Soul Hunt

by Margaret Ronald

  The Hound grinned wider. Maybe not.

  Another snapped at the flames behind me. You have already sounded the Horn once, incurring the Hunter’s wrath. What is it to do so again?

  “More than I’m willing to do,” I snapped, and pushed past them, my hands encountering nothing but cool air and shadow as they swept through. Even that, though, was enough to both chill and preserve me. I kicked a sack out of the way to find another ladder leading down into the hold. “Listen, I’m no more happy with this than you are, okay?”

  The Hounds paused, fading. Whatever gave you the impression that we were unhappy with you? one asked, its head cocked to the side.

  And that right there was another thing I didn’t want to think about. Besides, there was Tessie, standing in the middle of a low-ceilinged, open room. This one was empty, stripped to the bare metal of the hull, and Tessie stood frozen in the middle of it, oblivious to the smoke curling around her head. I crouched and ran to her. “Tessie!”

  “It’s not here,” she said vaguely, staring off into the smoke. “I’d thought—”

  “Tessie, this boat’s going up, and you need to—dammit.” I caught her arm and pulled her down, so that her head was no longer wreathed in smoke.

  She blinked at me, the whites of her eyes gone yellow and watery. “Don’t,” she whispered, though I doubted she was actually addressing me. “They might be out there—if we stay still, they won’t see us—”

  “If we stay still we are going to end up well done. Or maybe brined, depending on whether this boat sinks first. Come on!”

  She shuddered, staggered, then leaned heavily on me. It was enough of an assent; I pulled her arm over my shoulders and practically dragged her to the ladder. The Hounds were gone—well, technically, they were still with me, but at least they had the tact to remain silent—and the next room was thick with smoke. But cool daylight shone through the way I’d come in, and I dragged Tessie toward the upper ladder.

  We’d gotten maybe two steps from the top of the ladder before the first blast of water from the firehoses hit the decks, and with it came a last billow of smoke and oil scent. The stink of dead fireworks hit me like a cosh to the back of the head, and I stumbled out into light, losing my grip on Tessie and collapsing straight into the puddled water on deck.

  Two

  I came out of it propped up against what felt like a piling and with the feeling that something was missing. It didn’t help that the first thing that met my eyes seemed to be a two-headed, human-sized cat talking to a blue rock. I squinted, tried to shake my head, then winced as my brain banged against the inside of my skull. Someone had put a dry blanket over my shoulders, and I pulled it up one-handed, rubbing it over my head until my hair stood up in spikes. That was one advantage to having short hair these days; with the braid I’d lost a few months back, I’d have been cold for hours.

  “Of course she was here,” a woman’s voice said, high and clipped and with that edge that meant her patience was about to run out. Sarah. “I’d asked her to keep an eye out for any sort of trouble like this—Evie’s always out and about, so it makes sense to have her on point and alert. I don’t know why you see this as a problem.” Sarah, lying her ass off.

  I dragged the blanket off my head and into my lap and rubbed my eyes until they decided to function. The two-headed cat-thing was still there, but it was now revealed as Sarah, wearing a bright green coat and a cat-mask, the latter pushed up over her face so that it was out of her way. She must have come straight from her shop, the Goddess Garden, without bothering to ditch her Halloween gear.

  How had she known to get out here so fast? I hadn’t called, and Tessie certainly wouldn’t have bothered.

  Tessie. I pushed aside the blanket and got to my feet, digging my fingers into the piling to keep myself steady. I was on the dock, facing the water now, and from here I could tell two things: one, that yacht couldn’t have been legally moored so close to those two boats, and two, that wouldn’t matter anymore because there wasn’t much of a yacht left. The fiberglass hull was cracked and charred, the deck no more than blackened boards, and the—whatever you call that little steering part near the front, over the hatch where I’d gone in for Tessie—was a melted lump of slag. Smoke still rose off the wreckage in damp black wisps, forlorn as the severed, ashy rigging, and a couple of firefighters stood on the dock, arguing over whether to go on board or not.

  I didn’t see Tessie immediately, but there was an ambulance not so far away. If I’d made it off the boat, then she must have too, right? I closed my eyes and tried to get a sense of the trail, since that at least would tell me which way she’d gone, then stopped.

  I couldn’t scent anything.

  A chill coiled in my chest. No. No, I couldn’t have lost my talent, it was the only thing that I knew I could rely on, it was the one thing that made me who I was. I swallowed down my panic and concentrated, hoping that I’d just been mistaken.

  After a moment—a moment like groping blindly through an unfamiliar room for a light switch that might not even be there—I realized that I wasn’t quite lost. But the scents that I was so used to following, the patterns that I as Hound could discern, were distant, as if behind a thick blanket of fog. Tessie’s mantle of diesel fuel and makeup hung in the air, but to get a hold on it, I had to concentrate hard, shutting out everything else. Even the smoke, which was still so omnipresent that my clothes stank of it, was muffled.

  I shuddered and opened my eyes. The grayouts, I was getting used to; the bad mornings where it was difficult to even decide to get out of bed, I could handle. But this—my talent, the one constant I’d always depended on, fading just like everything else—this, I couldn’t stand.

  “And furthermore,” Sarah said behind me, “I think it’s unconscionable that you’re giving such a hard time to someone who under any other circumstances would be considered a hero. Is it official policy to interrogate anyone who drags a friend out of a fire?”

  “That is not what we’re doing, ma’am,” another woman said, and my stomach turned over. I knew that voice. “And I think maybe you ought to let her speak for herself.”

  Crap. Not that I’d had any real chance of getting out of this anyway, but still … I turned around, leaning back against the piling again so that I was partly sitting on it. Sarah turned, pushing the cat mask a little further up her forehead, and the woman she was talking to—the one I’d misidentified as a blue rock, with perhaps some justification, tilted up her chin as she looked at me.

  Lieutenant—or whatever rank she now held—Rena Santesteban of the BPD. Just the last person I wanted to see, and I suspected I was the same for her.

  Sarah and Rena were, for a while, the closest things I had to friends, and a good example of why the periphery of the undercurrent is so unpredictable. You wouldn’t think to link the two of them together in any other circumstances, but both have brushed up against the nasties of the Boston undercurrent often enough that they know to stay out of the depths, and both of them have, on occasion, expressed impatience with me. And just at the moment, they wore remarkably similar expressions.

  That’s where any connection ended, though. Sarah dealt in fringy stuff, the edges of the undercurrent that were so powerless you couldn’t even move a handkerchief with them, and the New Age elements that even New Agers don’t buy. But beneath that façade of fuzzy-headed optimism was a diamond-hard core of bullheaded idealism, with sprinkles on top.

  Case in point: faced with the fragmenting chaos that was the undercurrent without the Fiana in charge, Sarah’s approach had been to try to create a community watch, something for magicians and small-timers to be a part of so that they wouldn’t always have to watch their backs. In theory a good idea, in practice less so, and in reality about as easy as yoking ferrets to pull a sled. Sarah knew better than to dabble in the scary parts of magic—and she’d been scared away from the truly numinous aspects of it, a fact that I still shared some blame for—but she still believed that we cou
ld, in time, all pull together.

  Rena had gone the other way. Which was part of why we weren’t on good terms at the moment. “Miss Scelan,” she said, turning over a page in her notebook. “Can you tell me what happened here?”

  “Where’s Tessie?”

  “She’s all right,” Sarah said. “Smoke inhalation, but the EMTs said she’ll be okay. They’ve taken her to Mass General. Which is where you ought to be right now—”

  “I’m fine,” I said at the same time Rena said, “That can wait.” She shot me a narrow look and waited. “I’m fine,” I said again, very aware of just how not-fine I really was. “Tessie lives on the harbor, and she noticed the fire starting. I was nearby, so she picked me up for help. That’s about all there is to it.”

  “Evie, you don’t have to say anything,” Sarah began, putting herself between me and Rena. “I can have Alison here in ten minutes, and she’ll tell you that there’s no legal requirement for you to talk to the cops right now.”

  I shook my head. “Alison’s an environmental lawyer, Sarah. I don’t think it’s the same thing.”

  Sarah shrugged. “Doesn’t stop her from offering her opinion on everything else.” She got a faraway, goofy look in her eyes. Say whatever else you like about Sarah, the woman’s a romantic of the beyond-hopeless variety when it comes to her girlfriend.

  Rena cleared her throat, still waiting. I put my hands on Sarah’s shoulders and carefully pushed her out of the way. “Sarah, go away. I can handle this. Go—I don’t know, go see what they’re up to.” I pointed to the far side of the street, where a few familiar faces—men I knew from the shallower parts of the undercurrent—were clustered, watching the husk of the yacht. Maybe Tessie hadn’t been the only one to have caught on to the uncanniness of this fire.

  Except that as far as I could tell, the only thing wrong was that it had happened at all. And you could say that for any number of fires across Boston on any given day.

  The dreamy look dropped from Sarah’s face, and her black brows drew together. “Fine,” she said. “Fine. I’ll be over here, and then—” She didn’t quite look over her shoulder at Rena, but it was close. “Then I want to hear about this, okay?”

  I nodded, trying to look honest and reassuring. From Sarah’s sour expression, it didn’t work. She retreated, leaving me on the dock with Rena.

  You know that feeling you get when you run into an old ex? And for whatever reason—it’s too soon, you’re still dating his best friend, the breakup involved his stealing your stereo—you know there’s no way to have any kind of civil conversation. Yeah. Take that and wring the romance out of it, then add a good dose of female friendship—and if you’ve made it through junior high you know how potentially poisonous that can be—and you’ve got a pretty good idea of how glad I was to see Rena. We’d been good friends, to the point that I’d cried on her shoulder after breakups and she’d thrown up in my bathroom after too much clubbing. But she’d cut off ties with me after the whole mess involving the Horn, mainly because I’d been so damned closemouthed that I’d ruined her case and, depending on how you looked at it, gotten her partner badly hurt.

  The thing was, Rena had been completely justified in cutting those ties. I’d hidden too much, and I hadn’t thought about the consequences for anyone but myself. And of all the times to run into her again—

  “So since when have you been playing harbor patrol?” I asked.

  “What is your relationship with ‘Tessie’?” she asked without looking up.

  “Business contact. I’ve done some informal work for her over the years, usually just research. Seriously, Rena, what brings you out here? You’re usually not in this part of the city. I didn’t even think you were in this precinct.”

  Rena turned the page over without looking up. Sarah might hide behind her status as an outsider, as someone who dealt with the undercurrent but didn’t let it touch her, but she had nothing on the armor Rena put on when she was in full-cop mode. No wonder I’d registered her as a blue rock when I was so out of it.

  “Do you know the owners of this boat?” Rena continued.

  “No. At least I don’t think so; the only person I know who owns a boat is Tessie, and this wasn’t hers.” I hesitated a moment, remembering Deke and the big guy who’d carried him out. Deke was, unfortunately, trouble. The man liked fire; he was a pyromancer, after all, and he could see things in flames that I sometimes didn’t even see in real life. But he stuck to stuff like newspapers, branches, maybe a couple of open grills if he was lucky. Not a whole damn boat.

  And besides, if he’d been the one to set the fire, I thought, he wouldn’t have smelled so damn scared. Deke wasn’t scared around fire, the same way I wasn’t scared of big dogs (quasi-immortal chaos-beings aside). If I could just find his scent again, take time to sort out the impressions before the boat sank completely and the nullifying sea devoured it … if my talent hadn’t deserted me completely now …

  I’ve never been a good liar, and Rena is very, very good at reading silences. She glanced up at me, her mouth a hard thin line. “You don’t think so?”

  I opened my mouth to answer, and tasted ice water and ferns in the back of my throat. A cold coil twisted down from my stomach, and the first sparks began to flicker at the edges of my vision. Great. “No,” I said. “Jesus, Rena, you know me. Do I look like the kind of person who hobnobs with boat owners? I think you need some kind of … of permit for that. Or maybe a McMansion somewhere.”

  The corner of her mouth twitched up, but Rena wasn’t about to let herself smile. “Why did you board the Mirabelle first?”

  “Mirabelle?” I glanced over my shoulder at the fishing boat next to the dead yacht. My vision kept graying out; never quite fading, but color going out of the world one second and returning the next. It was like trying to watch a film projected on water. “You mean the green one? There were people on it. Tessie dropped me off there, then got on—boarded—the burning one to see if she could help.”

  “Seems a strange thing to do, if she didn’t know the owners.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s Tessie for you. She wanted to check it out.” This was all starting to piss me off, and since that little thread of anger was about all I had that reached through the fog, I held on to it tight. “You know,” I added, lowering my voice. “Bruja shit. That sort of thing.”

  The tip snapped off Rena’s pencil. “You can take that bruja shit,” she whispered, the last two words—her usual terms for what I had to deal with on a regular basis—coming out with a poisonous sibilance, “and you can drop it right back in the harbor where it came from.”

  “Then I guess I got nothing more to say to you. Because if you don’t want to hear about any of the undercurrent, then there’s only so much I can explain.” As if to prove my point, the gray sparkles started up again. Great. I was going to pass out onto my old friend, and I’d be lucky if I just ended up in the drunk tank for it.

  “Evie—”

  “No.” I shrugged my jacket back into place, hoping that motion wouldn’t throw off my balance even more, and turned as if to go. “Either you’re sticking to your guns, in which case I can’t tell you any more, or you want to know everything, in which case it’s gonna be a shitload of magic, okay? Make up your mind, because until then I’m gonna stick to my side and not bother you with anything that isn’t your business.”

  Whether it was the momentary anger or just my body deciding that it was done messing with me, color and sense began to filter back into the world as I turned away. Rena cleared her throat. “It is my business,” she said quietly. “When it becomes this—” and I didn’t have to look to know she was gesturing to the smoldering hulk in the harbor, “—it is my business.”

  That was true, as far as it went. But I didn’t have the energy to convince her that you couldn’t separate magic from business. I didn’t think Deke had started the fire, but I’d do some checking up on my own, and if it turned out differently, I’d come back to Rena. Until then
, she could whistle for me. “You know where to find me,” I said over my shoulder. “If you decide you can handle some of the weird shit, then come on over.”

  On the far side of the street, the muttered discussion between two men in cheap suits had turned into an actual argument. Both were shadowcatchers, the bottom-feeders of the undercurrent, trading in loci that wouldn’t power any kind of magic beyond a twinkle. Sarah, as always, had stepped into the middle of the fray, trying to calm everyone down. “That’s not the problem right now,” she said as I reached her side. “Until we know what happened—and I’d like to stress that we don’t know that anything unusual happened—then there’s no reason to go making a fuss.”

  “Fuss? Fuss? What is this fuss?” the skinnier man snapped. “No, what I am saying is that if the community watch cannot be bothered to, hah, watch for this sort of aetheric disharmony, then what good is it?”

  “Don’t start with the ether stuff again,” muttered his compatriot.

  That at least was enough of a distraction. The skinny one was someone I knew, vaguely; he called himself the Elect of the Order of the Revealed Golden Veil of Isis-Sophia, or something like that with a couple extra titles tacked on. He was pretty harmless, an academic adept, of the kind that brush up against real magic once or twice in their lives and immediately dive headfirst into the esoteric cruft of centuries. On the rare occasion that an academic adept wanders into something huge, the result tends to be unpredictable, and by that I mean anything from blowing up someone’s house to releasing ugly things into the steam tunnels under Boston College. I was pretty sure the Jesuits had taken in the last guy to do that, and after I’d helped with the cleanup, one of the chaplains there had given me an official, if quiet, commendation. (I’d also come away from the cleanup with a knife scar in my left buttock that I preferred not to think about.) This sort of person was what the undercurrent now consisted of, since the big guys on top had been taken down. The Elect, Tessie, Deke … the small fry.