Wild Hunt (14 page)

The grin widened and turned oily. “Oh, I’m not telling you anything. Wouldn’t want to hurt your virgin ears.” With that, he deliberately turned his back on me and climbed the steps to the street. The same cherry-red sports car stood at the curb; up close like this, I could now see the rust spots all along the side.

“It hasn’t gone your way, though, has it?” I called after him. He stopped at the edge of the sidewalk. “Otherwise you’d be out of town already. You wouldn’t be coming by here to hassle the—what did you call them?—small fry?”

His smile thinned out. “Why do you care? Now you’ve learned the score, you finally want in on the game?”

Game? “Maybe.” That’s right, Janssen had mentioned something big going down…but aside from the attack on Abigail, I hadn’t noticed anything big. And somehow Janssen didn’t seem the kind of guy who’d be drawn to that pack at all. The opposite, in fact.

Janssen didn’t notice my pause. “Oh, how soon we lose our innocence!” He glanced down the street, then moved closer. “But you’re right. It’s less than ideal for me right now. In fact, I could have used your help a little while back, if you’d been quicker on the uptake. The guy who pulled it off doesn’t like my kind.”

“What, assholes? Can’t say I blame him.”

“Oh, you’re funny.” He reached out to pat my cheek, and I jerked away. Janssen laughed, the sound like nails dropping into a jar. “But you’re a little late. There’s a way around everything.” He jerked his head toward the boarded-up door of the Three Cranes. “As soon as I find another place that sells—well, sells what
I need for negotiation—then I’ll be all set. So go on home, Hound, and maybe when I come back in six months you might be relevant—”

He paused, staring behind me. I glanced over my shoulder, but couldn’t see anything. “What?”

“Shit,” he whispered, the color draining from his face. “Shit, I’m not ready for this…”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Aside from us, the street was deserted, though the cross street was full of people (and finally moving traffic, now that the RV was out of the way). “Janssen—”

Janssen leaped to the side of his car, fumbling with his keys. “Fuck off, Hound,” he spat over his shoulder. “I got work to do.”

“Go to hell,” I snapped, but…but wasn’t there a change in the air, like a cloud coming over the sun, only the sky was as hazy as it had been all damn day? A dimming of the light, somehow, as if my eyes were starting to give out…

I turned to face it fully as a hot wind blew across the street. Dust spun up from between the cracks in the pavement, hot and dry in my throat. My long coat rippled around my ankles—

Janssen’s car started up with a scream of abused engine, and I blinked and shook my head. There wasn’t dust, or wind, or cracks in the pavement, and I sure as hell wasn’t wearing a long coat. I caught my breath, then jerked to one side as Janssen’s car careened up onto the sidewalk and past me. “Out of the way!” he yelled out the window, following it with a blistering curse as something went
crunch
under the front of the car.

“Son of a bitch!” That crunch had been my bike. Janssen didn’t even slow down. He leaned on the horn as he drove off, scattering pedestrians in his wake. I crouched by the mangled remains of my bike, too furious to even draw breath. One wheel was intact, but the other looked like a Möbius strip, and the frame was bent, completely useless. “Shit, shit, shit,” I muttered, running my hands over it as if I could magically
bring it back to wholeness. There went my bike, my transport, my fucking paycheck—

The shadows of my hands on the frame suddenly faded, as if the sun’s light had waned. I paused, then looked over my shoulder, unable to shake the feeling that I’d done this already.

Past the intersection, on the far side of the street, stood something in the shape of a man, his hands clasped in front of him as if he were posing for a picture. He was in silhouette, shadowed by the lights beyond him, but the stillness he radiated implied that he was an adult, without either the restlessness or the vitality of a younger man.

For just a fraction of a second I caught a whiff of death-stink, not the sweetish scent of a corpse but something fouler, like the thing in Yuen’s jar. Only where that had had the unformed feel of a grub, this was the full cockroach.

I stood, one hand pressed against my nose in an instinctive, inadequate attempt to block that reek—then had a flash of something I’d never sensed before. Olfactory double vision: two scents in the same place at the same time. The second one was frail, almost a negative against the crippling rot of the other. I shook my head, and they canceled out, becoming not one scent but a palpable absence, the way a radio station playing dead air has a sound.

And yet I took a step forward, leaving my poor, mangled bike behind, drawn by a sense I couldn’t quite name. It wasn’t the lure of scent or of the hunt, or even simple curiosity—I knew all of those, and could step away from them even if it hurt to do so. This was new, and I didn’t know how to defend against it. It was like the call of the hounds this afternoon, the call that had pulled me to Abigail’s side too late.

This was the man who’d summoned those hounds. I bared my teeth, unsure whether I was acknowledging my place as one of them or denying it. Either way, I couldn’t keep from walking closer.

The silhouette leaned to one side, as if regarding my progress. For a moment I had the sense that someone was walking beside me, copying my movements, long coat flapping in a nonexistent wind.

I’d reached the intersection. Soon I’d see his face…I should have been able to see it by now, shouldn’t I? I curled my hands into fists, balking at the call that pulled me forward. I wanted to know who he was, but on my own terms, not this strange compulsion.

A car horn blared, so loud my skull seemed to shrink, and a brown-and-white blur shot in front of me, between me and the silhouette. I jumped back, tripping over the curb to land on my butt. The blur resolved into the side of a van—no, an RV, squatting there like a train car dropped onto the street.

A door in the RV opened up two feet down from me. “Get in!” yelled Reverend Woodfin.

I
pulled myself in, expecting a passenger seat or something that would at least pass for it, but a giant folding sign advertising
Woodfin Ministries
took up most of the space. “What the hell?”

“Close the door!” Woodfin wrenched the gearshift into place, and the RV’s engine groaned in response. Through the driver’s side window, I caught a glimpse of the silhouetted man receding, walking away as if this no longer interested him. I fumbled the sign out of the way and yanked the door closed. “Have you no sense at all? It’s damned lucky for you that I came back.”

“What are you talking about? Who was that?” I tried to manage some kind of sitting position next to the sign, and succeeded only in whacking my head on the sunshade. The inside of the reverend’s RV smelled like a dorm room, with the additional edge of what I slowly recognized as real gunpowder, not the scent-analogue of magic.

Woodfin glanced at me. “You saw a person?”

“I—”
No
, I wanted to respond, because that scent hadn’t been a person’s scent. But I had seen a shape. “Sort of.”

“Interesting.” He pointed ahead, to where the snarl of traffic signs gave way to large, red
DO NOT ENTER
signs. “Does that mean this turns into a one-way street?” A car honked at him, and he sped up.

“Jesus!” I huddled down further, trying not to imagine what I’d look like after going through the windshield. “Yes, yes, turn left here!”

“You don’t have to shout.” Woodfin shook his head and jerked the wheel to the left, careening around a corner far too tight for this whale of a vehicle. “Myself, I didn’t see any person, just got the sensation of the unclean. You get to recognize that, after the kind of work I’ve been doing. Yes, yes, I see the red light; don’t worry, it’ll be green by the time we reach it.”

I whimpered and clutched the sign, very aware of how inadequate a safety measure it was. I wasn’t used to being either this high up or this unsteady in a car, and Woodfin drove as if major road signs were only guidelines. A chorus of horns followed us as we wove through traffic like a guinea pig through a doll-house, and the reverend’s only response to them was—again—to speed up. He fit right in among Boston drivers, I acknowledged grimly.

“It so happens,” he said, as we rounded another too-tight turn, “that I was in town to pick up one last thing Elizabeth left behind, so that I could give it to you. Fortunately, I can now do both at once.” He gestured to the back of the RV. “Your clip is in the back, on the table. Go on back, I’m a safe driver. You’ll be fine.”

I doubted that. “My clip?” I tried to stand and clutched at the closest handhold, which turned out to be a bit of paneling that, on closer inspection, looked like it hadn’t been securely attached to the wall in years. “This is about
ammunition
?”

“No, it’s about debts.” Woodfin pulled into a new stream of traffic and trundled over into the left lane. I lost my footing and slammed against the wall. “You did my job,” he continued as if nothing had happened, “you ministered to Yuen at the transition from one life to the next. I was supposed to be on hand to do that,
to make sure that his passing ended his father’s unfortunate—hm—extension. So I’m paying off my debt to you. Believe me, I don’t want to write those debts off just because you haven’t got the common sense God gave a possum.”

“Point taken,” I said, deciding not to antagonize the crazy man anymore. I made my careful way into the swaying, thumping back end of the RV. The walls were covered with pictures—posters for gun shows dating back twenty years, Civil War-era photographs of stoic men before their amputations, advertisements for reenactments and historical replicas. Most of the pictures had notes written on them in a careful, round hand:
Chippewa Motor Lodge, 3/13
or
Contact Terence Bradlee
or
See Waldrop brothers about DeWitt-Horowitz connection
. “Where are we going?” I called over my shoulder.

“We? I don’t know about
we
.
I
have to get to a quarry out in—” He paused, and I saw with a kind of fascinated horror that he was checking a notebook from the glove compartment. “Assawompset. What kind of a name is that?”

“Got me.” I caught the side of what probably had once been a kitchen table. It had been turned into a work surface: a mess, but a carefully ordered one. Most of it had been covered with webbing to strap everything down: fine cloths of varying thickness, a pile of small green-bound books, a stack of small tools like jeweler’s calipers. The tools lay on top of a barricade made of what I had assumed at first were steel bars. A second look revealed them to be silver ingots with scrapes all up one side that suggested they’d been grated.

A single clip of ammunition, like the kind that Yuen used to supply for my gun, lay in a webbing of its own. I picked it up and slid it into the outer pocket of my courier bag. “Any chance you can take me back to where you found me? My bike—”

“No.” We jounced over another pothole, and I clutched
at the edge of the table. “I may not be as experienced in the particulars of this trade as Yuen was, but I do know not to drop someone back in the midst of that. In fact—” He pulled the RV to the right, blocking two lanes at once. “In fact, I don’t think you ought to go back there for a while. You’d make it too easy for that thing to find you again.”

If he wanted to find me, I didn’t think I could stop him. And if I didn’t get back there soon, my bike would be sold for scrap metal…but it hadn’t been reparable. I’d seen enough to know that. The most you could do with it was to take it apart and use the unhurt pieces—if there were any—in other bikes.

I put my head down a moment to mourn the loss of that poor, beaten-up thing. It’d put up with a lot from me, and if I ever saw Janssen again, I’d return the favor. “You can just let me off here, then,” I said finally.

“In the middle of traffic? I don’t think so. Ah,” he added, and cranked the wheel to the right. “This ought to take me where I want to go. What were you doing at Yuen’s, anyway?”

“I needed to ask Elizabeth—” I failed to move with the RV, and was slammed up against one of Woodfin’s posters. “Ow. I needed to ask her about a name I saw at her place. Skelling.”

Woodfin made a pleased sound. “Look at the picture next to you. Should be on your right.”

I craned my neck around to look at the poster and then realized it wasn’t a poster at all. It was a copy of Yuen’s photo—the six men in the Old West. Notes in illegible script had been scrawled on the frame and on the picture itself, arrows and circles running from one man to another. Woodfin had blown up several sections, each of the men’s faces in particular, and tacked them around the periphery. “Who are they?”

“My life’s work,” Woodfin said, beaming as he cut off another SUV. “I’m a gunsmith, a restorer of old weapons, and I’d assembled the full collection from
this expedition. It’s how I met Yuen, originally.” He leaned on the horn, and I peered out the curtained window to see the Public Garden across from us. Two skateboarders flipped us off as Woodfin honked again. “Six men got hired by a consortium of buyers on the East Coast to transport a few, hmmm, potent talismans across the country. Couldn’t take them over the iron road, couldn’t drive, not that there were many motorcars back then, in nineteen-oh-eight. They had to ride or walk, from San Francisco to New York, carrying some of the nastiest stuff you’re likely to find in this life or the next.” He grinned. “Their backers had commissioned a set of pistols for the expedition, all made specially. Kind of like your ammunition, come to think of it. Took me ages to track down all those guns, and longer still to track down their stories. Not how my daughter thought I’d spend my retirement, but I gotta say I like it better than playing endless games of checkers on the porch.”

I remembered the case on Elizabeth’s counter: the six guns, each in its own niche, and the name beneath one:
Skelling
. Two of the guns, I remembered, had been damaged to the point of no repair. Somehow I didn’t think they’d had an easy journey. “Which one is Skelling?”

“Rory Skelling. Far left.” Woodfin wrenched the wheel around again, and the Public Garden gave way to brownstone houses, still rocketing by at a distressing speed.

“What, the one with the mustache?” I found the blowup of his face and squinted at it.

“Yes, him. He’s the only one who didn’t have any extant correspondence—you wouldn’t believe how long it took me to track down his history.”

The sepia tones washed out any elements of color, but the silhouette was right: long coat, broad-brimmed hat, bright eyes shaded by heavy brows. I’d found my ghost…and now that I was looking at a larger picture, I could see something else. Take away the mus
tache, turn Irish red hair to Irish black, smooth out some of the planes of the face, make it a little more feminine and a bit uglier, and you’d have the face I saw in the mirror each morning.

What had Finn said about the descendants of his hound Sceolang? Once or twice a generation, someone will have his talent…“I think,” I said slowly, “I think we might be family.”

Woodfin’s answer was drowned out by a metallic clatter on the roof, and he grunted in annoyance. “Maybe. But Skelling didn’t have any descendants,” he said. “He died before the expedition ended.”

And I’d bet anything that his remains ended up in Mount Auburn Cemetery.
I shook my head, then paused. “What the hell was that noise just now?”

“Traffic strip. Nothing big.” Woodfin turned a little in his seat. Beyond him I caught a glimpse of the Charles, gleaming in the sticky afternoon sunlight—only it was on our right, and so was the Esplanade…“Now, Skelling’s an odd one, because he didn’t get killed on the job. That woman behind him in the photo, that was his wife, an outcast Lakota girl, and she—”

Esplanade on the
right
? Esplanade even this close? “Jesus Christ, you’re on Storrow Drive! What were you thinking?” I pushed the sign out of the way and leaned over the dashboard, trying to see whether there was any way out of it before we hit one of the bridges. “Turn around! Take an exit!”

“We’re perfectly fine,” Woodfin asserted. “I’m making good time for the first time today. Now, the Lakota girl didn’t leave a record of her own, but halfway across Massachusetts she and Skelling killed—”

“We are not fine!” Christ, couldn’t this man read the height limit signs? “Take an exit now!”

Too late. We rounded a corner and came up on one of the bridges that made Storrow Drive such a pain for anyone in a vehicle larger than a minivan. Woodfin
hesitated, then hit the accelerator, just as I yelled and ducked.

The low brick arch scraped along the top of the RV with a screech, followed by an almighty bang. In the rearview mirror, I saw a chunk of aluminum-wrapped machinery fall off the back of the RV and roll to the side of the road.

There was a moment of dead silence, loud enough to drown out the chorus of horns behind us. “Air conditioner,” Woodfin said finally. “I always forget to add that into my height allowance. Well, it needed replacing anyway.”

I stared at him. “You’re insane. Completely insane.”

“Then you’re in good company.”

Woodfin turned onto an exit without further comment, heading toward Boston University. “What happened to the rest of them?” I asked after a moment.

“Oh…Kolya, he’s the mean one in the middle, he settled in Atlanta until someone got sick of him. DeWitt started up a saloon in San Francisco, once he got back West. Georges didn’t even make it to the Mississippi. Ants.” He gave an involuntary shudder. “Prescott—I was about to tell you what happened to him. He ran off with some of the packages they were transporting, about the same time that Skelling and his wife killed each other. The others caught up to him out by—” he checked the notebook again, this time keeping an eye on the road, “—Assawompset. Yuen’s uncle seemed to come out the best of them, and he had his own problems. His idiot brother was fool enough to misuse what he’d brought home.” He smiled grimly. “Which gets us back to you, again.”

“That’s why Yuen’s father was imprisoned in the jar?”

Woodfin shook his head. “Poor bastard tried to use some of the learning in the Unbound Book. Normally, I’m not one to say that greater knowledge is a bad thing, serpent and Eden aside, but that book’s a poisoned well. I know for a fact Yuen wished that
his uncle had just let Prescott run off with the whole thing.”

“‘Only the dead can kill the dead,’” I murmured, thinking of Elizabeth, and the pages she burned. I hesitated, just long enough for the blind spot at the back of my perceptions to wake up again.
Stolen property
, I thought,
and Skelling wanted it, and whoever attacked Abigail was connected somehow…
“What were they carrying?”

“Hm?” Woodfin pulled across three lanes of traffic into a BU parking lot and wrenched the gearshift back down into park.

“The expedition. The six men and their guns. What were they transporting?”

“Oh, a lot of things.” He tipped his head back and closed his eyes, then recited as if reading from a list. “A harmonium built by John Dee—that’s now in the Cloisters, though they’re smart enough not to put it on display—the pages from the Unbound Book, a necklace made of fulgurites, half of a harlequin costume, two ampullae of Christ’s blood from a Papist church, no offense, and at least three spearheads that were claimed to be the Lance of Longinus.” He opened his eyes and shrugged. “Jack shit, really, but they wouldn’t put the important things on the official list, so it’s hard to say what else they carried over.”

Of course. “Thanks,” I said. “And thanks for the rescue.”

“Don’t be dumb enough to need a second one.” He leaned over and opened the far door, as he had when he’d pulled up in Chinatown. “I don’t particularly want to be owing any more debts in this town.”

I walked the rest of the way home and arrived sore and dusty, and not even the warble of the fountain could cheer me up. A drift of mail, mostly bills, lay on the floor in front of the mail slot, and I kicked it out of the way.