Revenant

by Kat Richardson

  The priest knelt on one side of the altar and switched on a small electric floodlight that aimed its beam from the floor to the wall above. For a moment, the plain crucifix in front of a Plexiglas-covered bone altar piece was brightly lit, as were the vases of wilting flowers below. Then the priest turned the small light toward a section of the wall that lay farther back, near the rear windows, our shadows huge across it.

  I caught my breath, seeing the crumbled section of wall, thick with bones and skulls, but now torn and raked as if by giant claws. I turned in a small circle to see the whole room. There were three niches in total, two on the wall facing the door and one on the door-side wall. It was the niche beside the door that was now empty, hidden from first view in the darkest part of the room by the way the stairs deposited visitors next to the altar, with their backs to the niche. The other two niches were untouched.

  The long-faced priest took a taper from the altar and lit a silver oil lamp that hung from the ceiling by silver chains, adding to the golden light that touched the desecrated wall. He returned the candle and stopped near the lamp to look at the damage. “It is profane. The whole skeleton that stood in that niche is gone.”

  “A whole skeleton? Of a single individual?” I asked.

  The priest shook his head. “I cannot say for certain. This other one has mummified flesh which binds the bones,” he added, pointing to the niche across from the ruined one, “but the one that was taken did not. It is not recorded who the bones were in life.”

  “This is terrible,” I said, walking up to the ruined wall and putting out my hands as if I could recall the missing skeleton by touching the place it had stood. The priest laid his hand on the back of mine, stopping my movement as he said, “They are very old and fragile.”

  “Of course,” I replied, lowering my hands. How could I talk to the ghost if I couldn’t touch the bones to make a connection to it . . . ? I looked at the priest again. “Could you allow us a moment to confer?” I asked, giving a little more psychic weight to the trust and persuasion I’d already established with him.

  He looked uncomfortable, but he nodded as I leaned harder on the compulsion, feeling it like cold quills piercing my skin. “I shall wait in the vestibule,” he offered.

  He walked through to the tiny antechamber and sat on the wooden chair at the head of the steps, but he didn’t close the door, keeping a benign eye on us from a respectful distance—or as much distance as the small space allowed. It would have to do. I stood staring at the wall for a moment, awash in ghosts. If only they would cleave to their own bones, this would be easier. I turned toward Carlos and moved close to him, which in such a small room required only a few steps. Quinton followed.

  Carlos waited for me to speak, offering nothing. “I have an idea, but it depends on you,” I murmured.

  “Go on,” he replied, matching my low tone.

  “Can you, without touching the bones, force the ghosts to retreat to, say, their skulls? All of them. At the same time.”

  He frowned. “All of them?”

  “Yes. The ghost who has no skull to retreat to will remain isolated in the room and then I can hold him while you talk to him and find out what he or she can tell us.”

  His frown darkened into a scowl as he thought about it. He turned to look around the room, raising his eyes toward the ceiling. It almost looked like he was praying. He turned his gaze back to me and I shivered. “I can, but not without touching something of the chapel’s bone walls. To control them all will be difficult enough, but to do so with no contact is impossible. Your chance to catch the spirit in question will be short even then.”

  “We’ll have to find a way. I know it will take a lot of energy and won’t be easy, but I can manage my end if you can manage yours.”

  “I know how it can be done without the priest becoming upset. If you are ready . . . ?”

  “Hang on,” said Quinton. “Maybe I can help.”

  “You would have to die. That would not do.”

  “No. I’m just thinking there might be another way. . . . Is there any reason to keep all these ghosts captive here? Aren’t they . . . kind of miserable? If you can isolate the ones that have bones still here, why can’t you just . . . absorb them? They are dead after all. . . . Then you’d only need to expend enough energy to isolate the first one and the rest will simply replace the energy used for the start cycle. The tricky bit is making sure you don’t suck up the one ghost we need.”

  “That I will leave to your beloved.”

  Quinton was pleased with himself for the idea and I was certain it wasn’t just because it was clever—Carlos in need of energy could become dangerous and unpredictable, and none of the humans in the area wanted to die to make him feel better.

  “But I will need your help,” Carlos added.

  Quinton paled. “Mine? What do you want me to do?”

  “Pray.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  “What?”

  “Kneel, fold your hands, and let them rest on the edge of the altar while you bow your head. The balance of life and death is maintained so long as we each touch the edge of the altar—which is made of their bones. The ghosts will flow through you to me. It will be unpleasant, but it won’t kill you,” Carlos said, then added with a sharp, white grin, “It doesn’t matter if you pray or not, but I suspect you will.”

  Quinton made a face and turned to look at the altar, muttering, “This is not what I had in mind.”

  Carlos chuckled at him and sank to his knees, crossed himself, and clasped his hands, letting them rest at the edge of the Plexiglas barrier, tilting forward until his long fingers pressed against the altar built of skulls. He gazed up for a moment at the cross. Although I couldn’t see his face where I stood, his posture changed and he seemed to be truly praying to God. Then he dropped his head over his hands. I had to remind myself that he had been raised in the faith and had fallen from it. It was doubtful his mind was on anything other than the task at hand, but he appeared to be one of the devout.

  Quinton copied him, though his performance was less inspirational.

  The air of the small chapel chilled and the room seemed to compress, the ghosts all stirring at once and looking toward the altar. One by one, they slid toward it, suddenly fluid. Quinton gasped and shuddered as the first glittering stream of spirit energy touched him. I wanted to run to him, to pull him away, but I stepped back, looking for the one phantom that was not mesmerized and turning toward the altar. In the writhing, silvery sea of them, a single oddity was hard to find and several more slipped away, making Quinton twitch and utter muffled cries of distress with their passage. It tore at me and I started moving around the room as if my pacing could break apart the impenetrable cloud of specters.

  One eyeless face turned to watch me and I hurried to it, sinking slightly into the Grey to clutch the remnant of a soul more securely, the stinging burn of the thing’s energy piercing through my damaged fingertip, and slicing up the long bone of my arm. “I have it,” I said, ascending to the normal with the ghost in my grip, panting and shivering with tingling discomfort.

  For a moment, nothing changed and I wanted to scream. “I have it!” I repeated, louder.

  Carlos and Quinton stood up, and the priest in the vestibule did as well. I pulled the phantom closer to me so my hands didn’t seem to be clutching empty air a foot in front of my body. The tension among the remaining ghosts ebbed away, the room returning to its normal temperature as all three of the men came toward me and the ghosts drifted back into their muddled, endless flocking.

  Quinton was shaking and had turned a terrible shade of pale. He’d bitten into his lip and a small trail of blood had started from the corner of his mouth. Carlos glanced away from him and kept his eyes on me as the priest stepped down from the vestibule into the chapel.

  “What have you found?” the priest asked as he walked toward me. />
  “I believe I know what the vandals took and why.”

  He looked at me, expecting something. I made a gesture at Carlos, which was more by way of passing the ghost off to him. He took the motion as intended and caught the fine tangle of silver and white that I had held, drawing it into his own grip as he had done with Rafa.

  “The bones of the infected,” I said, for Carlos’s sake and not the priest’s. I could see Carlos nodding behind him, but the priest only looked confused. I was guessing, based on what Carlos had said Rui would need. This chapel’s bones were unlikely to include those of a thief who’d died in a fire, but according to the priest, many had died of something that would qualify as “a plague that killed thousands.”

  “Infected? The cholera?” the priest asked.

  Carlos took over the conversation, forcing the priest to turn to him while I went to Quinton’s side. I put my arms around him until he stopped shaking. Then I wiped the blood from his lip, out of sight of both the priest and Carlos.

  “Yes,” Carlos continued. “The missing skeleton was that of the man we would now call Patient Zero—the first person to have the disease and spread it.” That had the ring of truth and I supposed Carlos had gotten the information from the ghost in the scant time he’d had so far.

  “Cholera comes with dirty water,” the priest said.

  “Yes. But it can be passed by contact with the patient. These thieves may believe—in error—that they can culture the disease from the bones. This is like some of the other cases,” Carlos lied.

  Quinton gave me a questioning look as the color began returning to his face. I just nodded. He closed his eyes in relief.

  “How did they know . . . ?” the priest asked. “One hundred and twenty of our parish died in a single month of the disease. All of them are laid to rest here.”

  “I cannot know how they knew. But . . . I know what God told me.” I wondered if Carlos felt any qualms using the priest’s faith to misdirect him, but necessity is a bitch and the story sounded good. “I don’t know if we’ll be able to recover your skeleton, Father. It may be dust by now.”

  The priest sighed. “A pity. And no help in catching the vandals.”

  Quinton nodded at me and stepped a little to the side. “I’m OK,” he whispered.

  I gave him a worried look but turned back to finish our job. “It’s helped more than you can guess,” I said, using the priest’s shifting attention as cover to withdraw the compulsion I’d created between us. “Thank you for letting us see your chapel.”

  “It was my pleasure to help the church,” he said, looking relieved as the thin needles of persuasion dissipated. With luck the feeling would linger and he wouldn’t feel any need to question who had really been in his chapel tonight or why.

  We avoided any protracted conversation and hurried off with our ghost in Carlos’s pocket. The necromancer led us to the heights of the castle walls to examine the ghost in the moonlight, but, unable to tell us where its bones had been taken or why, it wasn’t a helpful specter. It only confirmed the details of its death and complained of the pain Rui inflicted on it.

  “Carving runes in the bone,” Carlos noted.

  “That’s not good,” I said.

  “What kind of ‘not good’?” Quinton asked, looking much better now that we’d walked and been in the fresh air for a while.

  “The bones must be in tune with the correct spell,” Carlos said. “If the bones were not already in tune, then they must be carved or grafted to match the song of the spell. The only reason for taking on the extra work such bones require is to add an aspect to the drache that is not a normal part of the spell. Whatever survives the fire of the Dragão do Inferno will not live long, but sicken and die, and spread more disease.”

  “Oh God . . .” Quinton said.

  “Now you pray?”

  “No, I’ve been praying since we got here, but the situation just gets worse.”

  “And we still do not know where they are or where they will call their drache,” Carlos said.

  “Can we do any more tonight?” I asked.

  Carlos shook his head. “We had luck here, but there will be no accommodating priests roaming the stairs in Monforte or Évora.”

  “I thought you said you’d already been there.”

  “I have, but without Rui to guide them the first time, they may have to return.”

  “The Capela dos Ossos in Évora has very limited hours—according to their Web site,” Quinton said. “Unless you feel like trying some breaking and entering in a major church in a fairly large city at midnight, we’d probably be better off going there first thing in the morning.”

  Carlos’s mouth almost turned up enough to call the expression approval. “I agree. And your suggestion in the chapel was . . .” He paused as if having changed his mind about what he was about to say, then finished. “It was genius. But we have all expended too much energy today to face any of Rui and Purlis’s company with a hope of emerging unscathed. The morning will be soon enough.”

  We returned to the Casa Ribeira. Seeing no one and finding the door unlocked, we headed upstairs to our rooms and retired to our respective beds without further discussion. We’d talked enough in the car and could sort out any details in the morning. The constant aching and itching of my injured hand was the least of our troupe’s discomforts. Quinton had continued to wince with sudden pains and had grown paler and more sleepy throughout the drive back. Even Carlos looked tired—mortality seemed to wear on him badly.

  In the morning, I woke up restive and stiff, too aware that I’d been abusing myself in the Grey, but neglecting any more reasonable physical routine. I knew it wasn’t what most people would do, but I figured it was better to risk pushing myself too fast than to stagnate, stiffen, and chase my own thoughts into useless corners. I left Quinton in bed while I went downstairs for a swim—I’d had little proper exercise and while the stitches in my hand were a problem, I needed to move and let my mind drift without the distractions of desire, worry, regret, or still more conversation about the current problem.

  I passed Carlos’s door, seeing it standing an inch ajar, and heard the low rumble of his voice without being able to understand the words or hear them clearly. Portuguese, I assumed. A soft gasp that faded to a small moan followed from someone who was definitely not Carlos. I turned and continued down the stairs, not even wanting to pull the door closed and call attention to the fact they’d been overheard—the whole idea made me shudder.

  I went to the kitchen to find some plastic to put over my injured hand and emerged into the courtyard in my borrowed bathing suit to find Eladio skimming invisible leaves from the pool’s surface while glaring up at the bedroom windows. The wine crate that had so annoyed Nelia was propped on one of the chairs near him, its lid hanging a little askew.

  “What is that doing out here?” I asked.

  Eladio seemed startled at my presence, as if he hadn’t seen me walk past him. His concentration on the windows of Carlos’s room was so intense that perhaps he hadn’t. He shook himself at my words and blinked as he looked at me.

  “She gave it to me to take to the storage shed,” he said.

  His emphasis on “she” sent a green spark of jealousy arcing from his energy corona, which was a tangled mess of green, red, and orange that sparked pink one moment and sickening olive the next. He had it bad.

  “You love her, don’t you?” I asked.

  He swallowed a sound of longing and pain, shaking his head. “It is nothing.”

  “We won’t be here much longer,” I said.

  He just grunted and pulled the skimmer from the pool. He put it away and returned to tuck the box under his arm. “Bom dia, Senhora Smith.”

  He limped away, his right leg and spine slightly twisted, and disappeared around the edge of the house. I hoped I was right about leaving soon—the atm
osphere at Casa Ribeira was becoming unhealthy.

  I swam for about twenty minutes before I was too winded and aching from the uneven stroke of my arms to do more. As I got out of the pool, Quinton sat waiting on the chair that had lately housed the wine crate. Several ghosts were hanging around the edges of the courtyard as well, but I ignored them in favor of my boyfriend.

  “Hey,” he said, smiling at me.

  “Hey, yourself,” I said, reaching for my towel.

  “You look wonderful when you’re wet.”

  “I bet you say that to all the sea life.”

  “No, only tall, gorgeous brunettes. And eels.”

  “Eels?” I asked, pausing in removing the plastic from my hand.

  “Yeah. I figure if I distract them, they may not bite me.”

  “Just how many eels do you know?” I asked, getting frustrated with trying to pick the plastic and bandage tape off my hand.

  “None, but I like to be prepared.”

  I held my hand out to Quinton. “Can you remove this mess?”

  “Certainly,” he replied, turning his attention from my body to my mutilated hand.

  Carlos walked out onto the terrace. I saw no sign of Nelia.

  “And speaking of slithery things that bite . . .” Quinton added under his breath as he freed my hand.

  I gave him a hard look—he’d seemed less antagonistic toward Carlos until this moment. Quinton returned a warning shake of his head.

  “Coming for a swim?” I asked as Carlos stopped at the pool’s edge.

  “No. I may bask in my mortality for a time, but I’m not fool enough to risk it by drowning.”

  “You can’t swim?”

  “I could when I was younger, but water is rarely kind to such as me. I prefer the wrath of fiery stars—if I miscalculate, at least I shall die warm.”

  He’d almost died in a fire once before and I couldn’t see the advantage of one death over the other; but I did notice he’d made a vampire joke, so he was in a good mood—“warm” being the uncomplimentary term some vampires used for normal humans and their state of life.