Yes, I thought, and closed my eyes, reveling in the sense of—not wholeness; even with my imperfect understanding of the world I could tell that something had been severed—but sufficiency. I might be injured, but I was no longer fettered—and most important of all, I was myself again.
I opened my eyes and to my surprise, the first person to meet them wasn’t Deke or Roger (who, I now knew from scent, were standing to my left just outside the circle), but one of the historical tour guides who shepherd packs of visitors around the Common: a small black woman in period dress, her white skirts glimmering in the streetlights, her hair up under a bonnet. She gave me a small, tight nod as if she approved of my choice of profanity. I grinned at her, then turned to Roger. “Thank you.”
“Ah, that’s much better. I much prefer talking with people who are all here.” He glanced at the sky, then at his watch, and frowned. “Even if it’s cost me a little time. Come on, Cam, I gotta get back or she’ll have my hide.”
“Wait.” I stepped down from the fountain, marveling at how easy it was to walk again, how clear everything seemed once more. “What can I do to thank you?”
“Thank me? For what? No, no, you just got caught up in an experiment. No debt on either side.” Deke grabbed his sleeve and whispered urgently, but Roger shook his head. “No need to bother her with that. Talk to you later, Hound.”
Deke, crestfallen, waved at me but followed along in his friend’s wake. I stretched, reveling in how good everything felt, then glanced back for the tour guide. She was gone, of course.
By the time I let myself into Nate’s place, Katie was already asleep (or at least her light was out; if she was like me, she’d have learned to read with a flashlight under the covers) and Nate was on the couch with a new stack of midterms in front of him. “Hey,” he said, looking up. “You all right?”
“Yes.” I smiled and settled in next to him. “Yes, I am. For the first time in a long while.”
“Good. That’s good.” He put an arm around me absently. “Aunt Venice called; she wanted to know if you could track something down for her.”
“No discounts for your family,” I said, trying to make sense of the papers in front of him. Higher math was not my specialty, even at those points where it intersected magic. Especially not those.
“And Sarah called. She wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“Crap. I pissed her off. And Katie. I should apologize … I’ll do it in the morning.” I leaned against his shoulder, but the tension in his muscles had nothing to do with the phone calls. “What’s wrong?”
Abruptly Nate dropped his pen and pulled me close, so close I damn near had trouble drawing breath. I squawked, but the way he held on to me wasn’t so much possessive as desperate, as if I were a lifejacket in a storm. “You can’t go,” he said into my shoulder. “At midwinter. You can’t go.”
“I don’t want to,” I said, and reached up to touch his hair, early gray and brown sliding through my fingers. “I’ll figure something out—I’m sure I can, somehow. But I have to do this on my own. Nate, you can’t save me from this.”
He was silent a moment, then loosened his hold and sat back, though he still didn’t quite meet my eyes. “I nearly attacked someone today. I … I was thinking about you, about the Hunt, about how damn powerless I am, and suddenly this argument I was having with one of the other TAs just seemed so fucking stupid in comparison. I nearly—” He touched his cheek, then his lips, as if reassuring himself that they were still in the right place. “It’s the first time it’s happened like that. And I thought, what if you’re not there? You keep me in check, Evie. I know where my limits are, with you. If you’re gone—”
I put my hand up, stopping him, then cupped it around his cheek. “You’re only just now noticing? It’s a curse, after all. It’s not meant to make you a productive member of society.”
He exhaled, a short, bitter breath that was somewhere between a laugh and self-inflicted contempt. “I’ll trust your word on it. I have trouble trusting my own …” He looked back at me. “They have noticed,” he said. “Not … not anything explicit, but my students, my advisor, the other TAs … they know something’s different. And they’re a little scared of me. Whenever it gets close I can feel the pressure in the back of my head, and I think they see it too. They back down.”
I shrugged. “Must be nice.”
“No. They look at me … they look at me the way people looked at my father.”
I nodded at that. His father had tried the same intimidation on me, only there was too much of the hound in me to react the way he’d wanted. “Nate, trust me on this. You’re not your curse.”
“I trust you,” he said, softly enough that I didn’t quite think I’d imagined it. “But I want it gone.”
“Then we’ll find a way to get rid of it before I go.” I stopped, realizing what I’d said. Nate’s eyes met mine, and to keep from talking more I kissed him quick. “There are ways,” I said. “Your father got rid of it, after all—there’s the wolfskin he hit you with—”
“Long gone, I’m afraid. He took it back.”
“Well, there are other ways. Maybe nothing so simple as a usual cursebreaking, but there are fissures, places where it’s not as strong. We’ll find a way. Okay? Trust me.”
“I do trust you,” he whispered, and sighed against me. “More than I can say.”
I rested against his shoulder a moment. “So what were you arguing about?”
“What? Oh … the TA. Possibility theory. It’s a little difficult to explain; it’s the counterintuitive parts of higher maths, which is why it was a problem.”
I thought about what the quarry spirit had done, and how it could have done that to me. There were some things I knew about magic, and permission, and purposefully misinterpreting words, but still … “Yeah,” I said, chasing that from my mind for now. “Possibility is a bitch. Fortunately, so am I.”
“Not to me,” Nate said, and kissed my cheek. Well, he’d meant to kiss my cheek; I turned just in time to catch his lips against mine, and from there things got interesting, enough that I was reminded anew how it felt to keep his wild side in check.
That night, tangled up against Nate and pleasantly sore all over, I dreamed of the Hunt again. They were very happy, very happy indeed.
Because now I’d taste a whole lot better when they came to tear me apart.
Not the most encouraging dream.
Seven
Tania gave me a measuring look when I got in the next morning, but she sent me to Somerville and Medford without a question, then out to East Boston and Charlestown. Any past November, I’d be begging Tania for a double shift on an unseasonably warm day like this one so I could sock away some extra cash. Mercury Courier doesn’t close down during the winter, but the shifts are slower and harder, and I’d gotten stuck short of money in February before, when the heaps of dirty gray snow made everything just that much worse.
I spent most of the morning going back and forth between towns on either the far side of the river or the far side of the harbor, and just for some extra fun, over the railroad tracks. Want to dislocate a biker’s shoulder? Send her over the tracks repeatedly. If it doesn’t do that, then it’ll sure as hell turn her forearms to mush. The damn things are worse than potholes.
I did most of my work for Mercury in a thoughtful haze, going from place to place without quite registering where I was headed or what I carried. Boston traffic’s useful for that—you can concentrate solely on what’s in front of you, and that’ll be enough to occupy most of your thoughts and then some.
In fact, I even had enough presence of mind to search for the book for Nate’s Aunt Venice. It was a little unusual—normally I’d want the signed contract in hand before I started work, even for someone who wasn’t in the undercurrent—but I had the excuse, I had the means, and my God, I could hunt again. That was enough of a reason, as far as I was concerned.
Unfortunately, from finding the scent of that partic
ular book (sand and dust and a peculiar greasy green quality that I was learning to associate with old glue) to finding the pages that were missing took all of forty-eight minutes. Not even enough to run over my lunch break. I spent another ten minutes in front of what I’d found—a senior art exhibit at Boston University, where the pages had been collaged up and turned into
History Devours Itself 4: What We Have (Is) Known and tried to fight down the vague disappointment in my stomach. I had so little time left, and it had been so long since I’d had a truly satisfying hunt …
It was probably that, more than any sense of obligation, that made me seek out Deke. And it was definitely that need to hunt that made me use my talent to track him down rather than just calling him on my cell. (Deke didn’t like phones, but he’d started to carry one just in case—to call the cops, he explained, though I couldn’t imagine what problems he’d have that a cop could help with.)
I found him down by the waterfront, on the footbridge across Fort Point Channel. I locked up my bike by the courthouse and started across, whistling through my teeth, waving once he saw me.
They’d done their best to spiff up this part of the city—luxury hotels, new construction, a fragment of a park—but fragments of the old waterfront remained. Namely, one big house out in the middle of the channel itself, on decaying pilings like dead man’s fingers. Since the pedestrian bridge at the mouth of the channel had been a swinging bridge once upon a time, the house had probably controlled the mechanism that opened the bridge to let ships through. But time had passed, and the only boats that sailed this way now were small enough that they could go right under the bridge, and the house over the water sat and sagged, so isolated that only one graffiti tag marked its side.
Deke, however, seemed to be regarding it like a homeowner deciding on new landscaping. “Nice place,” I said as I reached his side.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Better than the drains.”
I glanced at him. “You’re living out here now? I thought you hated the water.”
He shrugged. “Easier to see Roger this way. ‘Sides, I don’t hate it so much, just what—” He stopped, and the faint smile dropped from his face. A shudder coursed through him, and for a second I caught a stink of fear rising off of him, so acrid and sharp I wondered that the bundled-up families passing on the far side of the bridge couldn’t scent it as well. That was the same fear I’d smelled on the burning yacht, before Roger carried him off. Deke shook himself and pulled himself together with an almost audible clunk. “I manage,” he finished. “Talking of Roger, there’s something I want to ask. He won’t, he’s too suspicious of anyone he doesn’t know, but there’s something he wants found—”
“I know,” I said. “I guessed. That’s why I’m here.”
Deke’s face lit up. On the heels of that sudden fright, his undiluted excitement seemed a bit strange, but also a relief, given that I was hoping for a job. “Really? Oh, Hound, I’m so glad—he’s needed help for a while, and now I can help him out, I’m so glad—”
I held up one hand. “It depends on what he’s looking for, okay? Where is he?”
Deke pointed.
I looked. “The courthouse?”
“No—no. Out in the harbor. See, he was late last night, because we were helping you. He’s not supposed to be away from the water at night. She doesn’t like it.”
“She?” I glanced again at the courthouse—no, at the harbor beyond it. “Tessie? She said someone was looking after her boat.”
“No! No, not Tessie. Not Tessie at all.” He hesitated. “I’m really sorry about her. Is she okay?”
“Last I heard.” And I hadn’t gone back to check on her, more’s the pity. Stupid of me. “So who’s ‘she’?”
“She’s his ally. Sort of. It’s … look, I can take you to him, okay? He can’t be on the mainland, not for another few days, because he wasn’t in sight of water when the sun went down. But I can take you to the island. And bring you back. Promise.”
“I don’t know, Deke—”
“He said she can help you. When we were talking, he said about the hold on you. On your life. Roger said she can help.”
I froze. For a moment the air felt heavier, the sun (what there was of it, this late in the day) more piercing, even the rough planks under my feet seemed to communicate their presence up through my bike cleats. The touch of wind on my skin felt more real, more alive than it had in weeks, and it would be gone so soon—
If there was even a chance, didn’t I have a responsibility to find out?
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Deke gave a happy whoop and, before I could do anything, clambered over the wire fence that separated us from the outside of the bridge. He motioned for me to follow, and I did.
I glanced at the other pedestrians—not many, not with night coming on earlier—and scrambled over, expecting at any moment to hear a yell from some security guard. Nothing, not even when I landed on the far side next to a No Trespassing sign. Rena would kick my ass if she could see this, I thought.
Below the bridge, in the underpinnings of steel and concrete that held it in place, was a narrow wooden walkway—the close end of the one that led to the little house in the middle of the channel. A tiny boat, the kind that aspired to be a Zodiac but had given up on those aspirations some time ago, floated just under the bridge. “I’ll take you to him,” Deke said, and settled expectantly in the boat, one hand on the motor.
We slid out from under the bridge, following the curve of the marina. Deke chattered away about Roger and the time he’d saved Deke from some bully or another back in high school … or maybe it was two different stories, I couldn’t tell. Only half listening to Deke, I watched the city recede behind us.
Technically, the islands are still part of Boston, as is the harbor itself, but … it’s different, being out on the water. I wasn’t sure I liked it. We swept past the docks on either side of the harbor, past the barren wasteland of office buildings and parking lots on the waterfront, past Castle Island and the other remnants of Southie that I still carried with me. The great white eggs of the water treatment plant on Deer Island, at first so small and ridiculous, loomed up into huge structures just as their smell—rotten eggs and sewage wasn’t the half of it—loomed up as well. Just in time for the first big waves too. I held on to the edge of the boat and tried not to barf.
Across the water, through the shoals of the islands … One island had DO NOT APPROACH signs up on every beach, with a big biohazard sign next to the largest and WARNING ASBESTOS beneath that, though how asbestos got out here was beyond me. Another was no more than a little circular wall, seemingly there for the sole purpose of holding the beacon that warned us away. Deke made a gesture over his shoulder at it, as if warding it off.
We arrived at the far side of a long, flat island large enough to have a few hills on it and an imposing gray stone building beyond those hills. The air smelled of salt and dead fish, with that peculiar scraped, gritty scent of beaches in this part of New England, and the cheery little refreshment shack at the end of the dock had long since been boarded up for the winter, making it just as inhospitable as the stone walls behind it. Whatever that other building was, it took up most of the island.
Roger met us at the dock, a big fuzzy hat pulled cockeyed over his head so that he looked like some bizarre Canadian pirate caricature. “Cam!” he roared, and hauled Deke out of the boat with one hand. “Great timing. I’ve got fish on the grill. And who’s—” He stopped. “Huh. So you came out, after all. Cam, I told you not to go bothering her.”
“She came looking for me!” Deke hauled a box out of the back of the boat (I realized I’d been sitting on it most of the way) and tucked it under his arm. “She can help, Roger, I know she can.”
“If you say so.” He gave me a long look, then thumped Cam on the shoulder. “Go on; fire’s already started. Hound—you mind if I call you that?”
“Better than ‘bitch,’” I said.
A slow smile crept up Roger’s face, drawing brows and whiskers together in a wrinkly gray mass. “So it is. Well, Hound, welcome to Georges Island. Home, for now.”
“You’re living out here?” I asked, climbing out of the boat.
“It’s not so bad. So long as the rangers don’t notice me, and I got ways to make sure they don’t. Besides,” he gestured to the big stone building that eclipsed the far side of the island, “there’s plenty of room in the old fort. Not like anyone’s using it these days.”
“And from what Deke told me, staying on the mainland isn’t an option.”
Roger chuckled, following me off the dock and onto the gravel path. “Not if I don’t want to pay for it, like I’m doing now. My boat was better, but after what happened, well.” He shrugged.
“What did happen?”
“Not sure. One minute Cam and I are talking in the galley, he’s catching me up on all the local gossip—I can’t believe the Sox actually won since I last left town, can you?”
“Didn’t help them this year,” I said, more bitterly than I’d meant.
“Well, you win some, you lose some. Anyway, one minute we’re shooting the shit, the next the room’s full of smoke and the hold’s on fire. Cam takes one look at the flames, screams, and falls down, and it’s all I can do to get him out of there.” He gazed out to sea, and I didn’t have to know directions to know he was looking out to where the yacht had gone down. “I’ll miss her. That was a fine little ship, with a good history, and she served me well.”
I glanced ahead. Deke was well ahead of us, and probably out of earshot, but I still lowered my voice. “I hate to ask, but Deke is, well, known to be something of a pyro in these parts.”
“He was with me the entire time,” Roger said, still staring out to sea, then turned to face me, his eyes cold and hard as ice. “And I’ll thank you never to insult my friend to my face again.”
Soul Hunt Page 10