Revenant (33 page)

He forced a well-practiced laugh that in some other circumstance might have been charming. “You interest me, which is why I wanted to have this little talk.” His words came out in small puffs as he walked, each movement jarring them into the air as he lurched on his unstable prosthesis and put too much of his weight on the cane, watching the grooved and patterned ground as much as he watched me. “You see, I don’t understand you. Everything I hear about you—even from your enemies—indicates you have a strong sense of what is morally right, that you’re driven by a desire for justice, without worrying too much over the letter of the law. I understand that position—I’ve been there, am there, myself. What we do may look unfathomable—even wrong—to outsiders, but we know it’s the right thing to keep the world in balance.”

“Are you implying we’re of the same moral type?” I wasn’t sure if it was his presence, the situation, or just the conversation, but I felt nervy and overwound as if the air were filled with static.

“From different approaches, but yes.”

“Hmm . . . And yet I’ve never felt there was any excuse to kidnap and kill a child. You not only thought so; you took your own granddaughter. I think that’s pretty far out of the ballpark of moral rectitude.”

Jagged red sparks flew in Purlis’s aura. He didn’t like what I was saying, but he continued to keep his cool and replied in the same low, featureless voice, “Any true sacrifice is painful.”

“It’s not a sacrifice when you force someone to do it against their will—that’s just murder. Why would you even consider such an action reasonable? What ‘sacrifice’ did you need a six-year-old child to make for you?” The electric feeling on my skin was intensifying with my anger.

“Necessity—”

“Strike two. There is nothing reasonable and necessary about kidnapping and murdering a six-year-old girl for spare parts. Your own granddaughter!”

He stopped walking just where the walkway divided to head for the zoo and turned to face me directly. “It was a hard choice, but Soraia is special and Sam has another child.”

His face was calm, but the colors in his aura were now heaving and flickering in a polychromatic display I’d seen only once before. In the past year, Purlis had progressed from a fanatic who believed in his cause without wavering, to a full-blown psycho. For the first time in my life, I was certain that the world would be better off if I shot a man in the head and bore the consequences. And I didn’t have a gun.

“She is special, but she’s not a box of Tinkertoys for whatever unholy purpose your friend Rui and his ilk have in mind. And without her, you . . . what . . . would have settled for Martim if you could find him?” My disgust was heightened by the irritation of his energetic presence.

“No. He wouldn’t have suited the work.” As if anyone should have understood that without having to be told.

“He wouldn’t . . . Oh yeah, because Soraia is a special little
girl
as well as your granddaughter, so she becomes a piece of the construction, along with your left leg and all the other bones you’ve looted from ossuaries all over Europe.”

“There’s always a price for the acts that redefine a nation—or the world.”

“So your leg was the buy-in for world domination? Surely you don’t think the Kostní Mágové are going to give you any real control over whatever it is they’re making?”

He didn’t give any sign in his expression that I’d hit home, but his energy corona sparked and he shifted his weight off his bad leg by the tiniest bit. “I’ve been at this game long enough to know how to control my assets.”

“Assets? This bunch of religious fanatics? You told me you were a patriot.”

“I am.”

“I’m not sure how you square that ideal with plans to bring down some kind of apocalypse. It just seems to fly in the face of individual liberty.”

“Individuals rarely stand high enough to achieve the scope of vision that will allow them to see what’s truly the greater good.”

“But you do, standing on your pile of bones with the likes of Rui Araújo.”

“We can’t always choose our allies.”

“I’d bet Trotsky said the same thing about Stalin.” Purlis gave me a sideways glance but held his tongue as his aura gave off a shower of annoyed orange sparks. “And since you’ve lost her, I suppose now you’re looking for something to replace Soraia. . . . What kind of diabolical engine are you building, Purlis, that you need the bones of children and family? Are you planning on killing your wife or your son for this, too? Bear in mind I feel pretty strongly about his continued existence.” There was no need to tell him how much I knew. If I didn’t find a way to get out of the area, I might have to go
with him for a while, and every piece of information Purlis and Rui didn’t have was to my advantage.

“I don’t need them. We have more than sufficient supplies of betrayers and spies.”

“And you’re both. So what else are you after? The innocent? The pure? The unbaptized babies of women born in a full moon? Or maybe those with a gift your skeleton-sucking friends don’t have?”

The mad strobing of his aura shut down suddenly, becoming a tightly controlled spiral of blood-red and gold energy bound in white bands of force. “Some of those, yes, but the talented
and
pure prove much harder to find. Sadly, you don’t have the vision I thought you did. You could have been useful to me, but associating with monsters seems to have derailed your sense.” I could see him shift his weight and reset his grip on his cane.

I made a more subtle shift—reaching for the Grey. “The only monster I know is you.”

TWENTY-FOUR

I
had no more time and saw no other way out. I dropped toward the world between as fast as I could, not worrying about the location of temporaclines or what paranormal things might be nearby. Purlis was about to do something and I had to get away from that—before I strangled him with my bare hands. If he had traps for me in the Grey, so be it, and I hated that my precipitous vanishing act would probably give him more information about my own abilities than he already had.

But as I fell, something jerked me hard back toward the normal world and down to the ground. Purlis’s cane slashed, gleaming oddly, through the air where I’d been standing, and he stumbled as he recovered from my sudden flicker. The force of the strike alone would have broken my legs, but the trail of oil-slick glisten it left in the Grey told me there’d been more to his attack. That cane wasn’t just a bit of steel and wood, and I didn’t know if it was connected to the cold or the breathlessness that now held me against the white paving stones.

Something pulled me down like a net drawn tight. I cursed
myself as much as him, and I could feel the spell digging into me the same way the floor of the bone church had tried to do. I snatched at the ivory lines of the trap that I could now see inched in bones between the cracks of the white paving stones. This was plainly some work of Rui’s and I hadn’t seen it. Purlis had done an expert job of maneuvering me and keeping my attention on him, not on a potential pitfall. I ripped a piece of the spell out, but that left me with no better escape route.

I struggled toward the deepest layers of the Grey, down near the Grid where energy rules and the world devolves to wire frames of light and color in the void of physical matter. I could see it, but I was unable to drop any farther than the most superficial layer, my physical form refusing to sink or soften into the realms of mist and shadow that lie just outside of normal. It felt as if my own body were holding me back and my every move toward the Grid made me ache in every bone and joint. Usually I travel through the realm of ghosts and shadows securely housed in the armor of my physical body. However tiring it is, my ability to bestride all three planes—the normal, the paranormal, and the Grey—intact and whole is my one unique attribute. Everything else I can do or see or experience is within the power of someone or something else, as well. That ability is what defines me as a Greywalker—and now I couldn’t do it.

I knew, much as it galled me, that I could lie struggling on the sidewalk, growing colder in the grip of Rui’s bones and exhausting myself, or I could give up, save my energy, and hope to find another way to extract myself from the situation later. Not a great choice, but there was no better alternative and prisoner is still a better position than corpse. I didn’t think Purlis or Rui—wherever he was—cared which they got.

I let go and was yanked back into the normal world. I slumped on the sidewalk as if my own bones were water.

“Welcome back,” Purlis said, looking insufferable. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t help you to your feet.”

“No,” I muttered, unable to raise my voice any louder. “You’re unforgivable.”

“You’ve an interesting set of talents. It’s a pity we have to be enemies.”

“Who says we have to?” I asked.

“You don’t like me and I can’t trust you. . . .”

“Oh, but we won’t be enemies forever. Eventually one of us is going to be dead.” I found I was looking forward to it, since I had a much better chance of giving death the slip than Purlis had.

Purlis chuckled in spite of his physical discomfort as people who were obviously working for him converged on our position. “True. And sooner rather than later, I suspect.”

He limped away as his team encircled me, hiding my strange, crushed posture from public sight. In a moment, Rui Araújo parted the circle and stood looking down at me. He seemed pleased, the red spikes in his aura jumping. He made a small gesture, murmured a word in Portuguese, and the force pulling me to the ground vanished.

I unfolded and stood slowly, wincing more than was strictly necessary, brushing the dirt off my dress and a few drops of blood off my abraded knees. He watched me with eyes brighter than one would expect of someone who had to be more than two hundred fifty years old. The penetrating quality of his gaze was disconcerting. I stood still and looked back at him, saying nothing, doing nothing.

Rui studied me a few moments longer. “You are not injured,” he
said. His voice was at odds with his appearance, low and soft, moving slowly, but not old at all, rather the opposite. He also had clear English, but a strong Portuguese accent and though there was nothing unpleasant in his tone, I felt like I was listening to a scorpion discussing the pros and cons of stinging me to death.

“You can’t possibly know,” I replied.

“No broken bones, no cracks, or bruises. Old injuries only. And a few scrapes on the skin,” he added with a shrug and a dismissive snort. “I see everything.” He pointed as he continued. “Feet, leg, knees, hip, spine, ribs, wrist, shoulder, neck, nose. What interesting scars your bones have.”

“I used to fall down a lot.”

“I see two . . . three that could have killed you.”

“I also bounce.”

“So I see. Come.”

He beckoned and I discovered I had no choice. The men and women encircling us stepped aside and flowed out into the crowd again, but I followed jerkily after Rui like a reluctant pet on a leash, whether I liked it or not. I could resist and strain, which slowed my movement down, but didn’t stop me; it only made me tired and sore. This could be a problem. I tilted my head and peered at the space between us through the Grey. A fine net of white lines ran from Rui’s hands to various positions on my body and he towed me along like a badly strung puppet. There were a lot of them, but, individually, the lines wouldn’t be much to break when I had the luxury. I just didn’t at the moment. I guessed that he had literal control of my skeleton—probably created while I was in his trap where the bits of his ivory spell had burrowed toward my bones. I could oppose him, but the force of magic overcame the force of my currently weak muscles. I was still a bit on the anemic side after what had happened with
Carlos and I didn’t have the stamina to bother resisting more than necessary, especially if I meant to break away when a better chance arrived.

“Where are we going?” I asked, walking along of my own accord now.

He relaxed a little and let me catch up to him. “Ah, you’re being reasonable. Purlis said you would not. I disagreed. At my temple, you did nothing that was excessive or impulsive—unlike your companions. You understand when you are beaten.”

I said nothing and Rui seemed to think that meant I agreed with him. He pointed ahead to a silver car with dark-tinted windows. “We shall take a ride. I have many questions for you.”

“Will you be upset if I don’t answer them?”

“Perhaps not answering them will be the answer.”

There was a man behind the wheel of the car. Rui waited while I got into the backseat. He got into the front and the locks clicked down, leaving no manual lock buttons or levers for me to toy with. There was still the opening above the front seats that I could have reached over to wreak some havoc, but the arithmetic of whom to take out first and if I would survive it was trickier than I liked. And there was the option of digging through the seat’s back into the trunk, but it wasn’t viable in this situation—I’d be shot or enchanted before I could get past the center armrest. I sat still and waited for Rui to ask his questions.

“What are you?” he asked, looking at me in the vanity mirror. I could see his eyes and the back of his head, but not much else from where I sat behind him.

Funny: I now expect every magic-user and paranormal I meet to know what I do in the Grey, because Carlos and a few others nailed it even before I knew, myself. But, in fact, most have no idea such a
thing as me exists and they don’t need to. If they want help that I can give, they seem to find me on their own. I frowned and blinked at Rui. “I’m a licensed private investigator.”

Rui glared and I saw his shoulders tense. My ribs seemed to collapse inward as if a giant fist were crushing my chest. Breath gushed out of my lungs and I clapped both hands over my mouth to stifle my scream. It felt as if my guts were being squeezed up through my throat. I was dizzy and thought I was going to vomit. Then the pressure vanished, though it took several seconds for me to refill my lungs, fighting the gripping pain as my ribs and intercostal muscles moved back into their accustomed positions.