Revenant Read online

  Also by Kat Richardson

  GREYWALKER

  POLTERGEIST

  UNDERGROUND

  VANISHED

  LABYRINTH

  DOWNPOUR

  SEAWITCH

  POSSESSION

  ANTHOLOGIES

  MEAN STREETS

  (WITH JIM BUTCHER, SIMON R. GREEN, AND THOMAS E. SNIEGOSKI)

  ROC

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014

  USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China

  penguin.com

  A Penguin Random House Company

  First published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  Copyright © Kathleen Richardson, 2014

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Richardson, Kat.

  Revenant: a Greywalker novel/Kat Richardson.

  p. cm—(Greywalker; 9)

  ISBN 978-0-698-14560-3

  1. Blaine, Harper (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women private investigators—Fiction. 3. Man-woman relationships—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3618.I3447R48 2014

  813'.6—dc23 2014008562

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  Contents

  Also by Kat Richardson

  Title page

  Copyright page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  EPILOGUE

  Author’s Note

  This one is for my fans and minions, especially Thea and Eric Maya—Thing One and Thing Two—with many thanks.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d like to thank some people for being awfully good sports: Maggie Griffin; Robin (R. K.) McPherson for notes about Black Ops and bones; the brothers Bara and my first agent, Steve Mancino, for being much nicer than their namesakes here. Colleen Lindsay and Dana Kaye for introducing me to Maggie. Jane Haddam (Orania Papazoglou) for letting me pick her brain about Portugal and the Capela dos Ossos in Évora. Liz Argall as well as trusty friends Elisabeth Shipman and Nancy Durham for beta reading. Laura Anne Gilman, Barbara Ferrer, and Monica Valentinelli for being indefatigable cheerleaders and ass kickers. Wonder agent Sally Harding and the crew at the Cooke Agency. Anne Sowards and the team at Roc—you make me look good! The enormously talented Chris McGrath for the best cover ever! And chief minions Thea and Eric Maya for going through every single volume of the Greywalker saga to find the continuity errors.

  Last, but never least, my husband for putting up with me and taking up the slack while I was busy writing this book. I love you.

  PROLOGUE

  Death doesn’t frighten me. We are old friends by now. But just knowing death doesn’t mean I seek it. Some people do. Some even reside there, but that’s not for me. For me, it’s an occupational hazard. I’m a Greywalker. I dance along the high wire between the realms of the living and the dead, in the strange intersection called “the Grey,” where ghosts dwell and monsters are real and the fire of magic sings in hot lines of power, gleaming like neon in rain-slicked night that continues all the way to the bottom of the well of the world.

  But that’s not what my business card says—HAVE GHOST; WILL TRAVEL. No, mine just reads HARPER BLAINE, PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR. I wanted that job and I worked to get it. The other . . . That just happened one day when an angry man beat my head in. It would have happened anyway; he just accelerated the process. I’ve died and come back three times and each brings me closer to the last, and each time I wake changed. I have no control over it—it just is. I suspect that my next tango with death will be my last.

  So I work for ghosts and monsters and sometimes for the people I love. And that’s where things get weird. Because a little more than a year ago I wouldn’t have expected my lover to leave me within the next six months to pursue his father across Europe, and I wouldn’t have expected to get a mysterious message in another eight months summoning me to join him, or that I would bring a vampire along with me when I did.

  ONE

  I woke in a coffin and knew the rat had died. I’m not normally claustrophobic, but for a moment I hyperventilated and lay there, sweating and quietly freaking out, while wishing I were just in a low-budget horror film rather than in the cargo hold of a transatlantic jet, resting in a cleverly ventilated box with a label on the outside in six languages that read CAUTION: HUMAN REMAINS. HANDLE WITH CARE.

  I had no way to know how long I’d been in the box, but I thought it couldn’t have been more than a day since I’d received a code-phrase message from my boyfriend, Quinton, summoning me to Europe. There’d been very little information except that he needed me in Lisbon as soon as possible and I was to come without leaving any sign that I was gone or alerting anyone keeping tabs on me that I was exiting the country. I knew from discussions starting a year earlier that it had to appear that I was still in my usual place for as long as possible. Whatever it was Quinton wanted, it involved his father, James McHenry Purlis—spy, manipulator, and all-around villain.

  Since I was in a bind, I’d turned to the local vampires for help. They seemed to get around without much harassment from TSA or border patrols, and they owed me a few favors. And there was the matter of Carlos, both vampire and necromancer, who had a personal interest in breaking down Purlis and his mysterious project. If anyone was capable of making me disappear without a trace and reappear elsewhere, it would be him. I’d left messages for him explaining the situation, made discreet arrangements on my own end, and had agreed to meet him. . . .

  The location in question was a funeral home. As I walk
ed in through the doors labeled with a tasteful sign—BARRON VIEWING, 7–9 P.M.—it occurred to me that I’d come to trust Seattle’s vampires. It had been a slow change and an uncomfortable one, but when I was in a corner, it was most often Cameron and Carlos to whom I turned for help now—a far cry from the relationship I’d had with them when I’d first fallen into the Grey. The situation had changed a lot since I’d met my first vampire, but more than that, I had changed. I wasn’t the frightened and defensive loner I had been.

  I passed the immaculately dressed funeral director, who stood near an interior door and gave me an inquiring look. I shook my head and murmured, “I have an appointment with Silverstein.” He nodded and pointed toward a curtained doorway at the end of the hall. As I passed the open doorway he guarded, I saw that the viewing room was empty. A sad state of affairs for a funeral director: all dressed in black and no one to console.

  I gave him a small smile. “I’m sure someone will come soon.”

  “I doubt it,” he replied in a professional, funereal hush. “The man was a child molester. Someone shot him . . . in an appropriate location. I won’t mind if no one comes.”

  I blinked and nodded. “Oh. No. That’s fair, I suppose.”

  He offered me a thin smile. “Thank you.” He folded his hands in front of his belt and returned to waiting for no one.

  I went to the curtained door and opened it to discover a stair landing and a flight of steps leading down. The walls were a sterile, glossy white that reflected the light from the fixtures on the walls as well as from the room below. I’d been in mortuaries before and the chill and odor told me I was walking down to the prep room—where the dead were made presentable for their grieving families and friends. I was more sure than ever that I wasn’t going to like Carlos’s transportation methods.

  Carlos stood between the embalming tables. A plump, older woman in a black suit stood several feet away, near a cabinet. The woman somehow seemed to fade into the background even in the glare of the lights, but Carlos was indelible. I’d never seen him in a room so well lit. The work lights shining off the high-gloss white walls and poured-cement floor cast illumination into every corner and crevice of the room and every crag of his face. His hair and beard looked blacker than ever as the light bleached color from his skin and chased away the perpetual shadow under his brow. I was shocked to realize that he hadn’t been in his forties when he’d died—as I’d long assumed—but in his late twenties or early thirties at the most. I blinked at him, momentarily stunned as I reevaluated what I’d always believed about this particular vampire.

  “You act as if you’ve never seen me before,” he said, his voice still as dark and powerful as ever, almost incongruous in a face so suddenly young.

  “Maybe I haven’t,” I said, walking closer. Now I could see the scars, thin as razor cuts, around the edges of his face. They vanished under the thick bristle of his beard and the sweep of his hair, leaving trails like strands of spider silk on his neck and the surface of his forearms, which were revealed by his rolled-up sleeves. I’d seen the marks only once before, fleetingly, and had forgotten them until now. He knew I was staring, but he only raised an eyebrow and let me.

  “What caused all this?” I asked.

  “Never shy, are you, Blaine?”

  “With you? What would be the point?”

  He laughed and the sound rolled like thunder, shaking the Grey version of the room. “Perhaps I’ll show you the window I was thrown from, if the building still exists.”

  “Was this—”

  “My death? No. I’ve always been very hard to kill, though several have tried.” He raised his chin and touched a patch of skin on his neck where his whiskers grew thin. “That was my mortal wound. Remember this: If you mean to kill a mage, first you silence him and bind his hands behind his back. Better yet, cut them off. Very few can cast by thought alone without killing themselves.”

  I shuddered and turned my gaze away. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. If things go badly in Portugal, you’ll need every trick you can conjure at your disposal. Luckily, you are also very hard to kill.”

  “Oh, no. I seem to die all too easily. I just don’t stay down. Usually.”

  I felt his silence as much as heard it.

  “There’s a limit to everything,” I said. “Someday I won’t get up again. Maybe soon. Maybe not.” I was prevaricating, since I was convinced the next death would be my last. Another Greywalker had told me I would know, but it was like knowing that the earth spun as it orbited the sun, even when you couldn’t see or feel it—I just had the feeling that it was true.

  Carlos made a low growling sound and closed the distance between us. “Perhaps we shouldn’t do this. There is a risk. . . .”

  “Living is risky. Driving a car is risky. I’d guess from the setup that we’re going to be playing dead—or at least I will—which is only crazy. And you and I, we’re pretty good with crazy, by now. So let’s just get this over with. I assume whatever transportation you’ve arranged will be arriving soon.”

  “Within an hour. Tovah will manage the paperwork and so on.” Carlos gestured toward the woman in the corner.

  She stepped forward and offered me a handshake, and I could see a tiny dazzle of Grey on her wrist, not much larger than a grain of rice. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’ve already filed all the necessary papers with the consulate and completed those that will be traveling with you. All should continue smoothly.” She noticed my frown and glanced at her wrist when I didn’t reply or shake her hand.

  I’m often suspicious of unexplained Grey marks—they’re rarely a good sign—and as I knew Purlis’s project was aimed at gaining some kind of control of paranormal creatures to use them as spies and engines of terror, it gave me pause. I hated to question it—especially in front of Carlos—but I did. “What is that?”

  Tovah shifted her glance to Carlos without turning her head, not at all affronted by my rude behavior.

  “Nothing sinister,” he said. “All of those who assist us bear a mark, inconspicuous but visible.”

  I peered at it, giving it a look through the Grey to better see the actual shape. “It looks like a dagger.”

  “It is mine,” he said, as if I should have guessed. Maybe I should have—Carlos has a particular attachment to a knife that once nearly killed him and, being a necromancer, he has an affinity for instruments of death, anyway.

  I nodded. “All right. Why haven’t I noticed these marks before?”

  “You’ve seen them, but you had no reason to question them. Now you have every reason.”

  I made a noise of dissatisfaction and turned my attention back to Tovah rather than to the tiny mark on her skin.

  “Do you do this often?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she answered, as if the conversation had never been interrupted. “But not with someone who’s still alive. You may find it a bit unsettling—the Portuguese officials require a rather old-fashioned container, which is not as comfortable as a proper casket.” She indicated two long wooden boxes that had been arranged on the farthest table.

  I had to admit, I’d never considered whether a casket could be called “comfortable.” I walked toward them and looked the boxes over. They were built of something like wood chipboard and lined with a dusty-looking metal. Nylon mesh straps formed three loop handles on each long side of the slightly protruding bottom plank and a rubber gasket ran all the way around the open top. Both boxes were the same size and I thought I’d probably be less cramped than Carlos would be, since the box was long enough to accommodate either of us—with a few inches to spare over my five feet ten inches—but rather narrow for the width of his shoulders. Matching lids leaned against the wall nearby, and an electric screw gun and a box of impressively long wood screws stood on the end of the counter.

  “They look . . . cozy,” I said.

 
“They’re lined with zinc and hermetically sealed,” Tovah said. “I hope you have no metal allergies.”

  “No.” I frowned. “So, they’re airtight?”

  “Usually. Yours is . . . not quite to spec. The consulate does not require an inspection at the arrival destination and the anomaly will be undetectable on X-rays because of the metal lining. All the paperwork is in order, so there should be no reason for anyone to open the boxes anywhere en route. You’ll be picked up as soon as customs releases the cases and the Lisbon mortuary will deliver you to your destination. It’s all arranged.”

  “It sounds . . . um . . . fine. Thank you.”

  She gave me a small smile and stepped back, finished with her recitation and reassurance. She looked at Carlos and he nodded. She left the room through another door that I suspected led to a loading dock or storage area.

  “Now what?” I asked him once her door was closed.

  “Now . . . I put you to sleep.”

  “That sounds like the euphemism veterinarians use.”

  “I assure you, it’s not the same. But there is, as I said, a risk.”

  “And I already said it’s acceptable.”

  “No, you did not. But now you have. Come sit on the table here and remove your boots.”

  “Why?” I asked even as I moved to do as he directed.

  “Because you will be more comfortable without them. And I don’t wish to stoop.”

  “Is your age getting to you?” I teased him.

  He closed the distance between us faster than I could see and wrapped his near arm around my waist, pulling me tight to his side. I gagged on the bleakness of his aura and the boiling nausea he brought with him. He put his mouth near my ear and whispered, “There is another way, Blaine.”

  I had to swallow hard before I could reply. “No. You know the answer will always be the same.”

  “I cling to hope,” he said. Then he laughed, let me go, and took half a step back. “On the table, if you please.”