Soul Hunt (16 page)

I edged out of the rose garden, creaking a little. I might have the scent, but tracing it through this—it was like following a groove in the sidewalk, blindly, using only your feet. And the trail itself didn’t even make any sense. Think of the paths you walk during a week: to your home, to the grocery, to work, to visit friends, the routes you take or don’t, the grooves worn by your passage over time. Usually that’s what I find: the paths laid down by someone over the course of time. But this one wasn’t like that; even taking into account the years, it felt incomplete. Like one wrong note or a single broken stone in a handful of pebbles, drawing attention because of its imperfection. Or half of a puzzle piece …

The incompleteness of the scent seemed matched,
somehow, by the visual echo that refused to leave. Every time I turned my head, the lights and activity of the waterfront retreated into shade, a forest of masts stark against a dull gold sky. When they were present, the scent felt almost complete—almost, but still broken, missing some vital part. It wasn’t disruptive, just a sort of very strong visual déjà vu. It didn’t feel wrong, though—I didn’t get the sense I was in danger. Instead I just felt watched. As if someone was alert now.

Well, these days I was more alert than I had been. Besides, I was the Hound, I had the scent, and I needed this stone if I wanted to live past midwinter.

I followed my nose out across the greenway into the nest of bars and shops that made up Quincy Market. No sign of Vinny and his friends this time, thank God, but every now and then the few people I passed seemed to slip into conversations that didn’t make sense in this century, words that were echoes rather than real time.

There were ways to set up wards so that only a person fulfilling certain characteristics would trigger them—say, a blood relative on a Tuesday, for example. But most were so complicated and so useless that adepts didn’t bother. And “ward” was really the wrong word; it was closer to the original definition of a
geis:
a prohibition or decree meant for one person in certain circumstances. Should this happen, you must do thus. That sort of thing. Such patterns were old in terms of use, but they weren’t something I expected to run into in Boston. (At least now that the Fiana were down.)

Stranger still, the visual echo vanished as soon as I left Quincy Market. I looked back as soon as I realized it was gone, then checked my steps.

Through the twisty streets to a package store—what most non-Bostonians would call a liquor store—on Haymarket. I paused a moment just outside the door, trying to guess the building’s age. It didn’t seem
old enough to have been around back then, but it was worth a try.

The bell chimed as I entered, and a skinny kid at the front counter looked up. “We’re closing in ten minutes, lady,” he said. “Make it quick.”

“Sure,” I said, and slipped between the aisles. I hadn’t been in one of these places in years. At the back of the store was a spiral staircase leading down and a handwritten sign on pink posterboard:
VISIT OUR WINE CELLARS—TASTINGS TUESDAY NIGHTS
. I glanced over my shoulder, but the kid at the counter was ringing up three bottles of vodka for a little old lady in black.

The stairs led down to a cramped cellar about a third the size of the building above. I didn’t know much about wine, but this looked like a perfect place for it: cool, a little damp, the brickwork exposed and smelling faintly of soot. And—if I ignored the coolness and the trails of recent customers and the muted, indistinguishable scent of the wine quiescent in its bottles—the scent of tar and salt and adrenaline was present as well. Dina’s thief had come this way, once, and the brickwork looked almost old enough for it.

I ran my fingers over the wall at the base of the stairs, trying to get a sense of which way the thief had gone. Down here, it was clearer than it had been, as if the passage of time meant less underground, or as if this were closer to the source. Or, to take the simplest answer, because fewer people made it down here. South, I decided, turning and edging around a rack of bottles. He’d come this way from the harbor and gone almost straight south. Only given the cowpaths of Boston streets, going straight in any direction for long was damn near impossible—

I stopped. The far end of the cellar was sunk a little further into the wall, in the shape of an arch. Above, the bricks followed that arch, continuing it into the ceiling and spreading out, but the rest of the ceiling was newer, as were the close walls. Whatever passage
had been down here was long bricked over, and the current owner had put his best wines in front of it.

I started taking down bottles, putting them to the side, trying to find a way to get to the brick itself. I wasn’t hoping for a secret entrance—okay, maybe some part of me that had watched too much Scooby-Doo was hoping for it—but in some way I was hoping for at least one more clue. Maybe the thief had stashed the sunstone here, maybe there’d be something more …

The clerk’s footsteps creaked overhead, and he called down the stairs. “Lady? We’re closing. Lady? Goddammit.”

I dragged the half-empty rack to the side, enough for me to see the complete lack of secret passages or hidey-holes, and slammed my fist against the brick. Nothing. I could feel the trail pass into the stone and beyond. It must have been laid before this passage was closed off, but that didn’t help much now, did it?

It didn’t matter. I’d look up records for this place, find out who owned it, maybe work out a way to dig … there had to be some way to get through.

Something twisted against my chest, and I scratched at it absently before realizing that it wasn’t my biker gear fraying at the seams. Instead the inner pocket of my jacket twitched and jumped against my skin, like a trapped frog.

I stifled a yelp and clamped my hand over the jacket. The fingers twitched faintly, like a dying fish, and I damn near flung the things into the corner of the room. Instead, gritting my teeth, I withdrew them and held up the weakly shivering bundle.

The ceiling creaked again: the kid, coming downstairs this time. I reached up and put both hands, one still holding the fingers, against the brick—

The fingers flexed in mine, like someone trying to clasp my hand, and the ceiling overhead vanished, replaced by a brick arch, dank and slimy with condensation. I caught my breath, then gasped a second time
as the total lack of scent hit me. I couldn’t smell anything, not even myself.

The tunnel was no longer bricked up. Instead slick, oily water half filled it, stretching out ahead and behind me. A strange, brassy light filtered through grates overhead, not daylight or even a close approximation of it but something else, like light seen through smoked glass. But past it, down at the far end of the tunnel, there was a single flickering flame: a lantern, held aloft by someone standing on a rickety dock amid crates and barrels painted a dull black.

Smuggler’s haven,
I realized. This was still Boston, but long ago, when patriots and opportunists had good cause for sneaking cargo in under King George’s nose. This would have been underground, and it might have stayed the same since then.

I squinted at the person holding the light. She wasn’t the thief, of that I was sure. For one, her hands—one on the lantern, the other clenched in her dress—were intact. For another, this small, grim, brown-skinned woman was not the sailor I had scented; she was a landswoman. Her clothes—well, you see Colonial re-enactors and tour guides all over Boston, particularly during summer, and while their styles are all accurate, there’s a certain vibrancy that comes from using modern fabrics and modern sewing techniques. This woman looked faded, belonging to another era, but her dress was still scrupulously clean, the kind of clean that I knew from my mother: too proud to look poor.

She was the same woman I’d seen on the Common, I realized, when Roger and Deke broke the quarry spirit’s hold on me. Only here she wasn’t out of place; here she was in her element, and she stood with a calm control belied only by her tight grip on the lantern.

“Meda!” A man’s voice, somewhere behind me, and for a moment I mistook it for the package store clerk. I turned to see a little boat, floundering down
the tunnel. One oar was jammed in the stern; the other had been put to poor use by the man in the boat, who seemed to be using it as a canoe paddle. His left hand was tucked tight under his right arm, and though I couldn’t see his face the grubby sheen of his jacket seemed darker and shinier right there.
Blood,
I thought, and held tight to the dead fingers. “Meda, are you there?”

“I am, and don’t shout. The master will hear.” Her voice was strangely accented—the cadence of the past, perhaps, or something else—and it did not echo, unlike the man’s.

“Old Grouchy can hear and dance a jig for all I care. I have it, Meda, I have it. I am sorry, it was not enough, I was not enough, but I have it and there’ll be no more at Nix’s Mate—”

Meda stiffened and lowered the lantern. She glanced up at the grating, then straight at me. She had the look in those eyes that I’d only seen in very strong magicians. There’s something about it that marks you—Maryam had it, Roger had a flicker of it, all the members of the Fiana shared in it—and this woman could have faced down any of them. And though I couldn’t explain how, I thought she knew me.

“Aye,” she said. “No more.” And she raised her other hand in a gesture I didn’t know, as if to cast sand across the water.

I started to step forward, and my nose mashed up against the bricks, hard enough that tears sprang to my eyes. The vision or whatever it was vanished, and the fingers were again dead flesh in my hand. “Fuck,” I mumbled, stuffing them back in my pocket, then stopped.

The scent was gone. Not ended, not out of range, but gone. Even the pitiful traces I’d followed this far no longer existed, as if they’d been swept up by a tidy housemaid. “God dammit all to hell—”

“Lady, I told you—” The stairs creaked, and I
turned around too late. The kid stared at me, then at the scattered bottles, then back at me. “Jesus! Jesus Christ, what is going on?”

“It’s all right,” I said. “I just had to, to find something.”

“What?”

“See, I wanted to look at the wall, only it wasn’t there—” God, my head was starting to pound, not just from the bonk on my nose but from the incomplete hunt, the pressure of that lost scent an ache both physical and mental.

“At the wall.” He nodded slowly, holding his hands out at his sides as if to show that he was unarmed.

“No, really—” I snorted and rubbed at my nose; I’d skinned it. That probably wasn’t helping my case. “It was important. Say, do you know when this building was built?”

His eyes widened. “Okay. Okay, lady, we’re closing now,” he added, speaking carefully and slowly, “so unless you want to look at the wall some more—”

“Thanks, no. I um. I can pay for what I’ve done,” I added, trying to find my wallet.

His eyebrows went up even further, and he took a step back, closer to the stairs. “That’s, that’s okay. Whatever you’ve done is between you and God, okay?”

Ah, crap. There was no way I was going to get out of this conversation looking sane, was I? I edged toward the stairs. “That’s not—”

My cell phone chimed weakly with an errant signal bouncing down from above. I jumped; the kid jumped about a foot higher and ended up in the corner holding a bottle of chardonnay like a really ineffective shield. “I’ll take this outside,” I said brightly, and ran up the stairs, face flaming. On the way out, I dropped what cash I had in my wallet on the counter; at least that might make up for the extra work.

The number wasn’t one I knew. I caught the ring just before it swapped over to voice mail. “Scelan.”

“Evie?” The voice was Sarah’s, speaking over what sounded like a crowd of people.

“Sarah! Jesus, I’m sorry—I’m so sorry, I meant to get in touch earlier—”

“Evie, I need help,” she said, practically shouting over the sound of the crowd. “I’m at the watch meeting in Dorchester, and we need a neutral voice here—” Someone—a man’s voice, high and hysterical—interrupted her, and I heard Sarah cover the phone to speak back to him—then a wet thump, and a cry.

“Sarah? Sarah!” I stared at the phone, but the connection was lost.
Goddammit.

T
he trouble with being a biker in Boston is that while it’ll get you through traffic more quickly than a car—which is why Mercury specializes in downtown work—it’s still a lot slower overall. Especially if you happen to leave your bike in another neighborhood entirely.

According to the schedule Sarah had given me, the ersatz “community watch” had been meeting on the Triplets’ turf this time. The Triplets didn’t quite run a protection racket. They’d put down roots in the community, but they didn’t really care too much about what went on in it, so long as they knew who was currently on top. They only dealt with organizations—gangs, families, parishioners—and they’d curse anyone for a fee. Not all the curses worked, which they freely admitted, and I’d heard Sarah speculate that the degree to which they did work depended on how much the Triplets valued the target and client both. But enough were effective that they brought in sufficient cash to own bits of other local businesses, thus making a legitimate living. (Which is more than can be said for most magicians.) Between that and a tacit agreement with some of the local Babalorishas, they had a quasi-symbiotic role with the neighborhood. They’d even been one of the first to acquiesce to Sarah’s community watch.

They also didn’t like to come out in public. Which made arranging meetings on neutral territory difficult. If something had gone sour there—

I cut off the thought and ran a red light, careening into a little alley off the main drag. The street was pretty run down, with grates and locks over every storefront and the crumbling look that happens when neither the current owner nor the previous had any money to spare for upkeep. A Vietnamese grocery took up one corner of this skinny block, a car-repair shop took up the other, and in between—