“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“For what?” I asked.
“I hurt Mamãe.”
Before I could say it, Sam had put one arm around her daughter and said, “No, you didn’t. I’m so sorry, anjinho. I’m sorry I let those horrible things happen to you.”
“You didn’t . . . hurt me, Mamãe.”
“But I let your grandfather take you away.”
Soraia just shook her head, adamant. “No.”
Sam cuddled both of her children closer. She put her head down against Soraia’s hair, crying softly now.
Mara picked up her bowl and got to her feet. She backed away from the sofa and motioned to me to follow her to the kitchen. Ben and Brian were a few steps behind us.
“They’ll be all right,” Mara whispered as she put the salt bowl on the drain board. “At least in time. There are some awful things in that poor little girl’s head and her mother’s almost as haunted.”
“Are you sure they’ll be OK?” I asked.
“It may be a long road, but yes. Eventually.” She smiled at me, a tired, troubled smile. “Well done, Harper.”
“I didn’t do much,” I said.
“Oh no. I’m the one who didn’t do much—I just calmed them down and helped banish their negative energy long enough for you to do the work. Really, it’s sometimes little things that make a difference.” She looked me over and gave me a hug. “You should probably be going soon if you’re to reach Lisbon before dark. Not that I’m eager to get rid of you . . .”
Ben and Brian chimed in on that note but Mara was right—I needed to go, though I wasn’t comfortable with it. I looked over toward the couch, but Sam and the kids were still huddled together and the last thing I wanted to do was disturb them.
I said some quiet good-byes to the Danzigers, picked up my things, and headed for the door.
On the sofa, Soraia raised her head, whispered into her mother’s ear, and slipped out of her grasp to run to me. She stopped a step in front of me, looking up at my face, anxious.
I crouched down to make it easier.
“I saw you,” she said.
I smiled a little. “Thought so. Are you going to be all right if I go?”
“Why are you going?”
“Because I have to help your uncle and Senhor Carlos stop the people who hurt you from hurting other people.”
She nodded. “All right. Are you going to hurt them back?”
“It’s tempting. Really tempting, but my job is to make things better, not worse. Not even if they deserve it.”
She nodded, looking grave, and hugged me, saying nothing more.
SEVENTEEN
Traffic had not improved on the way back and since I hadn’t driven the route the first time, I got lost and came toward the city on a different highway. At the outskirts of Lisbon, I had to wait in slow traffic near the air base in Montijo. A modest group of protesters with signs I couldn’t read blocked the road and an equally modest contingent of police was trying to move them out of it. Both groups seemed peaceful enough, but as the demonstrators were pushed away from the road, some of them began shoving back, shouting and hitting at the police with their signs for no reason I could make out. Singly, the cops lost their tempers and their collective, steady push became curt, rough, and finally angry. A dark shape, barely visible in the westering sun, circled over the seething lines of demonstrators and cops, and even though it was difficult to see, everyone ducked as it moved. Someone yelled and, as the dark thing swept away into the sky, the peaceful protest turned into knots of pointless violence scattered along the roadside. I stared at it, rolling down the window and cocking my head to look into the Grey. Another shape moved around the edges of the infant riot, seeming to nip at the cops and protesters like a dog herding sheep. It was made of red energy and silver mist, and where it walked, the violence escalated. This had to be the work of Purlis’s Ghost Division and there was nothing I could do. I closed the window in haste and found a path through the traffic.
The conflict seemed to spread outward like crystal growth and I had to detour several times to get onto the bridge that would deliver me into Lisbon proper. Paranoid that something might have seen me, I took a circuitous route, checking frequently for any kind of paranormal tail. I never saw one, but I took the precaution anyhow and arrived at the house in Alfama after sunset.
Nothing had changed inside since I’d left and that bothered me more than it might under other circumstances. Trying not to imagine the worst, I raced up the stairs to our suite and burst through the door to the sitting room.
No Quinton at the desk. I ran through to the bedroom.
He was sitting cross-legged on the bed with his laptop open in front of him and a pair of long cables running off across the floor. I breathed heavily with relief. He looked up, craning his neck to see me better.
“Hi. Everything OK? Sam and the kids made it all right?”
“Yeah. We made it to the Danzigers’ all right, but it’s going to be a rough road for Sam and the kids. They’ll be OK, though. What about you?”
“I’m fine. I slept like the dead.”
I let that go. “No signs of anything unpleasant in the streets?”
“Uh . . . not up here. There’ve been a few incidents around town today, though. Some disturbance happened at the Banco do Portugal headquarters that the news is vague about and some kind of protest down at Montijo Air Base went wonky.”
“I know—I was there. And so was your father’s band of invisible agitators.”
He frowned a little. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. There was something—a ghost of some kind I think—working the edge of the crowd, making them angry and volatile, and something I could barely see had descended on the protesters and police from the sky, and they all acted like they’d been strafed. After that, it went to hell.”
“Damn it. That sounds like the same sort of thing I saw in Paris. Damn it! I keep missing him,” Quinton snapped, and started to get up.
“Nothing you can do right now,” I said, waving him down. “Tell me what else you found—that may be more important to us than getting a closer look at the wreckage your father’s group is responsible for.”
He frowned. “All right . . . I’ve been working on your bones-in-the-news question.”
“I had an idea on that—or rather, Ben did. Anything about ossuaries? Or bone chapels?”
“Yeah. They weren’t connected by the press or police yet, but there have been a series of vandalizations of small ossuaries here in Portugal—did you know that Portugal has the largest number of extant ossuaries of any country in Europe?”
“No. What does that mean?”
“It means that while there may be bigger, better-known piles of bones in places like Italy and France, there are more of them total and per square mile in Portugal. And with a comparatively small population, that’s a lot of dead bones for every live one running around. It seems to me that would make this country very attractive to bone mages—which could be why Dad is concentrating here at the moment.”
“I agree,” I replied in haste. I still felt wound up from my trip to the house while Quinton seemed to vacillate between anger and a strangely distant curiosity. “What happened with these small ossuaries?”
“Well, over the past few months, there are four ossuaries along the coast in the Algarve that have been vandalized. Algarve is a coastal vacation area that’s very popular with European travelers. Anyhow, bones have been removed, causing the ossuaries to shift or fall in some cases. In another, it was basically a shrine in a wall and someone took the arm off the crucifix, which was pretty obvious. But no one’s been saying the crimes are connected. So far, all the reports read like it’s just a local annoyance and the press is blaming the tourists, but locals are disturbed by it. The ossuaries are old and small, but sacred, and with the other problems in Portugal, it seems like a bad sign.”