Griffin writhed and blanched, gasping. She made a gesture while choking out a few words, and the cage of bones and silver shivered. She clenched her teeth in useless fury.
As Soraia’s wretched prison shuddered, Quinton yanked one side open. It fell apart around her and she let out a thin cry, throwing herself into her uncle’s arms. The blood from her forearm smeared over his back.
As I helped Quinton to his feet, Carlos dropped the fabric of his working onto Griffin’s body and stepped back as she lay like a corpse beneath it. He walked away from her to look down at the remains of the bony tomb that had protected the floating man but now showed only a gaping pit in the floor. “Your aegis of bone allowed him to escape. He was blind to what happened here—which will obscure your failure for now, but Rui will not be pleased when he returns. He shouldn’t have let the beauty of the finish blind him to the essentially shoddy quality of your work, nor to your need to borrow a spell from someone else to hold me at bay. Were I you, I’d be gone before he returned. Not that running will save you. . . .”
“Bastard,” Griffin spat.
Another of the ghost receptacles cracked open in the heat, sending its shrieking, burning ghost into the air in a shock of ethereal cold that made me wince and shudder. Everyone else ignored it. Quinton continued to the door, skirting the flames as he carried Soraia. He was moving more heavily than I had ever seen him.
Carlos bowed to Griffin. “Indeed. If you’re still here when he returns, tell Rui you did your best but failed nonetheless because he’s become as lazy a master as he was a student. He’ll tell you that you never stood a chance against me.”
“Against whom? Who are you that I should accept this . . . humiliation like a good little sport?”
“My name is Carlos, but it will do you no good against me when we meet again—as we will.”
Carlos turned from her and walked toward the door, apparently unconcerned for the fire that I knew could easily destroy him. He never looked to see whether we were behind him. I helped Quinton and Soraia to the door as if I didn’t want to run, screaming, from the place as fast as possible.
Carlos paused at the threshold without turning back, letting us pass him, and then muttered a few words, pushing his hands out to the side in a sweeping gesture. The remaining candelabra exploded in flames, and the dry bones began to burn in the sudden, intense heat. He walked out of the building, allowing the door to swing closed behind him. The sparking, gleaming black energy drained away, fading as he stepped through the doorway to the outside.
Quinton, holding Soraia in his arms, was leaning against the wall of the building, his posture revealing his exhaustion. He stumbled toward me and Carlos, then stopped to set the little girl on the ground. He knelt down, saying, “Can you walk with us, Soraia? We need to go to the car.” He looked ill and unsteady, and I hoped whatever spell Griffin had cast over him had no lingering effects.
The girl nodded, huge-eyed and pale, but I stepped to his side and knelt down. “I can take her,” I said. I held out my arms and the small blood-smeared girl crept into them.
I felt the sickening presence of Carlos beside us and Soraia recoiled in my arms, making a frightened, keening noise in her throat. I patted her back and stood up with her in my arms as he said, “We should go as quickly as possible. The fire will bring attention.”
“This girl is going to need some attention, too. She’s still bleeding.” Soraia continued to hold herself as far from Carlos as she could. “And something’s not right with Quinton, either.”
“I will assist him. Carry the girl to the car—her bleeding is slowing and we must go swiftly. I promise that neither of them will die before we reach safety.”
I jogged as well as I could with forty-five pounds of cringing child in my arms and turned back only once to glance up, watching the flames leap as the misty forms of ghosts flooded the air above the building. Amid the smoke and ghostlight, I could see the twining, sinuous form of the Guardian Beast as it gathered up the stolen souls and herded the spirits back into the Grey.
I turned back and continued to the car, feeling some dark and heavy thing dragging on me through my connection to Quinton. The distance to the car was grueling. I finally put Soraia down in the backseat as Carlos placed Quinton beside her from the other side. Soraia was shivering and I was shaking a bit myself. She looked more like a ghost than a girl.
“May I see your arm?” I asked.
She nodded, staring at me with very wide eyes. “Você é um anjo esquisito,” she whispered as I inspected the long, weeping tracks of the cuts on her arm.
I felt Carlos behind me. “She believes you’re an angel,” he said.
I didn’t look up. “It must be the aura. No angel here, just you and me.” I looked back to her slashed skin. The cuts were bleeding less after being pressed to the cloth of first Quinton’s shirt and then mine, but they were starting again. I looked up at her. “We’re going to take you to your mother, all right?”
She nodded.
“We have to do something about this first, though. Can you be very brave just a little longer?”
Quinton put his arm around her from his side of the car and hugged her. “I know you can, Little Fairy.”
Carlos knelt down beside the open door. She cringed away from him, squirming back against Quinton and gasping in fear while drawing her arms in.
“It’s all right, Soraia,” Quinton said, kissing the top of her head as he held her close to his side. “He’s not going to hurt you. I won’t let him.”
Carlos asked her a question in Portuguese, and I could feel an unusual, warm swell of his glamour enfolding her, sparks of golden light shimmering between them. She still looked frightened, but she nodded, holding out her bleeding arm and shivering. He didn’t smile or attempt to soothe her any further. He only put one of his hands over her arm and bent very low over it, as if he were going to kiss her wrist.
Quinton started to pull Soraia away, but I caught his eye and shook my head. Carlos had done too much to get her back alive to harm her now. He was a vampire—blood and death were his specialties and though we were all pushed to the limit, I wasn’t going to second-guess him.
Soraia blinked sleepily, her head drooping, as Carlos crouched over her. After a minute, he stood, running his fingers up her arm, and stepped away from her, the golden gleam of his glamour extinguished like a candle. He looked even more fatigued than before, but there was no sign of blood on him and her arm, though still marked, was no longer bleeding.
Carlos asked Soraia another question. She nodded drowsily, muttering something and trying to curl up to sleep against Quinton while drawing her arm in against her body. Quinton pulled her into his embrace and she nuzzled his chest, her eyes closing. Carlos and I folded ourselves into the front seats and talked in low voices while I drove.
As I took the little car down the road, I could see the fire and the storm of ghosts above it. “All those dead . . .” I murmured. “I suspect some of them weren’t just spirits they had harvested from somewhere, but ghosts they made themselves.”
“If I’d had more power to draw from, there would have been four more. Perhaps I should have let your spouse-in-soul shoot them. . . . Even with the deaths of two of his acolytes at my disposal, I was at a disadvantage and couldn’t have killed them all in his own temple. Rui will realize that, once he’s back in the world. We couldn’t have fooled him with such a charade, but since Griffin did us the favor of locking him—and his power—away, I was able to convince her I could have destroyed her and her master within their own bastion. She wouldn’t have let the girl go otherwise, and next time, she’ll know better.”