Revenant

by Kat Richardson

  Mara fixed her husband with a quelling look. “Ben, we’re not in the lecture hall today.”

  “But it’s fascinating and I’d think that magic users who channel their powers through bones would be attracted to such places. Have any of the problems been associated with ossuaries?”

  “Not that I know of—not known ossuaries at least,” I replied. “I’ll have to check into it when I get back.” I looked at my watch. It was past three o’clock and I wasn’t sure how it had gotten so late. “And I need to get back before much later or I won’t get enough done before Carlos wants my attention.”

  Sam was looking appalled, her eyes wide as she cuddled Martim on her lap. The boy wriggled until she reluctantly let him go to toddle around the room. “What is it he was planning?” Sam asked.

  “I wish I knew,” I said. “He didn’t tell me last night because he wanted to get to work as quickly as possible.”

  “No. Not . . . your friend. I mean my father. Why would he do this?”

  “I don’t know. He has some plan about destabilizing Europe, though how this fits, is beyond me.”

  “His own granddaughter . . .” The horror was starting to hit her. “He gave her to those people. . . . They cut her arm. What were they doing to her?”

  “What did she tell you?”

  Sam was pale and her voice was a little shaky. “It didn’t make sense. She’s . . . She’s always been such a happy girl and now she’s obsessed with death and skeletons and ghosts—she talked all night in her sleep, tossing around and crying. . . .”

  “What did she tell you?” I repeated, not wanting to plant any false ideas by speaking of what I knew Soraia had seen.

  “She said . . . She said there were dead people—corpses. She said they walked around. She said the bad people—that’s what she called them—bad people. She said they boiled them. . . .” Sam’s voice broke. “She said they took the bones out of a boy who was still alive! Oh my God, oh my God . . .” She began crying, her voice coming in hiccuping gulps. “It can’t be true! Oh God . . .”

  Martim sat down hard on the floor and started screaming, his hysteria matching his mother’s. Sam made no move to go to him but stared into empty space, shaking. Ben got up to comfort Martim. Mara and I leaned forward to help Sam, but Sam shook us off with a sharp cry and turned aside, starting to rock and fold in on herself.

  “I didn’t take care of her! I didn’t protect her! I let that bastard come near her and—and—and he took her and it’s my fault! He gave her to those people! Oh my God, oh my God . . . Soraia!”

  As she screamed for her daughter, both the baby and Soraia—off in Brian’s room—screamed, too.

  Brian ran out and skidded to a stop, his eyes wide. “She’s hurt! I think—”

  Behind him came Soraia, screaming, eyes wide as she ran toward her mother. She threw herself at Sam, wrapping her arms around her, screeching in spasms of distress, “Mamãe! Mamãe!”

  Mara was off the couch in an instant, kneeling in front of Sam. She shot Brian a look over her shoulder. “It’s not you, Brian, love. Go back to your room. Ben, bring me the baby.”

  Brian began to retreat, but he only went as far as the hall to the bedrooms, standing in the shadow to watch, quivering, wide-eyed. Ben strode across the floor with Martim clutched to his chest and bent down next to his wife. The chorus of screams rose in volume. Mara scooped Martim from her husband’s arms and held him against Sam’s rocking body, until the baby had wrapped his arms around her, too. But although the character of their screaming changed, it didn’t stop.

  “Ben,” Mara said without raising her head, “I need a burdock root, anise, and a sprig of rosemary. Harper, I need you, too. And Brian, if you’re not going to leave the room, be useful and get the damned salt bowl off my worktable. And a match. Now!”

  Ben and Brian ran as I stood next to Mara.

  “What should I do?” I asked.

  “There’s a knot that needs unpicking. Sam’s guilt is affecting Soraia and things are becoming a tangle. The girl thinks she’s to blame. The mother thinks the same of herself. The poor baby’s in the middle and just adding to the feedback. I need you to get hold of the loop between Soraia and Sam, find the knot, and pick it loose when I say so.”

  Ben and Brian came pounding back into the salon, handing over their objects as quickly as Mara would take them. Mara set the copper bowl of salt on the floor in front of Sam and lit the dry, wizened burdock root on fire, dropping the vile, smoking thing into the salt dish.

  “Harper, time for you,” she said, and I dropped into the Grey, letting the icy mist swallow me as Mara began twining the rosemary and anise together in her fingers and whispering to the herbs as she did.

  In the silvery world I could see the anxious orange sparks around Ben and Brian while Mara remained a calm gold and green, her whispers coiling into the burdock smoke and wafting toward the tangled, knotted ball of red and olive green that was Sam and her children. Their screaming shook the world. I didn’t have time to examine much as boiling mist swirled around them, threatening to choke me in a sea of half-formed faces. Random lightning struck around me, growing worse with every moment.

  I pushed my hand into the edge of the intertwined auras, sliding along the burning strands until I hit a bump, a knot. I started to pick at it with my fingertips and wished I had the pheasant feather an old Salish woman had given me to help ease the knot apart. Usually I had little trouble with energy strands these days, but the knot of this hysteria was writhing and tying itself tighter with every shriek. I pushed my arm deep into the mess, working blindly, by feel alone. “Come on . . .” I muttered. “Come on, Soraia, let go.” But when I thought she wasn’t going to give me any slack, the knot moved. I shoved my fingers into the slightly open loop and wedged it wider, grabbing the strand that ran through the open bend and pulling it back toward me.

  For a moment, the boiling Grey mist pressed itself into a shape with wide eyes under a mop of curls and I was sure I was looking into Soraia’s face, somehow.

  “Let go,” I said, still tugging on the burning strand of energy in my hand. “Please.”

  The mist sank down and the knot flowed open with the cool slither of silk, falling away.

  I pushed back up to the normal world, into panting silence.

  The burning burdock root still stank and Mara had torn the rosemary and anise into shreds, but the little family on the couch was no longer screaming. Their postures had softened, slumped, so the children were merely leaning on their mother, one on each side, while Sam sat with her face in her hands, trying to catch her breath. Ben and Brian had both retreated a few steps and Ben was holding his son as the boy hugged him, shivering. Soraia lifted her head and stared at me.

  “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

  Traffic 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 o
ut 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.”