Soul Hunt (17 page)

Well. In between was a crowd. Looking over their heads as I approached, I could see a little of the problem: the middle window of the upper story had been smashed in, and while I didn’t scent any magic immediately, a stifled, flat smell hung over the block, as if someone had tried but failed to complete an invocation. More important, there was already an ambulance on the far corner.

I locked up my bike and tucked my helmet under my arm. Someone at the edge of the crowd glanced back, then did a double-take and nudged the guy next to him. Great. “What the hell happened here?” I asked before they could get away.

They just gave me a wary look, but one of the guys with them was a lot more talkative. “You would not believe it—one moment we’re just sitting out front, minding our own business, then this crazy white guy in like a purple bathrobe ran up the road, pushed past us, and ran in yelling. Next thing we know he’s hitting people, saying they wrecked his place, and then he must have like thrown a chair or something because the window broke.”

“That’s good glass too,” said the girl next to him. “Not supposed to break easy. And I didn’t see no chair.”

“What, so he like, broke it with his mind?”

“I didn’t say that,” the girl insisted, even as the two who’d first noticed me looked at each other. “Only that I didn’t see no chair.”

“Thanks,” I said, and slid past them. Crazy guy in a purple bathrobe? Well, I knew plenty of crazy guys, but not their off-duty dress. Broken glass littered the sidewalk, and not just from the second-story window. The ground floor was a restaurant:
GRILLED MEATS AND PICKLE
, named by someone with a greater desire for honesty than for appealing marketing. And it, too, had a smashed window—broken right below the stenciled graffiti above the frame: three 3s, positioned so that they formed a triangle. “Goddammit,” I muttered.

“Hound,” a deep voice said behind me. I turned to see a tall black man in a red hooded coat standing at the edge of the crowd. “You took a long time.”

“Had a long way to come,” I said, racking my brain for his name. Haroun, that was it. Current liaison for the Triplets, though who knew how long that’d last. Others had been discarded for getting too full of themselves, promising what couldn’t be delivered, or skimming too much. And by “discarded” I mean that the former liaisons hadn’t been seen in Boston again. I used to know one man who claimed they were sold for parts, but that never seemed quite plausible. “What happened? Where’s Sarah?”

“Sarah?” His lips curled. “You should be worried more about your other friend. The one who came here yelling.”

Other friend? Who? “All I know is I got a call from Sarah—”

“He came in here,” Haroun said, easily talking over me as if I were an unruly student and he the professor, “interrupted our discussions, and accused us of conspiring against him. And then he hit Younger in the face.”

“Oh, shit.” It’s not a good idea to hit a magician, and I’m saying that as someone who’s done so in the past. With enthusiasm. The trouble isn’t that it gets you hurt right away, it’s that there tend to be consequences. Particularly if you’re attacking one of the
Triplets. “Is Younger all right?” Haroun nodded. “And the other guy?”

He made a gesture like flicking dust from his sleeve. “You’re sure you don’t know him?”

“She knew him.”

I turned to see Sarah, wrapped up in a brilliant pink coat and holding an icepack to her face. “Sarah! God, are you okay? Did he hurt you—”

She took the pack away, revealing a bruise the color of raw steak all across her cheekbone. I made an inarticulate noise, but she didn’t seem to notice, staring at me hard instead. “Haroun, can you bring a light closer, or maybe one of those glass …” He handed her a shard of glass, silvered on one side, possibly from a mirror inside the restaurant. “Thank you.” Sarah held it up, angling it between us, and muttered something as she examined my reflection. “You’re all right,” she said wonderingly. “I’d thought—”

“You thought right.” I took the glass from her hand—after the number of cuts she’d sustained there in the past, you’d think she’d be more careful—and closed my fingers over hers. “I’m okay now. There was a severing.”

“Severing? But then you’re not okay, you’re just not getting worse.” She turned my hand over, held it out in front of the light from the store, and glanced at my shadow, as if expecting it to be faded. Well, after a few days more of the quarry spirit drawing on me, it would have been. “A severing doesn’t bring you back to yourself, it just stops whatever’s leeching off you—and how did you let something do that in the first place?”

“I’m fine. Really. Now, how did you manage to get that shiner?”

Sarah sighed and glanced at Haroun as if for confirmation. He drew breath to answer, but just then a new commotion started, this time at the front door. A wail of utter misery echoed from the door, followed by its maker—and two cops, one at each elbow. “My
home,” cried a sad little man in, yes, a purple bathrobe, though now that I saw it I could recognize it as the kind of “ritual garment” that some of the stranger adepts wore: purple silk with characters embroidered on the edges, now stained with food and grease and worse. Definitely worse, I thought, taking a sniff. “My home, all my books, my loci, my
pomegranates—
”

I took a step forward, even though I knew I couldn’t do anything. He turned as I did so, spotted me, and flinched away, into one of his escorts, who grumbled and pushed him upright again. “Hang on,” I said. “Wasn’t he at the docks when that boat caught fire? The Elect, or someone like that.”

“Yes,” Sarah said, replacing the icepack on her eye. “He was the one who called me to let me know something was going on. Saw you pull Tessie out.” She sighed and balled up her other hand in the folds of her coat. “She’s out of the hospital, by the way.”

“Good,” I said absently. The little man in purple seemed a threat about on the level of damp paper towels, but the police still bundled him into the car and drove off. “But if he was helping you then, why—”

Sarah rubbed her unhurt eye, and for the first time I could tell how much this was draining her. The little squabbles may have been no more than she expected when she first got into this, but enough of those will sap your strength. “Someone trashed his place. I didn’t catch everything he said, but it sounded like an invocation of some kind.”

Haroun cleared his throat. “An Hourglass Pinch, supplemented by a souring. It is a common curse, if you want to destroy a man’s possessions. He thought the Triplets were to blame.” Whatever changed on my face, it was enough to tick him off. “No, Hound. They were not. No more than Wassermann here was helping them.”

“Sounds like he needed a scapegoat, then. Your bad luck it was you.”

Haroun’s lip curled. “Luck,” he said. “You tell me now you believe in luck? You are in the wrong business, Hound.”

I thought of Dina, of the bad bargains I’d made. “That’s very likely.”

Haroun’s brows rose at that, and for a moment I thought he might even be softening a little. Sarah shook her head. “Look, wrong business or not, can you keep an eye on things here? Haroun and I—if we’ve got a chance of keeping a lid on this, we need to get down to the station.”

“You’re kidding.” Put me in charge of anything? How the hell was I supposed to keep magicians from fighting, put them all in time out?

“Right now we’ve got a few too many scavengers about,” Sarah added, tipping her head toward the crowd. “The Triplets’ wards will hold, since they’re in retreat right now, but I need you to do damage control. The last thing we need is—” She stopped, leaning forward. “What happened to your nose?”

I rubbed at the skinned spot. It still hurt. “Long story.”

“You haven’t gotten in a fight again, have—? Never mind. Will you stay, just for a bit?”

“Sarah, I don’t know—”

“People listen to you. They’ll give you a chance.” She glanced over her shoulder and edged closer. “But only one chance, so don’t screw it up.”

“Yes, thank you for that vote of confidence.” I switched my helmet to my other hand and ran my fingers through my hair. It was stiff from salt spray and greasy from the day’s sweat. “Okay. I’ll run interference for you.”

She nodded. “Great. Haroun, we’ll take my car if that’s all right with you.”

I could have warned him against the car; it was a beat-up beige hatchback that had probably last had a tune-up in the Cretaceous, but Haroun nodded, made a gesture to the storefront, and followed. He was good
at this, I thought, as they got in and drove off. I hoped the Triplets would keep him on for a while; people with sense were always in short supply in the undercurrent.

And right now I had to face some of the consequences of that. I turned to face the crowd and smiled brightly, and a few of the onlookers—the ones who’d just come to see the show, or who lived nearby and wanted to know what was up—smiled back. Unfortunately, that didn’t include the shadowcatchers who’d stopped by, and it certainly didn’t stop one particular voice in the back. “—the nerve, the absolute nerve to tell him to go away! And this after all that had happened—I don’t even see what the problem was, all he did was slap the boy, it wasn’t even that hard—”

I made my way through the last of the crowd and put my hand on the speaker’s shoulder. “Madame Sosostris,” I said, showing all my teeth in something that wasn’t quite a smile. “So good to see you out and about.”

Wheelwright turned white at the name—maybe hiding your real name is good for magicians, but for a charlatan it doesn’t help to have your stage name associated with outbursts like that—and choked on her next few words. I turned the glare on the people around her, but it faded as I recognized some of them: Kassia, a woman who worked pretty much the same racket as Wheelwright but under the Triplets’ protection; a guy in a green mechanic’s coverall, and Byron Chatterji, flipping his bowler hat between his hands as if he were about to pull a rabbit from it. “Got here a little late, didn’t you, Hound?” Wheelwright managed, choking up her grip on the huge purse she carried.

“Too late to see what happened.”

“What happened? A ghetto spat, that’s what happened, and it’s not nearly as important as you’re making it out to be.” Wheelwright turned and shook a ringed finger in my face. “Do you know, I had two balloons full of pigs’ blood—pigs’, mind you—thrown at my
windows this morning. And I had a full schedule too—do you know how long that took me to wash off?”

“I wouldn’t have thought your clients would notice,” Kassia said sweetly.

Wheelwright turned to her. “You—” I closed my hand a little more tightly on her shoulder. “Go to hell,” she said through gritted teeth.

“My still,” Chatterji said lightly. The words dropped into the argument like fine china on a stone floor. I turned to look at him, and he smiled nervously. “Someone has smashed my still. It will take months to rebuild, and I have not loci for more than five weeks.”

“Why do you even
need
a still?” Wheelwright snapped.

“Ah, see, that is a very interesting question,” Chatterji responded, perking right up at the chance for a lecture. “You see, there is the principle of severance and return—”

“The point is,” Kassia said, spreading her hands, “something is going wrong, and it is going wrong over the city. In years past, so I am told, one group bore the brunt of it, but that brotherhood is done with.” She made a genteel gesture in my direction, of either thanks or warning, and I inclined my head in response to both. “Now there is this community watch, and either it is ineffective or it has turned malicious.”

“There’s no call for that,” I said, letting go of Wheelwright. “Sarah is working with the Triplets to find out what moved the Elect to do this.”

Kassia turned and spat. “You sound like the police. How can we trust you?”

I started to answer, try to come up with some of my credentials, but stopped as I realized that I didn’t have anything concrete to give her. This was the undercurrent; someone could work for you for twenty years and still betray you. Trust was a scarce commodity.

Or at least that was the undercurrent as it had been. Not as Sarah wanted to make it. Not as I’d envisioned it, once.

“You don’t,” I said. “So you can ignore me, and go on building your own alliances in hope that they’ll protect you, or you can give this a chance and maybe get something better out of it by the end.”

Kassia gazed at me, eyes narrowed, then nodded once. “Or I can do both. You will forgive me, but I think I would prefer that.”

Wheelwright had latched on to Chatterji, taking his arm like a dowager with a gigolo. “It sounds fascinating,” she cooed. “How is the principle worked?”

From the look on his face, it seemed that Chatterji rarely got a willing audience for his favorite subject. “Oh, you see, it’s a very simple principle of severance and return. By removing a part of oneself, or letting it pass from you in the natural course—I of course use the diluted humors of one’s own body, since the kidneys are the seat of the passions and thus the perfect last point of divergence—you then spend time without it, creating a severance, so to speak—”

The man in the mechanic’s coverall edged closer to me. “He’s not talking about what I think, is he?” he murmured.

“Yes, he is—” I rubbed at my eyes “—if you think that he’s talking about drinking his own pee.”

Chatterji, with the luck of the talked about, caught my last few words. “That’s a very simplistic way to think about the principle,” he admonished, wagging his finger at me. “All it takes is severing a part of oneself, healing, and then regaining that part after time away. It makes sense, if one thinks of the soul as a contiguous object, as an echo of the greater Sophia—”

The mechanic shook his head. “It’s a load of crap! Or, sorry, a bucket of piss.”

Wheelwright shot him a nasty glare. “There’s no need to be bitchy because you’re jealous.”

Ah, Christ. “That’s enough of that—” I started, just as a second police car drove up. The woman in the driver’s seat got out and looked right at me, and her eyes narrowed.

Damn. Rena.

I turned a little, pretending that I hadn’t seen her. What the hell was she doing here? Her precinct wasn’t even near Dorchester, was it? And she hadn’t gotten transferred … come to think of it, I wouldn’t have heard if she had been transferred … but no, she’d been up at the docks a few days ago. Was there a connection between that fire and this?