Quinton couldn’t seem to get a grip on the idea of his father’s missing leg. “You’re sure it was a prosthetic? He wasn’t just limping from some other problem with the knee?”
Sam rolled her eyes and gave him an exasperated look. “I did actually finish my medical degree, Jay. I know a cheap prosthetic when I see one.”
“I just don’t get it. . . . It was fine when I saw him last.”
“When was that?” I asked.
He bit his lip and frowned at the floor, thinking. “Must be four or five months ago, about the time he was in Turkey. I lost track of him there, but I was able to stay on top of his assistants and follow his trail.”
“Maybe it was a false trail,” I suggested. “He may have known you—or someone else—was watching him and created another series of events to follow while he did something that redamaged the leg.”
“It’s possible. . . . I just . . . What did he do?”
I shrugged and Samantha mirrored me. “You said he’d had surgery on his knee,” Sam started. “Dozens of things can happen to a knee if the patient isn’t careful with it early on. And our father is certainly the sort of man who plunges into things without too much worry about the potential damage.”
Quinton was disturbed. “I suppose. I’m still a bit thrown by it, though. I have a bad feeling. . . .”
I’d had a bad feeling about James Purlis for a long time and this was only increasing my alarm with the situation. “This particular line of inquiry isn’t helping us find Soraia,” I said. “While it may be relevant—your father rarely does anything that’s not part of a larger plan—we can’t get any closer to him with only this information. We need something else.” My words sparked an idea in my head. “Did he leave anything? You said he brought presents for the kids. There could be a clue there.”
Sam handed Martim to Quinton and got clumsily to her feet again. “I’ll get them. I thought it wasn’t appropriate to let the children open them without their father around, since we weren’t near either of their birthdays and it’s still three months to Christmas. Dad didn’t seem to like that, but I didn’t give him a choice about it. By that time I was starting to be very uncomfortable with his presence—and that of his friends. I asked him to leave a few minutes later and then I took Soraia to school. . . .” Her eyes reddened as she said it, getting misty with tears, but she sniffed, rubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand, and turned to fetch the packages. “This will only take a minute. . . .”
The ghosts seemed to swirl around her as she left the room as if they all felt her passage and turned to look. It was an odd reaction, especially since she was oblivious to them and they didn’t actually turn toward her. She had some kind of weight in the Grey that was unusual.
I glanced at Quinton and found him watching me. “What do you think?”
“I think your sister is the calmest woman I’ve ever met. I’d be throwing a screaming fit if someone had kidnapped my daughter.”
“No, you wouldn’t. You would be thinking about how to hunt them down and kill them.”
“Like you are?” I asked, but I had to concede that point. “All right. I probably would.”
“Are you thinking that things didn’t go as she says?”
“No. I think they went exactly as she described them. I’m just surprised to see her so collected. It’s been three—or is it four days—and she apparently hasn’t heard any more about her missing daughter, but she’s sitting here, talking calmly to us about it.”
“That’s just how Sam is. She took care of our grandparents—Mom’s folks—when they were . . . declining. And she finished her medical degree at the same time. Sam is what the English would call ‘a brick.’ She’s totally unflappable.”
“And what happened to her legs?” I asked, uncomfortable but unwilling to let it slide.
“She was in a bus accident when we were kids. Crushed her legs, did a bunch of damage to her spine, but she survived and the damage was rehabilitated up to a point. It just didn’t come back quite as well as everyone hoped. Sam got to a stage of exasperation where she called a halt to the surgeries and experiments and said she’d just live with it. And she does, but that’s partially a credit to our grandparents for supporting her and looking after her when our mom and dad weren’t able to. That’s why she spent so much time taking care of them, later—it was like . . . coming full circle.”
“I still don’t understand what happened to your mother. She’s still alive, isn’t she?”
“She is, but—”
Quinton cut himself off when Sam came back into the room with an armload of wrapped boxes. “Good God, it is Christmas!” he said.
“Three for each of them—two Christmas and one birthday,” Sam said. “You can tell by the wrapping.”
“I think we’d better unwrap them and see what Dad left.”
“Agreed,” said Sam, putting the gifts down on the slab of unstained wood that served as a coffee table. “I’ll put them back together later if they prove to be genuine presents and not something . . . else.”
With three of us, it took less than two minutes to open all the packages. The gifts for Martim were generic baby things—a stuffed animal we decided was a platypus, a clattering box with doors that opened and closed to reveal various bells and rattles, and a package of baby-sized T-shirts—but Soraia’s gifts were a bit creepy. There was a very old china-headed doll whose face bore a watchful expression, a large smoky quartz crystal run through with black shards that hung from an ornate silver cap and chain, and a small flute-like instrument made of a smooth white material with an air hole on the top that looked like someone had taken a bite of it.
Quinton had unwrapped that one and he started to hand it to me. I leaned away from it as the jagged, black-and-white energy that writhed around it surged toward me. “No. I don’t want to touch that with my bare hands. Not until I can get Carlos to take a look at it.”
“Why?” Sam asked.
“It’s magical and whatever type of magic it has is all too eager to attach itself to me. That’s a bad sign, since it has no interest in either of you or the baby, so my best guess is that what it’s after is a person with a touch of the Grey. I’m guessing Soraia is a little . . . unusual. Is she prone to seeing things that you can’t see? Does she have imaginary friends?” I asked.
Sam nodded. “She does, but I thought that was just the sort of thing all little girls do when they suddenly have a little brother to compete with.”
“I didn’t do that,” said Quinton.
“I’m not a little brother,” Sam replied. “Besides, you had all those fun camping and hunting trips with Dad. You didn’t need an imaginary friend.”
“Do I hear some resentment there?”
“No. It’s simply a fact that your every waking hour that wasn’t spent in school or in front of some bit of technology was spent on what were, in essence, training missions with our father. If you had time for an imaginary friend, it would have been at night, in your sleeping bag, while you devised ways to escape from Camp Purlis.”
Quinton’s face looked as if she’d punched him in the gut. “Sam . . . I’m sorry.”
She closed her eyes and took a long breath before opening them again. “Don’t be. I was mad sometimes, when we were kids, but, really, I got the better deal. Just look at our lives. Look at us. I am so much better off. I have a family I love and can be with every day, in the open, like a normal person. I have a wonderful job—when I’m not chasing toddlers—a wonderful husband who works normal hours when he’s home, and a wonderful house whose front door isn’t camouflaged to blend into the landscape. It’s taken you years to find Harper and be together, and you still have to sneak and hide and live in the shadows. It may be a life you like, but not me.”
“I don’t like it. And I don’t want it. But until this business with Dad is over—”
“I know. But will this be the end of it? What are you going to do once you find him and Soraia? Kill him?”
“No!” Quinton was aghast.
Sam shook her head, her eyes once again suspiciously red and wet. Her aura jumped with sudden scarlet sparks. “Then it will never be over. Dad will stop plotting and maneuvering and manipulating when he’s in his grave and not one minute before.”
“You think I should . . . ?”
“I’m not saying you should kill him. But I’m not saying you shouldn’t, either. He’s a monster. He took my child. He tried to give her that thing your girlfriend won’t even touch. He used you, and when you resisted, he almost killed you. He had our mom locked up in a psychiatric hospital. He is not a person who should be running loose in the world, but you can’t lock him up and be sure he’d stay there. The only other choice is to keep hiding. How do you want to live, Jay? That’s the only thing I’m saying.” I took note of everything she said, but I didn’t interrupt—this wasn’t my conversation.
Quinton put the flute on the table and rubbed one of his hands over his face and into his brown hair. “There has to be some other solution. I almost shot him in Seattle—I did shoot him, but I mean I almost shot him dead and Harper stopped me. I don’t want to be a murderer, no matter how terrible he is. I just . . . It was something I couldn’t live with at the NSA and I won’t bring that back down on myself. I don’t want to kill people, not even by remote control, through blinds and cutouts and a dozen layers of protocol that turned an elegant little programming problem into a weapon. I don’t want . . . that. That is no better a life than hiding and skulking. I don’t want to start a new life waist-deep in blood—anyone’s blood and especially not my father’s. He’s a villain, but killing him would not make me a hero.”
Sam threw her arms around him, catching Martim as well in her embrace. “Oh, Jay! I’m sorry, that’s not what I mean at all. I don’t want that, either. I am so sorry. I am . . . I’m. . . . I just want it to end! I want my daughter back. I just . . . want her back so much. . . .” It was as close to a breakdown as I had seen from Sam, although still very contained, and I wondered if being “a brick” was really a good thing for the brick. The baby didn’t seem to care for it, either, making squeals of protest at being squashed between the two adults.
Quinton clung to Sam with his free arm, saying, “I know. I know . . .” over and over.
I noted that Sam had avoided any further discussion of the idea that her daughter might be in touch with the Grey and I shifted my own focus to something productive. I used the stuffed toy to shove the flute back into its box and then put the lid on it while the siblings cried on each other’s shoulders. It wasn’t that I wasn’t affected by the scene and had no stake in it—I had a big one—but there was nothing I could do or say. It was their moment, and interrupting it to say, “Your daughter is probably psychic or some kind of magic user” wasn’t appropriate. I found the horrible flute increasingly disturbing, so I dealt with that, instead. I felt better once the flute was back in its box, and Quinton and Sam both sat back, looking a little relieved themselves.
As I put the package on the table, a tapping came on the front window. We all looked toward it, but only I saw the old vineyard manager standing on the other side, waving for me to come out to the yard. I stood up. “I think there’s something that the resident ghost wants us to see.”
SEVEN
Brother and sister followed me out of the house, Sam carrying Martim on her hip as he gurgled happily about going outdoors. I walked around to a shaded spot next to the wall where the ghost was waiting. He pointed to the ground. “Can you hear the noise?” he asked.
I concentrated on listening and, in the somber song of the Grey, I could hear an odd thread of melody, thin and high. Like a bird or a piccolo.
I stooped and looked around in the Grey, trying to locate the sound. I closed my eyes and moved my head until I heard the sound more clearly. Then I opened my eyes. The wall was directly in front of me. I humphed in surprise. How could a wall make sound?
The ghost knelt down next to me and pointed to the bottom of the wall, obscured in the prickly canes of the rosebushes. “There. It doesn’t belong here.”
I had to lie down to see the chink in the wall. It passed all the way through the wall and was wide enough for me to slide my forefinger into with plenty of room to spare. A current of magic jolted me like an electric shock, but rather than knocking me back, it seemed to pull me forward. I yanked my hand away, pushing myself violently out of the edge of the Grey.
I knocked into Quinton’s legs. He reached to pull me back to my feet, giving me a quick once-over. “You all right?”
I nodded, brushing soil and grass off the front of my blouse and skirt. “Just shocked. There’s something in a chink in the wall down there, but I can’t get it—it’s very powerful.”
“Could I try?”
“I’m not sure that’s wise. . . .”
But he had knelt down and was already stretching himself out on the ground. “I see it. Just a sec . . .” he said, pulling a tool from his pocket and unfolding it into a pair of narrow pliers. Even in much nicer clothes than his usual jeans, T-shirt, and coat, he still had pockets full of useful things.
In a moment, Quinton got to his feet and held up another small white cylinder. “It’s the twin to the one Dad gave Soraia.”
He held the tiny flute out, clasped in the pliers’ jaws. It was very similar but not actually a twin. The mouthpiece was a little different and the tone holes were not in quite the same placement. I thought the slight bend in the tube went the opposite way, but without opening the box, I couldn’t be sure. I’d not only left the box in the living room; I had no intention of opening it again without Carlos around. This flute was also dirty, and it was the dark, rubbed-in soil that made the difference, revealing a grain I hadn’t seen on the clean specimen.
“It’s a bone flute,” I said. “They both are. From nearly identical bones, I think.”
“What a terrible gift for a child,” said the ghost.
Just behind him, Sam said the same thing.
I peered at the ghost. “Why? I can tell it’s a bad object, but why specifically a bad gift for a child?”
“They call Coca. They bring bad luck upon the child so it will be carried off by monsters.”
“What’s Coca?” I asked.
But it was Sam who answered. “Coca? It’s a dragon—a sort of Portuguese boogeyman. I sing the song to Martim sometimes when he’s being really difficult. Dorme, menino,” she began singing, “dorme agora, ou o Coca vem te comer. Basically it’s ‘Be quiet, little one, go to sleep, or the Coca will come and get you.’”
“Oh, that’s a lovely sentiment,” I said.
“About as nice as any fairy tale with girls in glass coffins and witches who eat kids,” Sam shot back in an unusual flash of temper. She calmed herself and continued. “The legend says Saint George killed Coca, but it’s really a fertility thing—every year there’s a festival where the knight is supposed to kill the dragon, and if he doesn’t, the crops will fail. What does that have to do with my daughter?”
“The ghost says this flute calls Coca to take children away—though in this case I think it was the other way around,” I said.
The old man ghost looked away, as if he were about to cry. “The poor girl. You must find her quickly. Bruxos who make such things, they cannot have any good in mind for her.”
“I’m inclined to agree.” I looked at the ground, noticing that a bit of the black-and-white residue left by Purlis’s companions had been pulled through the hole with the flute. I addressed the ghost. “I know who put it there. But did they make it, also?”
The ghost shrugged. “I cannot say. The ways of bruxos . . .”
I nodded. “Thank you. Again.”
He nodded himself away.
Quinton was waiti
ng patiently for me to return my attention to the living. Sam was eyeing me a bit askance. I guessed that my tendency to talk to what looked like empty air disconcerted her. But she was more worried by the flute Quinton was holding.
“Another one? Who put it there and why would they do that?”
“Is there a gate near this location?” I asked.
Sam nodded. “The alley gate is just beyond the roses.”
“Then my guess would be that your father’s creepy companions put it here. It makes a noise in the Grey that was probably supposed to lure Soraia out to this part of the garden so they could snatch her. It turned out they didn’t have to, but they couldn’t come back for it and risk meeting you again after they’d taken her, so they left it behind. They probably thought you’d never find it. I’m willing to bet it’s unique in some way we can try to track down.”
“And we’ll probably need Carlos for that, I’m betting,” Quinton said.
“Well, he is the local expert on bits of dead things.” I turned to Sam. “We need to take both of these with us and show them to a friend who might be able to tell us where they came from or who made them. And that may help us find Soraia.”
“May?”
“It’s not a certainty. It seems likely, but I’ll admit, I am making an educated guess here.”
Sam chewed on that thought for a moment, shifting the baby on her hip without conscious thought. Obviously, I still wasn’t quite a sure thing for her. She loved and believed her brother, but it’s a little hard to take seriously a woman who throws herself down on the ground to talk to ghosts, I suppose.
“It’ll be all right,” Quinton assured her. “I know all this sounds a bit crazy, but I told you about Harper and you know I wouldn’t lie to you. She knows what she’s doing.”
Sam looked at him. “I know. I know and I trust you, but it is somewhat hard to swallow. . . .”
“You didn’t have any problem with what Dad may be up to, but you choke on the idea of a woman who talks to ghosts? Sam . . .” Quinton was disappointed and shook his head.
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