasn’t wearing the jeans and sweater I’d had on when I lay down on the embalming table.

I shuddered, thinking that someone had changed my clothes and strapped me to the base of the coffin. If that someone was Carlos, I was going to slap him numb, necromancer or not. I chided myself not to get hysterical over such a small point. It was probably Tovah who’d managed it, making me look more corpse-like and appropriately dressed for my funeral, as well as safely tied down. She’d cleaned up the rat bite on my leg as well, for which I was grateful, but not put any more at ease. I plucked at the straps that kept me from rolling and sliding in my casket. No matter how much my clothes made me look like a stiff, I was now breathing and sweating as the silent panic started. I wasn’t sure I could be a convincing corpse without Carlos’s help and I had no way to get it. It didn’t matter if he, too, was wide awake, since neither of us could slither out of our portable graves and have a cozy chat about the problem. Given the state of the world—with terrorism, epidemics, floods, and fires everywhere, and civil war in Syria and Turkey, as well as dozens of other problems leading to unrest and paranoia at home and internationally—if I made one ill-timed sound or rolled in the box as it was being moved, no one was going to simply pass the coffin on without taking a look inside first. That would be a disaster. I schooled myself to be still, still, still, and quiet as my own corpse. I tried sinking down toward the Grey. . . .

My box lurched and I heard the engine downshift and groan. I couldn’t concentrate in the jostling box and had to give up my dive for the Grey. But at least it seemed I wasn’t in a plane after all. A truck? I hoped it was a truck in Portugal and not a truck crossing the tarmac at whatever transshipment point we’d passed through. I hated the idea of being lost luggage somewhere in Europe.

Wherever I was, something was keeping me from gaining access to—or even a view of—the Grey or its writhing energy grid. It could have been a side effect of the zinc lining in the box, but I wasn’t certain. I knew steel and silver both had unusual properties in the Grey, but I wasn’t sure if magical interactions were universal to all metals. I would have bet that the problem had something to do with my being inside a metal box inside a metal truck, but there was no way to test the hypothesis at that moment. I wasn’t all that interested in trying, anyway. It was always possible I’d sink too far, displace myself, and fall out of the truck at whatever speed we were going in traffic.

After what felt like a couple of hours in my stuffy little coffin as the truck wound up and down some steep hills and swayed around hairpin turns, the vehicle stopped and I was unloaded. I was pretty sure the people moving my box were being careful, but I still got jarred around and collected a couple of bruises from thumping into the side when someone lost their grip. Even through the zinc and wood, I could hear swearing. It wasn’t English swearing, but the tone was the same even if I didn’t understand the words. I held my breath and didn’t swear back, just in case. . . .

Then came the trundling sound of a cart underneath me before another spate of lifting, tilting, jostling, swearing, and finally a ringing thump as the coffin was set down on some hard surface. Eventually, sounds of the box-handlers faded away and the lid was opened.

The dimly lit room I’d been brought to was almost soundless, and the air, while cooler, was only a small relief from the close and overused atmosphere in my box.

A dark-haired woman peered into my container, her expression wary. “Senhora Blaine?” The energy around her head was streaked with black and orange like Halloween bunting. She appeared anxious and a little bit dead, but not undead.

I struggled to sit up—which isn’t easy after lying still for hours in an unheated cargo hold. I thought every joint in my body had turned to brittle wood that creaked and cracked as I moved. I glanced around, not sure I hadn’t somehow ended up in some long-ago place where time had stopped: The stone room was lit with candles in iron sconces near the door and an enchanted silence muffled its natural echo. Deep, dim coils of black and red energy surged along the floor from under the stout wooden door like floodwater slowly rising.

The woman watching me seemed relieved when I was upright. “Bom. Come with me,” she said. Her accent was one I’d never heard before, something that wasn’t quite Spanish and wasn’t quite Russian. She straightened up without offering me a hand, but I wasn’t entirely surprised. With the exception of Tovah, people who work for vampires aren’t the touchy-feely type. Though I tried to look for it, I saw no sign of the sort of mark Tovah had. Apparently some people don’t have to be in thrall to be useful.

I clambered out of the coffin, which was resting on the ground, as stiff and awkward as a stick insect as I crawled over the edge and onto the chilly floor, tearing the hem of my black skirt on the steel edge. The entire room seemed to have been carved out of solid stone, but it was definitely a room, not a cavern—it had a flat floor, straight walls, and a symmetrical, vaulted ceiling. Shadows fell into deep folds in the corners away from the door and its nearby candles, and the low gleams of magical energy flowed along the floor toward the darkness, as if seeking a hidden exit bored through the rock. Aside from me, my box, my hostess, and the candles, there seemed to be nothing else in the room. Inside my coffin, I’d been too warm and panicky. In this stone room, dressed like a dead doll in my funeral suit and soft shoes, I was suddenly too cold and my panic had mutated into overactive wariness.

My knees creaked and popped anew, protesting long inaction. The trip, I’d estimated, would be about fourteen hours, but there’d been extra hours in transit to and from airports and through customs and so on, so I was completely out of sync.

“What time is it?” I asked, scraping one bare knee a little on the stone floor as I got to my feet. I felt woozy and wound up at the same time—probably a side effect of what Carlos had done to make me appear dead.

“Desculpe. It is”—she paused to pull an old-fashioned watch from a pocket in her skirt, popping the lid open and glancing at it—“twelve minutes past two in the afternoon. Dom Carlos is still asleep.”

It was late summertime, so I knew he wouldn’t be up and about for another six hours or so, and that was fine. I had things to do that wouldn’t require his help, so long as I could get back in time. I assumed I was in Lisbon, though there was always the off chance that something had changed.

“Where is this? I mean, which city?” I asked, just in case. . . .

“Lisboa. This is the family’s town house in Alfama,” she replied. Alfama meant nothing to me, but at least I knew I was in the right city.

Now I had to find Quinton and discover why he’d needed me here now. If the rendezvous didn’t work out, I’d have to find an Internet café and see whether I could make contact again, since he didn’t know where I was any more than I knew where he was. The codes he’d sent implied a situation that couldn’t wait, so I hoped I’d find him the first time.

“Am I free to come and go?” I asked, not sure what the situation was in which I found myself. Was this some kind of vampire chapter house or something else? It certainly wasn’t the usual B and B, and I wasn’t sure whose “family” she meant when she talked about the house, since vampires over a certain age generally have no close mortal kin. I’m not sure they think of one another as “family,” either, unless it’s in the context of dangerous siblings that they may need to kill later.

“You are a guest. The doors will open for you—you may come and go as you please, though Dom Carlos will expect you when he wakes.”

“How do you know that?”

She gave a shrug that was as much a change of expression as an actual movement of head and shoulders. “Avó said so. I will await Dom Carlos’s instructions. If you must go out, return by sundown.”

I had no intention of running away, but this business couldn’t wait on Carlos. My lingering panic had transferred to finding Quinton.

The woman nodded, as if she understood my train of thought, and she turned, leading me out of the room. “There is a suite for you upstairs. I will show you the way.”

We went along a windowless, stone-walled corridor in the company of ghosts, past several heavy wooden doors with ancient-looking iron hinges and handles, all lit by candles. A draft of cooler air, smelling of stone and earth, passed along the hallway with us and rose up the stairs at the end as we ascended. My guide put her candle down on a table at the head of the stairs and opened a door, leaning down to blow out the flame as a mixture of sun and electric light flooded the landing. We emerged into a wider hallway with a floor of colorful, fitted stone tiles and walls of pale yellow plaster, and passed through a narrow but impressive Moorish entry hall. Decorative ironwork grilles hung over the windows on one side and matching iron railings edged the staircase and the gallery that looked down from above. Grey energy hung down the walls like gleaming draperies of ragged gold and red with twisting threads of black and white tangling through them and creeping down the walls like cracks in the plaster. The room wept quietly in the Grey with a sound like a distant viola accompanying a melancholy guitar. A grand staircase curved around the sides and back of the room. A pair of ghosts dressed in some kind of medieval clothes glided up the stairs and vanished around the gallery on the updraft of air from the cellars. I got the impression the house hadn’t been occupied in a while and was trying to shed the collected heat and stale air of many summers. It made the elegant little entry oppressive. It was a very old house and it had seen hundreds of summers.

The entry may have been stuffy and hot, but a breeze was fighting its way up the staircase from the cooler cellars below and the house seemed to breathe more easily as we ascended yet another staircase. The woman finally unlocked a door and led me into a tiny room with a few items of furniture, a bed not among them. Beyond a small sofa and a desk lay another door, which she opened and stood beside, holding the large old-fashioned key.

“This bedroom is at the front of the house. It is not as grand as some, but it has a better breeze from the river. The back of the house is quieter, but it faces the castle and the air is not so cool.”

“Castle?” I asked, startled at the idea of being close enough to one that it blocked the breeze. It was either a very large castle or very close. . . . Either way, being an American, I tended to find the very idea of castles intriguing, let alone the idea of one in the backyard.

“Sim. Castelo de São Jorge.” She pointed toward the back of the house. “It is just up the hill. You can see it from the roof and rear windows on this floor. The tourists enjoy it in the mornings and at sunset. Otherwise, it is much too hot to wander the grounds at midday until late October.” She offered me the room key. “If you would like to bathe and change before you go out, the bath is through the next door. There are clothes in the wardrobe and you are to treat the house as your own. It is still very warm this season and you may wish to do your business in lighter clothes. Even here on the hill, the afternoons are hot. I will be downstairs if you have any other requirements.”

I took the heavy old key and she glided out of the room before I had a chance to ask her name. She made no sound as she crossed the polished wooden floor and for a fleeting instant I wondered whether she was an apparition. I felt like I’d landed in a Gothic novel and expected to hear that there was an insane relative locked in the attic.

I wanted to rush out but knew I needed to change out of my torn skirt and wash my face at the very least. Tovah must have applied a layer of thick makeup to make me look more corpse-like, and I could feel it cracking with every movement of my face. I looked around as I started for the bathroom.

The rooms were small by American standards, but at least the ceilings were high. All of the doorways and windows were arched—not a square frame to be seen—and all of the floors were old, dark wood, rippled with age. The first room we’d passed through appeared to be a sort of sitting room or personal office and the inner room was the bedroom. Nothing was built in—no closet, no shelves. The furniture just sat up against the dusty cream plaster walls. The various pieces all looked as old as the house—which I was guessing at six hundred years or more from the ghosts and the general style.

I wasn’t holding out a lot of hope about the bath being much more modern, but I was wrong. The toilet was distinctly old-fashioned and the taps might have been a hundred years old, but they worked. The hot water was nearly scalding, whereas the cold water seemed to have been drawn through the rocky foundations of the house, so it was icy and tasted mineral and sharp. The tub was a large built-in basin, covered in tiny, painted tiles, long and deep enough that even I could probably submerge myself in it without significant body parts sticking out. Tiled pillars rose from the corners of the bath to support the ceiling above, which was also covered in tiles that made a mosaic of the night sky. A modern handheld shower thing had been attached to the plumbing, somewhat ruining the palatial effect. The room smelled of bleach and orange peels.

A door on the other side of the bathroom led to another bedroom and sitting room, the mirror image of the suite I’d been assigned. Curious, I walked through it, past furniture shrouded by covers, to the tall windows at the back, and I pushed them open. The hinges of the windows squealed and the air stirred up a draft of old dust. The scent of oranges and lemons came from a small walled garden at the back of the house. A steep slope beyond put the first floor of the next house up the hill almost on a level with the bedroom I was standing in. Tilting my head back, I looked farther up the slope.

Stone walls with square crenellated tops rose beyond the next house and a fringe of palm trees. I couldn’t make out more of the castle looking up, but from this position there was no other building as far as I could see from side to side, just castle walls checkered with quarried stones of white, gray, and butter yellow as they caught the sunlight over the housetops. Even in the shade at the back of the house, it was warm.

I returned to my bedroom and hunted for the change of clothes my hostess had mentioned. I hadn’t been able to pack my own clothes and I was surprised to find the wardrobe half full with blouses and skirts that all appeared to be my size, though I’d never seen any of them before. My own sweater and jeans from the night I’d gone to sleep looked scruffy hanging next to them. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble, and I supposed I should be grateful, though at that moment, I felt a little creeped out.

The whole reason I’d slipped illegally into the country in the guise of a corpse was to remain below certain people’s radar by letting them think I was still in Seattle, doing what I usually do. Staying off anyone’s scope meant blending into the background, which was going to be difficult enough as an American who spoke no Portuguese. But it would be easier if I didn’t look like an American tourist. So I was grateful to Carlos—or to whomever he’d had pick up the clothes in my size—because they were lightly used and appeared to be of local or at least southern European manufacture. If I kept my mouth shut and my head down, I would at least be slightly less conspicuous and seem slightly less American. My height would be a problem, though, and there was nothing I could do about that but try to stay out of places where I’d stand out.

I didn’t have time to take a full bath, but I did wash the makeup off and put on what I hoped was a boring outfit of blouse, skirt, and flat shoes. I didn’t have my usual shoulder bag full of useful stuff—including my gun, which was locked in a safe-deposit box at my bank in Seattle. I did need some kind of purse or shopping bag to put a few items in, since the skirt—which would have been midcalf on many women but barely covered my knees—had only two shallow pockets and the blouse had none. It was much too hot to wear a jacket. I started downstairs feeling a bit naked, since I rarely wear skirts or any shoes of a lighter construction than sneakers since I gave up professional dance. I’m much more at home in jeans and boots.

On the second floor just before the head of the stairs, a ghost stood in my way and stared intently at me. She looked like the medieval woman I’d seen ascending the staircase earlier, but it was hard to be sure since I hadn’t had a good look at her before. I stopped and gazed back at her. A mist swirled and ran around her feet like a whirlpool, expanding outward and rising slowly, as if she were being swallowed up in the maelstrom. She was very young, a teenager, really, in an age before that concept existed. Her face was long and serious. Long dark hair that fell to her hips was swept back from her high forehead with a band of cloth. She studied me, saying nothing and pursing her mouth as if she couldn’t make up her mind.

I took a step toward her and put out my hand, palm up. “My name is Harper. I won’t be staying very long.”

She cocked her head as if straining to hear me. Then she turned her head aside sharply, disrupting her rising tide of mist so it blew outward and swirled away, dissolving into empty air. I walked to the stair rail and looked down, but she wasn’t on the stairs. My mysterious hostess stepped out from one of the arches along the side of the entry and glanced up at me.

“Are you all right, senhora?”

“I’m fine. Did you see her?”

“The ghost? I see them sometimes. They don’t care to show themselves to me often. Where are you going?”

“I’m not sure . . . someplace where sick toys go to get well?” The only open part of the message had used the phrase “where sick toys get well.”

She frowned for a moment as if she had to translate the phrase. “Ah. O Hospital de Bonecas. The doll hospital. It is in the Baixa—the lower town—on Praça da Figueira. It will be faster to walk than take the tram. I will draw you a map.”

I followed her back into the tiled hallway to a kitchen, which was probably of the same vintage as the bathroom upstairs but not as luxuriously appointed. The sink and counters looked to have been carved from granite and there was still a cooking hearth on one side of the room, though it had clearly not been used in a century or so. She took a pad of paper and a jasmine-scented pencil from the worktable and drew quickly. I watched her. Her hands were bony and thin, but not like an old woman’s, and they moved swift as birds, drawing little sketches of the landmarks she thought I’d need to navigate by. It was a remarkable piece of work for something done so casually. When she was finished, she tore the page off and handed it to me. I took it, blinking at her in surprise.

“Thank you. What is your name, by the way?”

She puzzled that question for a moment, then gave a small smile that vanished as quickly as it arrived. “Meu nome é Rafa.”

“Thank you, Rafa.” I looked at her map again. “This is very kind of you.”

She blushed, which seemed to take her by surprise, and she put her hands to her cheeks. “De nada. And you look very nice.” She reached up and touched my hair. “But you should wear a scarf or a hat. You are very pale.”

Even at the end of an unusually dry summer, I hadn’t gotten much of a tan in Seattle, though I wouldn’t have said I was pale. Compared to Rafa, though, I looked as white as the ghost on the staircase. “I don’t have a hat. Or a purse for that matter.”

“I will find a purse and a hat for you.” She scurried out and, although I followed her as quickly as I could through the cluttered kitchen, she’d vanished by the time I came to the hall. I stopped where I was, rather than wander off and get lost. In a moment, Rafa returned with a wide-brimmed straw hat, a blue silk scarf, and a sort of purse made of the same soft, woven straw as the hat. Giving me no time to object, she gathered my hair back and tied it with the scarf, then put the hat on my head and looped the purse over my arm. “You look perfect now.”

Apparently I was doomed to be dressed by strangers whether I liked it or not.

She walked me to the front door and handed me another key. “This is for the front gates. Be back before sundown and don’t lose the key.”

She stood behind the door when she opened it, keeping to the shadow, and shooed me out.