Soul Hunt

by Margaret Ronald

  MARGARET

  RONALD

  SOUL HUNT

  For my parents, who let me get as many

  books as I could carry from the library

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Acknowledgements

  Midwinter

  About the Author

  By Margaret Ronald

  Praise for Margaret Ronald’s first Evie Scelan novel,

  One

  Two

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  There aren’t too many days when I wish I had never heard of the undercurrent, but Halloween’s close to the top of the list, right after Marathon Monday and just before the date of the seer enclave’s damn holiday picnic.

  Halloween traffic for a bicycle courier is usually not much different from your basic day-to-day Boston mess: taxis, buses, SUVs resolutely ignoring the narrow nature of city streets, and an awful lot of cyclist-shaped blind spots. But there’s enough of the undercurrent awake and in motion on Halloween that it’s a perpetual distraction, and this year was no different. In the past, I’d had either a clubbing binge with Rena or Sarah’s Samhain party to look forward to; this year, Sarah was so busy with managing her “community watch” that she’d had no time for the party, and Rena, well, Rena and I weren’t speaking. On top of that, I had my own plans, which were not something to look forward to either.

  All of this meant that on this particular Halloween, instead of threading my way back to Mercury Courier for another job on my beat-up loaner bike (the replacement ever since a curse-riddled jackass had turned my old bike into aluminum salad), I needed to stop for a moment’s rest. Not that it helped much; even the salt tang of the harbor couldn’t quite cut through the day’s murk. I locked up my bike by the Boston Aquarium, made my way through a screaming gaggle of kids on their way to see the seals, and damn near collapsed out on the end of the dock.

  Slumping against a piling, I closed my eyes. The air smelled of dead fish and kelp—the famous sea breeze that some people find so refreshing—and, below that, the many scents that my talent could distinguish, the ones that didn’t quite exist in a rational sense. Burnt ginger, clinging to a woman in a business suit stumbling over the uneven paving stones; mud and cheap newsprint, following an entire tour group as they hurried to catch up with their umbrella-wielding guide; damp cats and cinnamon, hovering over the entrance to a building as if it were waiting for someone. Every scent had its meaning, though I could only understand them by association, and every scent laid a trail for someone like me—someone like the Hound—to follow.

  Even in my worse moments, and there had been a lot of those lately, I could still focus on those scents, the pattern that they laid over the world, the sense they made. I sighed and blew on my hands, trying to make them feel a little less like they’d been immersed in ice water.

  “Scelan,” a woman’s voice called somewhere below me. I ignored it, trying to hold on to the pattern a little longer. The scents sharpened, and a tang of fireworks crept through them. I opened my eyes, briefly cringing at the sunlight. No obvious, immediate source, though someone nearby was working magic. That scent is distinctive enough that it’ll pull me out of anything else.

  “Scelan! Hound! Are you even awake?”

  I scanned the docks, then glanced down to see a figure in a heavy parka sitting in a motorboat just at the edge of the dock. The person pushed back her hood to reveal ash-blonde hair streaked with gray and a lined but carefully made-up face. “Tessie?” I said. “What are you doing off your boat?”

  “Technically I’m not off it,” she said, thumping the hull. “Are you free, girl? Something’s wrong up the Mystic, and I might need your nose.”

  I hesitated—I was free, at least until Tania from Mercury Courier called to find out why I hadn’t checked in yet. But there are things you don’t do in the undercurrent, and one of those is favors for an unspecified return. It leaves the scales unbalanced—and a favor is a dangerous thing to owe. “You sure you need me?”

  Tessie pointed, and I followed her gesture to see a thin line of smoke rising past the buildings. “I’ll pay your standard rate, contract and everything,” she called. “Just hurry up and come along.”

  “Coming,” I said, and scrambled down the ladder into the boat. Tessie fired up the motor, and we skidded off across the harbor, skirting the yachts and boats drawn up along the shore for the season.

  “I didn’t catch it till just now either,” she yelled over the roar of the motor. “It might be nothing, but my nets were tangled this morning, and I found two broken hooks in them—”

  “In English, please,” I called back. “I don’t speak oracular.”

  “Could be nothing. Could be bad.” She shrugged.

  That was the problem with magic that let you get a look at the future. Most of the time it was so opaque as to be almost useless. Of the diviners I knew, Tessie made the most sense, and that wasn’t saying much.

  But how had I missed the scent of smoke? I’d even been actively using my talent a moment ago, and this much smoke should have caught my attention immediately. Granted, I’d been having off days these last few weeks, and today was no exception, but I was the Hound, dammit. I should have noticed.

  I touched the knot of scar tissue at my throat, where a little horn-shaped mark deformed the notch in my collarbone. These days, I was more than just one Hound, if you wanted to look at it that way. “Tessie,” I said, scooting forward and immediately regretting it as we hit the wake of a returning tugboat. “What do you need me for?”

  She frowned and pulled up the hood of her parka, even though it couldn’t have been nearly as cold for her as it was for me in my courier gear. “Depends on what we find. Mostly I just want someone on hand in case I have trouble.”

  Tessie’s one of the fixtures of the magical undercurrent of Boston, though like everyone who made it through the years of the Fiana, she prefers to keep a low profile. (I’m the poster child for why doing otherwise is a bad idea.) As long as I’d known her, she’d never set foot on land, although the docks, the boats, and pretty much anything along the water’s edge were hers to look after. Although I didn’t entirely trust her—most magic is founded on stealing pieces of other people’s souls and using them to subvert the laws of nature, so anyone in the undercurrent might regard you as a renewable resource—she rarely gave anyone any trouble. Come to think of it, this was the most agitated I’d seen her.

  “Just keep your eyes open,” she said finally as we coasted below the Tobin Bridge into the mouth of the Mystic River. “If something looks really wrong—holy shit.”

  That was an understatement. A small ship, maybe a yacht—from the looks of it more suited to the high-class marinas we’d just left—had been moored at the end of a commercial dock, next to several fishing boats. Heavy black smoke obscured the entire back end, orange glints sparking along the dock to the other boats. As we approached, a flapping, burning cable smacked across onto the closest fishing boat, leaving a trail of flame that rapidly expanded. “This is what you meant by bad?” I called, fumbling for my phone.

  Tessie shook her head thoughtfully, though her hand on the tiller didn’t slacken. “Not quite. I thought … no.”

  A blare of sirens echoed across the water, and the
sullen glow of the fire was joined by flashing red and white lights. Someone must have called it in before it really got going. I started to relax my grip on my phone, but stopped as a fresh gust of wind carried both smoke and scent across the water to us. Smoke, the char of things that were not intended to burn, and under it an acrid tang that I knew well: sweat and fear. “Someone’s in there!”

  Tessie bared her teeth, then shook her head. “There’ll be more in a moment. Hound, can you steer?”

  “What? No—not well anyway—”

  “Then I’ll let you off.” She did something to the engine, and we skidded across the tops of the waves, right up to the side of the fishing boat. “You take care of any people, and I’ll start a patterning to hold off anything else in the fire. And keep your senses open—tell me what you scent!”

  I stood and caught at the ladder hanging off the end of the fishing boat, then had to lock my arms around a rung as my head swam. It wasn’t seasickness, or even a head rush, but it also wasn’t unfamiliar; I’d been having bad grayouts for a few weeks now. It was, however, poorly timed. Before I could call to Tessie, she’d steered to the side of the burning yacht, caught hold of the hull, and scrambled up, parka billowing behind her. For a woman so much older than me, she was surprisingly nimble.

  I shook my head until the fog retreated a little, then hooked my arm around the next rung and hauled myself up, smearing salt and greasy residue all down my front. It didn’t smell so much like fish as of predigested fish, and if I hadn’t been nauseated before, this would have done it.

  Somewhere here, though, amid the sparking fire—too much for me to put out, now, and the sirens were already coming close enough—someone was very scared. I turned my back on the fire and tried to catch that scent a second time, concentrating on the pattern, the pattern that had eluded me before and that I should have noticed, dammit, even before Tessie found me—

  There. Not the stink of fear, strangely enough, but a clearly human scent, just ahead of me. I ran to the little door leading into the main part of the boat and slammed my shoulder against it.

  Of course, it wasn’t locked. I fell into the room, almost sprawling against the far wall. Someone shrieked so close to my ear I jerked away.

  Blinking, I realized that whatever the fear had been, it probably hadn’t come from here. A skinny teenage boy with his shirt off jumped away from a bunk with an even skinnier teenage girl on it. “Jesus!” the boy yelled, scrabbling for his clothes. “Jesus, who the hell are you—”

  Good to know someone had even worse timing when it came to romance than I did. “There’s a fire,” I said, and pointed to the hatch. A few tendrils of smoke drifted across the light, proving my point. “Get your clothes and get out.”

  With the self-preservation instinct common to all teenagers, the kid backed off and glared at me instead. “This boat’s private property, lady.”

  “Shut up, Devin,” the girl said, yanking her shirt over her head. “How bad’s the fire? My dad’s gonna kill me if anything happens—”

  “Not bad yet. But you want to get out of here, now.” I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate again. Devin and his slightly more sensible girlfriend (“Shut the fuck up, Devin, and get your coat,” she told him without even a backward glance) might be a lot of things, but they weren’t the source of the fear-stink I’d caught. Not here, I thought, searching for the source of it, that familiar tang, but close, close …

  The scar at my collarbone shifted like a trapped snake under my skin, and my eyes snapped open. You are hunting, a voice like the cold breath of winter whispered in the back of my mind, and a chorus of murmurs followed it, like the shifting noises of a crowded kennel.

  “I’m trying to,” I muttered back. Devin’s girl, having shooed him most of the way up the stairs, turned back to give me a wary look. I ignored her—but the Gabriel Hounds, the Whistlers, the Gabble Retchets whose mark I carried in my bone and whose Horn I had once called, they didn’t. At the back of my mind, where the distinction between my own thoughts and those of this spectral pack blurred, I-or-one-of-them briefly wondered what her flesh would taste like torn from bone, what a chase she could lead us.

  The Hounds were not a part of me and my heritage, nothing to do with my talent save a shared name. Well, and a canine echo in my past; an ancestor of mine way back had spent most of his life as a hound, and passed on some of his talents to a few of his descendants. But he hadn’t, to my knowledge, had anything to do with the Gabriel Hounds. That was all my doing; they were a burden I’d taken up after claiming the Horn of the Wild Hunt from a walking dead man. At the time, I’d thought that I had no choice but to claim it; these days, I was less sure.

  Moments like this just brought that regret home. “No,” I said, and Devin’s girl, maybe hearing an echo of the Gabble Retchets in my voice, fled. “No, I just need to find whoever it was that was scared.”

  You mean other than yourself? The Hound’s amusement was almost manifest: a doggy grin, made much less friendly by the sheer amount of teeth in that mouth. But it withdrew, though I could feel it and the rest of that chaos-pack watching, awake and aware now.

  It didn’t matter, I told myself, even as a new wave of dizziness washed over me. I lurched to the stairs, hung on to a railing for a moment while the world shifted in and out of focus, and dragged myself up into smoke. Devin and his girl were gone, though I could still hear her yelling, and from the relief in her voice I guessed they were on the docks. Good. But someone else, someone scared, someone whose fear was like anise to the Hounds …

  When I’m hunting, properly hunting, the world dwindles down to that one scent, and I can focus solely on it. This wasn’t like that. It was as if the smell of smoke, omnipresent now and thick with melted plastic and oil, washed out everything else, save that one harsh burr of dread—

  I turned to face the burning yacht. The boat I stood on might be saved, but that one would be a loss—and just then, someone emerged from the hatch that mirrored the one I stood at.

  It wasn’t Tessie; that much I could tell right off. For one thing, Tessie kept her hair cut short, not back in a thick gray ponytail; for another—and more important—Tessie had never had a beard that impressive. The man was bent double, probably tall to begin with but stooped under the burden he carried slung over both shoulders. I scrambled to the edge of the fishing boat, staring. He was carrying a man.

  Worse, I knew that man. A sting of damp woodchuck and ash touched my nose, somehow aligned on the same thread of fear that I’d followed, and that was a smell I’d know anywhere: Deke, the pyromancer of the Common, the man who could see anything in a candle flame. The graybeard yelled something to him, but Deke hung limply over his shoulder. “Deke!” I called, but just then a gust of smoke hit me smack in the face, and the smell alone was enough to send me reeling.

  The graybeard, one foot on the far rail of the yacht, glanced back at me. His eyes narrowed. “Stay back, girl!” he shouted. “She’s going down.”

  I coughed black muck over my sleeve and tried to follow, but he crouched, still with Deke over his shoulders, and leaped off the yacht, landing on the next boat over, sending it rocking like a rowboat in a gale. Deke’s scent (still alive, I could tell that much) and the scent of fear receded with him.

  Well, now you know how the fire started, a dry, cynical voice said in the back of my mind. I snorted, then stopped. Where was Tessie? I risked a glance at the pier, where two fire trucks were already unspooling their hoses. No sign of her. As for scent—

  I shook my head and spat again. Nothing. Even the smell of smoke was muted, subsumed by the taste of ice water in the back of my throat. “Shit,” I muttered, and gauged the distance between the fishing boat and the yacht. It couldn’t be that far; the yacht was snuggled up between the two boats to either side, and that man had made the jump with Deke on his back—

  No one has ever accused me of good judgment. I ran for the edge and jumped, landing on a coil of smoldering rope. My ankle turned
, and I went sprawling, smothering the fire under my leg. (Not the best firefighting technique, I’ll say that right now.) Here the fire wasn’t so bad, but Tessie wasn’t up top. She had to be somewhere below, in the hold where the smoke would be worse—

  I didn’t let myself think. Instead I slid down the steps the graybeard had come up, trying to scent for Tessie—or anything, anything beyond the encroaching feeling in my own gut.

  This is bad. A canine murmur settled around me, and for a moment I didn’t just feel the shifting of the Horn under my skin, I saw the Gabble Retchets, the hounds of the Wild Hunt flickering in and out of existence, their shapes never quite congruent with real space. We knew you were foolish, that you could make bad bargains, but not that you would throw yourself into the fire so.

  “Like you care,” I said, pushing aside crates and charred boxes to reach the door.

  We do care, another Hound said, brushing against me as it paced past a fresh flame. You carry the Horn. We do not want it turned to ash.

  “Yeah, well, I’m not happy about carrying it either. You’ll get it back soon enough.” I was sweating under my courier gear, and the smoke—God, the smoke was going to kill me soon, and if it was bad for me, then how bad did Tessie have it? I turned in place, trying to scent her, or at the very least figure out where she’d come in with regards to where I was now. “For now I just need to find her.”

  We could hunt her for you.

  That turned the air cold, or maybe it was just the sweat on my skin freezing. “What?”

  We could hunt her. Sound the Horn, call us forth, and we will hunt her for you. The closest Hound, the one currently in the shape of a great ashen thing with bloodied ears, grinned up at me. It is what we are made for. Like you.

  That was not a comparison I cared to hear, now or later, but it didn’t change the pressure at my throat. I didn’t have to reach up to recognize that the scar had shifted, become a horn on a strap of leather slung round my shoulder, its weight light but insistent. I swallowed. “If I sent you to hunt her, you’d tear her throat out.”