Free Revenant by Kat Richardson Page B

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 largerplan—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 justsurprised 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