“No. But my own ideas about why turn out not to be the same as yours.”
“Oh? What was your idea?”
“I’d rather not discuss it,” he replied, blushing.
I frowned at him, thinking. “Oh. Yuck! I wouldn’t do that with a vampire, either!”
Quinton laughed. “I didn’t think so.”
“Oh, you did, too. You might not have believed it, but you thought it.”
“I blame popular fiction.”
I made a face. “When do you read pop fiction? I thought you were a politics and sciences guy.”
“I’ve spent a lot of time on trains and lurking around in public places. Having a book in front of your nose excuses a lot of just sitting around. But you have to pick a title no one is likely to ask you about. Oddly enough, few people want to pick the brains of men who read fantasy novels. Except those by George R. R. Martin—everyone wants to ask if you’ve seen the TV show.”
“And have you?”
“No. I’m more of a Doctor Who guy.”
I made a disbelieving noise in the back of my throat and let the conversation die.
I was managing the upheaval of the earthquake better now, but it was difficult until I let the sound weave into it, rather than trying to separate vision from hearing. I’d been a dancer longer than I’d been an investigator, and though I can’t sing, feeling the relationship of music to image and movement had once been a habit. The sad song of Lisbon’s magical Grid seemed to transform the events of 1755 into tragedy, instead of nightmare, drawing across the strands of my own energetic core like a bow over the strings of a violin. It urged me to slow down, to move with drooping, dolorous gestures, letting tears rise to the edge of my lashes until I had to stop and lean against a building to wipe them away.
Quinton paused and turned back to me. “Are you all right?”
“It’s this place—it makes me cry.”
“Earlier, it made you ache. Is this an improvement?”
“No. Pain I can work through. Anger I can use. Sorrow is difficult to turn into positive energy.”
“What can I do?”
“Just . . . be you.”
“I’m usually good at that, though I’ve been so many other people in the past eight months, I may be out of practice,” he replied, making his best effort not to slide back into his anger.
“Let’s keep going. I can manage better if you hold my hand while we walk.”
He smiled—imperfect and still worried, but still an expression that lifted my heart. “That will be a pleasure. It’s not as good as kissing you, but I can settle.”
I laughed a little, as he’d no doubt hoped, and put my hand in his.
NINE
We meandered toward Alfama by a slightly different route than I’d used coming down the hill. It wasn’t a long walk either way, though we now had only an hour to kill thanks to our stop at the bookstore. I almost wished we had more time. It had been so long since I’d seen Quinton; I wanted to linger with him before the situation grew grimmer, as it certainly would.
We walked up a rising, gently curving road and passed a small rococo church, which Quinton identified as Santo António. It stood right in front of a cathedral with Romanesque front towers and a rose window. The cathedral had been pieced back together with bits of other styles over time and after the earthquake—a bit of Gothic here, a bit of Baroque there. The stonework was now mismatched colors and textures from centuries of construction and repair. I was almost tempted to go inside and look at it, but the shuddering of the temporaclines around it was more than I could take and we hurried farther along the road. We passed several shops with signs that read ANTIGUIDADES—“antiques” I guessed by the displays—and an increasing number of small cafés and restaurants, walls tagged with ubiquitous graffiti. I noticed no one had had the heretical temerity to tag the cathedral or chapel.
I was sure we weren’t in the right place and would never get back to the house, but we passed a directional sign reading ALFAMA with an arrow pointing ahead, and we kept going up a tiled road cut by trolley tracks. Two men in clerical collars—one in a black suit and the other in a brown cassock—passed us coming downhill, talking together with serious expressions as they walked. They were an odd pair being of the same vocation, yet drastically different from each other—one in his suit with an aura a curious shade of ivory threaded with dark blue, the other more traditional in his clerical robes and an energy corona of sky blue that sparked with bright white bolts as they talked. I wondered if the conversation was contentious in some way. They nodded as we made room for them on the sidewalk, but they didn’t interrupt their chat even as they met up with another, older man who seemed to have been waiting for them in the plaza in front of one of the many antique stores. In spite of his smile, the man’s aura—a fit of black, white, and red spikes—gave me the creeps. The dampened violence of it seemed incongruous for a man of his vocation.
I hadn’t passed so many religious buildings or their residents anywhere else in the city and wondered if the strange trio was heading for the cathedral. Even with the presence of servants of the Catholic Almighty, I was still a bit paranoid; having lost one key, I now carried my purse in front of me. I felt less foolish about it when one of the priests spun around and shouted, “Gatuno!” He then hiked up his cassock and ran after a skinny young man who had passed us earlier in a buzzing cloud of pea green energy jagged with white sparks. The pickpocket zipped up the road much faster than his middle-aged mark, jinked under an arch in the wall, and seemed to vanish completely. His victim tried to follow, but gave up, panting, and turned back to his companions, gesturing and talking in a dismayed manner.
“I could catch him,” I said to Quinton. “His aura is so agitated, he left a trail like a comet in the Grey.”
“Would it be worth it?” He kept his hat brim down and pointed discreetly to cameras mounted on a pole at the corner ahead. “I’m pretty sure the local cops record everything and they’d certainly take note of a bystander suddenly finding a thief who did a disappearing act. I’m not saying it’s not a nice thing to do, but it’s got a risk factor. This is a popular tourist area, so it’s got a lot of criminal and police traffic as well.”
It galled me to walk away from something I could fix. After a few steps up the hill, I stopped under the pole on which the cameras hung. I took off my hat and my purse and handed them to Quinton. “Hold on to these. I’ll be right back.”
I threw myself into the Grey, searching for a temporacline in which there had been no cameras, but the buildings were still the same. I found one and slid into it, shivering at the sudden, intense chill after so much heat.
In the silvery world of the Grey past, I walked back to the arch in the wall and stepped through, and then I stepped back out of the Grey, into the normal. The arch led to a narrow covered walkway that opened into a courtyard. The contrast in light made the walkway seem dark as the inside of a dog, but I could see the sickly green glimmer of the pickpocket’s aura as he huddled in a niche, waiting until he thought the coast was clear to emerge. I walked up to his hiding spot and tapped him on the shoulder.
He jerked around to face me, catching one of his bony elbows on the hard stone edge of the niche. “O que você quer? Foda-se!” His whole skinny body seemed to quiver.
“Give me the wallet.”
“Wallet? What are you talking about, bitch?” His manners were horrid, but at least his English was excellent.
I rolled my eyes and held out my hand. “Wallet. Now. Or I scream for the cops.”
He launched forward, tucking his head down to hit me in the face with the top of his skull, but I stepped aside and gave him a shove, using his own momentum to send him across the narrow alley headfirst, into the opposite wall. He hit hard enough to bounce and stagger back before he sat down, shaking his head at the same time he tried to cradle it in his hands. “Ow!”