Wild Hunt (23 page)

Abigail thought it was weird, but he was right—it was fun, having this secret. So she kept her mouth shut the next day, and the next, and the next…

And Patrick kept coming by, always when he
wouldn’t be seen. Except he never came back to their grandparents, and whenever she asked when they could end the joke, he told her to trust him. And their parents arrived, and cried, and whispered to each other that their daughter seemed to be in shock, she didn’t seem to quite realize what had happened, and the funeral was planned…

About halfway through the funeral, Abigail realized he wouldn’t be joining them. She knew he was there—nearby, she was sure, just to watch—but as the eulogies droned on and her mother hiccupped and her father wept silently without a single change of expression, she knew. And along with that knowledge came the unwelcome realization that he was not entirely her brother. Not anymore. There wasn’t just one person in that body anymore: the ghost-responses of an older, craftier man merged with the slow and muted reactions of a boy’s personality. But the two of them together worked in concert, clinging to a form of life, and when she returned from the funeral they were there to meet her, laughing with her, sharing their old jokes, her brother but not her brother.

But still…

“I don’t know if I can explain it to you,” she said, twisting the cotton of her robe between her hands. “We were so close, and there was still some of him left…Even a shadow of my brother was enough. I knew it was a rotten trade, but I missed him so much.”

If you have to be haunted, why not by family?
My own thoughts came back like a spike of ice, and I shuddered, trying to ignore Skelling’s empty presence just outside my vision. “I—” I stopped, remembering an old woman who was not my mother on a cot deep under Fenway Park. Need deforms the undercurrent. “I do understand,” I said, fighting down revulsion. “It’s hard to explain, but I do.”

She gave me a hard look, then nodded. “I think you do. How strange. I’d love to learn more, but now…” She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”

They had gone on from then, Abigail and her secret brother. He’d disappear now and then, just for a day or two, but always returned to her side. In time she learned to recognize which of the two spirits inhabiting the body was speaking: Prescott’s strong and unpredictable voice, Patrick’s fading but beloved voice. And then, as the years went on more, she learned not to mind which one was which. The spirits in the body of her brother continued by her side, never quite aging, while she aged a little faster than she ought to.

He taught her the first few uses of magic, drawing on loci no bigger than a fingernail paring, and she followed in the footsteps of her great-great-grandmother, learning the tricks of theft both mundane and magical, and the sleight of hand that trod the boundary between. Because of his “empty aura,” as she called it, they could easily hide behind each other, becoming something that didn’t register on any record, whether video recording or ink spilled in a saucer. (I thought of the folded, hidden quality of Prescott’s—Patrick’s scent, and nodded.) Between the two of them they could steal the crown off a king. “We did steal the hat off a senator once. Just to prove we could do it. He didn’t notice until he reached his plane.”

It was about respect, Prescott insisted; they wouldn’t steal from those worthy of respect. And at the beginning, that included a lot of people, those who’d earned Patrick’s boyish idolatry as well as Abigail’s growing esteem. But Prescott, though he was the one who held to this artificial code, seemed to hold no one as worthy of respect, especially no one who had anything to do with magic.

“He used to talk sometimes about what he would do if he had his inheritance. I thought—after a while I knew he didn’t mean our parents. But he said he’d find a way to show the world what was so necessary, to force respect for magic and its power over the old chaos…That was his term for it, ‘the old chaos.’” She looked at the bandages on her arms and shivered.

Chicago, Austin, New Orleans, Seattle…everywhere the twins traveled, they lived on the proceeds of their thefts. New York was easy pickings but dull after a while, and Florida was the surest way to make a buck. San Francisco, as long as they stayed out of the shadow of the Coit, was profitable, and they made a score in Los Angeles that kept her in a high-class apartment and Patrick in loci for close to two years.

“Your parents?” I asked.

“Dead. They wasted away.” She caught my change of expression and shook her head. “Look, there are questions I haven’t let myself ask, all right? If I don’t ask them, I won’t have to answer them…This is hard enough as it is, Hound.”

Maybe. But I remembered that horrible dead smell in Chinatown when Prescott came looking for me, and the emptiness at the center of it, the hungriness of it…Prescott might exempt Abigail from his devouring need for loci, but why should he care anything about the rest of her family?

Boston had been off-limits because of the Fiana, Abigail told me. But then came word that the Fiana had gone down, gutted by a woman who went by the name of Hound. And though there were times that Abigail forgot that her brother was a ghost, his response was not that of a living man. He hadn’t shown rage or surprise, but a slow, grinding certainty, a grudge coming to the surface like the rocks of a treacherous harbor. “Your name, I think, was what triggered it…”

At the back of my neck I could feel Skelling shifting, paying attention, and from the way Abigail’s eyes narrowed, I thought she must have sensed the same.

He’d become obsessed with the Harlequin Horn. “He spent days telling me about it, how he’d summoned it into existence—days, repeating himself because he couldn’t remember what he’d told me.” She curled her free arm over her chest, as if protecting herself from the memory of endless, repetitive lectures.

Prescott—and it was only Prescott now, the frag
ments of Patrick coming and going like cloud shadows on a bright day—claimed that the horn was his by right, that it was only because of him that that “thieving whore” of a mother had even known what to do with it. Sometimes he mistook one Abigail Huston for the other, confusing mother with sister in terrifying displays of rage made worse by the connection they shared. His reactions to any occurrences outside his careful plans, never good to begin with despite the flicker of life he claimed, had become more erratic. And Abigail, after years of living with her secret, had decided that it was time for a rest.

“I have read enough of the
Liber Sine Termini
,” she told me.
Unbound Book
, Skelling whispered in my ear. “I know that only the dead can kill the dead. So I thought that I could acquire some of the dead, use that to—to lay him to rest.”

“You had the jar stolen,” I said.

“You know about that? Yes. Only it didn’t work. I thought that I could use the remnant of a ghost in that jar to act against my brother, to neutralize him at least for a little while. It should have worked.”

“No,” I said. “Yuen freed his father’s ghost before you got the jar. It was empty when you had it.”

“Empty. That figures.” She paused a moment, looking at her mangled hands. They wouldn’t be pickpocketing anything—not for months, perhaps not ever again. “I tried to bring my brother back, and it didn’t work. I tried to kill him, and it didn’t work. I think, maybe, the whole thing might have been a mistake.”

If Sarah could have seen me right then, she’d have taken back everything she ever said about my lack of tact.
A mistake. A
mistake?
My God, that’s not just an understatement, that’s self-delusion on a grand scale.
I drew a deep breath and tried to think how to express this in a way that didn’t involve the phrase
Are you completely insane?
“And you brought me into all this.”

“To undo it! I thought that once my brother was
laid to rest, I could return the horn somehow, earn some fragment of absolution.”

Something about her tone rang false, but when I glanced at her, there seemed to be no change in her demeanor. Maybe it was just that I had trouble imagining Abigail begging for absolution, or maybe it was Skelling’s presence and his memories shading mine, reminding me of Skelling’s desire for that horn and bringing into question how difficult it might be to let go of it.

The sound of a Green Line bell yanked me out of my thoughts “Train,” I said. “Off the tracks.”

The train passed by us with a rhythmic roar, and Abigail hopped back into the space between the rails. “If he’s dead,” I said, following her lead, “then he’ll have the same approach to current events as he did to old ones.”

Abigail exhaled, shook herself as if throwing off the memories of everything she’d just told me, and turned to face me. “Not quite. He’s not fully dead, just…preserved. And that means most of the time he can think. But I can still get him out of Boston, and I can get the horn away from him.” Her eyes narrowed. “Do you know what the horn is?” she asked.

“A Harlequin Horn,” I hazarded. “It calls the Wild Hunt. But I don’t know which Hunt, yet.”

Abigail’s expression went sour. “You don’t know the half of it, do you? My great-great-grandmother wasn’t just a thief, she was the best of thieves. She could steal something that didn’t actually exist.”

Her explanation included words like
catoptric
and
harmonic sub-frequency
and a lot of other terms that probably made sense if you had half of your brain marinated in magic, but the gist of it was this: if you have a thousand reflections that seem to be of one thing, you can focus those reflections and create a center—even if there is no center to begin with. A sub-myth. A Harlequin Horn.

“It can call any of them. The Gabble Retchets. The
Wild Hunt. The Host. All of them, and any of them. My namesake invoked and stole it, ages ago, and by the time she knew what she’d done, it was well out of her hands and on the other side of the country.” She caught a glimpse of my expression. “But I’ve fixed it now, crippled the horn, and without the missing piece he can’t do anything with it.”

“Well, that makes it all better then, doesn’t it?” I snapped. “And you’re wrong; he’s already killed Janssen. For crying out loud, the man was torn to pieces.”

“Janssen?”

I glanced at her, but she seemed genuinely confused. “Big blond guy? Kind of oily? Worked on ‘facilitating’ things?”

“Oh…him.”

I stopped and turned to face her. “What is wrong with you? He was slaughtered—even if he was a rotten piece of shit, the same thing almost happened to you. How can you just shrug it off?”

Abigail tilted her head to the side. “I told him not to set up anything with Patrick. Not while he had that little problem.”

“Little problem?”

“Patrick doesn’t like skinshifters. I think it’s because the wound that killed him was a skinshifter bite—from the woman traveling with the expedition, someone’s wife.”

“Good for her,” I muttered, then stopped. “Skinshifter?” Janssen’s little problem, the one he’d tried to pass on to Nate…

Only it hadn’t worked. Patrick knew enough to recognize a…a skinshifter when he saw one, former or not, and he’d torn the man to shreds—

Jesus. Why hadn’t I heard from Nate yet? I knelt and unclasped the suitcase, unstrapping Skelling’s gun from the webbing that held it in place. Wind gusted past me, suddenly cold after the day’s heat, carrying the sound of another train. I cursed again and dragged
the empty suitcase off the tracks, turning my back in a half-assed effort to hide what I was doing.

“You know a skinshifter?” Abigail asked, following me off the tracks.

“What—” I hesitated, then shook my head and loaded the gun, sliding one bullet after another into the chambers. “How do you know Skelling’s wife was a skinshifter?”

“I don’t know. Patrick knew. And he was there, after all…” The train rocketed past me, drowning out her words briefly. “…and a hound, again. Perhaps you’re drawn to each other, the same way you’re drawn to the horn.”

I got to my feet, a little unsteadily. The holster hung awkwardly on my hips, and I didn’t have a good way of hiding it. The gun was in much better condition than the holster, but neither one was top of the line, and I really didn’t want this thing falling off me at a bad moment. (Then again, the gun didn’t have a safety catch, so there was no way I was going to stick it into my waistband the way I sometimes did with my other gun.) Still, it might work to distract Prescott for just a moment.

Abigail leaned on her cane, regarding me with that same detached curiosity. Here was someone who’d drawn her deciding line, and it encompassed her and her brother, no more. Let the rest of the world go hang, so long as she had her twin. She smiled at me, completely oblivious. “History repeats itself, I’d say, only it’s a bit tactless—”

“Oh, you think?” I drew a deep breath, then glanced back the way we’d come.

She shrugged. “I just thought it was an interesting coincidence.”

God save me from this brand of adept
. I caught Abigail by the wrist; she flinched but didn’t protest. “Where is your brother?”

“I don’t know. About, I assume; I don’t keep track
of him all the time.” She patted my hand. “But I can assure you—”

Not good enough. I raised her hand to my face as if I were going to kiss it. There was barely enough of her own scent to follow, and it still had that odd, attenuated sense to it, as if I were sensing her at a great distance. But that didn’t matter, now I knew what I was looking for. There: the link with her brother was still active, a line of mirror-scent threaded through her own like a vein of precious metal through stone. Maybe it couldn’t be broken anymore, not after the years they’d spent using that link to hide their tracks. (And at the back of my mind, I recognized why I’d thought of grade school around her: not because of her age or her demeanor, but because somewhere in there she was still the ten-year-old who’d gone searching for her brother, who’d never been able to admit that she was wrong to hold on to him.) With an effort of will I wrenched my senses onto that alignment, seizing that link.