Wild Hunt (16 page)

I’d known there was something familiar in Janssen’s scent. But that very familiarity made it horrible now.

“Oh, you’re with him?” Janssen’s grin widened. “That’s just perfect. And he never had a word to say about his old dad? He must not trust you very much.”

The bartender set down a narrow glass of some thick golden drink, and Janssen swept it up, his hand dwarfing the glass. “If you’ll excuse me,” he said, carefully stepping around me. He settled into the chair across from Nate and lifted his glass in a salute. “Good to see you again.”

Nate darted a glance at me, then slowly sank into his chair.

“You bring her here to meet me? That’s sweet. Didn’t think you needed a nanny, though.” Janssen chuckled, the simple sound of it unclean.

“Don’t,” Nate said tightly. His scent had changed almost as soon as Janssen appeared, becoming that controlled, closed-down iron. He glanced at me a second time, then shifted just a little, drawing attention to the third chair at the table.

I took a seat. My face still felt as if I’d been splashed with boiling water, burning with shame and suppressed rage and an awful lot of other confused feelings. Janssen gave me a sour look, then snapped his fingers. “Bike. Right.” He took a roll of money from his pocket and peeled off several bills, tossing them in front of me. “That ought to cover it. Now let me talk to my son.”

It’d cover it all right; it’d cover a better bike than
my old one had been when I first got it. I swallowed—now that Abigail was in the hospital, any chance of the money she’d offered was gone. The prospect of that much cash was tempting, but I left the money where it lay.

“Anything you want to say, you can say in front of Evie,” Nate said.

Janssen made a face and muttered something that sounded suspiciously like “pussy-whipped.” But he turned that smile back on again, and took a long sip of his drink. “Has my boy been talking to you, Hound? He tell you what he did the first time we met?”

Lost his temper…
I shrugged.

“Broke my fuckin’ nose. Wouldn’t think it to look at him, would you?” Janssen’s smile widened, revealing even more of his teeth. “Starved little cub that he is.”

“Good for him,” I said, then remembered to look at Nate. A muscle twitched at the corner of his jaw, but he didn’t say anything.

Janssen chuckled. “That’s what I thought. Good to let those impulses out now and then, mm?” He deliberately turned so that he was no longer facing me. “All right. You got my letters, right? With the story of Sigmund and Sinfjotli, right?”

Nate glanced over at me; I shrugged. “I didn’t understand them,” he said carefully. “I don’t know much Wagner.”

Janssen choked on his drink. “Wagner? The man wouldn’t know a Volsung if one tore his head off. Fuck.” He turned and spat on the floor. “’Scuse me. No. What I wanted to tell you was the story of Sigmund and his son. This is important, boy. This is the sort of thing you need to know about.”

Nate curled his hands around his drink, his expression a combination of embarrassment and utter confusion. I shrugged; I was as lost as he was, and I was used to dealing with crazy on a regular basis. “I guess I didn’t follow that part of it.”

“Hell. You really are an idiot.” Janssen shook his
head, then turned to face me. “I don’t suppose we could have a little privacy?”

“Not really,” I said.

“Then be a good little doggy—” he paused to drain the last of his drink in a few quick swallows, “—and go fetch me a new one of these. Keep the change,” he added, slipping another bill under the glass.

I was about to tell him to fuck off, but something about Nate’s expression made me stop. Honorable intentions aside, I didn’t have a place here, and it wouldn’t do Nate any favors for his last meeting with his father to turn into a snipe fest between me and Janssen. “This once,” I said.

Janssen smirked. “So. Sigmund, the Volsungs, the Ylfings. Damn, I feel like a nursery-school teacher, having to spout this to you. Sigmund and his son found a hut in the woods, with two wolfskins hanging from the door. Are you listening to me, boy?”

I took the glass up to the bar and watched over my shoulder as Janssen went on, waving his hands to illustrate parts of the narrative. Nate’s expression didn’t change; if anything, it just became more lost. The bartender finally handed me a cool glass, damp with condensation, full of something that smelled like flowers gone to rot. “It’s pretty potent stuff,” she warned me. “You shouldn’t chug it down like it was beer.”

“I don’t think he’ll notice,” I said, nodding to Janssen.

He didn’t seem to care if Nate was following him, just so long as he could keep talking. “—called Ylfings, you understand? Because of the skins—oh, are you back already?”

I set the glass down just far enough away that he’d have to stretch for it. “If that’s all you have to tell me,” Nate said, “then I think we’re done here.”

“You’ll be missing the best part.” Janssen glared at me. “Go away, why don’t you?”

I ignored him, concentrating on Nate instead. He no longer seemed as closed down, but there was some
thing else in how he looked at Janssen: a desire to understand, a hope that there was something
to
understand rather than just plain crazy talk. I had no right to take that from him. “I’ll be back in a moment,” I said. “We can go then.”

“Okay,” Nate said without looking at me.

I left them talking and headed to the ladies’ room, always the best place for a third wheel to escape to. “She’s got a nice ass, but a face like a startled horse,” I heard Janssen say as I walked off. I shrugged; he wasn’t wrong, about the face at least. And it hadn’t stopped him from hitting on me earlier, although the thought of that was enough to give me the shudders again.

I washed my hands and waited a moment inside, listening to the perky pop that passed for Muzak here. I thought about my own father, who despite his prior history of being a jerk was at least sane. In Nate’s place I’d be just as confused, and probably angry about being fed this saga crap instead of something real. I shook my head and stepped back out—

—just in time to see Janssen pull something rank and ugly from his shopping bag and hit Nate across the face with it.

Nate staggered back, one hand going to the sodden gray thing that had hit him. I shoved my way past a pair of shrieking girls and yanked Janssen to his feet. “What the hell was that for?”

“Family business,” he said with a grin.

“Family business my ass! What did you do—” I glanced over my shoulder to where Nate stood, his hands braced on the table, shaking his head as if trying to dislodge something. The gray lump lay over his shoulder as if it were part of a sling, staining his shirt gray and bile-yellow. Somewhere, the bartender was ringing a large bell and calling for a little help here, please. “What the hell did you hit him with?”

Janssen’s grin narrowed, became feral and trium
phant. “You’ve got no place in this, Hound, not even if you were what you claim to be to this city. This is personal business between me and my son, and you—”

I heard a growl behind me, and turned in time to see Nate reach for me. Without even looking at me, he grabbed me by the shoulder and pulled me off Janssen. I let go without thinking, and Nate took my place, hands locked around his father’s throat. His scent shifted even as I tried to understand it; this wasn’t the cold, locked-down rage I recognized from before, but something else, something more akin to Janssen’s stink.

Two large men in band T-shirts pushed their way through the crowd and grabbed Nate and his father. One of the girls shrieked again, tentatively, as if testing her range, as they dragged them past her. I fought my way through the crowd behind them.

The bouncers tossed the two men out into the street, and in the time it took for me to get past the crowd at the door, Nate had grabbed Janssen by the front of his shirt and swung him up against the wall. “You rotten shit,” he grated. “You even come
near
her, and I’ll—”

I caught his arm, or at least got my hands on it. It felt like iron. “Nate,” I said. “Nate, stop it. They’ll be calling the cops any minute now.”

Nate didn’t answer. Janssen raised a hand, or at least a few fingers. “This isn’t any of your business, Hound. You just go on home. Besides,” he added, long teeth flashing in a grin, “I want to know what he was going to say. What’ll you do to me if I ever come near your little sister?”

Nate’s hand went from Janssen’s shirt to his throat, digging in so hard the skin around his fingers went white. “You can go to hell.”

One of Janssen’s hands clutched at Nate’s in a feeble attempt to pry it away, but his grin never wavered. “Better to let it out now,” he choked, the lack of air giving his words an unintended sibilance. “It’ll always get out eventually.”

“Nate.” I reached across his arm and took him by the shoulder, tying the three of us in a bonny knot. My fingers grazed the lump still stuck to his shoulder—leather, soaked in something like paint thinner and urine. “Nate, let go. We can deal with this guy, both of us, just let him go.”

“Let go,” Janssen echoed, still grinning.

“Shut up,” I said over my shoulder. “I don’t know what you did, but if I ever catch you in my city again—” Janssen gurgled a laugh, and I kicked him in the shin, hard. “If I ever catch you near here again, I’ll show you exactly how the Fiana went down.”

That shut him up. It didn’t reach Nate at all, though, and for a moment I thought he’d tossed me out of the way just so he could tear out his father’s throat. But he drew a deep breath, and the lines of his face smoothed out almost as if the bones had shifted under the skin. “Get the hell away from me,” he said, clipping off each word. His hand dropped away from Janssen’s throat, where the lines left by his fingers remained for a pulse or two before fading.

“Told you it was family business, Hound,” Janssen croaked.

“Fuck off.” Nate rubbed at his mouth, then pulled the lump of foul leather from his shoulder. “Evie, let’s go.” He turned his back on Janssen and started walking, but blindly, stumbling over the cracked pavement.

“It doesn’t go away!” Janssen yelled after us. “Just because you don’t like it doesn’t make it go away!”

“Keep walking,” I said to Nate.

“He’s wrong,” Nate said, but he kept walking. “He’s wrong.”

I
didn’t want to leave him. “At least let me check on you tomorrow,” I pleaded at the steps of his apartment. “I wouldn’t trust him not to keep harassing you.”

“He got what he wanted. He’ll stay away.” Nate rubbed at his mouth again, then turned and spat on the ground. “Christ, I can still taste that thing he hit me with.”

“What is it, anyway?” I reached to take the mess from him, grimacing a little at its smell.

Nate jerked away from my touch. “No.” He looked at the gray lump, and a bitter smile cracked his lips. “I’m going to take this thing home, and first thing tomorrow I’m going to burn it. No more trace of him.” Still holding the vile thing, he stretched slowly. I looked away. “Evie, I will be fine. Go home.”

“Are you sure—”

“Positive.” He glanced at me, then, as if dragged on a leash, turned and lurched up the stairs.

So I went home. And remembered, as I passed more and more streetlights that seemed to cast the wrong number of shadows, that I had an unwelcome passenger.

Fine. I had a ghost on me, and I had questions. Time to set a trap.

There aren’t many times when I can sympathize with the priorities of those who’ve gone further into
the undercurrent. Most of the time I’m fine with not knowing the secret name of Lilith just so long as I do know to put my pants on before my shoes. But staying out of the depths doesn’t mean they’ll stay away from you, and sometimes that ignorance works against me.

To take a particularly salient example, most adepts don’t worry about being haunted—mainly because they’re not stupid enough to let a blood relative get a grip on their soul, but also because they know the tricks to drive off a ghost. Me, I have a talent that lets me find things and a few hedge-magic tricks, none of which would last beyond a full adept’s sneeze. Which meant that even though I had an idea of how to construct a ghost trap, I didn’t really know what I was doing.

I’d never let that stop me before, though.

I stopped by the all-night corner store, avoiding a few concertgoers who’d managed to get very lost and very drunk, and picked up a few essentials for the night: bread, milk, and a big container of salt. The clerk gave me a weird look—I’d been in here twice in the last couple of weeks, buying salt each time, but the stuff had enough use in general house magic that I kept running out. Besides, he had to have seen stranger purchases.

The fountain in my office had gotten something stuck in it so that it now sounded like a naiad with asthma. It choked and sputtered when I thumped it, then went back to its usual arrhythmic flow. I scattered salt on the threshold and windowsills, bound a silver chain (well, mostly silver) at the foot of my bed, and, after a long search in the backs of my cabinets, found half a jar of crystallized honey that I could leave out. No liquor, not in my house for the last ten years, though this was one of those times I felt the lack. Then I turned the lights off, lay down, and hoped that the party two doors down blasting “Destroyed Eighties Hits II” on repeat wouldn’t affect my trap.

At some point I must have slept, but the dreams I
had were so damn dull that I kept waking up just to get away from them—walking down a long path in a land flat as a sanded-down board, traveling alongside a wagon stacked high with boxes, following the progression of a locomotive across the plain ahead and envying its swift passage. Then back to more walking. Even the dim interior of my apartment was more interesting than that. In those brief flashes of wakefulness, I sensed the gap in my perceptions coming closer, the emptiness of a ghost scent moving in toward the gift.

Empty scent
, I thought, half out of dream.
I should remember that. There’s something important about it
. But dream dragged me down again, this time into a slightly shifted landscape: cornfields, rolling hills, the tang in the air of a New England August turning toward September.

“It’s a simple matter,” a voice said, and I flinched before realizing that I was back in the dream, now following that wagon through a small town, past one of those ubiquitous Civil War statues. “You’ve wanted to walk off with it too. I’ve been watching.”

In the dream, I turned to see the speaker, but there was none, only a sense of…something, some emotion attenuated by time and events. Betrayal? Regret? Longing? Could have been anything, from the echo I felt. Skelling may have had enough strength to grab hold of me, but there wasn’t much of him left.

“Do you know how debased these things are? And the people we’re bringing them to? Thieves and whores, every one…You understand this.” The same voice, a man’s, mature but not cracked. I turned in place again, searching for the voice, but the landscape folded in around him. “It’s about respect. How can we respect our own employers when they’re the kind of people who’d…who’d turn magic into a crass commercial trade? Why
should
we treat them fairly?”

“I don’t trust you,” I said, and it was a man’s voice that I spoke with, creaky and dry. “Sorry to say it, but I don’t.”

The speaker sighed, and I turned again. A Native-American woman gazed back at me, and though she gave no sign, I knew somehow I’d fallen short in her estimation. “That’s really too bad,” the unseen speaker said.

I raised my hand, noting absently that it held an antique six-shooter, and pointed it at the woman—or where she had been, because now there was nothing but a blur of red and gray, of tooth and bone. Behind that thing stood another shadow, not the woman’s but another’s, a man in silhouette—

The gun went off, and I shuddered awake, staring up at the ceiling. Hazy sunlight filtered through the blinds, thick and golden like Janssen’s drink last night. The air felt like soup, and I’d kicked off not only the covers but the silver at my feet.

And that persistent blind spot still hovered at the edge of my senses. Skelling hadn’t gone anywhere.

I managed to catch an early-morning Green Line train out to Sarah’s shop. It wasn’t open yet, but I’d called ahead and threatened Sarah with an impromptu Axl Rose imitation outside her bedroom window unless she came downstairs.

She met me at the back entrance, still in her bathrobe. (There are advantages to living above one’s workplace.) “You are an evil woman,” she informed me, “and you look like crap. What the hell happened that you have to wake me up this early?” She yawned, then handed me a folded-over manila envelope. “Never thought I’d be selling incense to you.”

“How much?”

“Ten bucks even. Why do you even need it? You hate that stuff.”

If I hated it, so might another Hound, even if he no longer had a corporeal nose. “Long story,” I said, not wanting to admit that I’d messed up the summoning ritual after all her help. “If it doesn’t work, I’ll let you know.”

“Hmph.” She eyed me narrowly. “I’m thinking of holding another organizational meeting in a couple of weeks. Are you available?”

“Don’t know.” I rubbed at my eyes. “Oh, yeah. Have you heard of something called Gabble Retchets?”

Sarah laughed. “Funny, I figured you’d already know, being the Hound and all. Gabble Retchets, Gabriel Hounds, Seven Whistlers…” She arched her eyebrows, surprised by my lack of response. “You’ve never heard of them? It’s a term for the hounds of the Wild Hunt.”

I paused in the act of tucking the incense away somewhere it wouldn’t break and incapacitate my nose at a bad moment. “The Wild Hunt.”

“Yeah.” She grinned. “You do know that term, right?”

“Sort of.” You couldn’t go twenty pages in the folklore books she’d loaned me without stumbling over it. There were Wild Hunts in every part of Europe, and none of them could agree on what they were. They were the souls of sinners, condemned to wander the earth (probably waving to the captain of the Flying Dutchman whenever they crossed paths); they were the host of Faerie-however-you-spelled it, loosed once a season in a sacramental hunt; they were unbaptized children haunting their parents; they were Odin and his riders, chasing down anyone unlucky enough to get in their way. And half a dozen more. “Is there a…a definitive Hunt? One that has some basis in something beyond local legend?”

Sarah snorted. “Let me check with my consensus of pagan experts and we’ll get back to you.”

“Goddammit, Sarah—”

“Oh, look who’s cranky today. It’s not my fault you’re dating a goddamn Vulcan.” She paused, waiting for me to either rise to the bait or deny everything, then sighed. “Evie, there isn’t one Wild Hunt that all the others spring from. It’s a legend that’s dispersed all over—hell, often it’s a local landowner, like Red Edric or Black Matilda, who leads the hunt, instead of Odin
or Gwyn or even Hecate. It’s just a face to tack on to the idea of a spectral host. You can’t reduce them to just one ur-myth.”

“I thought you were all for syncretism.”

Sarah winced. “Yeah, well.” Her enthusiasm to believe that one aspect of the Triple Goddess was the same as another had been part of what got us into trouble with the Fiana, and while she didn’t regret it, I thought the brush with divinity in that particular form might have soured her on theory. For a little while at least. “This is folklore. Folklore doesn’t have to have a unifying myth; in this case, the Wild Hunt is a spontaneous reaction to the nights drawing in and the concept of mortality.” Theory or no, clearly she hadn’t soured on lectures just yet. “Look, if you need me to look something up for you—”

“I don’t. Probably not.” No point in having her chase down the wrong Hunt. Not when I wasn’t yet sure what I was dealing with.

“Good. Because I was about to say that I can’t. I’ve got too much on my plate, what with the organizing and all. I really think we’re making progress.”

Progress for this lot, I thought, would be not throwing chairs at each other.
Could you respect them
? The memory made me redden. “Sorry.”

“What for?” She seemed to soften a little. “Look, how about you come in for coffee? Alison’s sleeping, but I’ve got to wake her up in ten minutes for her deposition work anyway, and we can talk.”

“Can’t. Got work.”

“Work? It’s a Saturday, Evie, there’s no way you can be doing work on—” She stopped. “You’re hunting, aren’t you?”

“Got it in one.”

Sarah drew away, shaking her head. “Oh no. Look, Evie, if you…If there’s a reason you’re asking about the Wild Hunt…” She hesitated, and a flicker of actual fear, something suppressed for too long, slid under her voice. “Evie, they’re dangerous. Old-blood
dangerous. Chaos-and-inexorable-winter dangerous. You don’t mess with them, in any form.”

“I know.” Which was why I really, really hoped that I was wrong about this particular hunch.

The best plan under the circumstances was for me to go back out to the park where Abigail had been attacked, find the scent of her attacker, and follow it from there. (Well, not quite. The plan that made the most logical sense would have been to show up at Mercury Courier, beg forgiveness, offer proof that my bike had been totaled, and ask for an extra day off to procure a new one. But I didn’t really consider that a viable option.) That way, I’d have the whole panoply of scents: the shadow-scent of the hounds, Abigail’s faded lilac, and, if I hadn’t just been imagining it, the scent of her attacker.

It was a good plan, and if I’d still had my bike, I’d have gone with it in a heartbeat. However, I was at the mercy of the MBTA, and while that was fine for some parts of Boston, the T didn’t stretch out to the suburbs. It certainly didn’t stretch out to that part of Newton, unless I wanted to take the commuter rail followed by a series of buses. I might be able to get there later, but I wanted to check out closer places first.

Instead I went against Woodfin’s advice and headed back to Chinatown. After I verified that, yes, my poor wrecked bike had been carted away long since, I walked down to the cross street. I switched off my cell—the damn thing could bring me out of even the deepest trances, and I wasn’t in the mood to deal with interruptions today—and sniffed for remnants of a trail. There wasn’t any trace of the silhouette I’d seen, but if I sank in, if I gave myself over to searching…

It occurred to me, not for the first time, that—although the patterns of scent in Boston were chaotic tangles overlaid only with what order humans chose to give them—each separate neighborhood had its own distinctive pattern. Whether it was the spices-
and-fried-tasty-goodness element that separated Chinatown from the dry-paper scent that permeated so much of Beacon Hill, or the brilliant interweaving of Dorchester as opposed to the quiet intensity of Longwood, or whether it was actual scent or just the interactions of each neighborhood’s people, the result was fascinating. I was starting to be able to find my way through Boston solely by scent.

I smiled and knelt on the sidewalk where I’d seen the silhouette.
My city.
I liked how that sounded.

Enough people had passed over this spot in the last fourteen hours that the pattern of scent was dizzying, but only a few had stopped in this very spot for more than a couple of seconds. A woman with a dandruffy Pekingese—no, three people smelling of new raincoats and suntan lotion, probably tourists—no, a homeless man with a touch to his scent that probably marked him as a seer who hadn’t made it to the enclave—no, though I ought to try to find him at some point.

There: the blank, doubled scent that I’d noticed before. It wasn’t much. In fact, the weird, duplicated quality to it made it seem as if it wasn’t even there. I could, I supposed, follow it by that absence (Skelling’s presence over my shoulder stirred, but I ignored it), but that’d take a lot more patience than I had to spare. Besides, in that state I’d very likely be concentrating so hard that I’d walk out into traffic.

But there was an edge to the scent, like a distortion, like the lump in the sheets when you make the bed over something. I could only catch the barest hint of it: dry leaves, frost, a chill like December in the back of my throat. It wove in and out of the scent like a child hiding behind a sapling: never quite out of sight, never quite clear.

It wouldn’t have been enough two months ago. It was barely enough now. But it was more than the empty scent of the silhouette, and present enough that I could keep hold of it. I could track it.