“I thought I saw something on your neck,” I said.
“You, too? It’s nothing.”
But it wasn’t nothing, not the way it had sparked at my touch and she’d jumped to turn toward me, only to see I wasn’t whom she’d expected. But there was no one in the hall besides me.
“I still think Carlos is not a safe choice for you,” I suggested.
“It’s none of your business, Mrs. Smith.”
“No, but I know him better than you do and he’s not a nice man. I think you saw what happened earlier. Is that someone you want to be close to?”
She gave me a cool look. “It is none of your business,” she repeated, then picked up the laundry and walked away with it.
Of course it wasn’t, and Carlos, for all he was mortal and warm for the moment, was still a vampire and a necromancer—a monster, as he had said, who would return to his undead state by Monday night if we all survived whatever we were going to do between now and Saint Jerome’s Day. Nelia was an adult, old enough to have adult children if she had started young, and old enough to make her own decisions about whom she was going to lend her body to in whatever capacity. But it still gave me a queasy feeling, since she was his granddaughter, however many generations removed. I didn’t want to think about the implications of that kind of consanguinity.
But I was still thinking about it as we drove toward Campo Maior. Night had fallen and the roads were empty. My hand prevented me from driving and I had been a bit surprised that Carlos had chosen to take the wheel.
“You’re a font of the unexpected. I didn’t think you drove,” I had said as we approached the small car that sat in the driveway, dusty from the trip to the house for our use.
“That I do not choose to does not mean that I cannot.” His voice had been chilly and I’d wondered if Nelia had mentioned our conversation to him. “I find the effect of the steel and glass . . . disconcerting.”
It sounded like the flip side of the comfort I took in my truck’s ability to filter out the random energy of the Grey. “You never seem uncomfortable in the Land Rover,” I’d said.
He had given me a sideways glance as he got into the car and closed the door without another word.
Campo Maior lay in a small bulge of the border between Portugal and Spain, surrounded by the sometime enemy on three sides. It was a small city, placed as it was on a hill with a river on one side, and fields that rolled down to Spain on the other. Even from the highway, I could see the rigid shadow of a castle at the top of the hill, its fortified walls like arms reaching for the city beneath a quarter moon. On the outskirts, the area smelled of mown fields, dusty olives, and pigs, which I could hear grunting even in the dark as they moved restlessly in their yards. I imagined that even with the pigs, it was a striking place in the daylight. We passed a large, rambling building bearing a sign for the Delta company, and the odor of coffee reached in through our open windows. We wound up through the town to the second-highest point—the Igreja Matriz de Campo Maior.
The Mother Church of Campo Maior stood in a road that was wide by Portuguese standards, but still narrow by mine, completely surrounded by red-roofed buildings sprouting old-fashioned television antennas like a harvest of metal wheat, gleaming silver in the moonlight. It was another Baroque building with little ornamentation other than the contrast of dressed stone edges against white plastered walls. The edifice was six stories tall and as wide as a city block with a central arch between two square towers that made the massive doors to the sanctuary seem small. I had to crane my neck to look up at the huge structure.
We left the car a block away and walked back, not looking too unusual even after dark, since the town hadn’t gone to bed yet, it being Saturday and only an hour past sunset. Like Borba and Vila Viçosa, the town was white with marble and plaster except for the church itself. A small staircase led up between the massive stone-edged church and a smaller building on the east that was so perfectly white it looked like a house made of sugar and decorated with restrained piping of white frosting around the top, windows, and doorway. Facing the staircase, a delicate black iron grille protected an arched window below a white plaster frieze of leaves and curlicues with the words CAPELA DOS OSSOS painted in neat black lettering between the plasterwork and the top of the window arch. Behind the window, barely lit by a candle from within and streetlight without, rows of white skulls lined the ledge like pies in a macabre bakery. A priest in a long cassock was walking up the stairs ahead of us, one hand clutching a fold of his robe to keep from stepping on his hem, a ring of keys held in the other.
Carlos caught up to him in two long strides and said, “Padre, um momento.”
The priest turned, an expression of mild surprise on his long, bland face. “Sim?”
They spoke for a minute, the priest shaking his head and gesturing to the chapel.
Carlos turned back to us, his eyes gleaming. “The priest says that the chapel is closed—it was broken into and vandalized this morning.”
“What was taken?” I asked.
“I hope we may discover that ourselves.”
He turned back to the priest, who was frowning at us. “I speak a little of English,” the priest said, his voice very soft but carrying down the marble stairs clearly. “What interests you in the bones here?”
Carlos provided an edited version of the truth. “Other ossuaries have been desecrated recently. We wish to discover if there is a pattern to the vandalism.” I could feel the weight of his persuasion bearing on the priest through the Grey. “May we see what happened here?”
The quiet priest narrowed his eyes, resisting Carlos’s magical nudging. “You are from the government?”
“The church. These two have brought reports of such damage in other parts of Europe. We fear the current economic and political stress may be causing anger misdirected at us—at God. It may be nothing,” he said, then added, “But . . .” He spread his hands, as if he were shrugging, but I could see a thin strand of magic pulling between them, growing ugly spikes of compulsion.
I stepped close, tilting Carlos a questioning look. He lifted his eyebrows, giving way to me in silence. I knew from experience that any such spell of Carlos’s tended to do damage and I didn’t see the point in harming the priest just to get a look in his chapel. If the Kostní Mágové had already been here, our only interest was in figuring out what they’d taken so we could guess what they’d go after next.
“Father,” I started, leaning lightly on the Grey—just enough to incline him to like me, “it is an imposition, I know, but while my colleague may have doubts, I don’t. You’ve heard about the ossuaries in the Algarve, I’m sure, and the desecration of the tomb of King Sebastian in Lisbon. But there have been so many others, in Poland, in France, even in Rome itself. We must stop this. We must not let people lose faith when they need it most.”
The priest was taken aback and blinked at me. “Oh. No. I had not heard. You wish to see the damage here?”
“Yes. If you can allow it.”
“Yes. Yes,” he repeated, walking to the chapel door with the keys ready in his hand.
I walked past Carlos, giving him a smug smile.
“Well played,” he muttered.
“Persuasion is my gift,” I whispered back.
Quinton ran up the steps and joined the tail end of our parade, pulling a pad of paper and a pen from his bag as if his job were to record what we discovered. Few people notice or question a secretary.
The priest unlocked the door and we filed through a small vestibule with a drinking fountain, a small counter, and a chair. Then we followed the priest down a short set of steps, into low light and the odor of crumbling mortar, must, and beeswax as he went to the altar to pay his respects to the cross above it. I found my chest tight with an unaccustomed pressure as I stepped into the room. It boiled with ghosts that thronged against me, whispering and sighing, crying, screaming in pain, or moaning in despair. I had to stop and close my eyes, my breathing short and sharp until the feeling eased and the shadows of the jumbled dead made room for me.