The box was still on the ground where Carlos had kicked it. I was a foot or two away, but it was only a step to return to it. I bent down and grabbed the wine crate, carefully turning it so as to scoop up the contents with it.
I glanced over my shoulder.
Eladio had drawn closer, and the golden sunlight glinted on a knife in his hand. Carlos shifted slightly as if looking for a way around the pool that didn’t force him to shorten the distance between himself and the advancing man. The only other route was past me and while I was working on the box, it wouldn’t be wise for Carlos to be too close to it or me.
I hurried and put the box on the table Quinton had been using, shoving the sweating wineglasses aside so they tumbled and smashed on the ground. I couldn’t give Carlos more room, but I could try to give him more time. I tore the lid away in my haste and grabbed the bundle of bones within, tied with sinew and bound in the ivory and black strands of bone magic.
“Come to me,” I said, feeling the spirit resist my demand and the barbed bone magic cut into my hands like blades.
I snapped one of the bones in two, clumsy with my bandaged finger, and a burst of shimmering light blinded me for a moment, but even dazzled, I could see Eladio still advancing. Carlos had barely moved, his head cocked to the side as if he saw something odd. While I appreciated that Carlos didn’t want to harm the man if the ghost was the real problem, I wished he’d at least . . . do something. “This is not right . . .” I heard Carlos say. He moved away from me, but I was focusing on the box of bones again and didn’t spare a moment to look up.
As I concentrated on the ghost, I broke the rest of the bones into pieces as fast as I could, panting with effort and the pain from the spell and my hand. “Go,” I ordered. “Go. You’re free. Get out of here.”
The silvery shape of a young man—the same thin, quivering, addicted man from whom I’d retrieved the priest’s wallet in a Lisbon alley—coalesced before me. He looked terrified. I ripped away the last lingering bits of the binding spell, kicking the box apart and letting it all fall, glittering, to the ground to dim and die away. Then I plunged my throbbing hands into the ghost’s shape, groping for the burning-hot sliver that held him in the memory of himself.
From the kitchen door behind me, Nelia screamed, “Não, Eladio! Não!”
I grabbed the core of the ghost and pulled it free, letting his tangled strands unwind and fall away.
The shivering phantom vanished with a sigh and I turned, breathing easier, too.
But Eladio didn’t stop coming forward and Carlos started walking toward him with his hands out. “You have no need to harm me,” he said. “Her heart is not mine.”
But Eladio wasn’t listening. Now the fury and jealousy in Eladio’s face burned hot instead of cold, and the color of his aura was no longer simple red, but dripping around him like visions of running gore and flashing with bolts of green and crimson.
“Oh no,” I whispered, starting to move toward Carlos.
His head came up sharply and then he looked back over his shoulder at me. He held up one hand as if to stop me running toward him. “Blaine, I’ve thought of a better way.”
Nelia had run halfway around the pool, but she was still too far away to stop Eladio any more than I could, on Carlos’s other side. We both shouted at once, “No!”
Carlos took one more step, turning his head back to face Eladio as the other man lunged forward, closing the gap between them. Clutching Carlos’s arm with his free hand, Eladio stabbed the knife upward into the necromancer’s chest, just below the arch of the sternum—upward, just like another blade had cut into Carlos’s heart ages ago.
I felt it in my own chest and gagged on the sensation as I reached for Carlos and he staggered back.
Eladio spoke the same words Amélia had shrieked at Quinton: “She is not for you.” He jabbed the knife into his rival’s chest again and Carlos doubled over, collapsing.
Nelia gave a wordless shriek and threw herself at Eladio, clawing and kicking at him while other members of the family began to run into the courtyard from the kitchen.
Carlos fell on his back, curled around the gushing wound in his chest, his hands clutched over it as if he could stanch the bleeding with the pressure of his fingers, an expression of shocked surprise on his face.
He convulsed and rolled to his side, his lips moving and his fingers scrabbling across the stones soaked in the blood that ran from his wounds. I fell to my knees beside him, feeling the gash in his chest as if it were in my own, and feeling a breathless choking sensation of blood rising in my throat.
Red foam bubbled from Carlos’s mouth and he choked, gasping for breath he couldn’t catch. His body shuddered with every beat of his heart as it pumped blood to spurt onto the courtyard slates in a widening swath of red. Black needles of magic sparked a moment at his fingertips and then fell away, failing, fading. . . .
The family converged on Eladio and Nelia, pulling them apart, surrounding Eladio—who gave no resistance now—and holding Nelia back as she howled her grief.
Carlos fought for air and I leaned over him, racked with his agony. His eyes turned to me and I knew he could see me there, but no sound escaped him other than the choking rattle of his borrowed life flowing out on his breath.
The pang of his death shook me, and I convulsed over him, gasping and choking for a moment before being taken by a quick-fading dizziness that left me shivering with sweat as his life passed swiftly. It was over so fast, I thought he must have been closer to death all along than I’d ever imagined. Shaking, I struggled to my feet and backed away from his still body where it lay on the edge of the drop into the valley. His blood ran into the pool, making red swirls in the water Eladio had skimmed clear that morning. I stared, panting, at Carlos’s face, his eyes and mouth open, blood and foam at the corner of his lips.
THIRTY-FOUR
Quinton had been at my side in moments, pulling me to him and away from the terrible scene in front of me. My clothes were soaked in blood, my legs red with it and my arms smeared in gore to the elbow. I looked more like a murderer than Eladio, who turned white and sank to his knees, huddling in silence and shivering as we waited for the police.
We were up until midnight. Everyone who had come to dinner and some who had joined the scene later to fetch their families or employees were forced to stay until the territorial police allowed them to go. The crime was so obvious and pathetic that the police barely questioned anyone after Eladio confessed, his voice calm with quiet mortification. Nelia raged at him at first and then sank into weeping grief so profound she couldn’t stand. One of the family—a burly man with cowlicked hair—carried her away. The family seemed to have agreed she shouldn’t stay at the house.
As for Quinton and me, we followed the police back to Estremoz when they removed Carlos’s body to the mortuary. As the night grew deeper, I kept expecting him to sit up, but he never did.
The police officer who’d accompanied us back to town knew where we could find a guest room even at such a late hour, and it wasn’t until I was standing in the bathroom, seeing the dried red-brown stains of blood on my body, that I started to fall apart. I had noticed and cataloged everything as it had happened, but it was a blur now, a nightmare of gore-soaked fragments that played over and over as I blinked in the light of the washroom: Carlos standing calmly, turning to me; the knife; Eladio’s furious face seen over Carlos’s shoulder; the shock of the blade stabbing into flesh; the touch of death, and the heart that beat only because of what I’d done at Carmo pumping blood onto the stones around the pool; Carlos’s lips moving without sound; his hands twitching in the rushing tide of blood from his body; Nelia screaming; and then the stillness; Carlos’s eyes turning to mine a moment before life ceased.