Revenant (37 page)

The route twisted along a narrow highway through dry, tree-covered hills with the rising sun in our eyes and the dusty smell of olive and cork trees mingled with the odor of cured meat as the breeze twisted through the open windows of the delivery van’s front seats. I was considering a raid on the man’s cargo almost the whole time—my empty stomach now becoming insistently loud. I wasn’t sorry to see the last of the too-redolent truck when we reached the tiny outpost that turned out to be Ciladas.

I felt we’d been transported back to some wide bit of the road in Southern California’s eastern desert near San Bernardino or Riverside. Even in the early morning with the sun barely up, the place was hot, dusty, and smelled of agriculture. But it was still a Portuguese town of low, plastered buildings with red tile roofs, stone-paved sidewalks, the sound of the Grey atonally melancholy, and all the rest of the world as remote as the moon. And yet, once again, I was reminded of places I’d grown up, the scent of ocher dust, the color of the light, and the weight of sun like a veil lying on my shoulders and winding up my neck and face, as tangible as a touch. The town rolled along the edge of the road, which wasn’t even a highway anymore, with some of the houses hiding behind stubbled brown humps of land or perching on the ridge in rows like red-crowned birds. The only notable landmarks were the police station at one end of the main street and the soccer field on the other. The road stretched
away, east, out of town, into more rolling, sunburned hills dotted with dust-laden trees. It seemed like we’d come to the end of the world and the road was only an illusion that would vanish under our feet and return us endlessly to the same intersection.

I looked at Quinton. “Where to?”

He frowned and pulled a pad of paper from one of his pockets. “East. The directions say it’s a little more than three kilometers—about two miles. Can you walk that far?”

“I don’t walk on my hands.”

He gave me a tired smile and we started on our way.

Usually, I stride along at a good clip and could have completed the trip in less than an hour, but it was warm and I wasn’t at my best. Two hours later we turned onto a dirt road that went up a long rise landmarked by crippled cork oaks. The driveway curved to a rambling white house perched on the height so it looked down into a valley of wheat stubble and olive groves that tumbled to the edge of a small river. The energetic colors around the house were soft, as if they were as worn by time as the rolling hills. The sign at the edge of the road indicated that the house took in guests and I hoped we were in the right place. I could hear kids behind a courtyard wall and the splashing of water. A painted tile sign beside the gate in the wall identified the building with a number and the name
A CASA RIBEIRA NO VALE DAS OLIVEIRAS
, and a hand-painted addition just below the tiles read
TURISMO RURAL
.

“The name’s right—if I understood Rafa correctly,” Quinton said, “But the
turismo rural
is a tourist bureau, which would make this a sort of . . . very nice B and B, for lack of a better term. Most people call them
turihabs
.”

“Is this bad?” I asked, my voice still no louder than a whisper.

“Not necessarily, but I wasn’t expecting this. It’s not quite a hotel,
but it’s not really a private house, either, so, while it’s all right to just walk into the courtyard and see what’s what, we have no guarantee about who else may be here.”

I opened the gate and walked through into a white-walled corridor between the building and the courtyard wall. The ground was covered in slate slabs, and I followed the walkway along the side of the house until the wall turned and I came out into the courtyard itself. The wall ended a few dozen feet ahead, leaving an open, falling-away view of the shallow valley below. A wide blue swimming pool stretched across half of the revealed terrace and a small band of children pl
ayed in and around it, screeching with delight. Carlos sat in a deck chair at the far end of the terrace from the pool, brooding out into the view. He raised his head and turned toward us as a petite woman stepped out from the house through a door on my left. She was almost a dead ringer for Rafa.

She peered at us with a knowing smile. “Mr. and Mrs. Smith? Cousin Carlos told us to expect you in a day or two, but we’re pleased to see you sooner. I’m Nelia. Welcome to A Casa Ribeira.”

Carlos had left his chair and was a few steps away from Nelia. As he closed the distance and stopped beside her, he also reached forward and took my injured hand. For a moment he said nothing, glancing at me, then frowning at Quinton, and then down to my bandaged hand before he looked into my face.

“What have you done to yourself?”

TWENTY-SEVEN

N
elia settled us indoors away from the noisy children in the pool and brought food, then left us to our discussion in a quiet room that would have looked onto the terrace when the curtains were pulled aside. We were the only guests in the house—the children all being either the family’s or the other local kids who were too young to be much help with the tail end of the harvest season. Even though it was Saturday, the grapes and the olives were both disinclined to wait on human convenience, so nearly everyone who could work in the fields was, leaving us with only the company of Nelia and a few family ghosts who were mostly disinterested in us—gliding through their remembered business in endless, silvery loops or simply passing by without paying us much attention. A plethora of temporaclines littered the view in the Grey and gave a streaked and smoky appearance to the mist of the world between worlds, making the auras of the people in the room harder to see through the fog of the building’s memories.

Carlos was not pleased about my being captured and examined
by Rui, but he was willing to wait for a report until Quinton and I had eaten.

“I had to remove the fingertip once Rui said it matched one of his,” I explained, still feeling—and sounding—like I’d gargled broken glass. “Once he’d done whatever he was up to, I’d have been a danger to you two if I escaped, and completely in his power if I didn’t.”

“But you had to leave the bone behind, which gave him part of what he desired.”

“It was a trade-off. Rui has no direct connection to me now, but he did get the bone. On the other hand, he said it was a mere ‘grace note,’ and I got information and I got out. With Quinton’s help.”

“Now they know what you are capable of,” Carlos said, scowling, “and will follow.”

“They only know that I can drop through the Grey. They may find me eventually,” I croaked, “but I think they’ll have to be closer than Lisbon, or even Borba. Rui only caught up to me this time by listening to the resonance of my bones through the bone hooks that got into me at the temple—and which neither of us thought were significant at the time—once he was outside the house. He had to be that close. Without the hooks, he could only hear what he called my ‘bone song’ when he was a few feet from me.”

Carlos’s expression blackened. “I underestimated his skills. I expected your own healing ability to deal with it, but I . . . was wrong.” I could tell it was difficult for him to say so. He rarely made errors, much less the sort that came back with consequences later, and he’d made several here. I wondered if the memory of his power when he lived here had made him incautious and thoughtless of the changes time had wrought, but I wasn’t going to suggest it. We’d survived and had to look forward, not back.

“I haven’t been in top form. My body just hasn’t been able to keep up,” I said.

Carlos shook off my attempt at mitigation. “Nonetheless, I left you in danger that could have been avoided.”

“Could Rui find you the same way he found me? I mean, he must
know
what your bones—”

Carlos waved the comment off. “He’s had little success thus far—my bones have changed since the days of our association. And it’s hardly impressive to bribe and threaten a taxi driver to find my house.”

“Which is a crime scene now,” I said.

Carlos shrugged. “We could not have returned in any event. Tell the rest.”

“We may have some breathing room. Even with that bone, he’s not got much. It’s the only one of mine he seemed to have an affinity for. I don’t think Rui was paying much attention to what he told me—he was too focused on his plans.”

Quinton looked ready to throw up, but Carlos was intrigued. “What did you discover that was nearly worth the cost of your life?” Carlos asked.

“Rui doesn’t know about—or understand—your change of state. He thinks the house protected you from the daylight and that you’re a sitting duck outside of it. He doesn’t seem to have much knowledge about vampires in general, either, and he’s . . . excited by the thought of exacting revenge from you. He hates you to a point of blindness, but he figured out what you did to Griffin pretty much on sight, so that was a wasted effort.”

“Not entirely. It deprived him of his best assistant, stopped him from salvaging anything from that loss, and he will still have to find appropriate bones.”

“He does have one of mine,” I said, “and he talked about ‘adjusting’ my bones to make me . . . something else—he didn’t say what.”

“He did not and will not have that chance. The bone is a pity, but there are still others to collect. I have been to Évora. The skeleton of the child is missing, but they had no opportunity to take more—perhaps because Rui was too busy with you to oversee his minions’ efforts.” He looked at Quinton. “They have recovered from the loss of your niece, but they are no further ahead.”

“And there are only three days left, according to Rui,” I added.

“Only three days?” Carlos scowled. “What is significant about that date . . . ?”

“He didn’t say.”

Carlos made a dissatisfied growl. “Go on. What more did you discover?”

“Rui confirmed that Purlis gave up his left tibia for some control of the drache—and he was amused enough to tell me that my own left shin is a near match in resonance, but again, he’d have to be close enough to touch me for that to be useful. I guess it tickles some Kostní Mágové sense of irony. Anyhow, he said it wouldn’t matter that Purlis had sacrificed a major bone for some control of the project since Rui had placed three of his own bones in the construct, which he seemed to think would mitigate the effect of Purlis’s.”

Quinton shook his head, muttering, “Jesus . . .”

“Yeah . . . your dad’s completely past the sanity line. I—we had a really disturbing discussion before he let Rui catch me.”

“I’m sorry—” he started, leaning forward as if to pull me into his arms.

I put up my hand. “It’s not your fault,” I said in my strained, half whisper. “Both of you stop apologizing or I’ll never get done before I lose my voice.”

It took him some effort to sit back and let me go on.

“So,” I said, regathering my thoughts and swallowing a few times before I continued. “Rui told me a nasty story about a girl and a witch and I think I may have figured out how the ghost bone swap thing works, but I didn’t have time to try it out and I have no idea how it’s useful.” I pulled the bone flute from my pocket. “This is Rui’s bone song—he said it’s made from the twin of one of the bones in the construct. He used it to locate the finger bone I . . . left behind.”

Carlos smiled one of his wolf grins and took the flute from me as I held it out. “Ah, now this may be useful, once he can’t hear it.” He looked it over, listened, and pulled a long, kinked strand of white energy from the small bone. I watched him through the Grey as he stretched the white thread across the table, then picked up a sharp, serrated knife from the food tray and stabbed it into the wiry filament. He held it tight, muttering, as the energy strand whipped and writhed like a snake. Every word he murmured to it seemed to slide down the blade of the knife and stain the thread darker and darker, damping its vitality, until it lay limp and black. He pulled the knife away, picked up the strand, and wove its inky length around the bone again. Then he handed the modified flute back to me. “He cannot hear it now, but it may be best if you keep this, else I may be tempted to do something rash.”

“I don’t see you as the impulsive type,” Quinton said. “More the brooding, plotting type.”

Carlos gave him a sideways look that bordered on amusement. “At the moment, the balance of my impulses appears to be positive. Don’t tempt me to upset the scales.”

Quinton made a dismissive snort, as if he had no fear of what Carlos could do to him. It was an interesting reaction, but I was too worn down by sleeplessness and pain to give it much thought.

Carlos turned his attention back to me, saying, “If you must use it to call to Rui’s bones, remove the binding I’ve put around it, first, or the sound will die in the air. It should do you no further harm now that you no longer own the bone it sang to.”

“All right,” I said, my voice barely audible even in the quiet room as I accepted the flute. “There is one other thing,” I added. “Rui mentioned Coca and the Inferno Dragão as if they were the same thing. He said . . . the dust from the tomb of King Sebastian . . . Let me think. . . . ‘The dust of a great deception will make it seem to burn like flesh.’ I’m not sure what he meant, but I thought . . .”

Carlos picked up where my flagging voice gave out. “It will lend the drache the illusion of solid flesh that burns without being consumed.”

“But if it’s only an illusion—” Quinton started.

“The illusion of flesh. ‘A great deception,’” Carlos repeated. “But the flames will not be a mirage and there is no Saint George or Sleeping King to save the people that this burning death will descend upon, although Purlis’s agents have done a great deal to give the distressed hope of such a miraculous rescue.”

Quinton added, “After creating or contributing to their distress to begin with.”

Carlos nodded. “And when there is no rescue, their resistance to fear, despair, and the rhetoric of hate will be shattered.” He closed his eyes as if he were worn out and covered his face with his hands before running his fingers back through his hair in a gesture I’d never seen him use before. “Ah . . . now I know what he needs and where he’ll have to go to find it.”