Revenant (23 page)

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“For what?” I asked.

“I hurt Mamãe.”

Before I could say it, Sam had put one arm around her daughter and said, “No, you didn’t. I’m so sorry,
anjinho
. I’m sorry I let those horrible things happen to you.”

“You didn’t . . . hurt me, Mamãe.”

“But I let your grandfather take you away.”

Soraia just shook her head, adamant. “No.”

Sam cuddled both of her children closer. She put her head down against Soraia’s hair, crying softly now.

Mara picked up her bowl and got to her feet. She backed away from the sofa and motioned to me to follow her to the kitchen. Ben and Brian were a few steps behind us.

“They’ll be all right,” Mara whispered as she put the salt bowl on the drain board. “At least in time. There are some awful things in that poor little girl’s head and her mother’s almost as haunted.”

“Are you sure they’ll be OK?” I asked.

“It may be a long road, but yes. Eventually.” She smiled at me, a tired, troubled smile. “Well done, Harper.”

“I didn’t do much,” I said.

“Oh no. I’m the one who didn’t do much—I just calmed them
down and helped banish their negative energy long enough for you to do the work. Really, it’s sometimes little things that make a difference.” She looked me over and gave me a hug. “You should probably be going soon if you’re to reach Lisbon before dark. Not that I’m eager to get rid of you . . .”

Ben and Brian chimed in on that note but Mara was right—I needed to go, though I wasn’t comfortable with it. I looked over toward the couch, but Sam and the kids were still huddled together and the last thing I wanted to do was disturb them.

I said some quiet good-byes to the Danzigers, picked up my things, and headed for the door.

On the sofa, Soraia raised her head, whispered into her mother’s ear, and slipped out of her grasp to run to me. She stopped a step in front of me, looking up at my face, anxious.

I crouched down to make it easier.

“I saw you,” she said.

I smiled a little. “Thought so. Are you going to be all right if I go?”

“Why are you going?”

“Because I have to help your uncle and Senhor Carlos stop the people who hurt you from hurting other people.”

She nodded. “All right. Are you going to hurt them back?”

“It’s tempting. Really tempting, but my job is to make things better, not worse. Not even if they deserve it.”

She nodded, looking grave, and hugged me, saying nothing more.

SEVENTEEN

T
raffic had not improved on the way back and since I hadn’t driven the route the first time, I got lost and came toward the city on a different highway. At the outskirts of Lisbon, I had to wait in slow traffic near the air base in Montijo. A modest group of protesters with signs I couldn’t read blocked the road and an equally modest contingent of police was trying to move them out of it. Both groups seemed peaceful enough, but as the demonstrators were pushed away from the road, some of them began shoving back, shouting and hitting at the police with their signs for no reason I could make out. Singly, the cops lost their tempers and their collective, steady push became curt, rough, and finally angry. A dark shape, barely visible in the westering sun, circled over the seething lines of demonstrators and cops, and even though it was difficult to see, everyone ducked as it moved. Someone yelled and, as the dark thing swept away into the sky, the peaceful protest turned into knots of pointless violence scattered along the roadside. I stared at it, rolling down the window and cocking my head to look into the Grey. Another shape moved around the
edges of the infant riot, seeming to nip at the cops and protesters like a dog herding sheep. It was made of red energy and silver mist, and where it walked, the violence escalated. This had to be the work of Purlis’s Ghost Division and there was nothing I could do. I closed the window in haste and found a path through the traffic.

The conflict seemed to spread outward like crystal growth and I had to detour several times to get onto the bridge that would deliver me into Lisbon proper. Paranoid that something might have seen me, I took a circuitous route, checking frequently for any kind of paranormal tail. I never saw one, but I took the precaution anyhow and arrived at the house in Alfama after sunset.

Nothing had changed inside since I’d left and that bothered me more than it might under other circumstances. Trying not to imagine the worst, I raced up the stairs to our suite and burst through the door to the sitting room.

No Quinton at the desk. I ran through to the bedroom.

He was sitting cross-legged on the bed with his laptop open in front of him and a pair of long cables running off across the floor. I breathed heavily with relief. He looked up, craning his neck to see me better.

“Hi. Everything OK? Sam and the kids made it all right?”

“Yeah. We made it to the Danzigers’ all right, but it’s going to be a rough road for Sam and the kids. They’ll be OK, though. What about you?”

“I’m fine. I slept like the dead.”

I let that go. “No signs of anything unpleasant in the streets?”

“Uh . . . not up here. There’ve been a few incidents around town today, though. Some disturbance happened at the Banco do Portugal headquarters that the news is vague about and some kind of protest down at Montijo Air Base went wonky.”

“I know—I was there. And so was your father’s band of invisible agitators.”

He frowned a little. “Are you sure?”

“Yes. There was something—a ghost of some kind I think—working the edge of the crowd, making them angry and volatile, and something I could barely see had descended on the protesters and police from the sky, and they all acted like they’d been strafed. After that, it went to hell.”

“Damn it. That sounds like the same sort of thing I saw in Paris. Damn it! I keep missing him,” Quinton snapped, and started to get up.

“Nothing you can do right now,” I said, waving him down. “Tell me what else you found—that may be more important to us than getting a closer look at the wreckage your father’s group is responsible for.”

He frowned. “All right . . . I’ve been working on your bones-in-the-news question.”

“I had an idea on that—or rather, Ben did. Anything about ossuaries? Or bone chapels?”

“Yeah. They weren’t connected by the press or police yet, but there have been a series of vandalizations of small ossuaries here in Portugal—did you know that Portugal has the largest number of extant ossuaries of any country in Europe?”

“No. What does that mean?”

“It means that while there may be bigger, better-known piles of bones in places like Italy and France, there are more of them total and per square mile in Portugal. And with a comparatively small population, that’s a lot of dead bones for every live one running around. It seems to me that would make this country very attractive to bone mages—which could be why Dad is concentrating here at the moment.”

“I agree,” I replied in haste. I still felt wound up from my trip to the house while Quinton seemed to vacillate between anger and a strangely distant curiosity. “What happened with these small ossuaries?”

“Well, over the past few months, there are four ossuaries along the coast in the Algarve that have been vandalized. Algarve is a coastal vacation area that’s very popular with European travelers. Anyhow, bones have been removed, causing the ossuaries to shift or fall in some cases. In another, it was basically a shrine in a wall and someone took the arm off the crucifix, which was pretty obvious. But no one’s been saying the crimes are connected. So far, all the reports read like it’s just a local annoyance and the press is blaming the tourists, but locals are disturbed by it. The ossuaries are old and small, but sacred, and with the other problems in Portugal, it seems like a bad sign.”

“Any idea how many bones have been taken altogether?”

He shook his head. “No. Something’s always missing, but no one is really sure what, except in the case of the crucifix.”

He put the laptop aside and unfolded himself from the bed. He stretched, his spine protesting with a series of pops and snaps and his joints joining in the complaint. He shook himself out and closed the distance between us to put his arms around my waist and kiss me. When I didn’t respond in kind, he gave me a curious look. “Are you all right?”

“I could ask you the same.”

“Why?”

“You just . . . don’t seem like yourself.”

He shook his head as if dismissing my concern. “Probably lingering effects of whatever that was last night. You’re a little prickly yourself.”

I stepped back from him. “I’m sorry. I’m obsessing a bit about these bones and this business with the Ghost Division suddenly popping up. . . . Carlos said he thought he could learn something about what the mages are up to tonight, but I want to give him all of this information before he goes out and does whatever he had in mind.”

“Oh. Well, I think it’s too late. He’s not here.”

“It’s not that late yet. The sun just went down.”

“About forty minutes ago. I almost didn’t hear him leave, but the door up to the tower stairs makes a noise when it passes over the floor. It sounds like someone trying to sweep the tiles with a very stiff broom. I looked out and saw him going down the stairs right after the sun went down.”

I scowled. “He’d have had to sleep in the tower all night. Not very safe.”

“Safe enough, apparently.”

“I wish I knew what he’s up to.”

Quinton pulled me a little closer in a jostling manner and said, “Hey, a guy could get jealous when all you want to talk about is bones and some other man.”

“Carlos isn’t a man. He’s a vampire.”

“That is not my point, Harper.”

I stopped glaring into the wall and turned my attention back to Quinton. His aura was still streaked with green, but at least it was more of an apple color than olive. He frowned at me.

“You’re not joking,” I said. “You’re jealous of Carlos.”

“I wouldn’t call it jealousy. . . . It’s more like . . . preoccupation.”

“There is no point in it. I love you. I spent most of this past year without you because you had other things you needed to pursue. But there’s no one else I want to be with. Not for the moment, or in the situation, or if I can’t do better. No one at all. Ever. And you know
it. You know it right here,” I added, touching the bright pink line of energy that always pointed me to him, no matter where he was, no matter how far away.

He winced as I touched it and his energy corona flushed with a flurry of little sparks in green, black, white, and, finally, pink, like a Roman candle. “Ouch.”

I frowned. “That shouldn’t hurt.”

He blinked and shivered. “It doesn’t, exactly. It’s more like the sensation after you pull out a sliver.”

I thought of Amélia’s ghost floating over him as he slept and I felt furious. “Oh, I’m going to kill that interfering little specter twice over.”

“Who?”

“Amélia—Carlos’s dead wife.” I raised my head and looked toward the ceiling, then around the room, just in case I could spot her, but she wasn’t in evidence. “I hope you’re eavesdropping, Amélia, because I don’t want this to be an unfair fight. I’m going to turn you into a pile of sparks and ghost dust and send you back to the ethereal nothingness if I catch you playing with his mind again. So keep your incorporate hands off!”

“Is there something going on that I should know about?” Quinton asked.

“Yet another meddling ghost getting up to nothing good, I’m sure, though why, I don’t know.”

“That’s going around.”

“Oh?”

“Well, aside from this interesting half a conversation, the vandalized ossuaries, and sudden surges of violence that seem to be my dad’s work, this morning someone broke into the tomb of King Sebastian.”

“Who is that and how is it relevant to our problem with the bone mages?”

“You remember I said something about there being people in Portugal who believe in the ‘Sleeping King’—O Desejado—who will return to save the country in its darkest hour? A sort of Arthur figure with a cult built around him?”

“Yeah, a little.”

“That king was Dom Sebastião. He was a bit of a mess. His mother took off soon after he was born so she could be regent of Spain for the remaining twenty years of her life, so he was raised by his grandmother, Catherine of Austria—who was a bit of a hard-ass. He became king at the age of three in 1557. He was Jesuit educated and did a lot of important stuff, like establishing standard measures, reforming civilian and military law, creating medical and science scholarships, abolishing slavery of Brazilian natives, and mandating a school for navigators that taught them math and cosmology. Just that alone increased the number of ships that made it home from their voyages—and that’s a big deal for a seafaring nation. Portugal was an economic powerhouse in the Renaissance largely because of Sebastian. But he was kind of a misogynistic jerk—he never got married, and he was more interested in flouncing off to fight crusades against the Moors in north Africa than having kids or watching out for things back home.

“Anyhow, he was killed at the battle of Alcácer Quibir in 1578, but his body was never found, and he left no direct heir. It was kind of a boondoggle, and an expensive one as well, because Sebastian had borrowed money to do it. Phillip the Second of Spain became king of Portugal, and in 1582 some human remains that he claimed were Sebastian’s were entombed here in Lisbon at the Jerónimos Monastery. But most people were sure the body wasn’t actually his and that
led to the idea that Sebastian was still out there somewhere, waiting for the chance to come back and save Portugal. Which he never did. That’s the ‘Sleeping King’ legend. But the tomb is still an important icon of its own and someone—or several someones—broke into it very early this morning.”

“What did they take?” I asked.

“No one knows if anything was taken at all. The body and contents weren’t very well documented and it’s all dust now, anyhow. But I’d be willing to bet—given the way these things work—that the dust of a legend’s bones might be as useful to some people as the bones themselves.”