It was very quiet, and I thought they’d left, but in a moment, Quinton spoke again.
“You said it was risky—what she did for you. But if you respect her, why did you let her do it? Why didn’t you stop?”
“I did stop, though I admit it was difficult. In extremity and offered rescue, it was hard to temper the drive to survive with the knowledge that her life lay in my hands. And I did not ‘let her’ save me. Blaine made that decision for herself. You made that decision once for me, also. Did you think I would forget that you didn’t leave me to die in a fire?”
“That was Cameron’s doing.”
“Not alone. You don’t credit the breadth of your own compassion.”
Quinton scoffed. “For vampires? Your lot nearly killed me a dozen times.”
“Not ‘my lot,’ but all the others, and for her. It’s what makes you a terrible spy—you feel and cannot resist acting on that empathy—and it makes you her perfect mate. But it allows you to know—or to imagine—too much, which is why you want to kill me for touching her,” Carlos added with a chuckle.
“That’s not true. . . .” The rattling discomfort in my chest fell apart.
“It is. But, as I am useful, you have no choice but to tolerate my presence a little longer. I know what your father wants.”
“An invisible company of invincible, undead spies—a whole department’s worth of Sergeyevs to bring Europe down. I know.”
“For how long?”
“I only really put it together last night. Harper saw my dad’s project in action yesterday and we all saw the boxes at the bone church. Harper recognized the master bone mage from last night—we saw him just before that . . . drachen thing fell apart down the hill yesterday. It was just like the one at the bone church. The ossuaries that have been vandalized, the places my father has been, and what we all saw two nights ago . . . I knew there was some piece of information I had that made it all fit, made my suspicions true, but I hadn’t been able to tease it up to the surface. Now I know. That organ . . . the bones . . . You said at the time that you knew the man who made it. You said that you knew this bone mage when he was an apprentice and how would you if you didn’t study under the same master? It all comes together. The Kostní Mágové promised my father the secret of packing ghosts and monsters into boxes so they can be moved around like furniture and that’s what he wants, but there’s something else that has to come first—something they want and have convinced my father he wants, too—something that will burn Europe to the ground. You know what that is.”
“They must have their apocalypse—their dead in legions unburied, an endless sea of bones. O Inferno Dragão will give them that. And then, we all die.”
TWENTY-ONE
I gave them a chance to leave before I emerged from the bedroom and went downstairs, assuming they’d be in the salon, which proved to be empty. Quinton was in the kitchen with Rafa, asking her questions.
“Where?” he said.
“In the Alentejo. The olive trees were all that was left. I’m sorry. . . .” She stopped speaking when she saw me. “Bom dia, Senhora Blaine.”
“Good morning, Rafa. How are you?”
“I am very well, thank you. It is good to see Dom Carlos as he should be.”
“Where is he?” I asked.
“In the garden.”
Carlos in a garden in the daylight. This I needed to see. I started to go, then turned back. “Rafa, where did Dom Carlos sleep last night?”
She frowned. “In his bed. Where else should he sleep?”
“I mean where in the house. The cellar?”
She shook her head. “No. In the master’s chamber on the second floor. I had to take him there myself.”
“How did you lift him? He must weigh more than two hundred pounds.”
She blushed. “Avó helped me. He is light as a child with her hand on him.”
“And where is she now?”
“Oh, I think she won’t come for some time. It was very hard for her to bear him up after all that happened.”
There seemed to be more questions opened than answered, but I let them go and nodded to her, thanking her and starting for the door to the back garden.
“Oh, the key!” she cried. “Take the key.”
That was interesting: The garden apparently didn’t lie in her time frame of the house. I took the key off a hook by the door and went out.
In the modern daylight, the garden was shabbier than it had seemed the night before. Jasmine climbed up broken trellises against the house walls, growing from pots that had seen much better days. Three dwarf orange trees set in a shallow V were dusty and seemed in need of attention while the bougainvillea had overgrown the wall and was encroaching on the tiles around a fountain mounted to the surface. The pool and fountain were dry, the tiles and plaster cracked and chipping here and there. Carlos sat on the rim of the empty pool and squinted upward at the sun through the dusty leaves of an orange tree. A shaft of light struck blue highlights off his hair and warmed his skin with a ruddy glow across one cheekbone. It was like seeing some young relative of the Carlos I knew, one who hadn’t yet gained bitter knowledge and a taste for blood and power.
“You’re not supposed to look directly at the sun,” I said.
“I am also not supposed to be alive and sitting in my own garden. It’s run-down—I shall chastise the management company for that—but as I am somewhat run-down myself, I shan’t be too harsh on them.”
“I’m afraid I overheard part of your conversation with Quinton.”
“I know it. As, I suspect, does he. But we each pretend the other does not and thus we save our foolish male pride.”
“Why aren’t I attached to you, blood-bound, because of what I did?”
“Always direct, Blaine.”
“Why should I be otherwise?”
He replied with nothing but an ironically raised eyebrow.
“Come on, man of mystery. Tell me.”
“I’ve already told you. I am not blood-bound to another because I did not die of the Bliss—of the blood addiction. I Became, my blood poured onto the ground to feed something else. While I can—or could before this change—create blood kindred, it must be carefully and deliberately done. You gave me your blood. I gave nothing back—or at least nothing that I intended.”
“There’s still something more to this. . . .”
“Yes, but I cannot tell you what it is. I don’t know. I think I know what I’ve received from you, but what may have passed to you, is unknown. But it isn’t the blood tie, nor any form of control. You are not in thrall to me. Although it might be interesting if you were. . . .”
I rolled my eyes. “Please.”
He smiled a perfectly ordinary smile, the sun showing every bone-white scar where the glass of the church window had cut him, and finding tiny wrinkles around the corners of his eyes and mouth that darkness had never revealed. The smile faded quickly; then he shook himself and stood. “Let us not bait your beloved any longer. We should go inside and speak of dragons.”
He put his right hand out in a courtly, old-world gesture and I, laughing at it, put my left hand onto his, aligning our fingers.
For a second, our hands were one oddly shaped construction of four overly long fingers and two opposed thumbs that sprouted from both our wrists like the overlap of conjoined twins. I gasped and flinched, yanking my hand up and back without thinking.
The bizarre double hand divided at the knuckles of our middle fingers as if hinged there. All the rest of our hands were free and normal, the fingers sliding past one another, but our middle fingers remained connected at the medial joint. It was creepy to look at and impossible, like some kind of optical illusion where it appeared that my finger passed through the knuckle of his, without displacing either of our bones more than a micron or two. But it wasn’t an illusion. Our middle fingers were somehow locked together at that now-aching joint, mine pointing slightly downward from the plane of his hand.