“That’s eerie,” Quinton said.
“Do you have a camera?” I asked.
“I have the laptop—it has a camera and the battery is good.”
“Take a picture of the rocks. I want to find out if there’s anything more to know about these.”
Carlos was impatient with my request as Quinton grabbed his laptop and used the screen camera to take the photo. “Most likely the stones are merely convenient to where Rui is now—in Monforte.”
“What if they’re not?” I asked. “If we miss something at this stage, we may never catch up to them in time to stop their plan. Once the Hell Dragon is loose, our odds go down.”
He glared at me. “If we continue to linger, we shall have no chance of catching them at all.”
“Our chances aren’t great on that score no matter how you look at it. If we don’t have a backup, we’re screwed,” I snapped back.
He growled but didn’t reply.
By the time we were done arguing, Quinton had packed the laptop back into the bag and was ready to drive on. Carlos didn’t insist on further delay to pick up the bones, though I could tell it irritated him.
We pushed hard to reach Monforte and hoped the boy who’d been playing with dragons hadn’t paused to watch what happened.
Monforte was a village just off the IP2, but it had the unusual distinction of having seven churches to serve a listed population of three thousand people, a shrine, and the expansive Roman ruins on which the current town was built, as well as the remains of an encircling castle wall. It was quaint, well maintained, and haunted as hell. The churches weren’t the problem so much as the location. Armies had clashed in the fields nearby for millennia. Seen in the Grey, the soil of tiny, pastoral Monforte was red with blood.
We drove past a group of three small churches that climbed up the hill from the highway, a stone wall enclosing them and a steep path winding from the lowest to the highest, each drastically different from the others. The lowest one, sitting beside the highway like a mushroom, was a cross-shaped building with a central, cylindrical tower and small square projections on each side, all plastered smooth as a wedding cake and painted white with wide bands of deep yellow trim. The shape of it reminded me of Eastern Orthodox churches without the onion domes. Farther up the hill was a tall, narrow church with pointed square towers and peeling white paint that revealed hints of the stone underneath. At the top was a wide, low building with a crenellated roofline, plastered a newly painted white with the same deep yellow trim as the lowest church. The middle church looked drab compared to its neighbors that were so clean and bright that the white plaster glowed in the sunlight. On the road opposite the middle church tilted a tiny white and gold building with a cross on the roof over the date 1883, and a sign nearby that read RUA DO SENHOR DA BOA MORTE—Lord of Good Death Road.
We continued past the churches and the shrine to dying well and into the red-roofed village arrayed around the hill like the skirt of a ball gown. The steep, narrow road was interrupted by crossings that led to staircases instead of sidewalks as it wound up the hill to the heart of the village. We passed a grove of the ever-present olive trees and an apartment building with children’s playground equipment inside a white-painted wall. Then we turned and crossed suddenly into the old village itself, crumbling stone walls holding back the hillside behind squat buildings with red roofs and peeling paint. A modern steel staircase led from the side of the road up into the remains of an old castle through the embracing fortress walls. We drove past and around, into a small town square called Praça da República, where we parked the car and continued on foot, diagonally through the square toward the farthest of the church towers that faced the open plaza.
The streets were paved entirely in gray stone, and the sidewalks and central square in marble cobbles. Young lemon trees had been planted at regular intervals along the perimeter of the square, and the leaves gave a citrus fragrance to the air around the central fountain and its tiny potted palms. The buildings here were also white trimmed with wide bands of golden yellow. As we passed into the narrow street at the corner that led to our goal, we saw the Igreja Matriz do Monforte was painted the same way. It was a small, square two-story building with a single window above the door and a narrow three-story bell tower on one side. Just next to the bell tower was an even smaller, narrower building that bore a skull and crossbones over the narrow, arched doorway.
The church door was closed and we could hear the sound of the priest and parishioners within, praying aloud. We walked toward the tiny chapel of bones next door, past a rambling house in some state of reconstruction or renovation that had peeled back parts of its stucco to reveal old wood and stones beneath and release the musty smell of ancient plaster and rot into the sunlit air.
A slim monk in a long black robe stepped out of the chapel. He had something cradled in his arms and as he turned to close the door, the cowl of his robe fell back.
I felt as if I’d been stabbed in the gut.
“Rui,” Carlos said.
As if he’d heard him, Rui turned and looked at us. He made a gesture and my hand ached for a moment before I screamed in agony, falling to the cobbles as if I’d been sucked down by the earth itself.
Quinton threw himself down beside me, trying to scoop me into his arms while Carlos seemed to reach out for his old student as he had for Amélia when she held Quinton underwater.
But the bone mage had another trick ready. A wall of bones and rocks flew up between them, knocking Carlos back and disrupting his spell as he vanished from my sight.
Nearby, a two-stroke motorcycle revved its engine and though I could hear running feet, I couldn’t turn my head to see anyone but Quinton.
As suddenly as the pain and pulling had come on, they ended, and I sat up so fast, I clocked Quinton on the jaw with my forehead. I couldn’t see Carlos anywhere, but a handful of people had emerged from the church to see what was happening.
Quinton scooped me up and put me on my feet, saying, “Are you all right now?”
“Yes,” I said, leaning back against the partially deconstructed building to catch my breath. “We have to find Carlos.”
He held my good hand and we started forward, passing the curious churchgoers and climbing over the mess of uprooted cobbles and bones that now littered the road in front of the church in a straight line from side to side. The parishioners watched us go and turned as a body to return to the church, wearing puzzled expressions as we paid them no heed and offered no explanation. The priest had come to the door to usher them back inside and he, too, stared at us as we went past.
The street beside the church was as narrow as an alley and opened into a much wider road and a sudden blossoming of bigger streets and intersections at acute angles. A row of elderly men, sitting in plastic chairs beside a café that wasn’t open, stared down the road toward the green triangle of a park ahead. They muttered and gossiped to one another and looked us over with curious glances.
Quinton ran to the nearest one and asked, “Which way did the motorcycle go?” He clenched his hands in frustration and made a face, thinking until he could formulate the question in bad Portuguese. “Uh . . . Para onde foi a motocicleta?”
The old men exchanged glances, canvassed their opinions, and then pointed downhill toward the park.
“Obrigado!” Quinton called back as we ran toward the park and the swiftly diminishing sound of the unseen motorcycle.
The park was empty for no reason I could see and we found Carlos sitting on one of the benches, angry and a little dazed. He had pressed his left hand to the back of his head and there was blood dribbling slowly between his fingers.
“What happened?” I asked, sitting down next to him.