Revenant (22 page)

“What have you been up to?” Ben asked while we washed dishes.

“The usual—working for ghosts and fighting monsters in between pretrials and background searches.”

“I’m serious. You seem different.”

“Less annoying?”

“Less annoyed.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been good at analyzing myself.”

“You’re more calm,” Mara offered.

“Me? At the moment I’m only calm because I’m tired.”

“I wasn’t meaning that,” Mara said, putting leftovers into the fridge. “I meant your magical state seems more settled, stronger. You’re doing very well in that respect, yes?”

“I guess I am. Not much comes completely out of the blue anymore, and I generally know what I’m doing—or I can make an educated guess. No more unintentional slipping sideways through the Grey, less flying by the seat of my paranormal pants.”

“Good. So, what’s the situation with the Rebelos?”

“I don’t know about the husband—I haven’t met him, so his personality is a blank—but Sam’s another hardhead like I used to be. She’s a doctor and she isn’t as open-minded about the paranormal as she tried to be when we met yesterday. It’s been rough on her, trying to take in so much and make the necessary mental adjustment to what her father’s done and what it’s connected to. So she’s going to need help on her own end as well as needing to help her daughter.

“The biggest complication is that Soraia sees things. She talks to ghosts and claims to see fairies, and she’s guessed that Carlos is a vampire. We had a little chat about ‘being strange’ and how it’s not a bad thing, but she’s still confused about what she’s experiencing in paranormal terms. She’s got no context or background to help her understand this stuff in the best situation and now her situation is
far from the best. She’s very tough, but I suspect this shy, calm appearance is unusual for her. What she experienced last night alone was pretty terrible and we haven’t yet discovered what she may have been through in the three days she was missing. A couple of bone mages were planning to cut her up for spare parts after they let her bleed to death so they could make something Carlos hasn’t figured out yet. In addition, we saw these mages imprisoning revenants last night in the same sort of boxes Sergeyev was stuck in.”

Mara stopped me and asked, “So there are likely to be more willful spirits in boxes somewhere?”

“Yes,” I said. “And like Sergeyev, they’re probably aware of their state—dead, but imprisoned and being used like slaves and spies, moved wherever Purlis and the bone mages want them—and we don’t know exactly how they mean to use them, but you know what happened with Sergeyev. The boxes on the site last night burned and the ghosts escaped—the Guardian rounded them up—but that doesn’t mean there aren’t more of them elsewhere. Quinton believes there are some already in place throughout Europe.”

Mara and Ben both looked sickened at the thought. They’d been in at the beginning of the Sergeyev case, though we’d barely gotten acquainted by then, and knew very well what sort of nightmares it brought to adults, much less little girls. “I am afraid of what’s going to happen as soon as Soraia has the luxury of slowing down,” I continued, “and Sam isn’t prepared to help her. That was the real reason I wanted you two to take them in. Sam’s a doctor, so she understands trauma, but she doesn’t have the mental preparation or any magical ability to help her daughter with the paranormal aspects of this, and if she doesn’t get help . . . you know how badly that can turn out.”

Mara covered her mouth in shock for a moment—a gesture I had rarely seen her make even when we’d faced things more monstrous
than vampires. “Oh . . . bloody hell. She’s a lovely child—poor thing. I’d have to test her—which won’t be appropriate now—but I suspect she may be a witch herself. And not a hedge witch like me, but something much more unusual.”

“Like what?”

“I’d rather not be saying until I’m sure.”

“Is it a good thing?”

“It can be. It can also be terrible if twisted by bad teachers and evil circumstances.”

“Then you’re going to have to find some way to talk to her without her mother going off the deep end. Soraia knows she’s what we’re calling ‘strange,’ but she’s terrified that she’s going to be evil, as if it’s something she can’t avoid after seeing what she saw.”

“I’ll find a way. . . . I’m glad you brought them to us. I think there’s a touch of something unusual in the baby as well. I’d like to meet their father. . . .”

“You’ll have to hold off until Carlos and Quinton and I can put a stop to whatever
his
father is up to. It’s not going to be safe for Sam to contact Piet—that’s her husband—or go home until this situation is completely dismantled with no hope of a rebuild.”

“I can see that. I only wish I’d be having a hand in serving up some just deserts to a man who’d do this to his own grandchild. The vile bastard. I’ll work it out with Sam, then, shall I?”

“I think you should.”

I told them the rest of the background as we finished up and then went into the more recent points once we were all seated in what Mara laughingly called “El Salón,”
since the main part of the apartment was mostly one large room broken up by the placement of furniture to indicate what each area was used for. Sam was less comfortable than ever with the details Ben and Mara dragged out of me.

“So these Kostní Mágové are another type of necromancer?” Mara asked.

“I’d say they’re more like a subclass. They don’t seem to have any affinity for death in general, only for bones. Carlos said it’s related to a more mainstream religious thing taken to a bizarre extreme. It’s pretty odd.”

“It’s rather medieval,” Ben put in. “The cult of bones goes back a long way in the Catholic Church, and it’s still active in pockets throughout the Christian world. A lot of the belief turns on the principle that we are only shadows walking toward death and our heavenly reward. Our earthly lives are toil and suffering, so we shouldn’t be overly proud, materialistic, or live an ungodly life regardless of our social station, because we’re all going to be food for worms eventually. It was very common up through the plagues and later abominations like the Inquisition—the mortification of the flesh is a great excuse for all sorts of torments in the name of God. It’s one of the reasons you find these medieval ossuaries all over Europe.”

“Ossuaries. Those are collections of bones, right?” I asked, thinking of the unholy church in which we’d found Soraia.

“Yeah, but it’s more than that. They’re often the bones of the religious community that served the local church—the godly—and of the long-dead parishioners, buried in consecrated ground until the bones were stripped of all flesh. Then the bones are gathered into a chapel or a catacomb to make more room in the graveyard and to remind the people that in life they are in the presence and shadow of death. It’s where the danse macabre tradition comes from. In the case of ossuaries, the bones aren’t just gathered. They’re arranged or piled with great care, not so often as individual people and whole skeletons, but as parts—piles of femurs or skulls in one room, ribs in
another . . . that sort of thing. Or they use the bones themselves to decorate the chapel they rest in—that’s fairly rare, but there are some spectacular examples of it around. The ossuaries of Rome, Milan, and Paris are famous, and there’s a well-known chapel in Évora, and a really amazing display in Sedlec, outside Prague. Oh, and one in Czermna, Poland, I really want to see. The chapel is built—walls, ceiling, and floors—from the bones of victims of plagues and wars that have ravaged the area for generations. The interesting thing about that one is that it was built recently—relatively speaking—in the late eighteenth and into the early nineteenth centuries by a single priest. Modern ossuaries are so rare!”

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.