Revenant by Kat Richardson Page B

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 hadbeen 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