“Any idea how many bones have been taken altogether?”
He shook his head. “No. Something’s always missing, but no one is really sure what, except in the case of the crucifix.”
He put the laptop aside and unfolded himself from the bed. He stretched, his spine protesting with a series of pops and snaps and his joints joining in the complaint. He shook himself out and closed the distance between us to put his arms around my waist and kiss me. When I didn’t respond in kind, he gave me a curious look. “Are you all right?”
“I could ask you the same.”
“Why?”
“You just . . . don’t seem like yourself.”
He shook his head as if dismissing my concern. “Probably lingering effects of whatever that was last night. You’re a little prickly yourself.”
I stepped back from him. “I’m sorry. I’m obsessing a bit about these bones and this business with the Ghost Division suddenly popping up. . . . Carlos said he thought he could learn something about what the mages are up to tonight, but I want to give him all of this information before he goes out and does whatever he had in mind.”
“Oh. Well, I think it’s too late. He’s not here.”
“It’s not that late yet. The sun just went down.”
“About forty minutes ago. I almost didn’t hear him leave, but the door up to the tower stairs makes a noise when it passes over the floor. It sounds like someone trying to sweep the tiles with a very stiff broom. I looked out and saw him going down the stairs right after the sun went down.”
I scowled. “He’d have had to sleep in the tower all night. Not very safe.”
“Safe enough, apparently.”
“I wish I knew what he’s up to.”
Quinton pulled me a little closer in a jostling manner and said, “Hey, a guy could get jealous when all you want to talk about is bones and some other man.”
“Carlos isn’t a man. He’s a vampire.”
“That is not my point, Harper.”
I stopped glaring into the wall and turned my attention back to Quinton. His aura was still streaked with green, but at least it was more of an apple color than olive. He frowned at me.
“You’re not joking,” I said. “You’re jealous of Carlos.”
“I wouldn’t call it jealousy. . . . It’s more like . . . preoccupation.”
“There is no point in it. I love you. I spent most of this past year without you because you had other things you needed to pursue. But there’s no one else I want to be with. Not for the moment, or in the situation, or if I can’t do better. No one at all. Ever. And you know it. You know it right here,” I added, touching the bright pink line of energy that always pointed me to him, no matter where he was, no matter how far away.
He winced as I touched it and his energy corona flushed with a flurry of little sparks in green, black, white, and, finally, pink, like a Roman candle. “Ouch.”
I frowned. “That shouldn’t hurt.”
He blinked and shivered. “It doesn’t, exactly. It’s more like the sensation after you pull out a sliver.”
I thought of Amélia’s ghost floating over him as he slept and I felt furious. “Oh, I’m going to kill that interfering little specter twice over.”
“Who?”
“Amélia—Carlos’s dead wife.” I raised my head and looked toward the ceiling, then around the room, just in case I could spot her, but she wasn’t in evidence. “I hope you’re eavesdropping, Amélia, because I don’t want this to be an unfair fight. I’m going to turn you into a pile of sparks and ghost dust and send you back to the ethereal nothingness if I catch you playing with his mind again. So keep your incorporate hands off!”
“Is there something going on that I should know about?” Quinton asked.
“Yet another meddling ghost getting up to nothing good, I’m sure, though why, I don’t know.”
“That’s going around.”
“Oh?”
“Well, aside from this interesting half a conversation, the vandalized ossuaries, and sudden surges of violence that seem to be my dad’s work, this morning someone broke into the tomb of King Sebastian.”
“Who is that and how is it relevant to our problem with the bone mages?”
“You remember I said something about there being people in Portugal who believe in the ‘Sleeping King’—O Desejado—who will return to save the country in its darkest hour? A sort of Arthur figure with a cult built around him?”
“Yeah, a little.”
“That king was Dom Sebastião. He was a bit of a mess. His mother took off soon after he was born so she could be regent of Spain for the remaining twenty years of her life, so he was raised by his grandmother, Catherine of Austria—who was a bit of a hard-ass. He became king at the age of three in 1557. He was Jesuit educated and did a lot of important stuff, like establishing standard measures, reforming civilian and military law, creating medical and science scholarships, abolishing slavery of Brazilian natives, and mandating a school for navigators that taught them math and cosmology. Just that alone increased the number of ships that made it home from their voyages—and that’s a big deal for a seafaring nation. Portugal was an economic powerhouse in the Renaissance largely because of Sebastian. But he was kind of a misogynistic jerk—he never got married, and he was more interested in flouncing off to fight crusades against the Moors in north Africa than having kids or watching out for things back home.
“Anyhow, he was killed at the battle of Alcácer Quibir in 1578, but his body was never found, and he left no direct heir. It was kind of a boondoggle, and an expensive one as well, because Sebastian had borrowed money to do it. Phillip the Second of Spain became king of Portugal, and in 1582 some human remains that he claimed were Sebastian’s were entombed here in Lisbon at the Jerónimos Monastery. But most people were sure the body wasn’t actually his and that led to the idea that Sebastian was still out there somewhere, waiting for the chance to come back and save Portugal. Which he never did. That’s the ‘Sleeping King’ legend. But the tomb is still an important icon of its own and someone—or several someones—broke into it very early this morning.”
“What did they take?” I asked.
“No one knows if anything was taken at all. The body and contents weren’t very well documented and it’s all dust now, anyhow. But I’d be willing to bet—given the way these things work—that the dust of a legend’s bones might be as useful to some people as the bones themselves.”
“So we put a kink in their plans, but not as much as we thought.” But something was nagging me even as I dismissed the case as trivial.
“Assuming that the break-in was perpetrated by our unfriendly neighborhood bone-twiddlers.”
“Not too likely to be the work of an unaffiliated group—what are the odds?” I asked.
“Slim, I agree. So . . . is that the sort of thing Carlos was after? Because there were a few other stories, but they were older and farther afield. Oh, except for one thing that’s not in Carlos’s search, but it kind of gave me the creeps, so I bookmarked it for you.”
He turned the screen in my direction, showing a very short news piece about a man found dead in the quake-damaged area where we’d seen what might have been a drache the day before. “It sounds like the pickpocket you chased down. . . . I’m sorry.”
I stared at the story with its scanty details and bad sketch, asking for information about the deceased—a petty criminal who’d died of a heroin overdose.
“Damn it. I feel like I’m responsible. If I hadn’t given him the money . . .” I said.
“He’d have found it another place. You’re not responsible for his choices.”
“No, but . . . I shouldn’t have. How is it connected . . . ?”