“They seem to know what we’ll do. I hadn’t thought Rui knew me so well . . .” he said.
“Maybe we have a spy in our midst?” Quinton suggested.
“Where? How?” Carlos demanded, his annoyance making the words snap and spark in the Grey like firecrackers and leave a sharpness in the air of the normal world that stank of burning sulfur. “We are the only guests at the house, and the family and workers have no time to spare for us.”
“And Nelia won’t betray you,” I added.
Carlos turned a narrow glare on me that was intense enough to force me back a step.
Quinton grabbed Carlos by the arm. “Don’t be an ass,” he said, turning the necromancer away from me. The force of Carlos’s anger doubled him over as if he’d been punched. “Anyone can see,” he said with a gasp, backing up to sit on the church steps and catch his breath. “Anyone. The way she looks at you . . .”
Carlos turned his head sharply away, closing his eyes a moment. “Is like the way you look at Blaine.”
“No. When I look at Harper, I don’t want to die for her. I’m only willing to.”
Carlos turned and looked out at the street for a moment before he turned back to both of us. “I pray that my indiscretion hasn’t destroyed all chance of stopping Rui and Purlis.”
“It’s not like there’s much to be done now, except get to Monforte and hope we’re not too late this time.”
THIRTY-TWO
Quinton found a route that took us north and east, avoiding Estremoz and a reported traffic accident that had brought the main route along IP2 to a standstill. It was longer, but I doubted we were losing any time if Purlis and Rui had gone the other way. The countryside was rugged and dry, dotted with standing stones, strange mounds, ruins, and tiny towns with a single street of low plastered buildings scattered along the edges of fields and groves of olive and orange trees. We passed by a cork plantation and the musty odor of the thick, spongy bark drying in barns off the roadside clung to the car for miles.
I could see dark flights of birds rising into the sky far ahead, flocking in momentary illusions of monsters and gods, then falling back toward the ground again. Ghost armies marched over the harvested fields and clashed in the roadside barrens, safely at a distance behind the glass and steel of the tiny car.
We were still a few miles away from Monforte when a dark shape exploded into the sky ahead.
“What was that?” I asked.
Quinton and Carlos both craned their necks and peered at the sky.
“I don’t know—another flock of birds?” Quinton asked. “It’s hard to see.”
“Drive faster,” Carlos said. “It came from the ground ahead.”
“Do you know what it is?”
“We all do.”
“What?” I asked.
He shook his head but kept his eyes on the sky, leaning forward from the backseat to stare over my shoulder.
The road dipped toward a bridge over a lazy curl of river and we sped along, flying for a moment as the slope dropped below the wheels. In the distance I saw the dark shape, like a mirage shimmering in the sun, turn in the sky and swoop back toward us, diving toward the land.
It vanished into the landscape just a mile or so ahead, shaking the earth for a moment. Then the air was still and unnaturally quiet except for the whine of our engine. A disturbance of dust hung in the air where the thing had crashed just off the road amid a ragged stand of cork oaks in a narrow band of ground between the highway and the river. The land was below the embanked road and partially hidden from view by scruffy shrubs and trees planted at the highway’s edge, but the late-summer heat had left them drooping and even with the river water, the screen of leaves was thin enough to see into the sunken field.
“It’s down,” I said, excitement and anxiety clutching my heart and lungs and leaving a silvery taste in my mouth.
As we approached, a second smaller shape leapt up from the ground and rocketed into the sky while a man-sized thing darted away into the emptiness of the Alentejano plains with the nasal scream of a two-stroke engine being hard pressed.
Quinton jerked the car to a stop off the side of the highway a few yards from where the plantings gaped and showed a group of stones that stood side by side over a circle of gravel amid the wildflowers and grass. We all scrambled out of the car and ran toward the stones and the lingering smell of gasoline exhaust and motor oil.
“Dirt bike,” Quinton said. Then he pointed across the river. “Must have been waiting on the other side of the water and took off across the next field.”
Carlos and I weren’t looking at the fields. I was staring at the stones—three taller than he was and one cut halfway down—while he looked into the sky.
“Night Dragon,” he said, and shoved us both to the ground as a shadow spread over us and then stooped like a bird of prey.
It made no sound and the shade of its passing was insubstantial like that made by a thin cloud passing the sun. But the effect of its claws scraping the gravel was not—two sets of three straight lines scored the small rocks on either side of us with a stinking chemical odor and trails of smoke.
We all scrambled to our feet the moment it was past and ran for the rocks, crouching to remain below them so the flying monstrosity would have to come down where the odds were in our favor. With the sun shining, it was hard to see the construct of bones and magic as it wheeled in the sky.
“Someone has been practicing,” said Carlos.
The Night Dragon swooped for us again, silent and leaving only the trail of its shadow in the sky.
“Avoid the claws,” Carlos said as he ducked out from the shelter of the stones.
“I remember,” I said, recalling the Night Dragon that Carlos and I had destroyed the previous year. The claw Carlos had picked up from the wreckage of the thing had smoked and dripped corrosive acid.
The shadowy construct tilted its wings to pursue Carlos and clipped one against the ground, pinwheeling as it lost control and crashed toward the rocks. It was much more solid than any of the previous versions and the ground quivered as it hit. Quinton and I ran in opposite directions as the nightmare beast plowed into the standing stones, dissolving into a scatter of bones, smoking claws, and the stink of rot.
“That felt a little too easy,” Quinton said.
“It wasn’t meant to harm us. The dreamspinner simply ran away before he could be caught here and left the creature to self-destruct,” Carlos said. “The drache would have fallen apart like the others.”
“Does that mean we got lucky?”
“Very. Chances are good the rest of the party is at Monforte. We may have a chance to stop them if we go before the boy can warn them. It’s a pity we won’t have time to collect the bones and deny them that resource if we hope to catch them.”
He started back to the car at a run and we followed, but I was the slowest.
“What is this place?” I asked, looking at the rocks over my shoulder.
“It’s a dolmen—ceremonial standing stones.”
“I know that, but look at the rocks themselves.”
They turned and saw what I’d seen.
The rocks, three just taller than a man making a jagged row and the fourth cut short later, huddled together at one side of an oval of gravel that stood at their feet. They seemed like unremarkable stones colored gray and tan with green lichen eating slowly on the tops until a cloud moved aside and the sun struck, leaving a deep red stain the color of blood splashed on the rocks. Another errant cloud passed by and the stain disappeared, leaving the rocks a simple gray again.