“No?” I gasped, still having difficulty breathing without a hitch or ache. “Griffin, I suppose, is good enough. . . .”
Rui’s eyes narrowed and his silence was telling. I’d hit a sore spot. “Carlos must think me a particular fool not to check the body for curses,” he said, and made a spitting sound. “Her skeleton is quite useless, thanks to him.”
I nodded as if this were all news to me. “He is a bit of a bastard.”
Rui chuckled. “You can’t imagine. He won’t come for you. Not even if he had more time.”
“Didn’t think so. . . . We’re not that sort of friends.”
“What sort are you, then?”
I finally got a full breath and had to hold it a moment while my chest got used to the feeling again. “I work for his boss. Had a personal problem, needed some help—”
“Your problem—the younger Purlis.”
I nodded. “Called in a favor. Carlos is a mage and I’m not—I know better than to bring a knife to a gunfight. Also, he wanted to come. I guess that’s partially because of you. He hates Purlis, but he despises you.”
“Good, good . . . What he underestimates will kill him. Finally.”
“Bit of a disappointment to see him walking around in the daylight, I imagine.”
“I’d have punished Griffin soon enough for that mistake. He’s conquered death a dozen times, so why not once more? Within his own house, it would be easy enough to overcome the paltry difficulty of sunlight. Outside of it, he will be nothing but a burden to your lover. They cannot move until nightfall and we will find them. As we found you.” I was pleased to hear that the cloud of terror that had circled the castle had not given Rui any advantage after all. “They cannot return to Carlos’s house, since it’s now a murder scene. My dead student is useful after all.”
I concentrated on my physical discomfort to hold back the spark of satisfaction that Rui didn’t know as much about either Carlos or vampires as he should have. I hoped it would be enough of an edge when the time came—if I was able to pass the information on to Carlos and Quinton.
“How did you find me? You didn’t just cover every bus station in Lisbon.”
“Hah! No. You are unmistakable. Inside my shield, although I couldn’t see you, once my little burrowers had touched you, left their hooks in you, I could hear the song of your bones. They sing— off-key, out of tune, but those are matters easily corrected—and at the house, I simply listened. I was surprised that Purlis’s son had purged himself of them, while you hadn’t. We followed your bone song and the agents in the metro confirmed the direction. We knew where you must be heading and came to wait. Your plan might have been clever if not for that, and what could you do about it? Nothing! It’s, literally, in your bones. Short of breaking them or tuning them again by blade and fire and blood, you cannot evade me long, now that I know.” He closed his eyes and I felt the ripple of his anticipation through the Grey. “As close as this, I can hear them now. We have only four days, but you will be magnificent once I’m done with you.”
I didn’t care for that idea. I preferred my bones as they were, scarred and remodeled and in my own skin. I restrained the urge to ask what he intended to do, in spite of his obvious wish that I would. Rui seemed to enjoy the discomfort of others. I wondered if it went with the territory or if it was just Rui.
He reopened his eyes, watched me, and tried to wait me out as the car wound through strange streets. Away from the Pombaline downtown, Lisbon and environs seemed designed to confuse with few straight roads up the hills and lots of traffic circles and streets that sloped or angled into intersections with far too many outlets. It would be a challenge to retrace the way, and the fact that no one was trying to conceal it from me didn’t bode well. I thought we were taking a longer, more circuitous route than necessary, but the details mattered less than what would happen once we got wherever we were headed.
“I shall ask again,” he said. “What are you? Not a mage, not a witch . . . a conundrum: powerful and powerless at the same time. What are you?”
I hesitated. I thought he wouldn’t be familiar with the term “Greywalker,” and since he didn’t know in the first place, why help him . . . ? “I’m . . . sort of a . . . security guard. . . .”
He glared and I saw the tension gather in his shoulders and neck again. I cringed into the backseat, putting up my hands as if I could shove his spell away. “No! No, please! Not again. I’m not teasing you. I just . . . It’s hard to explain.” I did lay it on a little thick, but he didn’t know me and without Purlis in the car to break my cover, there was no one to tell him I was exaggerating my fears. Pain is not the most effective way to motivate me—I had spent enough time in toe shoes and physically abusive relationships to be inured to that.
“I work at the edge of the magical world. I keep the normal stuff on one side of the line and the paranormal stuff on the other. That’s pretty much what I do. Not my choice, just what I got stuck with.”
Rui appeared less than completely convinced, his eyes slit in doubt. “I suspect there’s more to it than that,” he said.
“Well, of course, but the details are not what you asked for—and frankly they’re more complicated and long-winded than you probably care about. I’m not sure that the ability I have would remain if you . . . adjusted me. . . .”
“Possibly not, but it would not be important then. There would be you as I had made you, which would exceed anything else you have ever been.”
“Am I . . . going to survive this . . . ?”
He gave me a sly look but didn’t reply. The car passed through industrial gates and dove into a tunnel cutting down under the ground at a mild slope that seemed to go on for a long time in darkness. Then the sound around the car changed and we seemed to be in something like an underground parking structure that was so poorly lit, the car navigated by its headlights through a field of cement pillars up to a double-wide loading door. A guy in street clothes sat at the edge of the loading dock platform with a compact automatic rifle resting on his knees. He hopped off the dock as we pulled in and held the gun at the ready position. Purlis was taking no chances this time. Though I supposed he might be nervous about the monster he’d tied himself to, it seemed more likely that he wanted a bit more insurance on my account.
Our driver got out and opened the door for Rui, and then for me. Rui waited without speaking for me to sidle out of the car, acting a little cowed and nervous.
I darted toward the rear of the car at my first opportunity and crashed to the ground in breathless agony, unable even to scream this time as Rui pulled his little crushing trick on me again, as I’d thought he would. If I hadn’t tried, Purlis’s agents would have felt things were going too easily. I couldn’t let them think that I was just as happy to be here, wasting their time and making them keep their eyes on me, rather than letting them chase down Quinton and Carlos. In spite of the demonstration he’d made at the zoo, I knew Purlis’s resources were limited and Rui had no easy way to track my companions, in spite of his bragging, so the more of these guys I kept bottled up here the better.
“Come, Senhorina Blaine, I have a great deal to show you. Don’t make me force you.”
I had the impression Rui would be delighted if I did. I didn’t have to fake breathless dizziness and discomfort as he let me back up. He and Purlis were well suited. I added another name to the very short list of people who’d benefit the world by taking a fatal bullet.
Another armed man awaited us just inside. With one guard ahead and one behind us, Rui conducted me into the facility. Past the roll-up doors, it changed from generic work space to horror-film set.
Ahead lay a long concrete hallway with intermittent steel doors and flickering overhead fixtures, but the walls were covered in bloody runes and murals of bones that seemed to move in the intermittent light. I pulled my shoulders in to avoid touching the walls and tried to watch where I put my feet on the red-splashed floors. Ghosts wandered through the halls in a haze of Grey, as if they couldn’t find the way out and weren’t sure where they were. This base hadn’t been in place as long as Rui’s bone temple, but it wasn’t brand-new, either, which made me queasy. A few of the doors opened onto ordinary rooms filled with office or surveillance equipment, supplies, guns—or men carrying them. But the rest opened onto visions of hell. We walked through more ghastly corridors and by rooms that held the memories of screaming and the song of bones like reeds in the wind and fingernails on chalkboards. A few robed figures passed us or could be glimpsed through doorways crusted in bone and blood. Even the floors writhed with marks that raised every fine hair on my body. I winced and gagged, feeling battered by the continual assault of remembered death. I was raw and had lost my sense of direction for a while, but a peep into the Grey reoriented me, and the cold steam playing in my vision seemed, for once, welcoming and soothing, washing the present horrors of the Kostní Mágové’s lair out of my senses and leaving the distant chime of the Guardian Beast in my ears.