Revenant

by Kat Richardson

  Carlos touched a small brown square on the lower section of the map. “Here.”

  Quinton set one of the compass points on the square and used the spine of a book to guide him as he measured the distance, muttering to himself, before asking for something with which to write the information down. When he was satisfied, we closed the windows and extinguished the candles before we left the tower and returned to my rooms.

  Quinton fetched his small laptop from his messenger bag and opened it on the tiny desk. “It’s a good thing the management company installed a data line a few years ago or we’d be screwed,” he said. He fiddled and typed for a while, entered some data, typed some more. . . .

  “Carlos, tell me if I’ve got the right house.”

  The vampire looked over his shoulder. “You do.”

  Quinton grunted. He typed some more numbers and then hit RETURN.

  We waited a few minutes and the map appeared with two red pins on it. Quinton zoomed the view in to the point he calculated the smoke had touched on the other map. It looked like a huge empty field about a half mile from the nearest major road, with only a single crooked block of shanty buildings sitting in the middle of nothing at the end of a dirt road called Alta da Eira.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “The area is called Penha de França and that in particular looks like a car repair shop in an abandoned commercial development. I think the area’s scheduled for urban renewal, but until the bulldozers come and the building starts, it’s pretty depressed and there aren’t a lot of people there. A perfect place to hide a little girl for a few days.”

  Carlos continued to look at the screen for a while without speaking. At last he said, “It was a pastoral hill and fields for miles in every direction around the Rock of France and its small church. Shepherds and cowherds grazed flocks under the trees. Now there are no trees, no flocks, no church. Only the emptiness of progress.”

  “The church is still there,” Quinton said, tapping the screen with his fingertip on a tiny building packed tightly into a block of other buildings.

  “That is not the church I recall.”

  “It may have been rebuilt.”

  “I have no doubt.” Carlos’s tone closed that avenue of the conversation like a tomb.

  The silence lingered and weighed upon us until Quinton broke its hold. “Carlos . . . What do you think these bone mages want my niece for?”

  The necromancer turned his bowed head, studying Quinton with narrowed eyes and an unpleasant curl to his lips. “For her bones, boy. What else?”

  “They’ll kill her for them?”

  “Yes, but not casually or quickly. They are frugal and it will be done by rite and ceremony they may have had no time to prepare yet. And they may have other uses for her before she dies.”

  Quinton paled, but in cold fury, not fear. “You probably shouldn’t tell me what other ‘uses’ they might have.”

  Carlos scoffed. “Nothing so profane as you’re imagining. They’re aesthetes, priests of the bones. They’d have little interest in defiling her in such a manner.”

  “That isn’t much of a relief. Who would murder a six-year-old girl for her bones? What kind of monsters can do that?”

  One corner of Carlos’s mouth quirked up in an ironic expression.

  Quinton saw it and shook his head. “No. You wouldn’t.”

  “I have. And much worse.” Carlos glanced at me and back to Quinton, adding, “But I am not what I was.”

  “Yes, but . . . what do they want her bones for? What is my father up to?”

  “Your father may know nothing of their purpose, or he may have convinced himself that such a sacrifice is necessary for a greater good. Either way, the Kostní Mágové are not known for subtlety. If they require the bones of a young child of the family as their price for whatever agreement they have with your father, their goal is nothing short of catastrophic. They will build something of those bones, something of magic and horrors. I don’t yet know what, though the appearance of drachen may be telling. Whatever it is, it shall be devastating.”

  “How are we going to get her back and stop them?”

  “Those are two separate goals. In depriving them of your niece, we will only redirect their plans, but it will buy us time to discover what they intend.”

  “But how?” Quinton yelled, pounding one fist into the top of the delicate antique desk so hard it creaked under the blow.

  “We attack the weakest link—we confront Maggie Griffin.”

  “It’s not going to be that easy to get Soraia back.”

  “No, but Griffin has the child and we have no other choices. The sooner we find your niece, the better the chance that she’ll be alive. As I presume that is your preference, we must move tonight.”

  Over his shoulder, for only a moment, Amélia appeared and vanished again.

  TWELVE

  It was nearly midnight when we reached the head of Alta da Eira. Carlos had been busy in his tower while Quinton and I had eaten a desultory supper, done research, and talked about the problem of what to do once we’d recovered Soraia. Just sending her back home with Sam wasn’t safe. Sam and her kids would have to be hidden until this was over and with that in mind, I had called the Danzigers.

  Mara answered the phone, and it took a minute or so of excited exclamations and inquiries before I could talk to her about the situation.

  “So,” she said, “you’re wanting Ben and Brian and me to drive to Lisbon immediately and help you hide a little girl and her mother from a band of villains? It sounds like old times!”

  “I know,” I said, “and I’m sorry about that. I didn’t want to put you in the middle again, but we both thought you would understand this better than most people. Sam isn’t very comfortable with the magic angle, but she and the kids are going to need to be in hiding until the danger’s past or Purlis will just snatch them all.”

  Mara gave a short, harsh laugh. “Oh, he won’t be doing that—I’ll make sure of it. And don’t tear yourself down over asking for help—we’re pleased as anything to do it. And it’ll be good to see you both again.”

  “We are working with Carlos . . .” I added.

  She made a speculative sound. “I might even be glad to see him, if the child’s all right.”

  “She’d better be,” I replied in a grim voice.

  I made the arrangements and told them where we’d meet them to hand over Soraia, Martim, and Sam for safekeeping. Then Quinton had called Sam and went through much the same thing with her. There would be a lag between the time Sam and Martim arrived and whenever the Danzigers got here, but that couldn’t be helped. We’d have to be vigilant during that period, but once the Danzigers took charge of Sam’s family, I felt reasonably sure they’d be safe. All of them.

  We had borrowed a car from the house management company to drive up to Penha de França and now left it at the bend of the road among a lot of other cars parked on the streets around the blocks of apartments that dominated the area, crowded together like convicts in a prison movie. I’d reclaimed my jeans for this job, since they seemed more practical than a skirt, and now we three, dressed in dark clothes, stood in the shadows, facing a long stretch of open nothing between the end of the road and the beginning of the L-shaped group of buildings that housed the car repair. We moved forward with great care, certain that there would be guards, alarms, or charms to keep us at bay. There was a strange, low sound in the air, as of some dread music heard from a great distance.

  The sound seemed to attract a pack of dogs that loped toward us from the hillside, cutting off the most direct path to the buildings. There was nothing paranormal about the dogs, but their presence was threatening enough by itself. They barked and yipped when they spotted us, then fell silent as they spread out in an attempt to herd us into a good position for an attack, the ones on the center snarling and
yipping to draw our attention away from those moving toward our flanks.

  As the dogs spread out, a bright beam of light fell from the lone, square building that stood facing the crook of the L, but no one emerged.

  “Motion sensor,” Quinton whispered as the light extinguished again. “They aren’t very worried about scaring off anything more troublesome than a dog. Either the locals know better than to come up here, or there’s something pretty terrible inside.”

  I was tempted to drop into the Grey to see what I could spot, but that would take me away from the steadily encroaching dogs. I reminded myself that I didn’t need to go anywhere with Carlos nearby, since he could detect auras of the living or undead as well as I could without withdrawing from the normal world. “How many people in the buildings?” I asked.

  “Five,” Carlos replied, puzzled. “I see one with no touch of magic, and the rest are much brighter. There are other things within, however, not living, but not precisely undead. Constructs.”

  “Are they all in that little building?”

  “Yes. The rest are empty of life, though there may be other things there that aren’t alive.”

  “It’s not going to be as easy to approach as it looks. There must be perimeter or door alarms at least. No matter how badass they are, they wouldn’t want anyone just walking in,” Quinton said, watching the dogs as they edged closer. “Once we’re past these dogs, we may have no margin of time to make a surprise entrance.”

  Carlos chuckled. “It’s not so difficult if we don’t care that they see us coming.”

  “Don’t we? What if they hurt Soraia?”

  “They cannot risk doing her any serious harm outside the ceremonial circle—it would taint the bones with fear and pain. If they wished for that, they’d have started already and we’d have heard her screaming by now.”

  Quinton shuddered. “You’re just a bundle of joy, aren’t you, Carlos?”

  “Not since I was an infant, and likely not then, either.”

  “You two can stop now, and do something about these dogs,” I said.

  The dogs were only a body length away in front of us, the dog on each side even closer, poised to lunge. The obvious pack leader crouched just a few inches ahead of the rest, teeth bared and a low snarl issuing from its mouth. None of us wanted to resort to Quinton’s gun and the unmistakable noise it would make, but that left us with no other weapons.

  Carlos knelt and bowed his head, murmuring and putting his hands near the ground. For a moment, the dogs seemed confused and then the leader leapt.

  Carlos spat a word and slammed his palms against the earth. A flame front roared up around us in a flash of light and rushed outward. The dogs yelped and howled, turning and running from the fire that was already dying out.

  Carlos rose again to his feet as Quinton muttered, “I think we blew our chance to do this stealthily.”

  The door of the little square building in the crook of the L opened and a figure in dark clothes was silhouetted against eerie, flickering light from indoors for just a moment before closing the door and stepping into darkness.

  I looked sideways through the Grey to see the man’s energy corona, but there was nothing to see beyond tangles of darkness. “Don’t bother with the gun—whatever that was, it’s not alive.”

  “Rush it,” Quinton said.

  We all ran forward, separated by no more than an arm’s length. I could see the black tangle of energy that hung on whatever the thing was, moving upright like a man, but making no sound. At first, it seemed not to see us; then it turned and a stray beam of starlight fell across the gleam of white bone where a face should have been. I ran harder and was the first to crash into it, throwing my shoulder into the construct of bone and magic. It dug into me, remnant muscle holding bone together and allowing it to push back. I heard its teeth clack above my head.

  “Go, go! I got this one!” I yelled, enveloped in the odor of its rot.

  Neither of the men paused, but kept running forward as I fought with the animated skeleton. It had no remains of a soul or life, only the brittle black-and-white magic that held it together, and though it was fierce, it was fragile. I plunged my hand through the arch of its ribs and laid hold of the ice-cold core of the spell that bound it together.

  The thing raked at me with its defleshed hands. I ducked my head, losing my grip on the frozen bit of magic that held the thing in form. It brought the memory of its weight with it, and I had to crouch and roll it over my hip as it lunged to grapple with me. It flipped over and hit the ground. I threw myself onto it and clutched through the gap of its ribs, ripping out the icy blackness that animated the thing. It subsided to the ground, parts falling aside as it reverted to death. I winced as the small shred of its demise passed through me like a narrow blade. Whatever had killed the person who used to own these bones, it had been recent, the remnant thread of its dying caught in the tangle of reanimation.

  I scrambled to my feet in a moment and ran for the door through which Quinton and Carlos had already disappeared. I stepped into the room and stopped short, my ears filled with an eerie whispering and wailing that wound through a rising and falling chant, bringing a giddy nausea much like what I experienced near Carlos. The people in the room ignored my entrance, continuing with their strange work. I wasn’t sure why they didn’t seem to have seen me.

  I looked around. The edges and corners of the room fell into shadow that was thickened by barbed coils of magic. All light came from the center of the room, but stopped abruptly at the edge of the black shroud of energy that seemed to creep like the nevoacria, slowly surrounding the people at the center. At first, the room was so dark outside the circle on my side that I couldn’t see. I tilted my vision toward the Grey and glimpsed Carlos moving around the edge of the room clockwise as Quinton prowled in the other direction beneath the mantle of shadow I was sure Carlos had conjured—it had the feel of his magic to it. Their advance was a slow agony when my own thoughts urged me to run forward, disrupt the scene by force, and take Soraia back immediately. But no matter how it galled, I knew there was a purpose in this careful progress. I crouched to take the moment’s measure. When my hands touched the ground, I felt the chill of death in the rounded shapes of bones rubbed smooth by time.

  The single large room of the building seemed to float in light the color of tarnished silver. It appeared to be some kind of bizarre chapel built of skeletal remains. The room was cold and reeked of rot, the weight of vile magic hanging in the air as a choking ivory fog. The walls and floor were covered in carved and painted bones, but the bones were not merely lying or stacked like cordwood; they were assembled into patterns and objects, as if in a gruesome parody of a church. Murals built of skeletal corpses seemed frozen in the midst of some action or another. Massive columns and candelabra of bones and skulls rose from the floor—even the altar and the cross above it were constructed from the bones of the dead. Perhaps a dozen narrow wooden boxes stood against the walls of the room, each no more than eighteen inches tall, wreathed in Grey mist and knotted spells, the polished surfaces reflecting strange illumination.

  The light in the room seemed to come partially from the candelabra in which stood macabre tapers of fingers and bones only partially flensed of flesh and dipped in wax. The flesh and fat of the dead burned with a sickening stink and added to the strange silver glow. The floor was a mosaic of stars, crosses, and circles created in tiny bones that ranged from the palest cream, through every shade of brown, to flame-darkened gray and black, all set in white mortar and worn smooth over time. The rest of the uncanny light rose from the largest circle, beaming upward from the floor like cold footlights on a stage in hell.

  At the center of the floor, where the shapes of cross, star, and circle overlapped, sat an old man dressed in black, his back to me as he levitated a few feet from the surface on a column of mist reflecting the silvery green light of the circle. His
energy corona showed bone-white amid a storm of black and rising spikes of bloody red. I knew I’d seen it before, but I had no focus to spend on remembering where. The mist seemed to hold him in a bubble of moving light that passed through him and made a path from him to the altar and from his right to his left. My eyes followed the illumination.

  To his left lay a pile of human bones and on his right sat a cage built of bone and silver metal that took on an oily, iridescent glow when viewed through the Grey. A little girl with black curls looked out through the cage bars. She lay flat with one arm sticking out of her prison as if pointing through the man to the pile of bones on his other side. Her hand lay palm up, exposing the pale, tender skin on the underside. Shallow parallel cuts ran from her elbow to her wrist, weeping blood onto the bone-covered floor. The light seemed to lap at her blood and carry it away in droplets of red that moved toward the floating man.

  The little girl whimpered, watching me, then shifted her eyes away to the altar at the front of the room, along the moving path of light. I felt breathless as my own horror tangled with the reflection of Quinton’s rage and anxiety, twisting the paranormal connection between us. The girl must have been Soraia. I fought the desire to run to her, fearing that a wrong move would kill her. I wanted to scream in frustration and anger.

  What was Quinton doing about it? I looked to my right, toward the movement I’d detected there when I entered. Quinton had crouched down to the floor in his covering of darkness just a few feet from another man who wore black robes and stood by the three-o’clock position of the circle, holding a large black candle burning in his hand. Both men were perfectly still, looking toward the altar. Quinton was poised for some action while the other man, oblivious to him, seemed mesmerized by the ceremony going on. Quinton glanced toward me as if he knew I was ready to leap, and shook his head with an angry grimace. He didn’t like it any better than I did. Carlos must have told him to wait for something, and we would do so, but I could feel his frustration mixing with my own.