“I’d rather not, but if you insist, I’ll go as far as the gate—if your leg is up to it.” He could have anything waiting in the emotional chaos of the zoological gardens. Here on the street, I was in public view, but the pedestrian crossing was a little more public than I thought our conversation could handle—especially if I had to make an escape through the Grey.
“It’s a small price to pay.” He waved to the car and it pulled off to park not too far away, but certainly not close enough to overhear us without equipment. I backed up a few steps and Purlis closed the distance in lurching strides. He covered a grimace with a strained smile that didn’t light his eyes.
“So, what happened?” I asked before he could own the discussion. “Your knee was healing fine the last I heard.”
“I don’t find your question germane to the discussion at hand, so let’s say that my work has taken a toll on my health and leave it at that. But I have been asking a lot of questions about you. . . .”
“Me? I’d say I was flattered, but that would be a strike for my team,” I said, crossing the dark paving stones of the parking area and onto the white stones of the walkway.
“You almost had me fooled. If you hadn’t shown up with the vampire, I might still have thought you were just a bit odd.”
“I’ve always been a little odd. Vampires are just the icing on the weird cake that is my life.”
He forced a well-practiced laugh that in some other circumstance might have been charming. “You interest me, which is why I wanted to have this little talk.” His words came out in small puffs as he walked, each movement jarring them into the air as he lurched on his unstable prosthesis and put too much of his weight on the cane, watching the grooved and patterned ground as much as he watched me. “You see, I don’t understand you. Everything I hear about you—even from your enemies—indicates you have a strong sense of what is morally right, that you’re driven by a desire for justice, without worrying too much over the letter of the law. I understand that position—I’ve been there, am there, myself. What we do may look unfathomable—even wrong—to outsiders, but we know it’s the right thing to keep the world in balance.”
“Are you implying we’re of the same moral type?” I wasn’t sure if it was his presence, the situation, or just the conversation, but I felt nervy and overwound as if the air were filled with static.
“From different approaches, but yes.”
“Hmm . . . And yet I’ve never felt there was any excuse to kidnap and kill a child. You not only thought so; you took your own granddaughter. I think that’s pretty far out of the ballpark of moral rectitude.”
Jagged red sparks flew in Purlis’s aura. He didn’t like what I was saying, but he continued to keep his cool and replied in the same low, featureless voice, “Any true sacrifice is painful.”
“It’s not a sacrifice when you force someone to do it against their will—that’s just murder. Why would you even consider such an action reasonable? What ‘sacrifice’ did you need a six-year-old child to make for you?” The electric feeling on my skin was intensifying with my anger.
“Necessity—”
“Strike two. There is nothing reasonable and necessary about kidnapping and murdering a six-year-old girl for spare parts. Your own granddaughter!”
He stopped walking just where the walkway divided to head for the zoo and turned to face me directly. “It was a hard choice, but Soraia is special and Sam has another child.”
His face was calm, but the colors in his aura were now heaving and flickering in a polychromatic display I’d seen only once before. In the past year, Purlis had progressed from a fanatic who believed in his cause without wavering, to a full-blown psycho. For the first time in my life, I was certain that the world would be better off if I shot a man in the head and bore the consequences. And I didn’t have a gun.
“She is special, but she’s not a box of Tinkertoys for whatever unholy purpose your friend Rui and his ilk have in mind. And without her, you . . . what . . . would have settled for Martim if you could find him?” My disgust was heightened by the irritation of his energetic presence.
“No. He wouldn’t have suited the work.” As if anyone should have understood that without having to be told.
“He wouldn’t . . . Oh yeah, because Soraia is a special little girl as well as your granddaughter, so she becomes a piece of the construction, along with your left leg and all the other bones you’ve looted from ossuaries all over Europe.”
“There’s always a price for the acts that redefine a nation—or the world.”
“So your leg was the buy-in for world domination? Surely you don’t think the Kostní Mágové are going to give you any real control over whatever it is they’re making?”
He didn’t give any sign in his expression that I’d hit home, but his energy corona sparked and he shifted his weight off his bad leg by the tiniest bit. “I’ve been at this game long enough to know how to control my assets.”
“Assets? This bunch of religious fanatics? You told me you were a patriot.”
“I am.”
“I’m not sure how you square that ideal with plans to bring down some kind of apocalypse. It just seems to fly in the face of individual liberty.”
“Individuals rarely stand high enough to achieve the scope of vision that will allow them to see what’s truly the greater good.”
“But you do, standing on your pile of bones with the likes of Rui Araújo.”
“We can’t always choose our allies.”
“I’d bet Trotsky said the same thing about Stalin.” Purlis gave me a sideways glance but held his tongue as his aura gave off a shower of annoyed orange sparks. “And since you’ve lost her, I suppose now you’re looking for something to replace Soraia. . . . What kind of diabolical engine are you building, Purlis, that you need the bones of children and family? Are you planning on killing your wife or your son for this, too? Bear in mind I feel pretty strongly about his continued existence.” There was no need to tell him how much I knew. If I didn’t find a way to get out of the area, I might have to go with him for a while, and every piece of information Purlis and Rui didn’t have was to my advantage.
“I don’t need them. We have more than sufficient supplies of betrayers and spies.”
“And you’re both. So what else are you after? The innocent? The pure? The unbaptized babies of women born in a full moon? Or maybe those with a gift your skeleton-sucking friends don’t have?”
The mad strobing of his aura shut down suddenly, becoming a tightly controlled spiral of blood-red and gold energy bound in white bands of force. “Some of those, yes, but the talented and pure prove much harder to find. Sadly, you don’t have the vision I thought you did. You could have been useful to me, but associating with monsters seems to have derailed your sense.” I could see him shift his weight and reset his grip on his cane.
I made a more subtle shift—reaching for the Grey. “The only monster I know is you.”
TWENTY-FOUR
I had no more time and saw no other way out. I dropped toward the world between as fast as I could, not worrying about the location of temporaclines or what paranormal things might be nearby. Purlis was about to do something and I had to get away from that—before I strangled him with my bare hands. If he had traps for me in the Grey, so be it, and I hated that my precipitous vanishing act would probably give him more information about my own abilities than he already had.
But as I fell, something jerked me hard back toward the normal world and down to the ground. Purlis’s cane slashed, gleaming oddly, through the air where I’d been standing, and he stumbled as he recovered from my sudden flicker. The force of the strike alone would have broken my legs, but the trail of oil-slick glisten it left in the Grey told me there’d been more to his attack. That cane wasn’t just a bit of steel and wood, and I didn’t know if it was connected to the cold or the breathlessness that now held me against the white paving stones.