Carlos chuckled at him and sank to his knees, crossed himself, and clasped his hands, letting them rest at the edge of the Plexiglas barrier, tilting forward until his long fingers pressed against the altar built of skulls. He gazed up for a moment at the cross. Although I couldn’t see his face where I stood, his posture changed and he seemed to be truly praying to God. Then he dropped his head over his hands. I had to remind myself that he had been raised in the faith and had fallen from it. It was doubtful his mind was on anything other than the task at hand, but he appeared to be one of the devout.
Quinton copied him, though his performance was less inspirational.
The air of the small chapel chilled and the room seemed to compress, the ghosts all stirring at once and looking toward the altar. One by one, they slid toward it, suddenly fluid. Quinton gasped and shuddered as the first glittering stream of spirit energy touched him. I wanted to run to him, to pull him away, but I stepped back, looking for the one phantom that was not mesmerized and turning toward the altar. In the writhing, silvery sea of them, a single oddity was hard to find and several more slipped away, making Quinton twitch and utter muffled cries of distress with their passage. It tore at me and I started moving around the room as if my pacing could break apart the impenetrable cloud of specters.
One eyeless face turned to watch me and I hurried to it, sinking slightly into the Grey to clutch the remnant of a soul more securely, the stinging burn of the thing’s energy piercing through my damaged fingertip, and slicing up the long bone of my arm. “I have it,” I said, ascending to the normal with the ghost in my grip, panting and shivering with tingling discomfort.
For a moment, nothing changed and I wanted to scream. “I have it!” I repeated, louder.
Carlos and Quinton stood up, and the priest in the vestibule did as well. I pulled the phantom closer to me so my hands didn’t seem to be clutching empty air a foot in front of my body. The tension among the remaining ghosts ebbed away, the room returning to its normal temperature as all three of the men came toward me and the ghosts drifted back into their muddled, endless flocking.
Quinton was shaking and had turned a terrible shade of pale. He’d bitten into his lip and a small trail of blood had started from the corner of his mouth. Carlos glanced away from him and kept his eyes on me as the priest stepped down from the vestibule into the chapel.
“What have you found?” the priest asked as he walked toward me.
“I believe I know what the vandals took and why.”
He looked at me, expecting something. I made a gesture at Carlos, which was more by way of passing the ghost off to him. He took the motion as intended and caught the fine tangle of silver and white that I had held, drawing it into his own grip as he had done with Rafa.
“The bones of the infected,” I said, for Carlos’s sake and not the priest’s. I could see Carlos nodding behind him, but the priest only looked confused. I was guessing, based on what Carlos had said Rui would need. This chapel’s bones were unlikely to include those of a thief who’d died in a fire, but according to the priest, many had died of something that would qualify as “a plague that killed thousands.”
“Infected? The cholera?” the priest asked.
Carlos took over the conversation, forcing the priest to turn to him while I went to Quinton’s side. I put my arms around him until he stopped shaking. Then I wiped the blood from his lip, out of sight of both the priest and Carlos.
“Yes,” Carlos continued. “The missing skeleton was that of the man we would now call Patient Zero—the first person to have the disease and spread it.” That had the ring of truth and I supposed Carlos had gotten the information from the ghost in the scant time he’d had so far.
“Cholera comes with dirty water,” the priest said.
“Yes. But it can be passed by contact with the patient. These thieves may believe—in error—that they can culture the disease from the bones. This is like some of the other cases,” Carlos lied.
Quinton gave me a questioning look as the color began returning to his face. I just nodded. He closed his eyes in relief.
“How did they know . . . ?” the priest asked. “One hundred and twenty of our parish died in a single month of the disease. All of them are laid to rest here.”
“I cannot know how they knew. But . . . I know what God told me.” I wondered if Carlos felt any qualms using the priest’s faith to misdirect him, but necessity is a bitch and the story sounded good. “I don’t know if we’ll be able to recover your skeleton, Father. It may be dust by now.”
The priest sighed. “A pity. And no help in catching the vandals.”
Quinton nodded at me and stepped a little to the side. “I’m OK,” he whispered.
I gave him a worried look but turned back to finish our job. “It’s helped more than you can guess,” I said, using the priest’s shifting attention as cover to withdraw the compulsion I’d created between us. “Thank you for letting us see your chapel.”
“It was my pleasure to help the church,” he said, looking relieved as the thin needles of persuasion dissipated. With luck the feeling would linger and he wouldn’t feel any need to question who had really been in his chapel tonight or why.
We avoided any protracted conversation and hurried off with our ghost in Carlos’s pocket. The necromancer led us to the heights of the castle walls to examine the ghost in the moonlight, but, unable to tell us where its bones had been taken or why, it wasn’t a helpful specter. It only confirmed the details of its death and complained of the pain Rui inflicted on it.
“Carving runes in the bone,” Carlos noted.
“That’s not good,” I said.
“What kind of ‘not good’?” Quinton asked, looking much better now that we’d walked and been in the fresh air for a while.
“The bones must be in tune with the correct spell,” Carlos said. “If the bones were not already in tune, then they must be carved or grafted to match the song of the spell. The only reason for taking on the extra work such bones require is to add an aspect to the drache that is not a normal part of the spell. Whatever survives the fire of the Dragão do Inferno will not live long, but sicken and die, and spread more disease.”
“Oh God . . .” Quinton said.
“Now you pray?”
“No, I’ve been praying since we got here, but the situation just gets worse.”
“And we still do not know where they are or where they will call their drache,” Carlos said.
“Can we do any more tonight?” I asked.
Carlos shook his head. “We had luck here, but there will be no accommodating priests roaming the stairs in Monforte or Évora.”
“I thought you said you’d already been there.”
“I have, but without Rui to guide them the first time, they may have to return.”
“The Capela dos Ossos in Évora has very limited hours—according to their Web site,” Quinton said. “Unless you feel like trying some breaking and entering in a major church in a fairly large city at midnight, we’d probably be better off going there first thing in the morning.”
Carlos’s mouth almost turned up enough to call the expression approval. “I agree. And your suggestion in the chapel was . . .” He paused as if having changed his mind about what he was about to say, then finished. “It was genius. But we have all expended too much energy today to face any of Rui and Purlis’s company with a hope of emerging unscathed. The morning will be soon enough.”
We returned to the Casa Ribeira. Seeing no one and finding the door unlocked, we headed upstairs to our rooms and retired to our respective beds without further discussion. We’d talked enough in the car and could sort out any details in the morning. The constant aching and itching of my injured hand was the least of our troupe’s discomforts. Quinton had continued to wince with sudden pains and had grown paler and more sleepy throughout the drive back. Even Carlos looked tired—mortality seemed to wear on him badly.