I nodded. “That’s her. She’s also a geologist and a teacher and while her personal vocation may be a little unusual, she’s methodical, well educated, and very smart. I think you’ll like her. Ben’s more the absentminded, bookworm scholar. He also speaks seven or eight languages, but I don’t know if Portuguese is one of them.”
“And what about our host, Carlos? What’s he?”
Soraia looked up at me with the same hard question in her eyes. “Carlos . . . That’s harder to explain.” I think it’s a mistake to lie to friends and allies if I can avoid it, and lying to kids in particular seems to backfire a lot. Obfuscating, on the other hand, is probably the only viable option when the whole truth is not acceptable. Soraia would probably be thrilled if I told the truth, but I wasn’t going to, since it wasn’t mine to tell. “You could say he’s an expert on anything dead, so the bone flutes were right up his alley. Aside from that, you’d have to ask him.”
Soraia got her thoughtful expression, but her mother continued. “It doesn’t look like I’ll have that chance. He hasn’t come down yet. I should thank him for helping us, though he is a little . . .”
“Creepy?” I suggested. Even people with little magical sensitivity get weirded out around Carlos when he hasn’t affected a glamour to charm them, and he rarely bothers with more than the minimum of psychic camouflage. He is, by nature and necessity, a killer, even more so than most vampires.
Sam hesitated, then said, “Brusque.”
“That’s a word for it.”
“Is he always like that?”
“Pretty much.”
“I hope he’s not ill, like Jay. . . . Maybe I should go up and see. . . .”
“No,” I said, putting up my hand to stop her rising from the table. “He’s fine. Trust me, you really don’t want to see Carlos when he’s just gotten up.”
“Is he a vampire?” Soraia asked.
Her mother was shocked. “Soraia!”
The little girl’s eyes widened and her lip trembled.
I caught her eye and shook my head. It was a very small gesture, but she saw it and shut up. “As I said, that’s something you’d have to ask him and now would not be appropriate.”
Soraia swallowed her fear, nodded, and said nothing.
I ate a few bites of my breakfast and finished my coffee before making another ham sandwich and putting it on a plate to take to Quinton. I excused myself and said we’d leave as soon as I got back downstairs. Then I returned to my room to wake the sleeper, but I didn’t get quite the reception I’d expected.
Amélia’s ghost was hovering over Quinton, whispering into his ears as he tossed restlessly. He looked paler than he had when I’d left him less than an hour earlier and it appeared that she was doing something to make him so.
I dropped the plate and threw myself across the room through the Grey to snatch at her.
Her energetic form was thin and cold, but she caught in my fingers like a tangle of hair. I yanked her away from Quinton as she screeched.
“Get away from him!” I shouted, flinging her energy at the misty shadow of the wall.
The house was unusually present and solid in the Grey, having been here for many years and filled with the constant flux of magic. Deep in the Grid I could see a nexus beneath, adding strength and permanence to all magical workings above it.
Amélia crashed into the ghostly wall as if it were solid and rebounded, broken into shards of herself like the reflection in a shattered mirror. She put up her hands and hid her face, her voice like the sobbing of mourning doves. “Tenha misericórdia! Fiz tudo isso para você!”
I wasn’t sure I got the gist, but I spat back in words that cut the mist in heat and barbed red anger, “When I want a favor from you, I’ll ask for it! Get out! Or I’ll rip you into shreds and feed you to the Guardian Beast! Get out!”
She vanished in a cry. The mist sank where she had been, drawn downward as she left the room.
My chest was heaving and the cold mist of the Grey made me feel frozen through. I backed from the mist world into the normal, keeping an eye peeled for her return and fell over the bed.
Quinton stirred and rolled to the side with a grunt of discomfort.
“Hey,” I said as he opened one bleary eye.
“Hey.” He sounded like he’d been gargling with glass.
“I brought you a sandwich, but I dropped it. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t need a sandwich,” he muttered, trying to draw me down into the bed with him.
I traded some dopey kisses with him for a moment, warming myself in his affection. Reluctantly, I pulled away in a minute.
He made a disappointed-puppy noise but didn’t fight it.
“None of that,” I said. “I feel guilty enough as it is. I’m about to leave with your sister.”
“I’ll get up—”
I pushed him back down as he tried it and it wasn’t hard to do. “No, you won’t. You need more sleep and I need you to do some research for Carlos while I’m gone.”
“What kind?”
“Online. He wants to know about any recent incidents concerning bones or bodies being disinterred, disturbed, or stolen or anything bizarre connected to bones or relics. Anywhere in Europe. He’s looking for information that could tell us what the Kostní Mágové are building out of these bones and what they’ll have to do now that we’ve denied them Soraia.”
“Oh. All right.” He slumped back into his pillow. “I feel wretched.”
“I think the term you’re after is ‘like death warmed over.’”
“Twice.”
I started to go but turned back. “Be careful of the ghosts around here. I know you can’t see them like I can, but if you have an eerie feeling, heed it.”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, but some of them have their own agendas and I don’t want you sucked into them.”
“Oh. OK.” He closed his eyes, sleep trying to drown him once again.
I returned to the bed and kissed him one more time. “I love you, my superhero.”
“Love you, too,” he murmured, sinking into sleep as I watched.
I didn’t feel quite so bad about leaving once I knew he was asleep again. I only hoped I’d scared Amélia off badly enough to keep her from repeating whatever she’d been doing. Quinton was still too close to his brush with death to be immune to the machinations of ghosts. I was going on faith that he’d been awake enough to remember what I’d told him.
I picked up the scattered remains of the sandwich and took them back downstairs.
SIXTEEN
I don’t remember the trip to Spain. I slept through most of it in the backseat with the baby. Apparently, I managed to miss a minor temper tantrum, two lost “binkies,” and a diaper change without so much as wrinkling my nose. Soraia decided this was my superpower and I was anointed—in my sleep—as the coolest aunt in the world. And I’d thought it was because I walked through walls—shows what I know about how to impress six-year-olds. We arrived in a modest city called Valverde del Camino after five hours on the road. We’d hit several patches of bad traffic getting out of Lisbon, then had to take a detour around some road work, which had added time to what I’d expected to be a three-hour drive.
The oldest parts of Valverde looked a lot like the nice parts of Mexico City, while the industrial bits looked exactly what they were. As far as I could tell from the places we passed—including a fenced yard filled with wooden chairs piled two stories high—the area produced a lot of furniture, olives, and leather goods. We searched for the Danzigers’ address for forty minutes and found it in a pleasant public square, above an old-fashioned cobbler’s shop in a building with a front of bright yellow tile.
Sam found a parking space for the tiny management company car—we’d decided it was better to leave hers in a long-term car park near the Lisbon airport, where tracing the plate would do no one any good. As we walked up to knock on the Danzigers’ door, Martim began fussing. Such is my lack of charm for toddlers—though it might have been that Mara’s wards around the building woke him up. The curling, vine-like magic wasn’t identical to the protections around their house in Seattle, but it was still recognizably hers in my Grey sight.