Wild Hunt (18 page)

“It’s—” Sylvia’s response was almost a sob, and she caught herself before her voice could break. Her arms were tightly crossed, and even though she had assured me twice over that nothing had been stolen, her eyes kept darting to either side of the room, as if searching out one item after another. Not because of guilt—at least I didn’t think so, not yet—but because theft meant something horrible here. “It’s none of your business. Now, please go or I’ll have you escorted out.”

“What was stolen?” I repeated, this time trying to draw on whatever uncanniness Skelling’s presence lent. It wasn’t much.

“A costume piece,” the man answered.

Sylvia shook her head. “Ravi—”

“What’s the harm in it?” He didn’t take his eyes from me. “She knows it’s gone. She even knows about Theo.”

“That just means she had something to do with it!” Sylvia switched to a panicked whisper, glancing out the windows to the atrium as if an eavesdropper might be clinging to the inner wall.

Something—not the blank spot that was Skelling, but a similar shape—shifted the pattern of scents behind me. “
My apologies
,” the contralto voice said in my ear. “
I’m afraid I mistook you for your relative
.”

I turned to look—again, nothing but that portrait, the woman presiding over this room like the image of a saint—and when I looked back, Sylvia’s expression had changed. Ravi still looked glumly determined, but Sylvia had lost that edge of panic. “Very well,” she said. “Ravi, get the box and meet me in the gardens. I’ll take her out by way of the Dutch Room.”

She stalked to the pillared entrance, her heels snapping on the tiles like rifle shots. “And,” she added as I reached her, “I’ll show you just why nothing’s been stolen.”

I followed her down. “I should tell you that I’m not with the police,” I admitted. “But if something has gone missing you should call them in. I know a few of the detectives, they’re good people—”

“They weren’t any help before, were they?” She paused at the edge of a door and gestured for me to go inside.

I did so. There were more glass cases here, furniture too baroque for me to even think of using, sculptures smiling blandly. I raised my eyes to the far wall, where more art that I didn’t have the brains to understand hung, and that’s when I saw it.

They hadn’t changed the room. They’d left it all just as it was—though it can’t have been that way when they found it after the theft; no thieves were that courteous. They could have rearranged the other paintings to cover the gap, could have put up a discreet
REMOVED
or
EXHIBIT TEMPORARILY CLOSED
sign, gray with time and optimism, could even have put up curtains or a little explanatory plaque. Instead they’d left the frames, the empty frames, hanging on the wall. Through them only the green silk of the wall showed, like windows onto nothing, like open wounds.

The entire room mourned their absence, mourned without hope of surcease. Even the smell in here was different, bitter, like swallowed tears.

“Three Rembrandts.” Sylvia came to stand beside me. “One Vermeer, and a masterpiece it was. A Manet, a Flinck, sketches by Degas, a gilded eagle, and a Shang dynasty beaker.” She sighed. “This is a loss. A theft. Not that gimcrackery you’re asking about.”

I didn’t say anything. Couldn’t say anything.

“You feel it too, I can tell. Mrs. Gardner—well, she watches over this place.” She drew a shaky breath. “None of the security cameras show anything happening two nights ago. But I checked on Theo before I left, and I know he was here. And then he turns up across the river with his face half bitten off, and it takes us forever to discover that one box is empty when it
shouldn’t be. That’s not a heist, that’s a vicious practical joke.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, knowing it wasn’t enough.

“I imagine you are.”

Even the gardens bore a trace of Mrs. Gardner’s painstaking genius. But there was enough air out here that I wasn’t overwhelmed. I stepped out into the sunlight and inhaled, trying to ignore the heavy dampness in the air.

Ravi had gotten there before us, and he’d pulled a screen around one of the flagstone patios. “Please, sit,” he said. “Will you need to dust for fingerprints?”

I refrained from telling him that if I did, most of the latent prints would be gone by now. “Different methods,” I said. “May I?”

He held out the box, straining a little from its weight, and when I took it from him, I understood why; it was a lot heavier than it looked. It resembled a lavish jewelry box, the kind that ladies of good taste keep on their dressers, or that traveling divas place in their safe-deposit boxes. My callused hands caught and dragged on the silky-smooth wood. A pattern of oak leaves had been carved into the sides. “This is what was stolen?”

“No,” Sylvia said. She remained standing, casting a wary eye over the rest of the garden. “That’s just the box.”

“We’ve actually been able to find records for the box itself,” Ravi said, happily moving into antiquary mode. “Mrs. Gardner had it made on the advice of one of her buyers.”

Sylvia sniffed. “Hangers-on, in this case. Poor woman practically begged to be buried at Mrs. Gardner’s feet.”

I turned the box around. The hinges were gold, and imprinted with that same oak-leaf pattern—but instead of being polished to a mirror shine, they’d been varnished over.

Ravi produced a folded paper from his jacket. I unfolded it to reveal a sketch of a masked character in a black-and-white costume, caught in mid-prance. “It’s a costume piece, from Harlequin. He’s a
commedia dell’arte
character, usually wearing that diamond pattern you see—I’ve got a paper Theo wrote up somewhere on the provenance of the name…”

“For heaven’s sake,” Sylvia snapped. “It was a little horn on a strap with a black-and-white checkerboard pattern. It was barely worth five dollars.”

I nodded absently, flicked the latch, and opened the box.

The garden seemed to shudder a moment, or else I did, and for just a second I had the sensation of imprisonment, of the home of something trapped for a very long time and now flown, like the inside of a cage after the lion has departed. I made an inarticulate noise and curled my hands over the end of the box to keep it from falling.

Ravi craned his neck around to get a glimpse of the inside. “Oh yes, I should have warned you about that. That’s what makes the box so heavy, you see.”

“It’s lead.” I hesitated a moment, trying to remember what my mother had taught me about lead poisoning (other than “stop eating paint”), then said the hell with it and touched the lining. It was cool, colder than it ought to have been, and dented in the middle, as if someone had carelessly crammed something into it.

“Lead, silver, and a very thin layer of steel under that, according to the sketches. You can see the tacks holding it together at the corners—see? Like a quilt, almost.”

No quilt had ever been made with this purpose in mind. Lead was a grounding factor, a metal that molded itself easily to human whims and so would shape itself to the desires of its maker. Silver and steel too each had their own properties against different magics. I’d bet my left hand that there were words incised under that metal, words that neither I nor anyone
would ever read, but that had acted as a Möbius loop for whatever lay inside. If Mrs. Gardner had ordered the box made to her specifications, she’d either known a lot about magic herself or had connections with someone who did. I rather suspected the latter, based on the lingering echo of her spirit in the museum. Adepts didn’t become loci; they devoured them.

All this work, this protection, for a little horn on a strap. Would it even be functional? From Ravi’s description, probably not, especially if it was part of a costume.

Costume. There was something to that. Perhaps the horn hadn’t been part of a costume, so much as a costume itself—no, that didn’t make any sense. But I couldn’t shake the idea of costume, masks, something hiding under another name.

There was no scent inside. Nothing. The horn had rested here for a long time, official records or no, but it hadn’t left a trace. Which meant…

Which meant that whatever had been here, Mrs. Gardner hadn’t wanted it tainting the rest of her museum. And too, that it was either self-contained enough that it wouldn’t leave any kind of trail, or it was ephemeral enough that it hadn’t had a trail to leave.

Neither was a good option.

“Call me crazy,” I said, “but I wouldn’t order a box if I didn’t have something to put in it.”

“That’s just what Theo said,” Ravi exclaimed, then paused. “Says. Theo
says
. But while there are records for the box, there’s nothing official for the contents. The horn’s not even part of the collection, at least going by the lists.”

Sylvia cleared her throat. “That’s not quite the case.” Ravi gave her a surprised look. “Well, you hadn’t been examining all of her correspondence, had you? No.” She turned a little toward me, somehow managing to indicate that she had her back to him even though we were roughly in a circle. “Mrs. Gardner made a few
purchases that are off the official rolls, notably around the time this box was made. She backed a—hmm, I suppose you would call it a consortium—to bring back several items from the West Coast. Even went so far as to have pistols made for the escorts—I suppose she got a kick out of the Wild West idea of it.”

I blinked.
Skelling, you’re late
. “This wouldn’t have been in nineteen oh eight, would it?” Sylvia’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t ask me how I know.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” she said tartly.

Nineteen hundred and eight. The expedition that Skelling was part of—and the things that Prescott stole…

Prescott couldn’t possibly still be alive, could he? No, Woodfin had named Prescott the oldest member of the group, and there was no way he’d have lasted this long, even if you pickled him…

…or if you put him in a
jar
…

I didn’t like where this thought was going. Yuen’s father had managed to seal off his spirit, but he’d done so poorly, leaving himself stuck. But couldn’t someone else have done the same thing, and done it right?

Goddammit, I’d have noticed if there was something that long dead walking around Boston. Wouldn’t I?

I shivered, and then, disregarding how these good people would react, bent over the box, curling over it as if it were a private pain. Scent, there had to be a scent, there had to be something—

A distortion, a blankness like the emptiness under your foot when you miss a step on the stairs. I shuddered, digging my fingers into the sides of the box so hard they hurt. At the very edge of my senses, a trace of wildness, sharp as frost in midwinter, like an ecstatic scream into the stars…

I sat up so abruptly I nearly smacked into Sylvia’s head as she leaned over me. “Are you all right?” she demanded, plainly expecting a
no
.

“Urng
,” I said, or close to it. God, what kind of horn was that? No painted clown ever carried any
thing like that, no costume ever had something that powerful. What would a horn like that call up? What could it summon?

In my memory, the sound of a low, hollow note rang through my head: the note that had called me to witness Abigail’s mauling, that had called the hounds that attacked her. I doubled over again, teeth clamped shut as my stomach tried to evict the morning’s breakfast.

“Oh, that’s it,” Sylvia snapped as the box slid off my lap. Ravi caught it, grunting from the weight. “Ravi, I’m an idiot for ever listening to you.” She straightened up and marched off, and through my haze I heard her call for security.

I leaned back, panting, to see Ravi staring at me with an expression of shock and bafflement—and, painfully, hope. Well, even if they thought I was crazy, maybe I could still help. “Don’t put it back in the museum,” I managed through what felt like cotton in my throat. “It was—it shouldn’t be there.”

He nodded, slowly, then fumbled in his coat pocket and pressed a business card into my hand. “Call me. If you find anything, call me.”

Small chance of that, and I almost told him so, but just then Sylvia returned with the two guards I’d seen earlier. The guard who’d helped me at the entrance. One of them put his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t make this difficult, please,” Sylvia said.

As they hustled me out of the gardens, I heard the voice again. “
Don’t bring it back,
” Mrs. Gardner murmured. “
Not to me.
”

“I won’t,” I said.

“Yeah, you just bet you won’t,” the other guard muttered.

I
switched on my phone as I walked away from the Gardner, doing my best to ignore the guards watching my back.
Rena
, I thought.
I need to get in touch with Rena. Prescott might try to attack Abigail again. If he’s the one who did it.

I misdialed her number, cursed, and tried again. It didn’t make any sense. Nothing about this—the Gardner, Skelling, Abigail—made sense, especially the ghosts. For someone’s imprint to linger after death in a recognizably human fashion, you’d need either a major spark—like ghosts that remain where they were murdered, for example—or artificial power. A ghost with a locus, for example, though loci could make up for the lack of vitality for only so long.

A truck blared at me, and I jumped out of the intersection. I knew this corner, it was my neighborhood; I knew it so well that I hadn’t thought about looking before stepping into the street. But I’d corrected my mistake in time. And that was a reason why the entity that had spoken to me in the Gardner couldn’t be a ghost, not by the usual standard. She’d mistaken me for someone—clear ghost pattern there—but then she’d realized her mistake and changed it. Ghosts don’t do that. Ghosts are dead, and one thing the dead have real trouble with is adapting to new informa
tion. That’s why some of them walk through walls in the houses they haunt: when they were there, the walls weren’t, and why should they change?

If a ghost could fit events into a pattern it knew, then it would do so, and damn any rough edges that didn’t quite match. A ghost couldn’t correct itself, or apologize for getting something wrong.

A ghost couldn’t plan a robbery. Not in such a way that it would come off with any degree of success, anyway.

The line connected and went to voice mail almost immediately. “Rena, it’s Evie.” I switched my cell phone to my other ear, mentally cursing Rena for not picking up. What was the point of having a cell phone if you never bothered to switch it on? “I’ve just run into some very serious
bruja
shit, and I need you to call me. Abigail Huston, the woman who was mauled—look, if you can spare anyone to keep a guard on her, I think she may need it. You would not believe the hornet’s nest I’ve just stepped into. I’ll explain when I see you—I’m on my way to see you now.”

I didn’t like being so cryptic, but Rena had told me once that she wasn’t the only one who listened to her messages, and I didn’t want to give her a name for getting crazy weird shit. Assuming she didn’t have it already…I glanced over my shoulder at the receding stone bulk of the Gardner, then jumped as my phone buzzed in my hand. Not a call, but messages on my voice mail. Guess I wasn’t in a position to complain about people not picking up.

First: “Evie, it’s Nate. I know you’re busy, but could you…shit, I shouldn’t have told you to go away last night. I need to talk to you. Something’s wrong, and I can’t say exactly what it is other than it’s like, well, like that Fenway stuff.”

That gave me pause—Nate hadn’t ever referred to what happened in the tunnels under Fenway. What was he talking about, though? Fiana? Magic in general? Or…without wanting to, I remembered the
taste of blood in my mouth and the Morrigan’s quiet approval of Nate’s purely mortal rage.

I shook my head. Second message: “Evie, it’s me. Don’t come over. Just stay away. Okay? My father’s been calling, and—Jesus, something’s wrong, and I think it’s me—”

The message cut off there. I stopped at the corner. The T station was this way, and ten minutes’ ride would take me to Rena. But Nate was the other direction…

My phone service didn’t care about private dilemmas. It switched to the next message with a merry chirp. This one began with a clunk, then a moment of silence. No, not quite silence; something chirped far in the background, like a pen of ducks in another room, or a one-sided conversation heard through a wall. I turned away from the traffic, curling around my phone as if to hold in the sound.

“Ah
.” It wasn’t a voice, not quite, because “voice” would have implied some kind of consciousness behind it. Instead it was a degree removed from that, as if the speaker had heard of words but didn’t quite understand the concept. “
Ahh
,” again, only this time there was a note in it I knew well—the sense of relief one gets when beginning a hunt, when all the difficult things drop away and it’s only one task, one mission ahead of me. The letting go that is so seductive about hunting.

It didn’t sound like Nate at all. I hadn’t thought Nate even
could
let go.

For a moment the message was empty, only the soft percussion of breath disrupting the static. I pressed my free hand to the ear not against the phone, trying to block out everything but that breath, forgetting for the moment that it was recorded, recorded hours ago, and that I couldn’t respond.

The message went from silence to a splintering screech. Nate—or someone—had broken his phone in mid-message. I turned away from the T station and started to run.

A smell hung over the porch of Nate’s apartment like a body from a noose, rank with adrenaline and sweat and something more acrid, something that made me draw my lips back from my teeth. I don’t have much in the way of instinct—most of it took off with my common sense when I started getting involved in magic—but instinct told me that this was not a good place for me to be.

I ran up the porch steps two at a time and stopped, panting, in the doorway. The stairs creaked as someone descended—a man’s shadow, huge on the wall, diminishing as it came closer. “Nate?” My voice cracked, and even the sunlight flooding in couldn’t keep me from shivering as I made my way up the stairs.

But the man coming down from the third floor wasn’t him. Janssen turned the corner and stared at me, then scrambled back a step like a recently declawed cat dropped into a dog kennel.

“No you don’t,” I snarled, and leaped at him, grabbing him by the shirt. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Like mold growing over a clean spot, his natural charm reasserted itself. “I’m not the one you’re looking for,” he said, raising both hands and smiling.

“No shit. I don’t know what you did here—”

“I
didn’t do anything—”

“Shut up.” I jerked my head toward the door to the apartment, which stood partway open. “What do you call that? And where’s Nate?”

His eyes widened. “Oh, this gets better and better. Were you screwing him? Because that’d—”

I swung him around, into the wall on the other side of the stairs. Something on the other side of that wall crashed to the floor.

Janssen’s grin didn’t falter. “That’d just be the icing on the cake, wouldn’t it?” He spread his hands. A thin, dry strip of leather was wrapped around his left hand—the thing he’d hit Nate with last night, now
sapped of whatever foulness it’d held. “As for me, I’m just visiting family.”

“Fuck you.” No blood, I realized. I couldn’t sense any blood, but the scent that was there was Nate, Nate and adrenaline and a horrible burnt stink that made me want to run like hell, didn’t matter which way. Janssen’s smell was there as well, and that was almost worse—

No. It wasn’t just Janssen’s smell. It was familiar, horribly familiar, and too much like Nate’s own—

“You rotten shit,” I hissed through my teeth. “What the hell did you do to him?”

“Him, nothing. No more than what I gave him when I fucked his mother.” Janssen’s grin turned into a smug, secret smile. “Heredity’s a wonderful thing.” I tightened my grip, pressing my fingers into the soft spaces just behind his jaw. Janssen’s eyes watered, and he choked on a laugh. “I told you my business contacts didn’t like my kind.”

“Your kind? What the hell are you talking about?”

He shook his head, as if I were an idiot child who persisted in not getting the joke. “You don’t expect me to let an opportunity like this go away, just because I’ve got a few embarrassing personal problems? So I handed those over to my son, let little Nathan take the brunt of it. All he’s good for, really, out of all my bastards. Call it a hand-me-down curse.”

“What do you mean, curse?”

His eyes gleamed. “What do you think?”

Snarling, I swung him around and shoved him down the stairs. Janssen caught himself with a neat two-step. “If you’ve hurt him,” I spat, “if you’ve even touched him or Katie, I will tear your fucking throat out.”

“I’m insulted.” Nevertheless, Janssen’s hand crept up to his neck, as if not quite sure that he could keep me from it. “Hell, I even fixed his door for him. I’ve got some decency, right? Don’t want to leave his apartment open to any two-bit thief.”

I stared at him. He honestly thought that this half-
assed kindness on his part made him a good guy. Probably also considered his babbling about Sigmund to be fair warning as well. “Get out of here. If I even catch a whiff of you again, I swear to God—”

“Swear me no swears, little girl. I’ve got business to do, and between you and the well-meaning officer who thinks he can follow me, I’ve already had a full day.” He glanced up the stairs. “I always told him the wild part would get out and, well, not my fault if he tried to stuff it away. Now it’s his problem.” He made a little bow, then turned his back on me. “See you later, Hound.”

I turned tail as soon as he was down the stairs. The door to Nate’s apartment was a mess, even with Janssen’s “repairs”: splinters everywhere, one of the hinges twisted almost off. In a dizzying flash I remembered how I’d scraped at these same locks, unable to fathom how they worked. I dragged the door open.

The room had been torn apart. If I’d been looking with just my eyes, I’d have thought Janssen had done it—but his scent stopped at the door. The table was on its side, a broken chair next to it, and a long slash knifed across the cushions where I’d slept not two nights ago. One of the bookcases lay on its side, across the door to Katie’s room, textbooks and papers spilled everywhere. Nate’s desk had been overturned onto Katie’s, as if sheltering it against the wall.

And the only scent in the room was Nate’s.

“Jesus,” I breathed, and took a step inside.

Something crunched underfoot, and I looked down to see the remnants of Nate’s cell phone. “Nate! Katie!”

I hadn’t expected anything—Nate’s scent was strong in the air, but cold; he was long gone—but an inarticulate, muffled cry came through the wall.

“Katie!” I clambered over the wreck of furniture and grabbed the bookcase, dragging it aside. I tried to open her door, but something blocked it. “Katie, are you okay? Where’s Nate?”

Her reply was too garbled to understand, but the hysterical tone of it said more than I wanted to know. I put my shoulder against the door and pushed. The room was dark inside, but not so dark that I couldn’t see the dresser and chairs that had been dragged in front of the door. Katie climbed over them and practically fell onto me, sobbing. “I’m sorry, Evie. I’m sorry, I couldn’t, I’m sorry—”

“Sorry?” She flinched at that, and I hugged her tighter, her barrettes digging into my collarbone. “Katie, what happened?”

“I didn’t see it!” she wailed against my chest. “I thought I was good at seeing things, but I couldn’t see this happening at all, and I couldn’t do anything—”

“Katie, stop. Stop.” I set her down on the floor and took both her hands in mine. “I can’t understand you. Just tell me what happened.”

She gulped for air, then sniffled. “That guy kept calling,” she said. “The one Nate doesn’t like to talk to.”

“Janssen?”

“I don’t know his name. He just kept calling, and—and after a while Nate just—he got mad.”

My spine went cold.

“Real mad. He—” She swallowed and glanced around the living room, her eyes widening as if she were seeing it for the first time. I realized that was exactly it—she hadn’t seen it in this state before—and hugged her closer. “He told me to get in my room and not make a sound. And then he, he yelled and—” She gestured to the table and the couch, her hands shaking. “And he left.”

Left. Oh God
. “Katie, when was this?”

Her lips pressed together, as if holding in a great cry. “This morning,” she whispered. “Early.”

“And you’ve been in there the whole—”

She nodded.

“Jesus. Jesus, Katie—” I touched her hair gently, and she burst into a fresh bout of tears. “It’ll be okay. It will, I promise.” I dug out my cell phone and tried
to think of who to call as Katie sniffled against me. Police? Exorcist? Locksmith for the damned door?

Hell with it. You went with what you had. I rocked Katie back and forth and waited for Sarah to pick up.

Whatever wise-ass comment Sarah had prepared died as she reached the apartment twenty minutes later. “It looks like a tornado hit this place,” she managed, finally. “Bad breakup?”

“Don’t start, Sarah.” I scrabbled in the wreckage of Nate’s desk, trying to see if he’d left any clue to where he might have gone. His computer didn’t look hurt, but it wouldn’t turn on either, and I couldn’t make heads or tails of the sticky notes on it. “Don’t fucking start.”

“Okay. Right.” She stared around her, shaking her head. “I had no idea…”

“Neither did I.” That was a lie.
I should have stayed with him last night. I should have stayed.

There were so many things that I should do. Call Rena, put out an APB, make sure Katie was all right…All the logic I had told me I ought to stay behind and take care of things here, trusting that Nate would be all right until I could find him.

Logic could go fuck itself. “Sarah, I need you to take care of Katie. If you can, call Rena Santesteban at this number.” I scribbled her number on a scrap of paper and pressed it into her hand. “Tell her I’ll call when I can, and to make sure Abigail is safe. I’ll be back with Nate.”

Katie emerged from Nate’s room, dragging a backpack twice the size of hers. “You’ll need this,” she said, panting.

Sarah glanced from her to me. “For what?”

“For the hunt.” I hefted the pack and slung it over my shoulders. “I’m going to hunt Nate down.”