The Golden City (19 page)

“It would be a terrible sacrifice,” he said with a sly smile, “but I suppose I could.”

Then he recognized it for a foolish reque
st
. She’d seen plenty of human hands in the pa
st
two years. But it was a trade she was willing to make. This wasn’t vulgar curiosity or sensationalism on his part. He simply liked to under
st
and.

She leaned forward and held out her left hand—the one without a cut across the palm. The webbing ran up to the la
st
joint on each finger. Their conjoined nature didn’t allow her the dexterousness of a human hand, but she found mo
st
tasks doable.

“May I touch your hand?” he asked.

Given his walking into her bath unannounced only a few days before, it was an ironic que
st
ion. He’d already touched her bare hand, once when he passed her the bathroom keys and then the previous night in the library. This was different, though. She ju
st
wasn’t certain how. “Of course,” she managed.

His left hand, ungloved, touched hers. His fingers were warm, sliding under her hand to support it. His thumb rubbed across her palm, di
st
ra
ct
ing her. She spread her fingers wider and let him turn her hand slightly to catch the light on the webbing. The silhouette of his fingers showed through the translucent skin. His heartbeat reverberated through her senses.

He was holding her hand because . . . he wanted to do so.

She swallowed. The sensation of Mr. Ferreira’s skin again
st
hers was surprisingly affe
ct
ing, making her body warm and her heart beat fa
st
er. She wasn’t accu
st
omed to such familiarity; that had to be the source of her rea
ct
ion.

His eyes met hers. “You have lovely hands.”

She jerked her fingers free of his light grasp, then wished she hadn’t. He’d done nothing wrong. “Thank you,” she mumbled. “I’m surprised that a . . .”

One of his eyebrows crept upward.

She should
st
op including Duilio Ferreira in her generalizations about humans . . . and about men. “I have large hands,” she said. “I’m given to under
st
and that human men prefer delicate ones.”

“I am not entirely human,” he reminded her. He held out his own hand, leaning close to let her view it. She could smell him clearly now, that light musky scent she’d originally mi
st
aken for ambergris cologne.

“Can you become a seal?” she asked.

“No,” he said with a shrug. “
Too
human for that, it seems.”

Oriana gazed down at the hand displayed before her. Larger than hers, with blunt-tipped fingers and neatly trimmed nails. His knuckles looked calloused. She turned his hand over. “What does a palmi
st
make of your hands?”

“I’ve never been to one,” he said. “Have you?”

A man of science, then?
“No. You don’t tru
st
seers either?”

“Well, I do li
st
en to Felis. She reads the cards,” he added in a conspiratorial tone. “I’m not sure if she’s a true witch or not, but other than her, I don’t li
st
en to fortune-tellers.”

She wasn’t certain whether he was joking about Felis. “You don’t believe their predi
ct
ions, then? Not even Silva’s?”

His warm eyes seemed to focus inward for a moment. “I think we make our own paths in life. As for my uncle, I’ve no knowledge how profound his powers truly are.”

That comment
st
ruck a chord in her memory, but she couldn’t place it. “I suspe
ct
he’s no more than a good guesser.”

She caught her lower lip between her teeth. Duilio Ferreira was easy to talk to, a dangerous temptation. She felt as if he under
st
ood her far better than . . . well,
anyone
. She could mention the
st
range meeting between Heriberto and her father to him. It would be nice to have someone else’s opinion of the entire matter. But it was a sereia problem and had nothing at all to do with Isabel’s death, so she kept her query to herself.

When she said nothing further, he rose, leaving his coffee cup on the tray. “Well, as I need to go break into a building, I should leave. Thank you for the company and for the intere
st
ing conversation.”

He’d switched back to more formal address with that la
st
comment, so she mu
st
have hit upon a raw nerve. “You’re mo
st
welcome, sir.”

He made his way out of the sitting room, but paused at the threshold and glanced back. “And my shoulder feels much better, Miss Paredes,” he said, answering her original que
st
ion. “Thank you for asking.”

He pulled the door shut behind him before she could think of a fitting response.

She couldn’t recall when she’d had that long of an exchange with any male since coming to the city, her ma
st
er Heriberto included. She would not mind doing so again.

D
uilio watched the building on Bonfim Street for a time. His gift insi
st
ed that the place was important, but now also seemed to think it was dangerous. Duilio wasn’t sure which warning carried the greater significance. On top of that, he had the feeling he was being watched, an odd itch between his shoulder blades. He could ju
st
put this off, but they needed results soon.

The apartment was in a narrow building above a small
st
ore that had once sold fabric, its red-painted walls faded to a dry rose in the sun. Buildings pressed close on either side, one facade tiled in white and blue and the other built of plain gold-brown
st
one. It did appear that the fabric
st
ore had been converted into a woodworker’s shop. A mechanical saw mounted on a large table dominated one side of a room. Another side held a treadle-driven lathe. Wood was neatly
st
acked again
st
one wall, along with shelves that held wooden kegs of various sizes. Nothing moved within.

Duilio rubbed his aching shoulder as he walked pa
st
the
st
ore. On reaching the building’s narrow entry he walked briskly up the
st
eps. A quick turn of his skeleton key opened the door, and he
st
epped inside. The white-painted hallway held nothing more than a closed door that led to the fabric-cum-woodworker’s shop and a narrow
st
airwell. Duilio headed up that to the apartment above. After a brief moment of fiddling with the lock, Duilio slipped inside and closed the door behind him.

The apartment smelled mu
st
y, as if it hadn’t been aired in months. It wasn’t huge but larger than Joaquim’s and probably far more expensive. Two windows on the front wall looked out over Bonfim Street. They had sheer lace curtains, but the dark drapes over those were half-closed, letting in only a pale bar of light. Duilio didn’t draw back the drapes; that would surely be seen from the
st
reet. He glanced at the single kerosene lamp on a table near the door and discarded that idea as well. He didn’t want to alert anyone to his presence.

Those with an arti
st
ic mentality were often held to be. . . .messy, and this tenant certainly lived up to that
st
ereotype. Stacks of papers covered every horizontal surface in the front room. A low couch couldn’t be sat upon because of the piles of sketches obscuring it. More sketches on foolscap lined the edges of the walls, many of them torn and tattered about the edges, made into ne
st
s for mice. That explained the mu
st
y smell that was making his nose twitch. Duilio perused the paper-littered tables and then gingerly lifted a few drawings from the couch. He held one up to the light
st
reaming in through the lace curtains. The charcoal sketch was a rudimentary likeness of the Duarte mansion, the fir
st
to be re-created by Espinoza and set upside down in the water.

Duilio laughed softly. Joaquim had finally run the arti
st
to ground.

He didn’t want to
st
ay in the place too long, but he needed to know what it had to tell him. Like mo
st
in the old town, the apartment was long and narrow, so Duilio headed for the door that led to the next room. He li
st
ened at the door and when he heard nothing, pushed the door open.

The shadowy room was uninhabited. It was a bedroom, but only identifiable as such because a long, narrow bed had been set again
st
the wall in the darke
st
corner. A pair of drafting tables with tilted tops dominated the room in
st
ead, the sort an archite
ct
might use. Both were completely immaculate, a
st
ark contra
st
to the mess in the front room. The blankets on the bed had once been pulled tight, judging by the neat corners that were left.

Duilio
st
epped back out into the front room, eyes narrowing. The clutter hadn’t been wrought by the missing inhabitant, but by mice. If not for their predations, the
st
acks would have been neat and organized. He looked at the couch with new eyes; it was a filing sy
st
em. Apparently the inhabitant simply hadn’t ever planned on having gue
st
s.

He turned back to the immaculate bedroom. The mu
st
-and-mouse smell carried through from the front room, and he could see evidence that the woolen blanket on the bed had been chewed as well. A small night
st
and
st
ood next to the bed. Duilio opened the single drawer, but saw only a dog-eared Bible within. He picked it up and checked for any inscription but found none. When he shook it out, nothing fell from between the pages. Sighing, he slid the book back into the drawer and closed it.

He’d hoped to find some clue where the arti
st
had gone, but his gift didn’t seem eager to attach significance to anything. “I could use some help,” he complained to himself.

Nothing popped into his mind, so he threw his hands up and turned to search the drafting tables. A thorough going-over of the fir
st
revealed only the arti
st
’s inks, pens, and pencils. The second had a neat
st
ack of paper atop it, all of which appeared to be blank. Inside the drawer, he found a couple of blades for sharpening pencils, along with cleaning cloths and some wadded-up papers. It was unusual, given the neatness of everything else.

His intere
st
piqued, Duilio began removing the contents of the drawer. As he pulled out the la
st
cloth, his fingers brushed something solid crammed into the very back of the drawer. He tugged on it and it came loose, a leather-bound volume.

Duilio felt gooseflesh prickling along his arms, his gift alerting him. “Aha!”

He flipped the book open and scanned the handwritten pages.

He turned to the front of the volume and saw neatly dated entries, the fir
st
more than two years old. They appeared to be calculations of the di
st
ances from the riverbed to the ideal depths for the miniature houses. Grinning, Duilio tucked the journal into one of his coat pockets.

With renewed energy, he inspe
ct
ed the two doors on the far wall. One opened onto a very dark dressing room that had definitely fallen prey to mice, judging by the odor. Garments lay
st
rewn about. Pinching his nose closed to mitigate the smell, Duilio shoved open the door as wide as it would go and dug through the scattered garments with one boot. They were plain-looking garb in the dim light, more like a workman’s than the flamboyancy he expe
ct
ed of an arti
st
. He’d judged the man too readily by his occupation. A basin and pitcher had been knocked from their commode, the pitcher’s handle broken off on the hardwood floor.
A
st
ruggle
?

He cleared mo
st
of the clothing to one side and picked up the broken pitcher, then turned it over to view the unglazed base. Something dark discolored the porcelain, as if it had seeped into the porous material. Duilio crouched down. Near where the pitcher had lain, the cracks in the wood were darker as well. He felt sure it was blood, but couldn’t quite tell. Fru
st
rated, he went back to fetch the lamp from the front room.

A twinge of warning alerted his senses before he reached the bedroom door, setting his heart to racing. Duilio sniffed . . . and caught the di
st
in
ct
ive odor of kerosene. He heard the sudden
whoosh
of a fire igniting.

Duilio ran back to the front room and
st
opped in the doorway, agha
st
at the sight.

Flames leapt several feet high, blocking the doorway, and for a second he couldn’t breathe, panic freezing him there in that spot. He clutched at the doorjamb. One of the few selkie traits he
had
inherited was an irrational fear of fire.

Duilio squeezed his eyes shut.
Don’t panic. Deal with this.

He opened his eyes again and tried to take
st
ock. Flames already coursed around the edge of the room, feeding off the scattered papers. His eyes flicked around the room, hunting for some escape.

Damnation! How had the fire grown so fa
st
?
He couldn’t get near the door. Someone had splashed kerosene all over that wall.

But there were
st
ill the front windows. The fire had already reached the couch in front of them, but hadn’t yet touched the curtains. He could get out that way. He had to, or else the fire would trap him in the narrow bedroom.

Duilio ran back to the bed and
st
ripped off the blanket, then returned to beat at the flames on the couch. Bits of charred paper flew up with the vigor of his a
ct
ions, glowing on the edges. He took a deep breath, ta
st
ed ash, and
st
arted coughing. The flames roared, loud enough to drown out the sound of his harsh breathing. He cursed under his breath.

Calm down.

Covering his mouth with one sleeve, Duilio doggedly beat out the flames on the couch. He grabbed the top edge of the couch and flipped the whole thing over, sending more sparks into the air. But the backside of the couch wasn’t afire yet. He got behind it and shoved it over, away from the window. He grabbed the curtains and drapes and yanked them down, all in one heave, and tossed them over onto the upturned couch.

He wiped ash and sweat from his face, then pressed close to the du
st
-clouded window to peer out. There were a dozen or more people in the
st
reet below, pointing and crying out. They weren’t looking at him.

A huge groan came from the floor below his feet, and he
knew
.

The woodworker’s shop on the fir
st
floor was ablaze as well—a place likely filled with
st
ains and resins and other chemicals that would burn hot. For a second his breath
st
illed. A cold sweat broke out all over his body.

Someone intended to bake him alive.