Soul Hunt (3 page)

Rena had gone the other way. Which was part of why we weren’t on good terms at the moment. “Miss Scelan,” she said, turning over a page in her notebook. “Can you tell me what happened here?”

“Where’s Tessie?”

“She’s all right,” Sarah said. “Smoke inhalation, but the EMTs said she’ll be okay. They’ve taken her to Mass General. Which is where you ought to be right now—”

“I’m fine,” I said at the same time Rena said, “That can wait.” She shot me a narrow look and waited. “I’m fine,” I said again, very aware of just how not-fine I really was. “Tessie lives on the harbor, and she noticed the fire starting. I was nearby, so she picked me up for help. That’s about all there is to it.”

“Evie, you don’t have to say anything,” Sarah began, putting herself between me and Rena. “I can have Alison here in ten minutes, and she’ll tell you that there’s no legal requirement for you to talk to the cops right now.”

I shook my head. “Alison’s an environmental lawyer, Sarah. I don’t think it’s the same thing.”

Sarah shrugged. “Doesn’t stop her from offering her opinion on everything else.” She got a faraway, goofy look in her eyes. Say whatever else you like about
Sarah, the woman’s a romantic of the beyond-hopeless variety when it comes to her girlfriend.

Rena cleared her throat, still waiting. I put my hands on Sarah’s shoulders and carefully pushed her out of the way. “Sarah, go away. I can handle this. Go—I don’t know, go see what they’re up to.” I pointed to the far side of the street, where a few familiar faces—men I knew from the shallower parts of the undercurrent—were clustered, watching the husk of the yacht. Maybe Tessie hadn’t been the only one to have caught on to the uncanniness of this fire.

Except that as far as I could tell, the only thing wrong was that it had happened at all. And you could say that for any number of fires across Boston on any given day.

The dreamy look dropped from Sarah’s face, and her black brows drew together. “Fine,” she said. “Fine. I’ll be over here, and then—” She didn’t quite look over her shoulder at Rena, but it was close. “Then I want to hear about this, okay?”

I nodded, trying to look honest and reassuring. From Sarah’s sour expression, it didn’t work. She retreated, leaving me on the dock with Rena.

You know that feeling you get when you run into an old ex? And for whatever reason—it’s too soon, you’re still dating his best friend, the breakup involved his stealing your stereo—you know there’s no way to have any kind of civil conversation. Yeah. Take that and wring the romance out of it, then add a good dose of female friendship—and if you’ve made it through junior high you know how potentially poisonous that can be—and you’ve got a pretty good idea of how glad I was to see Rena. We’d been good friends, to the point that I’d cried on her shoulder after breakups and she’d thrown up in my bathroom after too much clubbing. But she’d cut off ties with me after the whole mess involving the Horn, mainly because I’d been so damned closemouthed that I’d ruined her case and, depending on how you looked at it, gotten her partner badly hurt.

The thing was, Rena had been completely justified in cutting those ties. I’d hidden too much, and I hadn’t thought about the consequences for anyone but myself. And of all the times to run into her again—

“So since when have you been playing harbor patrol?” I asked.

“What is your relationship with ‘Tessie’?” she asked without looking up.

“Business contact. I’ve done some informal work for her over the years, usually just research. Seriously, Rena, what brings you out here? You’re usually not in this part of the city. I didn’t even think you were in this precinct.”

Rena turned the page over without looking up. Sarah might hide behind her status as an outsider, as someone who dealt with the undercurrent but didn’t let it touch her, but she had nothing on the armor Rena put on when she was in full-cop mode. No wonder I’d registered her as a blue rock when I was so out of it.

“Do you know the owners of this boat?” Rena continued.

“No. At least I don’t think so; the only person I know who owns a boat is Tessie, and this wasn’t hers.” I hesitated a moment, remembering Deke and the big guy who’d carried him out. Deke was, unfortunately, trouble. The man liked fire; he was a pyromancer, after all, and he could see things in flames that I sometimes didn’t even see in real life. But he stuck to stuff like newspapers, branches, maybe a couple of open grills if he was lucky. Not a whole damn boat.

And besides, if he’d been the one to set the fire, I thought, he wouldn’t have smelled so damn scared. Deke wasn’t scared around fire, the same way I wasn’t scared of big dogs (quasi-immortal chaos-beings aside). If I could just find his scent again, take time to sort out the impressions before the boat sank completely and the nullifying sea devoured it … if my talent hadn’t deserted me completely now …

I’ve never been a good liar, and Rena is very, very good at reading silences. She glanced up at me, her mouth a hard thin line. “You don’t think so?”

I opened my mouth to answer, and tasted ice water and ferns in the back of my throat. A cold coil twisted down from my stomach, and the first sparks began to flicker at the edges of my vision. Great. “No,” I said. “Jesus, Rena, you know me. Do I look like the kind of person who hobnobs with boat owners? I think you need some kind of … of permit for that. Or maybe a McMansion somewhere.”

The corner of her mouth twitched up, but Rena wasn’t about to let herself smile. “Why did you board the Mirabelle first?”

“Mirabelle?” I glanced over my shoulder at the fishing boat next to the dead yacht. My vision kept graying out; never quite fading, but color going out of the world one second and returning the next. It was like trying to watch a film projected on water. “You mean the green one? There were people on it. Tessie dropped me off there, then got on—boarded—the burning one to see if she could help.”

“Seems a strange thing to do, if she didn’t know the owners.”

“Yeah, well, that’s Tessie for you. She wanted to check it out.” This was all starting to piss me off, and since that little thread of anger was about all I had that reached through the fog, I held on to it tight. “You know,” I added, lowering my voice.
“Bruja
shit. That sort of thing.”

The tip snapped off Rena’s pencil. “You can take that
bruja
shit,” she whispered, the last two words—her usual terms for what I had to deal with on a regular basis—coming out with a poisonous sibilance, “and you can drop it right back in the harbor where it came from.”

“Then I guess I got nothing more to say to you. Because if you don’t want to hear about any of the undercurrent, then there’s only so much I can explain.”
As if to prove my point, the gray sparkles started up again. Great. I was going to pass out onto my old friend, and I’d be lucky if I just ended up in the drunk tank for it.

“Evie—”

“No.” I shrugged my jacket back into place, hoping that motion wouldn’t throw off my balance even more, and turned as if to go. “Either you’re sticking to your guns, in which case I can’t tell you any more, or you want to know everything, in which case it’s gonna be a shitload of magic, okay? Make up your mind, because until then I’m gonna stick to my side and not bother you with anything that isn’t your business.”

Whether it was the momentary anger or just my body deciding that it was done messing with me, color and sense began to filter back into the world as I turned away. Rena cleared her throat. “It is my business,” she said quietly. “When it becomes this—” and I didn’t have to look to know she was gesturing to the smoldering hulk in the harbor, “—it is my business.”

That was true, as far as it went. But I didn’t have the energy to convince her that you couldn’t separate magic from business. I didn’t think Deke had started the fire, but I’d do some checking up on my own, and if it turned out differently, I’d come back to Rena. Until then, she could whistle for me. “You know where to find me,” I said over my shoulder. “If you decide you can handle some of the weird shit, then come on over.”

On the far side of the street, the muttered discussion between two men in cheap suits had turned into an actual argument. Both were shadowcatchers, the bottom-feeders of the undercurrent, trading in loci that wouldn’t power any kind of magic beyond a twinkle. Sarah, as always, had stepped into the middle of the fray, trying to calm everyone down. “That’s not the problem right now,” she said as I reached her side. “Until we know what happened—and I’d like to stress that we don’t know that anything unusual happened—then there’s no reason to go making a fuss.”

“Fuss? Fuss? What is this fuss?” the skinnier man snapped. “No, what I am saying is that if the community watch cannot be bothered to, hah,
watch
for this sort of aetheric disharmony, then what good is it?”

“Don’t start with the ether stuff again,” muttered his compatriot.

That at least was enough of a distraction. The skinny one was someone I knew, vaguely; he called himself the Elect of the Order of the Revealed Golden Veil of Isis-Sophia, or something like that with a couple extra titles tacked on. He was pretty harmless, an academic adept, of the kind that brush up against real magic once or twice in their lives and immediately dive headfirst into the esoteric cruft of centuries. On the rare occasion that an academic adept wanders into something huge, the result tends to be unpredictable, and by that I mean anything from blowing up someone’s house to releasing ugly things into the steam tunnels under Boston College. I was pretty sure the Jesuits had taken in the last guy to do that, and after I’d helped with the cleanup, one of the chaplains there had given me an official, if quiet, commendation. (I’d also come away from the cleanup with a knife scar in my left buttock that I preferred not to think about.) This sort of person was what the undercurrent now consisted of, since the big guys on top had been taken down. The Elect, Tessie, Deke … the small fry.

I touched Sarah’s shoulder, grimaced as the cat mask turned toward me, and moved so I could see her face. “All set. Listen, I—”

“You’re sure?” She caught my forearms, searching my face. “Evie, what happened?”

“Pretty much what I told the cops. Tessie knew there was a problem, came to pick me up, and I had to go into the boat to get her out. I’m still not sure what the problem was—” something to do with Deke, undoubtedly “—but I can check it out with her later on. Listen, did Nate get in touch with you about Katie?”

“Katie?” She looked away, first at her hands, then at the two small-timers. “You mean—”

“For tonight,” I said. Nate’s little sister was nine years old, and she’d become very attached to Sarah and Alison. And me, though that didn’t speak well to her tastes. “And did you get the list I asked you for?”

“Oh yeah. That was no problem.” Sarah dropped my arms and started rummaging through the little crocheted purse she carried (how she kept more than a set of keys in there was beyond me, but then again I preferred to lug around my Mercury Courier bag). “No, tonight’s fine. Alison will be over around nine. I pled religious holiday to reschedule the watch meeting, but there’s enough overlap between groups that I actually have to attend a Samhain ceremony or I’ll get called out on it.”

“Sarah, your Samhain rituals usually include a big party and someone throwing up in the back room.”

“Yeah, makes me sorry I couldn’t plan one this year. I guess I’ll have to go through with the whole meditative observances.” She grinned at me. “Like your plans are much better. What, you finally wanted some quality alone time with Mathy McBonyButt?”

“Please tell me you don’t call him that around Katie.” I was an only child, but one thing I knew about sibling dynamics was that you never, ever gave a younger sister a new name to call her brother.

“Only around you, girl.” She finally produced a paper folded up into a tight square, a bright green flyer wrapped around it. “I also printed off the schedule for the watch meetings—we could really use you there, you know. The other page lists all the names I could find. But this is folklore, so there’s a lot of redundancy—I mean, Wodan isn’t always the same as Odin isn’t the same as Wutendes, not in these circumstances.”

“So long as the names are all here.” I took the paper and unfolded it. She’d listed the leaders of the Wild Hunt, from all the different traditions where
that legend reasserted itself. Maybe fifty or a hundred names, most with epithets like “blood-handed” or “vengeance” or “corpse-god.” Nice guys. “Thanks,” I said, and tucked the paper into my breast pocket. My fingers brushed the knot of scar tissue at my throat, unnaturally cool, and I felt the Hounds stir.

“Welcome,” Sarah said. “But I thought your research into the Wild Hunt was done, Evie. Didn’t that all end a little while back?”

At the back of my mind, one of the Gabriel Hounds let loose a low chuckle, like the sound an ogre might make when devouring an exceptionally tasty baby. “Not really,” I said, a little too loudly. “Soon, though. I’ll let you know what happens.”

Sarah gave me a strange look. “You do that,” she said, but just then one of the shadowcatchers—not the Elect, but the other—took a swing at his fellow. “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” she yelled, interposing herself between them. “What the hell, guys?”

I glanced over my shoulder. Rena was still at the dock, interviewing Devin and his girlfriend, but her partner Foster had noticed the commotion and was headed our way. The cool October light picked out a livid pink scar, brilliant against his dark skin, that ran down his cheek, narrowly missing his eye. I felt the Hounds shift again. That wound—as well as a number of others that I couldn’t see but knew were there—was the result of an echo of these Hounds attacking Foster, and a major reason why I didn’t blame Rena for hating me.

For just a second, I tasted blood in my mouth—not real blood, but the memory of it, and the Hounds’ quiet approval. I gagged, clamped my teeth together, and backed away, bumping into Sarah. “See you later,” I managed, and hurried away from the pier, trying not to run but really, really wanting to get out of there. Because maybe if I did, I’d stop salivating at the thought of human flesh.