Wild Hunt (22 page)

She turned to face the opposite wall, blinking fast. “We wouldn’t even have known Janssen was in the country if Foster hadn’t caught it. The brass says hands off, hands off, let’s see where he leads us. Well, this—” a savage gesture over her shoulder, maybe meaning me, maybe Janssen, maybe both of us, “—is where he leads us. One old woman in the hospital, and a heap of chunky salsa in the Fens.”

I hadn’t realized—but of course I hadn’t realized, I’m a pasty Irishwoman, and the only time that means anything is when leprechauns get stuck on everything in March. And Rena never talked about the crap she got as a Latina on the force—but that didn’t excuse me for being so goddamn ignorant about it.

I finally asked the question I should have asked straight off. “Where’s Foster?”

“Hospital. Dog attack. Reilly’s trying to make out he was involved in some kind of dogfighting thing, but we’ve got Huston in the hospital with the same kind of injuries, and Janssen had them too, just worse, so between the three I think they’re going to have a hard time saying it’s not connected.” She took a shaking breath, and brightness gleamed at the corners of her eyes. “They say he’ll probably be able to see out of that eye again.”

“Shit.”

“No, really?” She rubbed at her eyes and glared at the saltwater on her hand as if she wanted to arrest it. “He even had your goddamn down payment on him. The emeralds check out; Huston had the receipts for them and everything.” She pulled out a chair and sank into it. “It’s not just leather, you know that? The scrap
that came with them—it’s gilded, though the gold’s worn off. Foster thought it was dogskin.” She took a deep breath. “God, listen to me. I sound like him; concentrating on the little things in the middle of a crisis.”

“When did it happen?”

“Night before last.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “I’m telling you all this so you’ll be honest with me, Evie. I’m not saying I don’t believe you. But it’s really a stretch.”

“It’s what happened,” I protested.

“Doesn’t make it plausible.” She shook her head and sat down. “Why didn’t you tell me about Janssen when we talked before? I could have done something.
You
could have done something.”

“I didn’t know he had anything to do—” I stopped. “I’m sorry. But there’s a lot that I don’t think I
can
tell you—I can’t even explain it to myself.” I looked down at my hands, thinking about Abigail, about the theft from the Gardner. How much would that throw everything into chaos? How bad would it make her look to have missed one theft when trying to solve another?

I thought of the empty box that had held the Harlequin Horn and shuddered. Something that could leave an echo like that shouldn’t be let near Rena. Near anyone decent.

She held up a hand. “You know what? If you’re telling the truth, I don’t need to hear it, and if you’re lying, I don’t want to.” She paused a moment. “If you’re holding out on me, Evie, then I swear I won’t just stop protecting you. I’ll track you down.
Bruja
shit or no, friends or no, I will take you down.”

I almost told her everything. The new theft, the suspicion I had about the thief’s identity, a dead man wandering around Boston—but I knew how it would sound to her, and if what I’d already told her had strained credulity, what would she do with the full story? “I understand,” I said, aware of how much I was leaving undone.

Rena’s eyes narrowed, and she seemed about to say something more. The door creaked open, and the same officer who’d brought me a drink entered. “We’re letting her go.”

Rena stared at him. “
Go?
”

“Reilly says we got no reason to hold her.” The officer nodded to me. “Miss Scelan?”

I got to my feet and stood, swaying, for a moment. All the aches from yesterday came back with a vengeance. “Rena—”

“Go on,” she said, slumping back in her chair. “Reilly probably wants you out of here before the press can get hold of your name. It’s not the first time I’ve had him go over my head.”

She didn’t get up as I left, only turned over the photo of Janssen and stared at it as if there were secrets written under his skin.

I was led out through the offices to the front, where my cell phone and wallet were returned to me, and then out onto the steps. The sunlight was bright—it wasn’t too long past noon. I ran my fingers through my hair, grimaced at the feel of it, then paused as a figure across the street waved to me.

Sarah was in her full summer regalia, all gauze and fluttering skirts, and she’d even made a concession to the day by donning a pair of cat’s-eye sunglasses and buying a lemonade from one of the street vendors. “You know, Evie,” she said as I got closer, “it may have been a while since your last walk of shame, but that doesn’t mean you have to ignore me completely.”

“What?”

“You could have stopped by the Garden. I had cinnamon rolls out. And Nate certainly had an appetite.”

“He’s all right?”

“You’d know that better than I.” She grinned and raised her lemonade in a salute. “Some things you learn to recognize quickly.”

I shook my head. I had neither the time nor the temper to deal with Sarah in a good mood. “How’s Katie?”

“Katie’s fine, just scared.” Sarah eyed me as if considering what else to ask—what Katie was scared of, for one—but eventually refrained from asking anything. “If Alison starts nagging me about having kids, I’m blaming you. She used Katie as an excuse to stay up watching
Sailor Moon
and eating Cocoa Krispies instead of working on her deposition.”

“Oh. Good?”

“If you didn’t have to watch with them, yes.” She took another sip of her lemonade, then offered it to me. I drank it down eagerly. “I swear, I nearly found myself telling the guy at the coffee shop ‘In the name of the moon, I will have a latte’ this morning. Oh, and some woman dropped this off for you after they left.” She held up a battered suitcase.

“Elizabeth Yuen?”

Sarah shrugged. “I dunno. Small, Asian, in kind of a snit. She took a cinnamon roll, though.” She glanced over her shoulder and edged closer. “I can’t believe you told Katie about the twinkle incident. Do you know how embarrassing that is?”

“Uh-huh.” I took the suitcase, sat down, and set it on my lap.

“I mean, I’m still finding rhinestones in my underwear drawer.” She glanced over my shoulder as I flipped the catches—then just as quickly slammed the suitcase shut again, my pulse thundering in my ears. “Holy mother of—Is that what I think it is?”

“I hate to say it, but I think so.” The suitcase held an old-fashioned six-chambered pistol, resting in a worn leather holster dark with age. I’d only gotten a brief glimpse, but that plus the scent of it—old iron, and the tingle of both gunpowder and gold—told me that despite its cartoonish appearance, it was the real thing. “It’s from a, a gunsmith I know.”

“How many gunsmiths do you know?”

I ignored her and slid my hand into the suitcase again, trying to tell more about the gun without blowing a hole in my own leg. The barrel was slick and unnaturally smooth, chased with a fine pattern that my fingers couldn’t quite make sense of, and the wooden grip was warm beneath my fingers.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of a distortion, an emptiness in the air.
I never kept it in that good a condition
, Skelling murmured in my ear.

I didn’t answer. I’d done enough talking to ghosts lately.

Something crinkled under my fingers, and I pulled a scrap of paper from under the holster. “What, operating instructions?” Sarah said as I unfolded it. “I thought those things were just point-and-click.”

It was a handwritten note, printed on the back of a Silver Bullet Ministries flyer:

Which meant it was for show only, and not to be trusted in a firefight. Got it. And the “extended loan” probably meant I was breaking so many concealed-weapons laws right now that if Rena saw me, she’d drop my ass in jail before I could speak. I had a license for my own gun; I didn’t think you could get a license for this sort of thing.

I closed the case again and laid a hand on it, thinking of Skelling, of how little this gun had helped him, of the blind spot that persisted in hanging over my left shoulder.

Well. If I had to be haunted, who better than family?

Sarah took the note from my hand and scanned it. “Sounds like someone had mommy issues.”

“What makes you say that?” I got up and felt for my wallet and cell phone, both in their usual place.

“A whore sharing his name? Might be a wife, but he’d have recourse to strip her of his name. And that doesn’t seem quite right in context.”

I shook my head. “That’s assuming a lot. You’ve got no way of knowing he didn’t have a wife…” I paused. No way of knowing about a wife, or children…or a mother…

The box. The box at the Gardner. Mrs. Gardner wouldn’t have known how to build a seal like that. Someone must have told her. And Abigail Huston was buried deep at her patron’s feet.

Why had Gardner supported the expedition anyway? To own an item that she’d later fear so much she kept it sealed, or to keep it away from someone else?

“Evie.” Sarah gave me a wary look. “You’ve got that look again, Evie. Don’t go running off on a whim again.”

“It’s not a whim.” I put my hands on her shoulders. “Sarah, listen to me. If this goes wrong, things might get very bad for a while.”

“I’ve been through the ‘very bad’ part already, Evie. I know how to handle myself.”

“Not like this. If it gets dark, and you haven’t heard from me…well. Stay inside, keep the door locked, and if you hear hounds, don’t go looking.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Evie…”

“Trust me.” I gave her a quick hug, then picked up the suitcase and ran.

I
called Nate from the D branch of the Green Line of the T, out where it turned into something between a trolley and a commuter train, running through the lush greenery that suburbs like Newton could afford. I huddled in the back of the train; I’d had enough of the great outdoors lately, thank you very much.

Nate’s cell phone was presumably still in little bits on the floor of his apartment, but his land line was working. “Nate, it’s me,” I said as soon as he picked up.

“Evie? Are you all right? I called your phone, but no one picked up—”

“I was at the police station.” I glanced over my shoulder—no one but a pair of grandmothers talking in Russian and one very tired woman in a wilting business suit. “Janssen’s dead.”

“Janssen?”

Shit
. “Your father.”

“Oh.” Silence for a long moment, punctuated only by the gentle rocking of the train. “I wish I could feel something about that, Evie, but I can’t. Not now. How did it happen?”

“I think—It looks like it was the same thing that happened to Abigail.” Only much, much worse. “Nate, I want you to meet me at Newton-Wellesley Hospital.”

“Why?”

“Because you might be a target too. I didn’t think Janssen had anything to do with this, and now it turns out he did. That means you’re involved, even tangentially, and I’m—” I swallowed. “I’m not risking you again.”

He was silent again. “I understand,” he said, and surely it was the air-conditioning in the T car that made me shiver. “You be careful too.”

“I will.” I clicked the phone shut, then lay my head against the window of the train and tried not to think of the scent in the box at the Gardner.

I got off the T at the next-to-last stop, stepping out into heavy, flat air. All the leaves were unnaturally still against a hard, white sky; if there was a change coming, the sunlight gave no sign.

I made it through the lobby of the hospital without more than a few stares (and one kind woman telling me that the emergency care center was that way, and those were some nasty bruises), then did my best to look as if I knew where I was going as I followed Abigail’s scent through the halls. She wasn’t bothering to hide herself, or more likely couldn’t, now that she was incapacitated. Her scent was very weak, though—which didn’t necessarily mean that she was as well, but I didn’t like the implications of it.

I turned a corner just behind another pair of visitors, then ducked back the way I’d come. A uniformed officer stood a little way down the hall, and it didn’t take Sight to guess that he was in front of Abigail’s door. I didn’t know if he’d seen me, but there was no way that showing up here right now could look good for me, for Abigail, or for Rena.

All right
, I told myself.
Rena took me seriously enough to post a guard. That should be enough for a little while.

I made it back out to the parking lot and scanned it for Nate’s mobile wreck of a car. Nothing. But there was a familiar black Jeep Cherokee halfway down the lot. It could have been anyone’s—God knows enough
people in Boston drive them—but the three young men hanging out around it were also familiar.

I’d found the thugs from the Three Cranes.

They didn’t notice me as I walked through the lot to them, taking me for one more visitor. As I got closer, I caught part of their argument: Thug Number Two, complaining again. “Shit, we are never gonna get paid for this.”

“If you hadn’t been a dumbass and believed that crap about ‘getting my purse,’ we might not be in this situation.” The first, older, guy took a long drag on his cigarette and shook his head. “You’re a total fucking moron.” He turned to flick his cigarette into the lot and saw me. For a moment his eyes narrowed, as if he couldn’t quite place where we’d met, and then he demonstrated his quicker thinking by taking off without a second look.

“Hey!” His friends jumped up from their places on the bumper, then turned to see what had spooked him.

Too late; I knocked the third guy aside and caught the complainer by the collar of his grimy shirt. “Long time no see, boys,” I said, grinning with all of my teeth.

“Lady, I don’t—” He stopped, eyes widening, and folded over a little in the ridiculous protect-the-junk position of scared guys everywhere. His friend, the one who’d opened every damn jar he could find in the Three Cranes, backed away but didn’t go further than the next car, perhaps out of some misplaced sense of loyalty. “Shit,” the guy I had by the shirt said. “Shit, you’re not—”

“I’m pissed off, is what I am.” I kicked his legs out from under him. “Do you know what kind of shit you pulled, breaking in like that?” I shook him, then switched my grip to the back of his neck. He hung like a stunned puppy. “You’re not allowed to do that. Not in my city.”

“Fucking crazy bitch—” he spat, and I swung his face into the door of the Jeep.

His friend choked. “Jesus, that’s my car!”

It’s also your friend’s face
, I thought, but just shook my head. “Want to tell me who hired you to break into the Three Cranes?”

The guy whose collar I held spat something garbled around the word “fuck,” and I swung him into the door again. Somehow I could take the idea of spectral hounds, magical hunts, even a goddamn werewolf, but for two-bit assholes like this to even touch magic was more than I could take. They had no idea what kind of shit they were dealing with: if they’d had half an idea, maybe they’d show some respect—

Could you respect that? Any of those chattering idiots
?

The blond man’s words came back to me like a slap, and I let go of the guy. He dropped, and I stumbled back, into the next car. “Fuck,” he mumbled, “fuck, I’m sorry—”

Sorry?
His friend raised both hands. “We’re sorry, lady. We didn’t know it was…was protected or anything.”

“It’s Joey’s fault,” the guy on the ground mumbled, clutching the side of the car door to pull himself up. “He’s the one who got us involved with that crazy old bitch. Bitch never even paid us—”

Bitch
? I shook my head—hadn’t Prescott hired these guys? Wasn’t that how the jar ended up at the park where Abigail was attacked? “Hang on,” I said. “It wasn’t a man that hired you?”

He shook his head. “Little old lady. I was gonna go find her, but then she got put in the hospital, and so we thought we’d talk to her here—”

Jesus. Abigail. Abigail had hired them. Why the hell had she needed the jar? “Go away,” I said, backing away from them as if their stupidity was catching.

The Jeep owner looked relieved. “Look, we can go get Joey if you want, since he’s the one who managed it. We’ll make sure he knows you’re angry—”

“Get out of my face, you fucking sellout.” My skin crawled, and I stalked away, shuddering. Janssen had
been right about me, about the role waiting if I wanted it; those kinds of punks were ready to sell out to someone stronger, and they didn’t even have the undercurrent reasons. I might want to protect the city, but where did protection end, and the protection racket begin? I turned and spat away the taste of bile.

At the thought of Janssen, I glanced across the lot. No sign of Nate’s car, still. Maybe he’d come by T, the way I had? An itch struck the back of my mind, something about grade school…Why did grade school keep coming to mind?

The trouble with a talent like mine is that it’s mostly subconscious. The result is that I have a very smart nose hooked up to a very dumb brain, and moments like this hammer that home.

I’d almost made it to the end of the parking lot when a hand caught me by the elbow. I jerked away from it reflexively, then stared.

Abigail’s feet were bare, caked with grime, and bloodied from where she’d stepped carelessly, and they were the best-looking part of her. She still wore her hospital gown, with a flimsy cotton bathrobe tied in place over it, granting her a shred of dignity but no more. The cane she leaned on looked like part of an IV stand. Every inch of exposed skin was puffy and bruised, and the strips of gauze over her face couldn’t hide the wounds beneath. “Hound,” she whispered. “I’ve been trying to reach you.”

“Jesus Christ.” I took her hand; the bones that had felt frail before now seemed downright insubstantial. “What are you doing out here?”

“As I said, trying to reach you. Shall we go?”

“Go? You—” How was she even standing? “Why didn’t someone stop you on your way out here? You’re not fit to be out of bed.”

She smiled, and even though her face was a mess, I could see a trace of her earlier composure. “I can keep security guards and cameras from noticing me; do you think a few pedestrians will be any trouble?”

And, indeed, the family that passed us (walking from one end of the parking lot to the other, with the oldest kid complaining about the heat) looked past us altogether. I shook my head.

Abigail switched her cane to the other hand and pointed. “You came on the train, yes? We’ll go back along the tracks. Iron on both sides will be some protection against him.”

Okay. That I didn’t like, but it was more than I’d known before. “Abigail,” I said, moving to catch up with her. For a wounded old woman, she sure moved fast. I skipped up a step and moved in front of her, blocking her path. “Who did this to you?”

“A pack of dogs,” she said, avoiding my eyes.

“No. That’s what he used. Who set them on you?”

She stepped around me and pushed the gauze out of her left eye. It was swollen almost shut. “I’ll tell you on the tracks; there are some things that shouldn’t be discussed without iron nearby—”

“Abigail.” I touched her arm, and she stilled, staring past me. “His name is Prescott, isn’t it?” She didn’t answer me. “His name is Prescott, or that’s one of the names he used, and he’s a ghost. Or something close to it, something unnaturally preserved after death. He wanted the horn—” I stopped, unsure how much I could explain a dead man’s reasons. But the memory of my dream, of Skelling’s last story, came back as if Skelling himself had laid a cold hand on my head. “He wanted it because he didn’t think anyone else deserved it. No one else was worth it.”

“Respect,” Abigail breathed. “No one else was worth his respect. Only him.” She was silent a moment. “So that’s the name he went by,” she said at last and glanced up, blinking hard with the one good eye. “I suppose he changed it legally; he wouldn’t have kept her name, of course, not with that kind of mother.”

“I—what?”

“My great-grandfather, I think. Abigail Huston’s son. He…the ghost of him, anyway.”

And there it was. The blood link between the woman who’d first stolen the horn, the man who’d tried to steal it back, and the woman who’d stolen it again. Woodfin and I had both fallen into the same trap; we’d assumed that just because there was no recorded family for the members of the 1908 expedition, there was no family at all. Prescott could easily have had grown children before going on that expedition.

“But I’ve always called him Patrick,” she went on.

That caught me off guard. “What?” I asked, but as I said it the last memory slid into place: a young man talking about respect, respect in magic, a young man named Patrick…

“My brother. Prescott’s host.” She took a deep breath. “He’s dead, you know,” she said, conversationally, as if she were telling me that her brother was gay or divorced or older. She tottered forward, then turned back and regarded me with cool, pained eyes. “I’ll tell you about it. Just come to the tracks.”

This is what she told me as we walked along the railroad tracks, the cool wind driving before us and promising rain:

She and her twin brother had been a pair of holy terrors. The two of them drove their parents to a sort of proud distraction, and though they fought every now and then, at the heart of the matter it was the two of them against the world. Back when they were ten (so, I guessed, fifty-some years ago) they’d gone with their grandparents to stay out by Lakeville. The twins had immediately found the highest trees to climb, the best hiding places, and the big quarry nearby, which had been abandoned years before and was now the local swimming hole. White marble cliffs streaked with rust and ivy, dozens of spots to dive from—even some that were safe—and countless places where a few well-chucked rocks would flush out angry teenage couples.

“We brought water balloons one day,” she said with a faraway smile. “If I’d been in their place, I probably
would have killed us…but it was so very worth it.”

One day in high summer, Abigail stayed home—stomachache, plus she’d had a fight with Patrick the day before and didn’t want to be around him. (“Something stupid, like who got to choose the radio station.”) He went out to the quarry, and then it got to be dinnertime, and he hadn’t come back. First her grandparents went out, and then it got dark, and then her grandmother returned, crying.

Abigail didn’t even let herself think the word
dead
until her grandfather came home, looking twenty years older. They waited for word from the police, but by three in the morning both grandparents were asleep, and Abigail walked down to the quarry herself.

She’d stood on the high ledge, the one the boys dove off when they really wanted to impress a girl, and watched the lights of police cars across the water, the bobbing flashlights of search parties in the woods. And she’d spoken aloud, her words lost in the darkness above the flat, black water, swearing that she’d give anything, anything, if she could have her brother back. And she’d said more, words that she hadn’t known but that came to her like someone whispering in her ear. She hadn’t questioned them, believing that anything was worth it for her brother.

And the water stayed dark and unmoving, and she went home alone.

Just before dawn someone tapped on her window. It was Patrick, soaked to the skin and ghost-pale, but it was his smile and his voice, and so she let him in. She’d laughed from sheer joy, and hugged him, and almost went down to tell her grandparents, but he stopped her.
Let’s not tell them yet,
he said.
It’s kind of an adventure, everyone thinking I’m dead. We’ll tell them eventually—it’ll be like in
Tom Sawyer,
right
?