Revenant (13 page)

“I’m sorry to have vanished like that.”

“I guess I’ll get used to it. I just can’t keep up on those stairs. What are you doing up at this room?”

“I have the key—another one Rafa gave me that I didn’t lose.”

“Funny . . . It’s not the room we made up for you, but all your things disappeared out of the room downstairs. This is the room guests never stay in—and the room in the tower.”

“Guests?”

“Usually the house is leased to travelers—business people or long-term visitors. It’s been empty a lot recently with the economy and the EU problems. We never tell people not to use this room, but for some reason, they just don’t. The tower is locked, though. We don’t even mention it exists most of the time, since the stair is hidden. You can see it outside, but most people aren’t curious enough to try to find the way up. They assume it’s a false front, I think. We don’t lease to people with kids—they’re much too curious and destructive.”

“I see. Who else works here? You keep saying ‘we.’”

“Oh, no one really works here. I’m Gonçalo, the caretaker and handyman, and I come by every week. Everyone else works for the management company. They come when needed.”

I nodded. “And who else is expected in this party?”

“Just Senhor Ataíde. His note said he’d arrive tonight, but he didn’t say when.”

I nodded. “The man who came with me to the gate will also be staying, but I can take care of that arrangement. There was another box delivered with mine, wasn’t there?”

He nodded. “It’s still downstairs. I unbolted it, as instructed, but I didn’t lift the lid. Do you want to see it?”

“I do. I think I can find my way down, if you’ll go fetch my fiancé from the gate.”

Gonçalo grinned. “Oh! I see! Yes, I will do that.” He walked past me to the stairs and I followed him. He chuckled to himself all the way down to the entry.

I stopped him at the foot of the stairs. “I’ll go to the basement from here. Take Kit upstairs and I’ll catch up to him there.” I’d almost said, “Quinton,” but so long as I wasn’t sure who Gonçalo really worked for, I thought it better to keep up the fiction of Kit Smith.

Gonçalo was still chuckling as he headed to the front door, saying, “I will. I will.”

I dashed for the basement door I’d used with Rafa and clattered down the stone steps as fast as I could without falling. There were several big iron-bound doors, but only one stood slightly ajar. I pushed hard on the heavy door and walked in.

The room boiled with black and red energy, churning up the mist of the Grey like a storm at sea. Carlos was standing just in front of his shipping box. He was disheveled, unusually pale, and glowering. “I am not at my best when I wake, Blaine.”

“I guessed that. Which is why I sent the caretaker to let Quinton in instead of coming down here for dinner.”

Carlos growled at me and the sound resonated in my chest through the Grey. “I am not without restraint or resources.”

“I thought not, but there’s a lot we need to discuss as quickly as possible. I figured it would be better if I spoke to you now, rather than wait. The situation is pressing. And we saw something Grey in the sky today. We weren’t the only ones, either. I wasn’t sure, but the bits it left behind reminded me of that dragon-thing we encountered in the lab last year.”

He cocked his head and peered at me sideways, the same way I study things through the edge of the Grey. I wondered if he did something
similar, trying to see what ghostly telltales might have attached themselves to me. “It will have to wait until I come back. My hunger should be of greater concern to you at this moment than drachen and the machinations of your beloved’s father—however dire. So, unless you’ve decided to offer yourself, I suggest you step out of the path between me and the door.” He made an impatient flicking gesture with one hand.

I stepped aside. He started to pass, but he stopped for just a second beside me, closing his eyes, before casting me a curious glance and going out the door. I followed as far as the hallway, but he had gone toward the back of the cellar, rather than heading for the stairs. He didn’t turn, but said, “I will see you soon, Blaine. Go up to the tower and wait for me there. Both of you.”

“The tower is locked and the stairs are hidden,” I said.

“Not anymore.” He opened one of the other doors onto profound darkness that the candlelight couldn’t penetrate, and stepped into it, closing the door behind himself. I heard the bolt snick into place and then there was silence.

Having no choice, I went back upstairs and started for the upper floors. I met the caretaker on his way down from the second floor.

“Senhor Smith is upstairs. If you don’t need anything else, I’ll go now.”

“You don’t need to wait for Senhor Ataíde?”

“Oh no. I was waiting for you. Here,” he added, taking a ring of keys from his jacket pocket and handing them to me, “these are all the house keys, including the tower key—it’s the large one—and I’ve left the staircase door open at the end of the top-floor corridor. If you need anything, the management company’s number is in the kitchen by the phone. You may want to lock the gate behind me when I drive out—unless you think Senhor Ataíde will be here soon. The area can be a bit rough at night.”

“I expect he’ll be here within the hour and he’s not afraid of rough neighborhoods.”

Gonçalo nodded. “
Bom
. It’s good to have a member of the family here again.”

He started to go and I stopped him. “Wait. What family?”

“The Ataídes. The family has a tragic history and there are very few of them left. Centuries ago, they were the House of Atouguia—the Counts of Atouguia—but that title became extinct.” He took my hand and gave it a gentle squeeze instead of a shake. “I hope your business here will be better fated than theirs,
senhorina
.”

“So do I.”

I walked out to close and lock the gates behind him and then returned to the house—Carlos’s house. I headed upstairs to what I thought of as my room despite its being assigned by a ghost with unknown motives. I couldn’t help thinking how little I really knew about Carlos and his past.

Quinton was waiting for me on the small sofa in the sitting room. He looked over my shoulder as I entered. “Where’s the Guest of Honor?”

“Out to dinner,” I said, finally remembering to remove my hat, “but I suspect it’ll be fast food. He said he’d be back soon and we should meet him in the tower.” I untied my hair and shook it loose.

Quinton perked up and his aura sparkled with interest. “This place has a tower?”

“And secret passages, apparently, as well as cellars carved into the bedrock, and some resident ghosts who like to play games and are getting on my nerves.”

Quinton raised his eyebrows. “Oh?”

“Yes. Rafa, the woman I met when I first got here, was the housekeeper until 1992, but she died fourteen years ago. I’m not sure, but
the keys she gave me appear to lock a temporacline in place within the house, so the room or the house itself reverts to that time period and the ghosts in it become manifest and solid. They look and act just like normal people. What’s strange is, it’s Carlos’s house, but I don’t think he knows about her, because he sent instructions to Gonçalo to get the house ready for us and to wait for me here. I can’t imagine he’d do that if he knew Rafa was capable of managing it for him.”

“I assume Gonçalo’s not a ghost, since I also saw him.”

I shook my head. “Not a ghost. But we might be if we don’t get up to the tower. Carlos was not in a good mood.”

A smell like asphalt and orange blossoms on a hot day wafted into the room and an object thumped to the floor in front of the desk. Two more objects followed in close order. I walked over to look at them.

“House keys like the one Rafa gave me. We must not be in her temporacline now, because she apported them, rather than coming in and handing them to us, so it is most likely these keys that operate the time phenomenon. For some reason she wants to be sure we can get to her.”

“Control fiend?”

“Too early to speculate, not to mention she can probably hear us. Let’s go to the tower. I suspect we’ll have more privacy there. Until Carlos gets back.” I glanced around the room, trying to get a fix on where Rafa’s presence might be and directed my attention to a thin column of silvery mist near the hall door. “Thank you, Rafa. I’ll leave them for now, but I’ll pick them up before we go out.”

The mist shimmered and faded away.

Leaving the keys where they lay, I took my purse with Soraia’s gifts in it and started for the door. Quinton followed and we went down the hall to the formerly hidden door at the end.

It wasn’t so much a secret door, as a why-bother-to-look-at-it door. A section of the tiled wall at the back end of the corridor stood agape from floor to ceiling. Anyone seriously looking would have found the cracks, the keyhole, and the small handle in the tiles without much effort, but the busy design of the blue-and-white tiles made it a frustrating exercise if you didn’t know what to look for. In the Grey, I could see shreds of an ol
d spell that had broken and faded long ago, leaving only a cobweb remnant of the original energy and form laid over the tiles. I pulled the door farther open, and we went up the narrow staircase concealed in the wall in single file, me in front because I didn’t give Quinton a chance to go first.

The stairs ended in another door—thick, iron-bound wooden planks carved around the edges with symbols that gleamed black to my Grey sight. I moved my hand toward the twisted bronze handle and the ward stretched toward me, rising into a tangled web, twisted with sharp black barbs dripping a shining illusion of blood. I pulled back, feeling queasy and weak even without having touched the door. I took the ring of keys Gonçalo had given me out of my shallow skirt pocket and flicked through until I found the largest of them. It was almost hot to the touch and impossible to miss even in the gloom of the unlighted staircase. I held up the key and pushed it toward the lock.

“No. Don’t touch it,” Carlos said from below us, his unexpected voice making me jump.

The ward pulled back, sinking into the wood. The door swung open and illumination by fire and candle flooded out of the room beyond, drowning the thin light in the staircase behind us.

I whirled on the landing and looked back down the stairs to where Carlos stood at the bottom. “My apologies,” he said, walking up to meet us. “I had forgotten about the ward. The key alone won’t
open the door safely, though I’m surprised to find my safeguard intact after so much time and change.”

“What would have happened if I’d touched it?” I asked.

Carlos brushed past both of us to enter the room. “To you? Probably only passing illness and incapacity. To our friend, here . . . ? Something unpleasant and debilitating, but not fatal. Come in and sit. We have much to discuss.”

ELEVEN

C
arlos looked his usual self—no sign of the disordered and hungry state I’d found him in less than an hour ago. He strode to the window and glanced down, then turned aside and found a bit of naked stone wall to lean against. He crossed his arms over his chest and glared around the room in annoyance. “A shambles,” he muttered. “What a state my house has fallen into.”

The tower room wasn’t round, but rectangular, narrower at the front and rear where the windows broke the wall with tiny mullions of thick, wavy glass in lead and iron frames. A tiled mantelpiece took up the center of the left wall and surrounded a deep fireplace that currently flickered with an eerie yellow light that gave off no heat. A large map of Lisbon as it had been before the earthquake hung above the mantel. Candles in sconces and many-armed candelabra added a more-normal firelight to the room. The flames swayed in the currents of air we made as we moved to a long wooden bench set in front of a table opposite the fire. There were two heavy chairs next to the hearth, but I had no desire to sit in either of them, tangled as they
were with remnant threads of red and black energy. There was not a single ghost to be seen and the temporaclines lay in cold, compacted strata against the floor, shimmering like ice, shot through by a hot pillar of dark red energy that rose straight from the floor and spread a network of smaller lines like blood vessels across the ceiling and walls.

The fireplace was large and had a pot hook, but no pot, hanging over it, though there were several dusty, cobwebbed iron vessels piled near it on one side. Half of the walls were covered in bookshelves laden with moldering books, their leather spines cracked with age or eaten away by beetles. A carved, dark wood desk stood among the shelves, also scattered with tomes, dust, and spiderwebs. Old, dark stains the color of dried blood marred the pages of one open book. Stains of a similar color crossed the floor and vanished under the moth-eaten carpet. I closed my eyes a moment and concentrated, feeling the slightest tremor of lingering magic and death beneath my feet. A row of skulls occupied the top of one of the bookshelves, their empty eye sockets and grinning teeth unpleasantly white and gleaming, as if the former residents still hovered near their bones in forms of transient light. The right side of the room was mostly occupied with worktables, cabinets, and equipment I couldn’t—and didn’t want to—name. An odor hung in the air, a blend of melting beeswax, crumbling books, and dire experiments.

Beside me on the bench, Quinton hunched his shoulders and leaned a bit forward, unconsciously keeping his back from touching the worktable behind us.

“I hadn’t thought I’d be gone so long,” Carlos said, “or I would have worked a different ward over this place. It kept people out, perhaps too well, but had no effect on filth or vermin. I had expected the house to have changed in two hundred and fifty years, but I
foolishly left this room exactly as it was. And thus . . . it is exactly as it is.” He made a sound of disgust and gestured at the hearth, wiping out the illusion of a fire and dimming the room enough to induce shadows in the corners and under the tables. He plucked a bit of blackness from a shadow and whispered to it,
“Venhais, minhas sombras,”
spinning it between his fingers and then crushing it into his fist, which he then flicked open underhand, scattering the glittering dust of shadow into the murk beneath the chairs and tables. Something black crept there, where there had been nothing before.