Revenant (7 page)

“I’m following you,” I said.

“Sam married a Portuguese guy. Well, he’s half Dutch, but that doesn’t matter. Piet Rebelo. His dad was with the diplomatic corps and they met while she was taking care of our grandparents in Rhode Island and he was visiting some of his family that lived there—lots of Portuguese in Rhode Island. Piet is kind of like me—went into the family business in a manner of speaking. He works with one of the ever-changing EU trade-negotiation groups. Travels in fits. So . . . he’s currently out of town on business and Sam didn’t want to get the local cops involved in this because, while the Portuguese authorities are pretty serious about crimes involving children, she was worried about Dad’s government contacts hearing about it. She was afraid he’d find out through them if she’d reported it and maybe do something to her or Piet or the baby.”

“Baby?”

“She has a baby boy—Martim. He’s almost two and Sam was thinking about going back to work part-time. Soraia’s six, so she’s in school a lot of the time now and that makes it easier on Sam, but taking care of kids is a big job and Sam fears that if she calls attention to herself, Dad will find a way to spin it so she looks like a negligent parent instead of a victim. Neither of us thinks it’s a coincidence that Dad took Soraia right after Piet left town, so even if Sam had called him and he’d turned right around to come home, it would have been a day or more before Piet got here, and that’s extra time to Dad’s advantage.”

“So your sister didn’t call her husband? That’s kind of strange.”

“Not for Sam. She’s the supercompetent one. She rarely calls for help and she couldn’t even reach Piet initially. By the time I got in
touch with her, she’d decided she didn’t want to let him know because he’d insist on getting the government and police involved. Sam believes that would play into Dad’s hands in a worst-case scenario and put her in a position of being unable to do anything herself. She doesn’t want to think the worst, but she does. Dad is up to something terrible.”

I felt a little odd about the situation. On the one hand, Purlis was dangerous and crazy enough to do everything his children feared. On the other, going after him alone and without any help from the police was going to be rough. But this wasn’t a typical kidnapping, so Sam might have been right in feeling that the police would be more of a hindrance than a help. The most important thing was that there was a six-year-old girl in the hands of a man I thought wasn’t safe or stable.

I nodded. “I wouldn’t put anything past your father.”

“Me, neither. But the thing that worries me is that I haven’t been seeing much sign of the paranormal side of his project and I’m afraid Soraia may be why.”

I frowned at him. “In what way?”

“I have a bad feeling that whatever he’s up to is just waiting on some triggering event, and the timing of this makes me think Soraia is meant to be part of that.”

I felt ill and fell silent, thinking about all the horrible things magic could make of a six-year-old girl. . . .

SIX

I
t was nearly five o’clock when we disembarked in Carcavelos. The houses were mostly plastered and painted in soft colors like smaller versions of the grand Baroque buildings I’d seen in Lisbon, but the town reminded me of Manhattan Beach, an upper-middle-class beach suburb of Los Angeles. The architecture and the light were totally different, but the laid-back surfer kids, the well-heeled family houses in yards filled with shaggy palm trees behind stuccoed walls covered in purple bougainvillea, and a practical but recent-model car in the driveway were entirely familiar. The sidewalks were stone tile here, too, and, as Quinton had said, the street signs were mostly plaques mounted on the corners of buildings at the intersections. Only a few major streets with no convenient location for such signs had the kind of signboards I was more familiar with. I also found it strange that the stop signs read
STOP
and not some other word.

Quinton watched me puzzle over them. “It’s the universal traffic sign—everyone uses it.”

I felt quite provincial for not knowing that and I think I blushed,
but it was hard to be sure since although it was cooler on the ocean coast than it had been in downtown Lisbon, I could no longer kid myself that the air was less than warm. I’d been too long in the cool, moist air of the Pacific Northwest and had lost my California-girl tolerance of the heat.

We walked around for a while, trying to figure out where Sam’s house was, since neither of us had been there and we didn’t have the convenience of a cell phone with GPS navigation. We found a shop that sold trinkets and books for tourists to read on the beach, bought a local map, and asked the way to the international school, which Quinton knew was quite close to Sam’s house. The clerk directed us to Saint Julian’s with a lot of hand gestures and English that wasn’t quite as good as his speed of spitting it out.

We walked down the tree-lined Avenida Jorge V, past a long stretch of empty land on one side and houses on the other. An old stone wall painted with fading graffiti separated the pedestrian walkway from the vacant acreage that rolled lower than the street level. The area beyond the wall wasn’t cultivated or maintained except in a very basic way, so it didn’t seem to be a park. The tourist map identified the area as a former
quinta
—an estate in this case that had once been the vineyard and country home of a Portuguese nobleman. The school was housed in the old manor house, according to the tourist guide, so we were heading in the right direction. The slightly overgrown area and the trees made for a pleasant walk in the gently weeping music of the Grey—a gentler version of the sound in Lisbon—though I’m not sure either of us appreciated it. The magical energy of the area was less busy, swirling like currents in a lazy stream and sparking light greens, clear blue, and lemon yellow, which was a relief after so much horror lining the streets of downtown Lisbon. The area was mostly ghostless, but I supposed that a place that had
been used only for agriculture for a few hundred years hadn’t acquired the depth of life and death that towns and cities do.

After a very long block, we turned and crossed the street to follow a smaller road into the residential area. The houses were all different from one another in size and grandeur. Some were huge, two-storied cubes with balconies that sat in the middle of massive walled yards, while others were narrow at the front and ran deep into a small yard like a shoe box. The only thing the houses had in common was plaster. Every house—even the few that were obviously built of stone—was covered in a coat of painted plaster under a red clay tile roof. One impressively large house and its surrounding wall were painted the same bright magenta as the bougainvillea that flowered in the yard next door, but most were painted in softer colors. Not every house had a wall, but it was common enough that those without were the noticeable exception.

Sam’s house had a wall and palm trees, but I couldn’t tell anything more about the place from the distance at which we had paused. I sank a bit into the Grey, while Quinton kept an eye on the area in the normal world. The illuminated corona of Sam’s house was spiked with jagged red bolts of anger that seemed at odds with the gleaming bands of bright blue that curled around the house and yard and drifted up over the edges of the wall like a cloud. Streaks of black and white that looked like old barbed wire made paths around the outside of the wall, cutting through the blue only at the front gate in thin traces.

I eased back. “I don’t see any sign of watchers—paranormal or otherwise—but there’s a remnant of something I’d like to get a closer look at. Do you see anything?”

“No. Dad must be very confident.”

“That’s not reassuring.”

“No, it really isn’t. I hope Sam’s all right. It’s been a couple of days. . . .”

“The house looks otherwise normal, but we’ll know more up close,” I said.

We walked down the street toward the house, hand in hand like a couple of lovers out for a stroll. Nothing was interested in us, except a cat that sat on the top of a wall and watched us with a show of indifference. We crossed the street toward Sam’s house but leaving enough room to approach at an angle without going straight through the front gate. I stopped again to drop into the Grey and look more closely at the tracks of magic someone had left behind.

Correction: two someones. The two strands of energy residue weren’t identical, though they were very similar. I hadn’t seen magical signatures quite like them before. They weren’t a spell, but the residue itself was shaped into knotted and jagged lines that resembled gouges in wax or clay more than calligraphy—they seemed incised on the surface of the Grey, though they didn’t react magically to my inspection or prodding in any way. It almost seemed as if the people who’d caused them trod more heavily on the Grey than other creatures of magic, whose usually thin and fluid tracks faded swiftly. The black threads felt cold and smooth, but with an edge of grit to them, the twining white more angular and brittle. I closed my hand around one and pulled a little. It snapped and crumbled away, leaving a fading dust on the silvery surface of the mist world. Once broken, the rest of the line began to fade as well. I touched the other one, finding it a little warmer to the touch and rougher on the surface, though it was equally fragile when crushed in my hand.

I stepped back from the Grey and leaned my shoulder against the wall outside Sam’s house for a moment, thinking as Quinton watched me.

“So . . . ?”

“I can’t figure it. Two magical people have been here and they walked around the house like they were casing it, but the traces they left seem to be magically inert and fragile. And those traces are weird in their own right, being two colors that twine together—black and a creamy white color I’m not familiar with. Compound energy rarely remains in such distinct strands—it tends to blend. But these are more like . . . threads of disparate energy twisted together. Really odd.”

“Sam said our father had two other people with him—a man and a woman—whom she didn’t feel good about and who didn’t speak or come close,” Quinton said. “I’d assume the marks belong to them.”

“I can buy that—I never saw anything like this from your dad, but I can’t figure out these people’s intention or what they may have done.”

“These traces don’t seem to be a trap or a spell or anything like that?”

I took off my hat and paused to smooth my hair back into the scarf tied at my nape as I thought about it. Then I shook my head. “No, they don’t feel like anything active or even lying in wait. They shatter easily, too, and I don’t feel any movement of magical energy when I break them, as I would with a spell, ward, or trap of any kind. It’s like snapping a burned twig and getting a bit of charcoal on your hand, but nothing more.”

“That sounds a lot creepier than you may think.”

I had to shrug. I’m no longer sure what’s creepy to someone more normal than me. “I think it’s some sort of deliberate residue—like graffiti—but it can’t be meant for us, since neither of us recognizes it. But I don’t believe there’s anything here to cause us concern. Let’s go in and talk to your sister.”

Deciding we had nothing to lose, we went to the front gate and pressed a button on a call box mounted to the faded stone wall. Through the iron gate I could see a small slice of the front of the house, which was built of the same material as the wall. The upper story was plastered, but the lower was not and the tawny stone had the mellow, soft look of rock that’s been in the weather a long time.

I heard something mechanical move and looked up to see a small camera in a steel housing turn our way from the top of the gatepost, sheltered by palm fronds. The gate buzzed and fell open a half inch. We glanced at each other and walked into the yard, closing the gate behind us.

The front yard had been cultivated into a neat lawn bounded by the palms and a close-growing row of prickly pink rosebushes that hugged the wall. The perfume of jasmine drifted on a breeze from the sea that snuck over the wall behind the house. We got only a few steps up the laid-stone path before the front door opened and a young brunette stepped out with a baby in her arms.

“Jay!” she shouted, running toward us as fast as the jiggling weight of the baby would allow. I had to remind myself that only I and my lover’s underground friends called him “Quinton”; to most of the rest of world he was either James Jason Purlis, deceased, or Reggie McCrea Lassiter, depending on whom you asked.

Sam was slim and short—her head wouldn’t have come up to my cheek. I stood still and watched her in silence as she closed the distance to her brother, and I thought that they looked more alike than I would have expected even of siblings. She moved awkwardly, as if her knees and ankles didn’t work quite right, and yet her demeanor was confident, the energy around her predominantly cool and calm with only threads and occasional sparks of orange anxiety and scarlet anger.

“Hey, short-stuff!” Quinton replied, removing his hat, his face alight at seeing her even in these circumstances.

She stopped short in front of him and raised her eyebrows—the expression was exactly like one of her brother’s. “‘Short-stuff’? Just for that, you get to hold Martim—he’s wet. You have spectacularly bad timing, big brother.”

“At least it’s some kind of spectacular,” he said, returning the hat to his head and accepting the squirming bundle of baby, who began to wail the moment he was no longer in his mother’s arms. “Oh boy, you weren’t kidding. He
is
wet,” Quinton said, holding the baby out in front of him.

Sam gave him a hard look and scooped Martim back onto her hip. “That’s not how you hold a baby.”

Quinton grinned at her. “I know, but now I’m not the one holding him.”

“Sneaky, big brother. Very sneaky. Come on inside and we’ll change him.”

“We?”

“Yes. It’s your penance.” She looked at me. “You must be Harper.”

I nodded. “I am. And I’m terrible at changing babies, unless you mean in some existential kind of way.”

Sam forced a laugh, her aura jumping a little. She was trying very hard to make the scene look good for the neighbors, but playing nice with a stranger was difficult under the circumstances. “You don’t have to change anything. You look exactly as I knew you would.”