Revenant

SIX

It was nearly five o’clock when we disembarked in Carcavelos. The houses were mostly plastered and painted in soft colors like smaller versions of the grand Baroque buildings I’d seen in Lisbon, but the town reminded me of Manhattan Beach, an upper-middle-class beach suburb of Los Angeles. The architecture and the light were totally different, but the laid-back surfer kids, the well-heeled family houses in yards filled with shaggy palm trees behind stuccoed walls covered in purple bougainvillea, and a practical but recent-model car in the driveway were entirely familiar. The sidewalks were stone tile here, too, and, as Quinton had said, the street signs were mostly plaques mounted on the corners of buildings at the intersections. Only a few major streets with no convenient location for such signs had the kind of signboards I was more familiar with. I also found it strange that the stop signs read STOP and not some other word.

Quinton watched me puzzle over them. “It’s the universal traffic sign—everyone uses it.”

I felt quite provincial for not knowing that and I think I blushed, but it was hard to be sure since although it was cooler on the ocean coast than it had been in downtown Lisbon, I could no longer kid myself that the air was less than warm. I’d been too long in the cool, moist air of the Pacific Northwest and had lost my California-girl tolerance of the heat.

We walked around for a while, trying to figure out where Sam’s house was, since neither of us had been there and we didn’t have the convenience of a cell phone with GPS navigation. We found a shop that sold trinkets and books for tourists to read on the beach, bought a local map, and asked the way to the international school, which Quinton knew was quite close to Sam’s house. The clerk directed us to Saint Julian’s with a lot of hand gestures and English that wasn’t quite as good as his speed of spitting it out.

We walked down the tree-lined Avenida Jorge V, past a long stretch of empty land on one side and houses on the other. An old stone wall painted with fading graffiti separated the pedestrian walkway from the vacant acreage that rolled lower than the street level. The area beyond the wall wasn’t cultivated or maintained except in a very basic way, so it didn’t seem to be a park. The tourist map identified the area as a former quinta—an estate in this case that had once been the vineyard and country home of a Portuguese nobleman. The school was housed in the old manor house, according to the tourist guide, so we were heading in the right direction. The slightly overgrown area and the trees made for a pleasant walk in the gently weeping music of the Grey—a gentler version of the sound in Lisbon—though I’m not sure either of us appreciated it. The magical energy of the area was less busy, swirling like currents in a lazy stream and sparking light greens, clear blue, and lemon yellow, which was a relief after so much horror lining the streets of downtown Lisbon. The area was mostly ghostless, but I supposed that a place that had been used only for agriculture for a few hundred years hadn’t acquired the depth of life and death that towns and cities do.

After a very long block, we turned and crossed the street to follow a smaller road into the residential area. The houses were all different from one another in size and grandeur. Some were huge, two-storied cubes with balconies that sat in the middle of massive walled yards, while others were narrow at the front and ran deep into a small yard like a shoe box. The only thing the houses had in common was plaster. Every house—even the few that were obviously built of stone—was covered in a coat of painted plaster under a red clay tile roof. One impressively large house and its surrounding wall were painted the same bright magenta as the bougainvillea that flowered in the yard next door, but most were painted in softer colors. Not every house had a wall, but it was common enough that those without were the noticeable exception.

Sam’s house had a wall and palm trees, but I couldn’t tell anything more about the place from the distance at which we had paused. I sank a bit into the Grey, while Quinton kept an eye on the area in the normal world. The illuminated corona of Sam’s house was spiked with jagged red bolts of anger that seemed at odds with the gleaming bands of bright blue that curled around the house and yard and drifted up over the edges of the wall like a cloud. Streaks of black and white that looked like old barbed wire made paths around the outside of the wall, cutting through the blue only at the front gate in thin traces.

I eased back. “I don’t see any sign of watchers—paranormal or otherwise—but there’s a remnant of something I’d like to get a closer look at. Do you see anything?”

“No. Dad must be very confident.”

“That’s not reassuring.”

“No, it really isn’t. I hope Sam’s all right. It’s been a couple of days. . . .”

“The house looks otherwise normal, but we’ll know more up close,” I said.

We walked down the street toward the house, hand in hand like a couple of lovers out for a stroll. Nothing was interested in us, except a cat that sat on the top of a wall and watched us with a show of indifference. We crossed the street toward Sam’s house but leaving enough room to approach at an angle without going straight through the front gate. I stopped again to drop into the Grey and look more closely at the tracks of magic someone had left behind.

Correction: two someones. The two strands of energy residue weren’t identical, though they were very similar. I hadn’t seen magical signatures quite like them before. They weren’t a spell, but the residue itself was shaped into knotted and jagged lines that resembled gouges in wax or clay more than calligraphy—they seemed incised on the surface of the Grey, though they didn’t react magically to my inspection or prodding in any way. It almost seemed as if the people who’d caused them trod more heavily on the Grey than other creatures of magic, whose usually thin and fluid tracks faded swiftly. The black threads felt cold and smooth, but with an edge of grit to them, the twining white more angular and brittle. I closed my hand around one and pulled a little. It snapped and crumbled away, leaving a fading dust on the silvery surface of the mist world. Once broken, the rest of the line began to fade as well. I touched the other one, finding it a little warmer to the touch and rougher on the surface, though it was equally fragile when crushed in my hand.

I stepped back from the Grey and leaned my shoulder against the wall outside Sam’s house for a moment, thinking as Quinton watched me.

“So . . . ?”

“I can’t figure it. Two magical people have been here and they walked around the house like they were casing it, but the traces they left seem to be magically inert and fragile. And those traces are weird in their own right, being two colors that twine together—black and a creamy white color I’m not familiar with. Compound energy rarely remains in such distinct strands—it tends to blend. But these are more like . . . threads of disparate energy twisted together. Really odd.”

“Sam said our father had two other people with him—a man and a woman—whom she didn’t feel good about and who didn’t speak or come close,” Quinton said. “I’d assume the marks belong to them.”

“I can buy that—I never saw anything like this from your dad, but I can’t figure out these people’s intention or what they may have done.”

“These traces don’t seem to be a trap or a spell or anything like that?”

I took off my hat and paused to smooth my hair back into the scarf tied at my nape as I thought about it. Then I shook my head. “No, they don’t feel like anything active or even lying in wait. They shatter easily, too, and I don’t feel any movement of magical energy when I break them, as I would with a spell, ward, or trap of any kind. It’s like snapping a burned twig and getting a bit of charcoal on your hand, but nothing more.”

“That sounds a lot creepier than you may think.”

I had to shrug. I’m no longer sure what’s creepy to someone more normal than me. “I think it’s some sort of deliberate residue—like graffiti—but it can’t be meant for us, since neither of us recognizes it. But I don’t believe there’s anything here to cause us concern. Let’s go in and talk to your sister.”

Deciding we had nothing to lose, we went to the front gate and pressed a button on a call box mounted to the faded stone wall. Through the iron gate I could see a small slice of the front of the house, which was built of the same material as the wall. The upper story was plastered, but the lower was not and the tawny stone had the mellow, soft look of rock that’s been in the weather a long time.

I heard something mechanical move and looked up to see a small camera in a steel housing turn our way from the top of the gatepost, sheltered by palm fronds. The gate buzzed and fell open a half inch. We glanced at each other and walked into the yard, closing the gate behind us.

The front yard had been cultivated into a neat lawn bounded by the palms and a close-growing row of prickly pink rosebushes that hugged the wall. The perfume of jasmine drifted on a breeze from the sea that snuck over the wall behind the house. We got only a few steps up the laid-stone path before the front door opened and a young brunette stepped out with a baby in her arms.

“Jay!” she shouted, running toward us as fast as the jiggling weight of the baby would allow. I had to remind myself that only I and my lover’s underground friends called him “Quinton”; to most of the rest of world he was either James Jason Purlis, deceased, or Reggie McCrea Lassiter, depending on whom you asked.

Sam was slim and short—her head wouldn’t have come up to my cheek. I stood still and watched her in silence as she closed the distance to her brother, and I thought that they looked more alike than I would have expected even of siblings. She moved awkwardly, as if her knees and ankles didn’t work quite right, and yet her demeanor was confident, the energy around her predominantly cool and calm with only threads and occasional sparks of orange anxiety and scarlet anger.

“Hey, short-stuff!” Quinton replied, removing his hat, his face alight at seeing her even in these circumstances.

She stopped short in front of him and raised her eyebrows—the expression was exactly like one of her brother’s. “‘Short-stuff’? Just for that, you get to hold Martim—he’s wet. You have spectacularly bad timing, big brother.”

“At least it’s some kind of spectacular,” he said, returning the hat to his head and accepting the squirming bundle of baby, who began to wail the moment he was no longer in his mother’s arms. “Oh boy, you weren’t kidding. He is wet,” Quinton said, holding the baby out in front of him.

Sam gave him a hard look and scooped Martim back onto her hip. “That’s not how you hold a baby.”

Quinton grinned at her. “I know, but now I’m not the one holding him.”

“Sneaky, big brother. Very sneaky. Come on inside and we’ll change him.”

“We?”

“Yes. It’s your penance.” She looked at me. “You must be Harper.”

I nodded. “I am. And I’m terrible at changing babies, unless you mean in some existential kind of way.”

Sam forced a laugh, her aura jumping a little. She was trying very hard to make the scene look good for the neighbors, but playing nice with a stranger was difficult under the circumstances. “You don’t have to change anything. You look exactly as I knew you would.”

She turned to lead us inside before I could ask what that was.

The house was old—European old, not American old—and had a thin, clinging film of history that wasn’t particularly dramatic. Sam noticed me looking around the wood-and-stone interior.

“It’s mostly restored to the original—or as close as we could get and still be practical,” she said. “It used to be the vineyard manager’s house when the estate was still producing wine.”

“It’s lovely,” I said. I really did like it—I have a taste for old things and not much appreciation for things sleek and modern—and the house was warm and cozy. It hadn’t been a perfectly happy place all of its existence, judging from the energetic colors and the ghosts, but it was now. Or it had been until a few days ago.

Quinton left our hats and bags by the door and followed Sam into another room off to the left of the main entry. The siblings fell into some chitchat while Sam changed the baby. I could hear them murmuring through the open doorway as I continued to look around the main room. It was a lofty space that rose to the roof beams on one side and opened into a dining area and kitchen toward the back. The baby-changing room and probably a couple more rooms were hidden off to the left of the doorway and a wooden staircase with chunky wooden rails marched up one interior wall to the bedrooms above. A modest fireplace anchored the end of the main room while views of the yards at the front and back could be glimpsed through the tall, narrow windows on each side of the living room and dining area. It was a more-modern design than the house itself, but it suited the building’s current use better than the smaller, closed rooms it must have had originally. The soft yellow stone had been left bare on the fireplace and staircase walls, but it had been plastered and probably insulated on the longer exterior walls. The rear windows that faced south had been left open to the ocean breeze that came in with the scent of brine, jasmine, and lemons. One of the vineyard managers had lingered around the fireplace, pacing in perpetuity. While Quinton and Sam were still busy with Martim, I walked over to see if he was a repeater or a more-aware spirit.

The pacing ghost didn’t notice me until he walked through me. Then he stopped, startled, and looked around until he spotted me. “Eh? O que é isso? Quem está aí?”

I didn’t need a translator to get the gist of what he’d said. I sank a bit closer to the Grey, edging toward the fluttering cold current of his temporacline, but not entering the layer of time. I didn’t want to vanish from the normal world; I only wanted to chat.

“I didn’t mean to startle you,” I said, hoping he understood at least my tone, if not my words. “I’m . . . an investigator—a seeker of lost things.”

He peered at my shadowy form. “Inglês? What do you want, spirit?” His English was rough and stumbling, but not inaccessible.

I worked a hunch. “Have you been bothered by a pair of mages recently?” Willful spirits and those with some awareness of their surroundings usually notice things like mages and magic in their vicinity the way normal people notice small earthquakes.

“What? Bruxos! Sim,” he added, nodding. “Two that want the little girl. They watch her until the mother took her away. I have not seen her again. What happens?”

“They may have taken her.”

The phantom man looked angry. “You will get her back? The house is happy with her here—with her family here. They do not bother me.”

“Can you tell me anything about the mages?”

“Me? What would I know?”

“What sort of magic did they use? Could you feel it?”

“Feel . . . ? The air was colder when they were near. It made my bones ache. And the smell . . . like the vineyard when the rain comes too late and rots the grapes. But magic? I know nothing.”

It was still more than I’d had before. “Was there anything around them like old burned wood, like charcoal? Brittle, black, or white . . . ?”

He shook his head. I guessed he didn’t experience the magic the same way as I had felt its residue, but it had been worth a shot. “Thank you,” I said.

“I did not help you,” he said, puzzled.

“Yes, you did. I’ll be able to recognize them, now, when I smell rot and feel cold where it’s warm and clean.”

His craggy face lit. “Bom. Bring her home. She makes us smile.”

“I will,” I promised, backing out of the Grey.

Quinton and Sam were watching me from the kitchen archway. Sam was startled and pale, her eyes wide while small, sharp sparks jumped from her aura. Quinton still looked a little tense, but he gave me a tiny smile and turned to his sister. “She does that a lot.”

Sam cut her eyes from me to him. “Do you get used to it?”

“Not really.”

She gave a nod and pulled her discomfort and fear back, smothering the sparks in her energy corona. She turned back to me. “What did you see?”

I always feel a bit strange telling people their homes are haunted. Some freak out, others think I’m lying, and some claim it’s cool until something goes wrong. I studied her, the way she stood oddly poised on both feet without leaning toward me or away, the serious expression on her face, even the way she had shifted slightly toward Quinton and her son in his arms. She was a little bit afraid or wary of what I was going to say, but she wanted to hear it anyway.

“You have a significant ghost. Not a haunting, per se, just one ghost who’s at least a little aware of your presence in the house. Don’t worry, though—he likes your family.”

She looked uncomfortable and grew a little paler. “He?”

“One of the vineyard managers, I would guess, or a winemaker . . . I’m not sure which. He’s an older man and very concerned about the vines and the weather and the house. I didn’t get his name and I couldn’t tell you what time period he’s from—his clothes aren’t distinctive in that way. He doesn’t have a full manifestation. He’s more of a moving shadow I happened to be able to catch and talk to.”

She was taken aback and blinked at me. “You’re some kind of psychic, then.”

Quinton and I both shook our heads and Sam frowned. “No, I’m not a psychic,” I said. “At least not as you use the term. I go to them—they don’t come to me.”

Her frown told me she didn’t quite get the distinction, but it wasn’t worth trying to explain further. “Anyhow,” I continued, “he wasn’t much help, but he did give me a description that could come in handy.”

“Of one of Dad’s friends? But I could have given you that.”

“Not what they looked like, but more . . . the effect they had on things. It wouldn’t be useful to most people, but most people don’t talk to ghosts, either.”

She made a small dismissive gesture with her hands. “The only thing that matters to me is if it will help get my daughter back. Will it?”

“Possibly. It will help me identify the people who took her. You said a man and a woman were with your father just before Soraia disappeared.”

Sam nodded and started walking into the living room. “Yes, but I’m sorry, I really need to sit. My knees are kind of a mess.” She sat down on a sofa that faced the empty fireplace, then held her arms up to Quinton who handed her the baby he’d been carrying. “OK, so, yes. A man and a woman were with him, but as I said, they kept their distance and said nothing.”

“What did they look like?”

Sam bounced the baby in her lap as she spoke. “He was old—I’d guess about seventy—and Portuguese, wavy hair with a lot of gray, though I think it was originally black. He had blue eyes—very disconcerting.”

“How do you know he was Portuguese and not, say, Spanish or French?”

She stopped and blinked rapidly, her gaze turning inward as she thought about it. “I think because he was so dour. He had a sort of stern face with a prominent nose—very eagle-like. It gave him an austere look. The woman was American or English, very pale skinned with straight blond hair that was a bit faded, but not really gray. I think she was in her late fifties, but it’s hard to say. At first I thought she was friendly—she had this little smile that kept sneaking out—but then I began to change my mind. They both had a disquieting way of looking at me as if they were studying an insect they intended to kill and mount on a pin, and I thought she was smiling about adding another bug to her collection. It’s a very uncomfortable feeling.”

Martim whined in protest and Sam began bouncing him again. He giggled, spewing happy gold sparks into the Grey mist of the room.

Quinton asked a question of his own now, his demeanor much more focused and grim than it had been in the yard. “Did Dad introduce them? Say anything about them?”

“No,” Sam replied. Then she looked at me. “That’s not odd for our father. He never says anything more than he has to, so I assumed the people with him were associates and not concerned with whatever brought him to my home.”

“Do you see him often? Or was this a bit of a surprise?” I asked.

“Oh, it wasn’t quite a surprise—I knew he was coming since he’d called and said so. I was almost not home, but he claimed he wanted to bring the kids some birthday presents, since he’d missed so many of those events. I should have told him to ship them. What was a surprise was his calling in the first place. I have done everything I can to stay off his radar. Our father isn’t a nice man and I don’t want my family mixed up in the things he does. I thought I had made that clear to him. This was the one time I had a moment of weakness over the possibility that Dad might have a paternal bone in his body—I’m an idiot to have imagined he’d be less of a son of a bitch after all this time. Now Soraia and the rest of us are paying for my bad judgment.”

She didn’t sound bitter; it was just a statement. Sam was the most collected, calm woman I’d ever met who wasn’t some sort of gruesome magic user. It was strange, especially when coupled with her painful gait.

“The leg made me think he’d lost his edge and might be feeling his mortality a bit,” she continued, “wanting to mend some fences now that he was disabled.”

Quinton rolled his eyes. “Playing it up, was he? Leave it to our father to pull the sympathy card for knee surgery.”

Samantha frowned and blinked at Quinton, confused. “I’m not sure what you mean. His left leg is missing from the knee down. He had a temporary prosthesis that didn’t fit very well, so his limp was quite pronounced. Worse than mine.”

Quinton was startled and stared at her, shaking his head. “No. . . . He was fine when I saw him last. The knee surgery was ten months ago and he was a model patient. He needed a cane to steady his stride on that side, but he was otherwise perfect. What happened to his leg?”

Sam shrugged. “I don’t know. He didn’t offer much of an explanation—just said he’d had an injury in the field. He acted as if it were nothing and just went on with the rest of what he’d come to say.”

Quinton couldn’t seem to get a grip on the idea of his father’s missing leg. “You’re sure it was a prosthetic? He wasn’t just limping from some other problem with the knee?”

Sam rolled her eyes and gave him an exasperated look. “I did actually finish my medical degree, Jay. I know a cheap prosthetic when I see one.”

“I just don’t get it. . . . It was fine when I saw him last.”

“When was that?” I asked.

He bit his lip and frowned at the floor, thinking. “Must be four or five months ago, about the time he was in Turkey. I lost track of him there, but I was able to stay on top of his assistants and follow his trail.”

“Maybe it was a false trail,” I suggested. “He may have known you—or someone else—was watching him and created another series of events to follow while he did something that redamaged the leg.”

“It’s possible. . . . I just . . . What did he do?”

I shrugged and Samantha mirrored me. “You said he’d had surgery on his knee,” Sam started. “Dozens of things can happen to a knee if the patient isn’t careful with it early on. And our father is certainly the sort of man who plunges into things without too much worry about the potential damage.”

Quinton was disturbed. “I suppose. I’m still a bit thrown by it, though. I have a bad feeling. . . .”

I’d had a bad feeling about James Purlis for a long time and this was only increasing my alarm with the situation. “This particular line of inquiry isn’t helping us find Soraia,” I said. “While it may be relevant—your father rarely does anything that’s not part of a larger plan—we can’t get any closer to him with only this information. We need something else.” My words sparked an idea in my head. “Did he leave anything? You said he brought presents for the kids. There could be a clue there.”

Sam handed Martim to Quinton and got clumsily to her feet again. “I’ll get them. I thought it wasn’t appropriate to let the children open them without their father around, since we weren’t near either of their birthdays and it’s still three months to Christmas. Dad didn’t seem to like that, but I didn’t give him a choice about it. By that time I was starting to be very uncomfortable with his presence—and that of his friends. I asked him to leave a few minutes later and then I took Soraia to school. . . .” Her eyes reddened as she said it, getting misty with tears, but she sniffed, rubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand, and turned to fetch the packages. “This will only take a minute. . . .”

The ghosts seemed to swirl around her as she left the room as if they all felt her passage and turned to look. It was an odd reaction, especially since she was oblivious to them and they didn’t actually turn toward her. She had some kind of weight in the Grey that was unusual.

I glanced at Quinton and found him watching me. “What do you think?”

“I think your sister is the calmest woman I’ve ever met. I’d be throwing a screaming fit if someone had kidnapped my daughter.”

“No, you wouldn’t. You would be thinking about how to hunt them down and kill them.”

“Like you are?” I asked, but I had to concede that point. “All right. I probably would.”

“Are you thinking that things didn’t go as she says?”

“No. I think they went exactly as she described them. I’m just surprised to see her so collected. It’s been three—or is it four days—and she apparently hasn’t heard any more about her missing daughter, but she’s sitting here, talking calmly to us about it.”

“That’s just how Sam is. She took care of our grandparents—Mom’s folks—when they were . . . declining. And she finished her medical degree at the same time. Sam is what the English would call ‘a brick.’ She’s totally unflappable.”

“And what happened to her legs?” I asked, uncomfortable but unwilling to let it slide.

“She was in a bus accident when we were kids. Crushed her legs, did a bunch of damage to her spine, but she survived and the damage was rehabilitated up to a point. It just didn’t come back quite as well as everyone hoped. Sam got to a stage of exasperation where she called a halt to the surgeries and experiments and said she’d just live with it. And she does, but that’s partially a credit to our grandparents for supporting her and looking after her when our mom and dad weren’t able to. That’s why she spent so much time taking care of them, later—it was like . . . coming full circle.”

“I still don’t understand what happened to your mother. She’s still alive, isn’t she?”

“She is, but—”

Quinton cut himself off when Sam came back into the room with an armload of wrapped boxes. “Good God, it is Christmas!” he said.

“Three for each of them—two Christmas and one birthday,” Sam said. “You can tell by the wrapping.”

“I think we’d better unwrap them and see what Dad left.”

“Agreed,” said Sam, putting the gifts down on the slab of unstained wood that served as a coffee table. “I’ll put them back together later if they prove to be genuine presents and not something . . . else.”

With three of us, it took less than two minutes to open all the packages. The gifts for Martim were generic baby things—a stuffed animal we decided was a platypus, a clattering box with doors that opened and closed to reveal various bells and rattles, and a package of baby-sized T-shirts—but Soraia’s gifts were a bit creepy. There was a very old china-headed doll whose face bore a watchful expression, a large smoky quartz crystal run through with black shards that hung from an ornate silver cap and chain, and a small flute-like instrument made of a smooth white material with an air hole on the top that looked like someone had taken a bite of it.

Quinton had unwrapped that one and he started to hand it to me. I leaned away from it as the jagged, black-and-white energy that writhed around it surged toward me. “No. I don’t want to touch that with my bare hands. Not until I can get Carlos to take a look at it.”

“Why?” Sam asked.

“It’s magical and whatever type of magic it has is all too eager to attach itself to me. That’s a bad sign, since it has no interest in either of you or the baby, so my best guess is that what it’s after is a person with a touch of the Grey. I’m guessing Soraia is a little . . . unusual. Is she prone to seeing things that you can’t see? Does she have imaginary friends?” I asked.

Sam nodded. “She does, but I thought that was just the sort of thing all little girls do when they suddenly have a little brother to compete with.”

“I didn’t do that,” said Quinton.

“I’m not a little brother,” Sam replied. “Besides, you had all those fun camping and hunting trips with Dad. You didn’t need an imaginary friend.”

“Do I hear some resentment there?”

“No. It’s simply a fact that your every waking hour that wasn’t spent in school or in front of some bit of technology was spent on what were, in essence, training missions with our father. If you had time for an imaginary friend, it would have been at night, in your sleeping bag, while you devised ways to escape from Camp Purlis.”

Quinton’s face looked as if she’d punched him in the gut. “Sam . . . I’m sorry.”

She closed her eyes and took a long breath before opening them again. “Don’t be. I was mad sometimes, when we were kids, but, really, I got the better deal. Just look at our lives. Look at us. I am so much better off. I have a family I love and can be with every day, in the open, like a normal person. I have a wonderful job—when I’m not chasing toddlers—a wonderful husband who works normal hours when he’s home, and a wonderful house whose front door isn’t camouflaged to blend into the landscape. It’s taken you years to find Harper and be together, and you still have to sneak and hide and live in the shadows. It may be a life you like, but not me.”

“I don’t like it. And I don’t want it. But until this business with Dad is over—”

“I know. But will this be the end of it? What are you going to do once you find him and Soraia? Kill him?”

“No!” Quinton was aghast.

Sam shook her head, her eyes once again suspiciously red and wet. Her aura jumped with sudden scarlet sparks. “Then it will never be over. Dad will stop plotting and maneuvering and manipulating when he’s in his grave and not one minute before.”

“You think I should . . . ?”

“I’m not saying you should kill him. But I’m not saying you shouldn’t, either. He’s a monster. He took my child. He tried to give her that thing your girlfriend won’t even touch. He used you, and when you resisted, he almost killed you. He had our mom locked up in a psychiatric hospital. He is not a person who should be running loose in the world, but you can’t lock him up and be sure he’d stay there. The only other choice is to keep hiding. How do you want to live, Jay? That’s the only thing I’m saying.” I took note of everything she said, but I didn’t interrupt—this wasn’t my conversation.

Quinton put the flute on the table and rubbed one of his hands over his face and into his brown hair. “There has to be some other solution. I almost shot him in Seattle—I did shoot him, but I mean I almost shot him dead and Harper stopped me. I don’t want to be a murderer, no matter how terrible he is. I just . . . It was something I couldn’t live with at the NSA and I won’t bring that back down on myself. I don’t want to kill people, not even by remote control, through blinds and cutouts and a dozen layers of protocol that turned an elegant little programming problem into a weapon. I don’t want . . . that. That is no better a life than hiding and skulking. I don’t want to start a new life waist-deep in blood—anyone’s blood and especially not my father’s. He’s a villain, but killing him would not make me a hero.”

Sam threw her arms around him, catching Martim as well in her embrace. “Oh, Jay! I’m sorry, that’s not what I mean at all. I don’t want that, either. I am so sorry. I am . . . I’m. . . . I just want it to end! I want my daughter back. I just . . . want her back so much. . . .” It was as close to a breakdown as I had seen from Sam, although still very contained, and I wondered if being “a brick” was really a good thing for the brick. The baby didn’t seem to care for it, either, making squeals of protest at being squashed between the two adults.

Quinton clung to Sam with his free arm, saying, “I know. I know . . .” over and over.

I noted that Sam had avoided any further discussion of the idea that her daughter might be in touch with the Grey and I shifted my own focus to something productive. I used the stuffed toy to shove the flute back into its box and then put the lid on it while the siblings cried on each other’s shoulders. It wasn’t that I wasn’t affected by the scene and had no stake in it—I had a big one—but there was nothing I could do or say. It was their moment, and interrupting it to say, “Your daughter is probably psychic or some kind of magic user” wasn’t appropriate. I found the horrible flute increasingly disturbing, so I dealt with that, instead. I felt better once the flute was back in its box, and Quinton and Sam both sat back, looking a little relieved themselves.

As I put the package on the table, a tapping came on the front window. We all looked toward it, but only I saw the old vineyard manager standing on the other side, waving for me to come out to the yard. I stood up. “I think there’s something that the resident ghost wants us to see.”