The first room was mostly a shop, with displays of dollhouse miniatures, doll clothes, and a plethora of accessories. It was all high quality—no cheap plastic, mass-produced junk—and a lot of it looked handmade. Layer on layer of ghostly children wandered through the displays. Behind a counter at the back were ceiling-high niches in which sat dozens of dolls and stuffed toys of every description and age, from near-new Barbies to ancient teddy bears and porcelain-headed ladies in fancy dresses. Most of them watched me with phantom eyes.
I walked up another flight of stairs to the hospital itself, where dolls and toys were taken in with loving care by the white-coated staff, who marked a number on the bottoms of their feet or tied a paper tag to the leg to identify them later and then carried them off to be “operated” on at white tables. Glass-fronted drawers held disembodied doll parts: heads, legs, arms, eyes. . . . It gave me the willies.
I was unnerved enough by the dismembered dolls that I jumped when Quinton spoke into my ear. “It’s a little disturbing, isn’t it?”
I whirled to glare at him. He caught me by the shoulders, saying, “God, I missed you,” and kissed me. It was a long, hard kiss that made my already wobbly knees go weak. Quinton had to haul me tight against his body so I wouldn’t slither to the floor and that was not at all disagreeable. Nearby a small child made a sound of disgust, which is the same in any language: “Eww . . .” We both gave the child—a little girl with a mop of short, dark curls—a stern look. She turned away to chase after her mother, saying something in Portuguese that was probably, “Those people are kissing!” because her mother laughed and shot us a curious glance.
Quinton stiffened in my arms, staring for a second at the little girl as she grabbed onto her mother’s hand.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, taking a small step back from him.
Quinton shook himself. “She looks so much like Soraia. . . .”
“Who?”
“My niece. My sister’s daughter. My father kidnapped her.”
“What?” I asked, appalled.
“That was my reaction. I’ll tell you as we go.”
Even angry and a bit shaken, he looked good to me. I hadn’t seen him in months. He’d cut his hair again, so it didn’t quite hit his shoulders, and had trimmed his beard much smaller and narrower, so he managed to look both shaggy and fashionable at the same time. His clothes were a little more fashion-conscious also, but not enough to stand out in a crowd of Europeans. He was carrying a small-brimmed black hat and a smaller version of his usual backpack that looked more like a portfolio or messenger bag.
We went downstairs together and Quinton paused to put on his hat as I slipped outside in the Grey to take a look around. I didn’t see a sign of anything immediately threatening, although the constant replay of Lisbon’s earthquake left me feeling disquieted.
FOUR
We walked out of the doll hospital and along the sidewalk toward a wide opening between the buildings on the west side of the square, making an effort to be casual when we both felt bleak and worried.
“Why did you pick that place to meet?” I asked. He was tense even while he did a pretty good imitation of a man in no hurry.
He paused to adjust his hat, cocking the brim down a little farther so his face was less exposed to the cameras dotted here and there throughout the public square. “About ninety percent of the agents working for my dad are male. They’d have been pretty easy to spot in there and I had been watching out the windows for anyone I recognized working the square. “Why did you go into the knitwear shop?”
“Is that what it was?” I replied. “I thought it was World of Sweaters.”
He gave a strained laugh, the darkness around us lightening for only a moment. “‘Malhas’ means ‘knits.’ So you were close.”
“I didn’t know you spoke Portuguese.”
“Only a little tourist pidgin. I looked it up. Why did you go into the shop?”
“I wanted to get a better look and more information without wandering aimlessly around a haunted plaza.”
“Haunted?”
“Yes. There was an earthquake here, remember? It killed thousands of people and knocked down most of downtown Lisbon at the time. The building that was here then is stuck in a loop, and I could see it falling, burning, and being swamped with water over and over. It’s very unpleasant.”
Quinton looked more unhappy than ever. “We’d better wrap up our business in Lisbon quickly, then.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
“How did you get here, if you don’t mind my asking? I mean, I didn’t give you any helpful hints on that, I know, and I’m sorry.”
“It wasn’t a problem. I went to Carlos.”
“I can’t say I’m surprised. I assume he came along.”
“He did. Now, tell me what’s going on.”
He ignored my request, giving a tiny shake of the head. “I’m not sure how happy I am about Carlos’s involvement. . . .”
I sighed. “He has a vested interest in the mages behind this business. I think he’ll be invaluable, even if he’s a bit obsessive and scarier than usual. Kind of like you’re being right now. Not that I blame you.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Only that I’d heard from you and needed to get here. He didn’t give me an option about his accompanying me and I wasn’t going to argue. He does have an interest in your father’s project and his focus on the Kostní Mágové is absolute.”
The previous year, Quinton had nearly died trying to stop his father’s mysterious project. James Purlis had persuaded someone in the black depths of the espionage community to fund what he called “the Ghost Division”—some kind of dreadful research that involved, among other things, capturing paranormals and vivisecting them to see how they ticked and if any of their abilities were useful to Papa Purlis’s plans. He wanted to see whether they could be made to work for him, or even if the source of their abilities could somehow be applied to someone already under his control. In the mess he’d left behind when Quinton shut down the Seattle end, Carlos was able to discover that Purlis wasn’t working this angle alone: He’d enlisted the help of an ancient cabal of bone mages who probably had their own agenda. Carlos had also said these Kostní Mágové were extremely dangerous and that he’d known them since he’d lived in Lisbon before the earthquake. It was apparent, now, that Purlis had either learned a few tricks from his captured paranormals since last July or worked out a much more advantageous arrangement with the Kostní Mágové. I’d already picked up a bit from Carlos about them, but I wanted more. I hadn’t pressed for it, knowing it was likely to come out once Quinton and I were able to talk to him in person.
Quinton made a noise in his throat. “I haven’t been able to keep as close track of my dad as I’d have liked,” he admitted, his expression growing tortured. “He gave me the slip a while ago and I haven’t seen him in the flesh since—I’ve just been following his spoor, so to speak. He’s been busy—he’s got small units all over Europe and the Near East and he’s traveled through all of them. He’s spread his resources thin, but it’s effective. I don’t think there’s any coincidence that when he arrives, shit happens—political unrest, riots, outbreaks of weird diseases. He was in Turkey right before the suicide bombings, in Greece just ahead of a series of financial riots, in Paris before a rash of anti-Semitic violence, just ahead of an outbreak of Avian flu in northern Germany, and on and on, more of the same with me always one step too far behind, trying to stop him or at least minimize his effect. I can’t believe I missed this business with Soraia. I should have been here sooner.”