Revenant (27 page)

“Ah. I did. And when I had what I wanted from him, I slaughtered him. A peculiar kind of stardom. The irony was that he killed me first and should have known I would repay him in kind. He did not warn me that the ascension I desired would be a journey through hell from which I would emerge a vampire and the only way to reach that state—the Becoming—was to be murdered, torn open while alive and bled like a butchered animal. Not merely to die, or to sink into the Bliss and change painlessly in the addiction of blood. For that alone, I enjoyed destroying his creation when you brought me to it.”

“His creation . . . ?”

“The organ. The object of your first client’s desire. Sergeyev’s prison. Just like the small boxes assembled in the temple last night.”

He’d mentioned it before and it had been on my mind, too. A ghost had come to me in my first days as a Greywalker and asked me to find “an heirloom,” which proved to be quite a bit more than that. I hadn’t known what I was into, that my client was dead for centuries and that the solution of the case would require me to leap into the occupation I hadn’t wanted. “Oh gods . . . You wanted it. Mara and
I believed it was because it was a dark artifact—a thing of power you could use for your own ends.”

“That was true. But even greater was the satisfaction in undoing what he had done.”

“I nearly got you killed then, too.”

He looked amused. “It was a close thing.” He pressed his back against the column and pushed slowly to his feet. “Which of us can stand well enough to carry the other this time?”

“I think that’s you.”

“This may also be a close thing. . . .”

I found it harder to get to my feet than he had, but though I flinch from the touch of vampires in most cases, this time his hand on my arm didn’t send a bolt of nausea or pain through my body or shake my mind with unimagined horrors. It was a cool touch—unnaturally cool—but not grave-cold, and though it raised the hairs on my arm and the back of my neck, it didn’t make me ill. “I think I’m getting used to you,” I panted through weakness and the persistent cold of the Grey.

“I may find that inconvenient.”

“I said ‘used to,’ not ‘fond of.’”

He laughed and leaned back to counterbalance my awkward struggle to regain the upright. When I’d attained it, he put his arm around my shoulder and I put mine around his waist. It felt very strange to be half hugging someone who spoke casually of slaughtering others and ripping souls into shreds as if we were boon companions—though in our horrifying way, we were. Between us, we reeled like a pair of drunks.

“Where’s the exit?” I asked.

“Griffin went through the doors to the north chapel. There should be stairs to the crypt from the ambulatory or the transept.”

“I was never a good churchgoer. I have a rough idea of what the nave, aisles, and altar are and beyond that, I’m a heretic.”

“I never imagined I’d be pleased to have been a Catholic in life.”

We made our unsteady way out of the ruins through a door that deposited us on a bare roof.

“The apse . . . is gone,” Carlos said, and stopped, looking out at the city.

“You didn’t notice that when you arrived?”

“No. I came another way.” He stared into the distance over the Baixa and toward the castle of São Jorge. “The streets were never so straight when I lived here.”

“Quinton told me it was all rebuilt after the earthquake by some nobleman called the Marquis of Pombal.”

Carlos jerked as if I’d electrocuted him and turned to stare at me, nearly letting me fall.

“Pombal . . . didn’t rebuild anything. He was no nobleman. He was secretary of state—what would be the prime minister now. He
ordered
it done, the same way he ordered an end to the Inquisition and to the purity of blood laws—which was well-done—but in the same autocratic way he decided who would die after the Tavora affair. He was only Carvalho e Melo then, but by his hand he would have wiped out every member of the Tavora, Lencastre, and Ataíde families if he could have. He hated and distrusted them and it was a fair excuse. He was made Count of Oeiras for his duplicity and Marquis of Pombal ten years later. It was the end of the old families—all but Bragança and Periero de Melo. He took the rest down like hares in the field.”

“Your name is Ataíde.”

“Only a bastard son.”

“How do you know what became of them after you left? You said you never came back.”

“I was neither blind nor deaf. News always comes. I did not know at the time that this would be the result of what I went to do on All Hallows’ Eve. When I survived another betrayal, when I found out what had happened, I knew it would be the seal on my doom. He was the secretary of state—the voice of the king—and he hated me. His brother was the patriarch of Lisbon by then. Had I, a man who would not die, nor age, reappeared in the ashes, alive and whole when all the city was still in flames and ruins, that would surely have been taken as sorcery—he threw me from the window of this holy place and I lived, but it fell! Even without the Inquisition, little would have stopped them from having me burned at the stake.”

“Wait, wait . . .” I begged him, not sure I’d caught the implication that was circling the back of my brain like a shark. “The Marquis of Pombal . . . was your cousin? The one who threw you—”

“Out that window,” he confirmed, pointing with his free hand to the back wall of the old chapter house that still stood on the sheer side of the building next to the church. “Yes. So, you see why I did not return. After a time, I closed my eyes and ears to Lisbon. I forgot what I did not wish to know. This was my city and these are my ruins.”

“It rose again, like your clumsy phoenix.”

“Under the hand of the
Marquês de Pombal
.” He spat the name. “Is it any wonder that my plans are frustrated in this place as if his very ghost opposed me?”

I found his almost superstitious reaction strange and disquieting. “We can leave Lisbon as soon as we know what the bone mages are up to.”

“We’ll have to leave soon, regardless.”

I frowned at him, but he said no more and led me across the bare roof to a set of unattractive iron railings that secured a short flight of
steps to the edge of the curtain wall. More steps led us down by stages until we stumbled past a gate, into the Rua do Carmo and into the path of a policeman strolling along the road.

The cop called out to us, sounding suspicious but not yet alarmed. Carlos drew in a breath to reply, but I cut him off.

“Oh thank God!” I said, playing the dizzy tourist. “We got lost by the church and we don’t know how to get back to our hotel.” I even giggled like the inebriate I appeared to be. I felt a bit light-headed from blood loss, so it wasn’t a stretch.

The policeman peered at us, his English not quite up to my chattering speed.

“Nós estamos perdidos,”
Carlos said, in Portuguese that made mine sound fluid and dulcet.
“Nosso hotel
 . . . Rossio.
”

I wouldn’t have believed he could sound so befuddled and foreign. The cop seemed to buy it, however, and pointed north, down the road toward a bright smudge of light one long block away. “Ah! You have luck. Rossio is there.”

We thanked him as if we really were drunken tourists and we staggered onward. A few feet from the intersection, Carlos winced and swayed and I nearly fell into him. He caught me without grace or sign of affection and we leaned against the edge of a doorway. I felt unsteady and ill from the heaving and rolling of the Grey’s constant replay of tragic history—a history the creature beside me had helped cause.

“You don’t do well,” Carlos observed, sounding rough himself.

“No,” I replied. “History is too persistent here and I’m too weak to push it back. A cab might be a good idea,” I said, swallowing bile and breathing too hard.

“That is why I chose the Rossio. If there are taxis to be found, they will be here.”

“Is that because some things never change?”

“Yes. And no.”

The driver who pulled over at our hail gave us a sideways glare that measured up the likely origins of our bloodied and rumpled appearance and found us questionable, but not bad enough to blow off. He was English and became much happier to brave the narrow twisty streets of Alfama once we started speaking English also.

“Right,” he said, “top of the hill. Hang on.”

A better piece of advice he could not have given, for he took off into the late-night traffic with a jerk and a jink that slipped us between a bus and a limousine in a cacophony of horns.

TWENTY

T
his time, the house was illuminated—it even looked welcoming as the taxi driver let us out at the gate. He’d barely squeezed the small car through the medieval streets of Alfama with close calls at every turn and passing. I’d been too exhausted to react and Carlos had spent the short ride brooding out the window at the city he no longer recognized.

The taxi fare was surprisingly low and even with my meager collection of coins, I was able to tip the guy to a degree that earned me a huge grin. “You’ll want to be more careful with your money around here, love. Neighborhood’s gone to the dogs since the smart set moved to Chiado and Bairro Alto. Still, it’s lovely, ain’t it? Can’t complain about the view, eh?”

“No. And thanks for bringing us up.”

“Pleasure’s all mine.”

We watched him drive away, threading the twisty streets once again with inches to spare and no apparent care for his paintwork. Carlos and I limped through the gate and courtyard to the house.

Quinton and Rafa awaited us in the dimly lit doorway.

“Look what I caught,” Quinton said, waving his arm to indicate the phantom housekeeper.

“How?” I asked.

“With the key. We’re in her version of the house right now. That’s why I left the gate and door unlocked for you. Holy crap!” he added as we stepped from the shadow into light. “What happened?”

He lunged to grab me as if he thought I’d fall at any moment, leaving Rafa to attempt an escape while he was distracted. Carlos made a gesture and spat out a word, and she froze in place as if time had stopped.

He turned back to us and, in the light, I saw a smear of dried blood on his forehead and long streamers of it stiffening the black fabric of his shirt from collar to waist. In the dark it had been invisible, but here it was plain. “You look like death,” I said.

Carlos bowed his head with an ironic smile, just out of Quinton’s sight as my lover said, “You look worse.”

“Do I?” I glanced at my arms, but the left was fine. The right was covered in small nicks and filthy scrapes that had bled and dried closed again already. My shins below my skirt were covered in worse scrapes and gouges where the stones of the broken church had cut me while they fell and my outfit was filthy and ripped in several places. I’d never taken that kind of damage in a temporacline before. I already felt weak and uncertain, and the sight didn’t improve my sense of being barely in the normal world at all.

But Quinton was looking at my face, not my body. He smoothed a warm hand over my cheek and forehead and into my hair. “You look like you’ve been in a wreck.”

I gave a rough laugh. “A ruin. But we survived.”

Quinton finally turned back to look at Carlos. His eyes widened, but he said nothing.

Carlos raised an eyebrow, but I noticed he was leaning back against the wall with more of his weight than usual. His skin was waxy, not merely pale, and he seemed smaller, thinner, or diminished. In his own lifetime, he must have seemed a giant. Now he just looked tall, broad shouldered, and worn down.

I watched his chest for a moment, just to be sure he was still breathing. He was, so the odd change in his state of existence was still operating.

“We should adjourn this discussion to a more comfortable location,” he said.

“I don’t think I can make it up the stairs yet,” I said.

“There used to be a salon in this house,” Carlos said, and led the way out of the entry and through one of the other doors at the back. The door opened into a room that ran from the front to the back of the house and had long windows on both sides to let the air through. The room was clean, if sparsely furnished, and we settled into a pair of couches that sat at right angles near the back, overlooking the small garden through tall, Moorish arches. The heat of the day reflected off the stone wall that held back the hillside and the house above to flood the room with the scent of orange trees, jasmine, and bougainvillea. It might have seemed romantic and pleasant if I hadn’t been exhausted, bloodied, and woozy. I snuggled against Quinton, feeling unseasonably cold. He put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me close, unknowingly repeating the gesture Carlos had made earlier. It gave me a chill.

“Now . . . will one of you tell me what happened? Harper bolted out of here as if you were dying.”

“I was and would have been gone from this world if she hadn’t arrived when she did. She would have sacrificed herself to save me and I was almost thoughtless enough to accept that offer.”

I felt Quinton bridle and start to lunge for him at Carlos’s implication, but he fell back as the necromancer held up his hands.

“I said almost. Your spouse-in-soul is remarkable and only a very great fool would allow her to leave the world for so little good purpose. I am no fool and I don’t value friends so cheaply. More immediately, I have an idea of what the Kostní Mágové are building, but not the specific details. Tell me what you have discovered about bones. . . .”

Quinton still felt tense and the color of his aura shifted as he spoke from a red-tinged anxiety to a softer blue color shot with occasional sparks of red, orange, and olive. He repeated the information he’d discussed with me earlier and Carlos was able to tease more specifics from him by precise questions based on knowledge neither Quinton nor I had had. When they were done, Carlos was pale and a sheen of sweat had appeared on his forehead. He looked ill and I felt equally terrible, huddling against Quinton’s side.

Rafa stepped into the room and stood still in a shadow, barely visible to me from the corner of my eye, but in Carlos’s line of sight.