Wild Hunt (21 page)

“Very good,” Woodfin said. “You must have spent some time putting that together.” He gave me a hard look, as if trying to read where I’d figured it out.

“I had help.” Most of my obeying-authority circuits were tied directly to my Catholic guilt, so I was a little better facing off against someone whose clerical collar didn’t come with apostolic succession. But all that meant in practice was that I didn’t have the urge to confess my sins as I explained myself. And I didn’t have to mention Skelling’s role in this.

Nate glanced back the way we’d come, toward the scent of the quarry. I wondered if he could smell it too, that cool, inviting scent. “This—Prescott person. He didn’t stay here, did he?”

I looked over at Elizabeth, standing cold and untouched by the side of the RV. “No. I don’t think he did.” She bowed her head. “This is just conjecture, but some of the things they were transporting involved necromancy.” Like Woodfin’s Unbound Book. “So maybe what the men of the expedition did wasn’t so much a burial as a…a sealing. Locking him away.”

“Sort of,” Elizabeth said. “They invoked a guardian and set it over this place to keep him imprisoned. I’d expected to find it still here—my father had talked
with it, you see, when he was ten—but instead it’s changed into that thing in the water.”

Mana turning in on itself. The locus, the spirit, becoming sentient enough to ask for blood. If the spirit had been a guardian, set in place to contain something like what Yuen’s father had tried to become, that would explain the obsession it had with keeping the nearby land safe.

“And that’s why I was drawn here,” Nate mused. His hand bumped against mine, then clasped and squeezed it. “And shedding blood here—”

“Would be bad,” Woodfin declared. “It’s too young—it doesn’t know morality. It doesn’t know what it can and can’t claim.”

“If Prescott were still imprisoned, it wouldn’t be a problem,” Elizabeth snapped, crossing her arms. “I thought I was done with all this,” she added, almost to herself.

I could sympathize with that. “He’s not still imprisoned,” I said. “He’s in Boston. I don’t know how, but he’s there, and I think someone must be working with him, because he’s got the horn—”

“Horn?”

I stopped short. All three of them looked confused. “It’s…I don’t know what it is. It’s called a Harlequin Horn, but that’s not what it is.”
Names
, I thought,
why can’t anyone in the undercurrent name something what it is?
“I have to get back to town.”

“So do I,” Nate said. “Could I use your bathroom?”

“You’re surrounded by
trees
,” I pointed out, “and you ask for a bathroom?”

“Sign of civilization.” Woodfin waved toward the screen door. “It’s on the right.”

“I’ll give you a lift back,” Elizabeth said as Nate disappeared into the RV. She glanced at Woodfin. “It’s okay. One of us has to be here, but the other one can go.”

When Nate returned, we piled into Elizabeth’s
Mini, and the three of us got maybe two feet down the road before the reverend ran after us, carrying a clunky old suitcase. He handed it through the window to Elizabeth. “Not sure about this, but it can’t hurt. Take a look and you decide, okay?” She took it without comment and stuffed it next to my feet.

We drove in silence for a while, leaving the dirt road for a sparsely paved one and that for a two-lane highway. “What’s in the suitcase?” I asked finally.

“Don’t know. Not checking till I drop you off.”

Ah.
I drummed my fingers on the armrest, then glanced into the backseat. Nate had curled up into a fetal ball, his chin pressed against his chest. It couldn’t have been comfortable, but his chest rose and fell in the slow cadence of sleep.

There are some things
, Yuen had said,
that you hold on to. Even when you know you shouldn’t. Even when holding on costs you everything.
I’d thought I couldn’t imagine holding on to anything that strongly, but I’d been wrong. If I hadn’t known it then, I did now.

“The jar,” I said. “The jar that held your grandfather—I think Prescott hired those goons to steal it from you. I can’t prove it, but—”

Elizabeth didn’t look at me. “I don’t care about the jar, Hound. I wouldn’t care about any of this if I hadn’t promised my father I’d clean up after him.” She took a turn a little too fast and honked at the motorcyclist who flipped her off. “I didn’t think it’d be this much work.”

It always is,
I thought.
When we start cleaning up after the dead, it’s always too much work. Or even those who aren’t dead yet…

“I have to care,” I said slowly. “An old woman—she came to me asking for help, and I couldn’t do a damn thing to help her.” And when I’d tried, she’d screamed at me to keep away. It hadn’t made sense—why keep me away, when I was the closest thing to help? Had she
wanted
to be the victim of those hounds? Couldn’t be. Maybe it was just my own guilt at hesitating, at cost
ing her those further wounds. “I have to find Prescott. I don’t know why he hurt her, but I’ll stop him.”

“Says the hero.” Elizabeth’s tone had eased, though, and she looked a little less weary. “If you keep up like that, maybe I’ll come back to Boston someday.”

That was probably as much of an approval from her as I was going to get. A truck passed us on the right, smelling of hay and apples. I tried Rena’s number again; still nothing. I thought of the shadow hounds and hoped to God she was all right. If she was, she was going to kill me for this; I’d left her a cryptic message and then run off: exactly the sort of thing she’d told me never to do. Still, I’d make it up to her.

Harlequin, Harlequin…that had been a stupid name for the horn; anyone could see that pattern had been added afterward…it was more like camouflage…

I hadn’t thought I could doze, but the motion of the car had me blinking and drifting as much as Katie had been two nights ago. I didn’t quite come back to myself until we’d pulled up a block from the Goddess Garden and Elizabeth was reaching across me to open the door. “Thanks, Hound,” she said. “But don’t look for me anytime soon, all right?”

“Thanks,” I said, and let the rest lie.

Nate got out and gave the Goddess Garden’s windows a worried glance. “You’ll be all right?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” He rubbed at his chin. “I’m a little scared to talk to Katie just yet.”

“She’ll forgive you.”

“I know. That’s the problem.”

I handed him the backpack. “If you see Janssen—”

“I won’t. I don’t ever want to see him again.” He hesitated, then leaned forward and gave me a quick kiss, so light it was gone before I felt it. “I’ll come find you later, all right?”

“Or I’ll find you.” I watched him go, then turned toward home.

There was a traffic jam on Park Drive. That wasn’t
so unusual; college kids get confused by the whole concept of a one-way street more often than you’d think, bollixing it up for everyone else. But as I got closer, the snarl of cars looked less like a traffic jam and more like something else. Police cars, several of them, lined the road, but none had lights flashing, and while they’d blocked off a lane of traffic, there weren’t any ambulances.
At least nobody’s hurt
, I thought.

As if I’d invoked it with a thought, the first scent of blood reached me. I stopped dead. The scent was faint—I was still a ways away—but this wasn’t an undercurrent scent, or even some trace of my talent going haywire. This was a real, physical scent of blood, and if I was catching it from this far away, there was a lot of it.

I quickened my steps, barely aware I was doing so.
Not Katie
, I thought,
not Sarah, not Rena, not Abigail, please not anyone I know—

And then I stopped dead in my tracks, because the scent entwined with the blood was one I did know, the one that after last night I’d begun to associate with Nate. The wild scent. Janssen. What had he done this time?

I forced myself to move without any obvious hurry. Cops don’t like it when you come running up to a crime scene; they tend to think that means you had something to do with it.

The police had cordoned off a footbridge and a section of the park on this side of the stream, and a small group of people had gathered at the edge of the yellow tape. A tall policewoman was telling them that there was nothing they could do, to please disperse. Her counterpart was at the other end of the tape, arguing with a man carrying a camera.

I didn’t slow to look, but walked past and followed the footpaths around to the far side of the bridge. The cops had tied the tape to a forsythia bush, and while that would provide me with a little cover, it also hid
most of the crime scene. I pushed a branch out of the way and peered past it.

The first thought that came to mind was
Where’s the body?
I could smell blood and nastier things, bile and spilled bowels and a dreadful meaty reek that was going to put me off rare steak for some time. But while there were blue plastic tarps set up all over the grass, none of them had that distinctive lumpen shape of a body underneath, nor were they large enough to hide one.

Each one of the tarps covered something, though. I stared at them for a moment, counting—there were six at least, and probably more on the side of the bush that I couldn’t see.
Christ
, I thought,
are those
children?
No—none of them are big enough even for that. If Janssen’s done this—whatever
this
is—I swear I’ll—

A breeze—not a desultory, halfhearted thing like the ones that had tweaked at the hot weather up till now, but a stiff, cool breeze tasting of metal—blew across the fens. The tarps rippled, and two flipped open entirely.

I wouldn’t have to go looking for Janssen after all.

There wasn’t much of his face left, but the remnants were contorted in a scream that ended where the ragged edges of his lips pressed against the dirt. His shoulders were contorted, as if he’d been reaching for something, but his reaching arm ended in a hash of split bone and meat. Though the back of the tarp still stayed down, there wasn’t enough space back there to allow for another arm, or even another shoulder blade.

One of the watchers at the tape screamed, almost delightedly, and the camera guy went nuts. It took them a moment to tack down the tarp furthest from me, and I took a step back into the forsythia before they could reach this one.

A hand grabbed the back of my shirt. “Where the
fuck
have you been?” Rena hissed.

E
very other time I’d been in a police station, it’d been in a much more friendly situation—picking Rena up at the front desk so we could go scare the DJ at Jillian’s, arguing about parking tickets for a friend who’d gotten towed, waiting in the front room until my mom could come by and explain that it had all been a misunderstanding and I’d pay for the replacement sign. Hell, even the parts of the morgue I’d visited were the ones they kept visitor friendly. Not that I was eager to repeat that experience.

I’d still take it over this anonymous, concrete-block room. I didn’t have claustrophobia—cramped towers in cemeteries aside—but this looked like the sort of room that would be perfect for triggering it. One table, one mirror set into the wall, four chairs, and a ceiling that hung over me like old guilt. Even the smell was anonymous: not the scrubbed and sterile cleanliness of the morgue, but the careful facelessness of a place that let no trace of events take hold. A thousand people might have been here before me, but I wasn’t going to be finding out about any of them from this room.

The company didn’t help matters. “Okay, Miss Scelan,” said Cop Number One. I hadn’t heard his name yet, and somehow I didn’t feel comfortable asking for it. He was about my height, with thinning
brown hair and a blotchy red birthmark along his jaw, and he gave the air of someone who had not only seen it all but dealt with idiots at every stage. “One more time. How did you know this man?” He tapped the picture of Janssen that lay on the table, a fuzzy telephoto blowup showing him in mid-laugh.

“I didn’t know him,” I said. Cop Number Two—Cop One had called him Dave when he came in, but every time I tried to assign that name to him, it slid right off—made a note. “Not personally or anything. I met him for the first time a few days ago. He wanted me to take on a job for him.”

“And what kind of job would that be?”

I sighed and glanced at the last occupant of the room. Rena hadn’t spoken since she’d brought me in. She stared at the table, refusing to look at me. “Am I under arrest?” I asked, speaking to her rather than the two before me.

“Arrest?” Cop One looked shocked. He did a good job of it. “No, not at all. We’re just having a talk, aren’t we? You’re helping us with our inquiries, that’s the phrase.”

“Then I don’t have to tell you anything about my job.” That knocked the feigned shock off his face. “Besides,” I said, “you know this stuff already. I mean, twenty minutes ago he—” Cop Two didn’t even bother to look up, “—was threatening me with losing my license as a private investigator.”

“You certainly could lose it,” Cop One said. “If you’ve done anything to deserve it.”

I sighed. “The point is, you know what I do for a living. So why do you have to ask what Janssen wanted me for?”

“Janssen,” Cop One murmured, and Cop Two made another note. “So he wanted to hire you?”

I hesitated. “No. Not technically—he seemed to want
me
to hire
him
. I think he’d gotten the wrong idea about what I did, and he wouldn’t believe me when I told him that I wasn’t interested.”

“And why would he think you wanted to hire him?”

Because six weeks ago I brought down the biggest undercurrent gang this side of the Atlantic
. “I don’t know. Maybe he was starting up a PR business.”

That got a momentary tightening of lips from Cop One. Cop Two might have smiled, except that his face seemed to be stuck in permanent professional detachment. He had the same stocky build as his partner and even seemed to share the same flat-nosed face, or maybe that was just an effect of the official cop expression they were both so good at. “So you told him to buzz off. But you met him again.”

“That wasn’t for work, I told you.” Jesus, this wasn’t good. I didn’t know how much I could hold back about Nate, especially since if they’d already called him in, he might be spinning a story that mine totally failed to corroborate. “Look, how do you know all this? Were you having me watched?”

Cop Two spoke up, still without taking his eyes from his screen. “The gentleman in question had been under our eye for a while.” Rena shifted in place, but didn’t say anything.

“Under your eye? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means we know you met Janssen.” Cop One leaned over the table. “And apparently got into a bar fight with him. Mind telling me the circumstances of that?”

“He started it. Any of the witnesses will tell you that.”

Cop One grunted. He drummed his fingers on the table, skimming the edge of Janssen’s photo. “Where were you between the hours of midnight and three
A.M.
last night?”

“A friend and I felt the need to get out of town for a bit,” I said. “We were out by Assawompset.” I tried to remember any of the road signs I’d seen on the way back. “Lakeville.”

Cop One’s lip curled. “And neither of you came back to Boston till this morning.”

“No.”
Could Nate have done it?
I wondered. As a wolf, he might have been able to tear Janssen apart, but not like that. Not like that. And I’d been with him all night, dammit. We must have been too far away to hear the hunt, or maybe the quarry’s sanctuary wasn’t in name only. “There’s no way either of us could have gotten back here by then.” As soon as I said it, I realized it was a lie. Nate couldn’t have made it back, but I could—leaving him asleep by the quarry, running back along that gray path, though the thought nauseated me.

Cop One was watching me narrowly, and I pulled myself away from that line of thought. Looking guilty right now wouldn’t help anyone. “Do you know the name Harold Westmark?”

What?
“Who?”

“How about Erik Marsh?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

“Jonah,” Cop Two said warningly, and for a moment I thought this was another name I ought to know, but he was looking at his partner. He nodded back toward Rena and shook his head.

Cop One—
Jonah? Really
?—exhaled a short, sharp burst, and got up from his seat. He tried to pace, but the room wasn’t large enough for him to take more than a few steps. “You were at a crime scene two days ago,” he said over his colleague’s muttered protest. “Why?”

Crime scene?
“You mean the dog attack?”

Cop One glanced at Rena, imitating his partner’s action of a moment ago. “Yes. The dog attack.”

“My statement’s on record with the Newton cops. What does that have to do with this?”

“Were you aware that Mr. Janssen had met with Miss Huston several days ago?”

I shook my head. “No. No, I didn’t know that.” Although it seemed to make some sense—had she been involved with his contact, the one that “didn’t like his kind”? Had whatever tore Janssen to pieces been
something like the hounds that had attacked Abigail? It couldn’t have been the exact same pack—if the shadow hounds were capable of that kind of slaughter in such little time, they’d have shredded Abigail in the same way.

Unless something had changed between then and now.

Cop Two rubbed his eyes. “Let’s try this again,” he said. “Where did you first meet Karl Janssen?”

“I want to make a phone call.”

“Answer the question, Miss Scelan.”

“I want to make a phone call.” What kind of lawyer would deal with this crap? Who could I call?
Hell
.

Cop Two didn’t say anything. The moment stretched out, Cop One glowering at me, Rena still in the corner like a ghost. Finally she looked up and met my eyes.

Crap.
“I met him under the Seaport Avenue bridge, near the Barking Crab.”

And on. And on.

After another round or two and what felt like three more hours, all three of the cops got up and left me there. By then my lack of morning coffee had really started to make itself known; I had a headache that felt like Athena’s soccer-playing sister was trying to kick her way out of my skull. But there was nothing I could do; I waited in that room, chasing my thoughts around in a circle, until a uniformed woman brought me a cup of water and walked me to the bathroom. I sponged off yesterday’s sweat and grime as best I could with paper towels, then stuck my head under the faucet. It wasn’t much, but it’d do.

My escort also let me make a call on an unpleasantly sticky phone. I left a message with Sarah’s assistant at the Goddess Garden, but I knew that girl; there was a good chance Sarah wouldn’t get the message before the day was out.

And then it was back to the room for another hour or so. I’d lost all track of time, and the mirror behind
me didn’t help. The one-way glass had faded a little, so that my reflection was doubled by just a bit.

I stared at it for a moment, ignoring the knots in my hair and the caffeine-deprived zombie look, concentrating on that edge of the image. Something about that seemed significant, the doubled image…

Doubles. That was what was significant about the scent that had led me to the Gardner. It had been doubled, folded in on itself. It wasn’t just a matter of scent, I knew; that was just how my brain interpreted the trail, but the mirror clarified what I’d sensed. You could hide someone’s scent if you were able to superimpose it on yourself so that the two canceled out instead of building into something greater.

But the only way that would actually hide someone would be if one of the parties was dead. The dead had no scent—the rotted stink of Yuen’s father aside—so that absence provided a perfect mask, hiding the living scent.

I put my hands to my head. Abigail had somehow gotten involved with Prescott. Prescott had stolen the horn. Janssen had gone first to Abigail for some reason and then to Prescott instead, to get a piece of this action. Only Prescott didn’t like his kind.

The link was almost there, almost within my grasp. Abigail was the one part of this that didn’t make sense, didn’t seem to have some kind of connection…no, she wasn’t the problem, but her great-great-grandmother was…buried at the feet of her patron, buried too deep for anyone to find…

The click of the door opening dragged me out of my thoughts, and I sat up to see Rena busying herself at the door. She muttered something that sounded like a prayer, then pulled one of the chairs over and sat down across from me. “The tape’s off,” she said. “No one’s listening.”

I licked my lips. My mouth tasted like the moss I’d been sleeping on that morning. “Are you sure?”

“You’ll just have to trust me, won’t you?”

She should have been smiling as she said it—that was how Rena was, right? I wished she were smiling. “Okay.”

“Now.” She turned over Janssen’s photograph, pushed it to the side, and folded her hands in front of her. “Tell me what you’re not telling them.”

“I don’t know if it’ll—”

“Evie. Just tell me.”

I sighed and ran my hands through my grimy hair. I smelled awful, and I wanted a shower and coffee and Nate…“Okay. I think Janssen was killed by a pack of unreal hounds, on the orders of a dead man. That’s the gist of it.”

Rena’s expression didn’t change. “And?”

“And the same person had Abigail attacked, only I got there too late to help her. I don’t yet know why he’s in Boston or what he wants, but he’s here…” I paused. How had Prescott gotten out of the quarry anyway?

Rena was still waiting. “And I had to leave town in a hurry yesterday. A…a friend of mine had been cursed, and I had to follow him. That’s why I didn’t follow up with that message I left you, and I’m really sorry about that, but he was hurt—” My voice broke, and I caught myself. “I had to help him. I’m sorry.”

She nodded. “That’s your story.”

Something in her voice made me look up at her. “Rena, you don’t think—”

“I don’t know what to think,” Rena snapped. “You run out of town, this guy turns up strewn all over the Fens—yeah, the press are having a field day with that—and your goddamn message!” She glared at me, her fingers fidgeting the way she sometimes got when she needed a cigarette
now
. “What the hell was up with that, Evie? Why did you need to see Huston?”

“It’s important,” I mumbled.

“Important? Christ, Evie, I don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into but you have no idea how bad this is. And I’m not just saying this as your friend, I’m
saying this as a representative of the law. You understand?”

I waited a minute for her to calm down. “Not really,” I finally admitted.

“Oh…shit.” Rena got up and stalked to the far end of the room, kicking the chair in the corner, in which she’d spent most of my interrogation. For a moment she stood with her back to me, shoulders heaving as she took several deep breaths. “Janssen was our lead,” she said. “He’d been involved in the Gardner thefts.”

“You mean—”

“I mean the biggest fucking heist Boston has seen in decades, Evie. The paintings from the Gardner, back in 1990. You remember that?”

I thought of the empty frames, the green silk behind them.
This is a loss
. And Janssen had said he’d “handled the first one.” He’d as much as boasted about it, and I hadn’t even noticed.

“How did you find him?” I asked, trying to think. Could I tell her about the second theft now? Did it even matter in this context?

“I
didn’t find him. Foster did.” She grimaced and turned, glaring at the little window set into the door. “He was the biggest lead any of us had, at least any of us down here in the trenches. If they had something bigger up among the
real
detectives,” and the bitterness she put on that word was enough to make me wince in involuntary sympathy, “they weren’t sharing it with us. But Janssen was
ours
.”

“This case was your big chance,” I said.

Rena wheeled to face me. Her mouth worked a moment, and I couldn’t tell if she was holding back tears or trying not to cuss me out. “It was,” she said, finally, clipping off her words as if it cost her not to scream them. “Mine and Foster’s. You know, sometimes I think they stuck him with me just so they wouldn’t have to listen to either of us. Stick the black kid and the Latina together, let them waste their time
on the little stuff. If they’ve got any complaints, just forward them to the PC team up top without touching the levels where the real work gets done. Bring us out when there’s something a beefy white guy can’t do. Leave us with the shit jobs, unless we catch something real early, and I mean before-it-happens early.”