Soul Hunt

by Margaret Ronald

I stifled a yelp and clamped my hand over the jacket. The fingers twitched faintly, like a dying fish, and I damn near flung the things into the corner of the room. Instead, gritting my teeth, I withdrew them and held up the weakly shivering bundle.

  The ceiling creaked again: the kid, coming downstairs this time. I reached up and put both hands, one still holding the fingers, against the brick—

  The fingers flexed in mine, like someone trying to clasp my hand, and the ceiling overhead vanished, replaced by a brick arch, dank and slimy with condensation. I caught my breath, then gasped a second time as the total lack of scent hit me. I couldn’t smell anything, not even myself.

  The tunnel was no longer bricked up. Instead slick, oily water half filled it, stretching out ahead and behind me. A strange, brassy light filtered through grates overhead, not daylight or even a close approximation of it but something else, like light seen through smoked glass. But past it, down at the far end of the tunnel, there was a single flickering flame: a lantern, held aloft by someone standing on a rickety dock amid crates and barrels painted a dull black.

  Smuggler’s haven, I realized. This was still Boston, but long ago, when patriots and opportunists had good cause for sneaking cargo in under King George’s nose. This would have been underground, and it might have stayed the same since then.

  I squinted at the person holding the light. She wasn’t the thief, of that I was sure. For one, her hands—one on the lantern, the other clenched in her dress—were intact. For another, this small, grim, brown-skinned woman was not the sailor I had scented; she was a landswoman. Her clothes—well, you see Colonial re-enactors and tour guides all over Boston, particularly during summer, and while their styles are all accurate, there’s a certain vibrancy that comes from using modern fabrics and modern sewing techniques. This woman looked faded, belonging to another era, but her dress was still scrupulously clean, the kind of clean that I knew from my mother: too proud to look poor.

  She was the same woman I’d seen on the Common, I realized, when Roger and Deke broke the quarry spirit’s hold on me. Only here she wasn’t out of place; here she was in her element, and she stood with a calm control belied only by her tight grip on the lantern.

  “Meda!” A man’s voice, somewhere behind me, and for a moment I mistook it for the package store clerk. I turned to see a little boat, floundering down the tunnel. One oar was jammed in the stern; the other had been put to poor use by the man in the boat, who seemed to be using it as a canoe paddle. His left hand was tucked tight under his right arm, and though I couldn’t see his face the grubby sheen of his jacket seemed darker and shinier right there. Blood, I thought, and held tight to the dead fingers. “Meda, are you there?”

  “I am, and don’t shout. The master will hear.” Her voice was strangely accented—the cadence of the past, perhaps, or something else—and it did not echo, unlike the man’s.

  “Old Grouchy can hear and dance a jig for all I care. I have it, Meda, I have it. I am sorry, it was not enough, I was not enough, but I have it and there’ll be no more at Nix’s Mate—”

  Meda stiffened and lowered the lantern. She glanced up at the grating, then straight at me. She had the look in those eyes that I’d only seen in very strong magicians. There’s something about it that marks you—Maryam had it, Roger had a flicker of it, all the members of the Fiana shared in it—and this woman could have faced down any of them. And though I couldn’t explain how, I thought she knew me.

  “Aye,” she said. “No more.” And she raised her other hand in a gesture I didn’t know, as if to cast sand across the water.

  I started to step forward, and my nose mashed up against the bricks, hard enough that tears sprang to my eyes. The vision or whatever it was vanished, and the fingers were again dead flesh in my hand. “Fuck,” I mumbled, stuffing them back in my pocket, then stopped.

  The scent was gone. Not ended, not out of range, but gone. Even the pitiful traces I’d followed this far no longer existed, as if they’d been swept up by a tidy housemaid. “God dammit all to hell—”

  “Lady, I told you—” The stairs creaked, and I turned around too late. The kid stared at me, then at the scattered bottles, then back at me. “Jesus! Jesus Christ, what is going on?”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I just had to, to find something.”

  “What?”

  “See, I wanted to look at the wall, only it wasn’t there—” God, my head was starting to pound, not just from the bonk on my nose but from the incomplete hunt, the pressure of that lost scent an ache both physical and mental.

  “At the wall.” He nodded slowly, holding his hands out at his sides as if to show that he was unarmed.

  “No, really—” I snorted and rubbed at my nose; I’d skinned it. That probably wasn’t helping my case. “It was important. Say, do you know when this building was built?”

  His eyes widened. “Okay. Okay, lady, we’re closing now,” he added, speaking carefully and slowly, “so unless you want to look at the wall some more—”

  “Thanks, no. I um. I can pay for what I’ve done,” I added, trying to find my wallet.

  His eyebrows went up even further, and he took a step back, closer to the stairs. “That’s, that’s okay. Whatever you’ve done is between you and God, okay?”

  Ah, crap. There was no way I was going to get out of this conversation looking sane, was I? I edged toward the stairs. “That’s not—”

  My cell phone chimed weakly with an errant signal bouncing down from above. I jumped; the kid jumped about a foot higher and ended up in the corner holding a bottle of chardonnay like a really ineffective shield. “I’ll take this outside,” I said brightly, and ran up the stairs, face flaming. On the way out, I dropped what cash I had in my wallet on the counter; at least that might make up for the extra work.

  The number wasn’t one I knew. I caught the ring just before it swapped over to voice mail. “Scelan.”

  “Evie?” The voice was Sarah’s, speaking over what sounded like a crowd of people.

  “Sarah! Jesus, I’m sorry—I’m so sorry, I meant to get in touch earlier—”

  “Evie, I need help,” she said, practically shouting over the sound of the crowd. “I’m at the watch meeting in Dorchester, and we need a neutral voice here—” Someone—a man’s voice, high and hysterical—interrupted her, and I heard Sarah cover the phone to speak back to him—then a wet thump, and a cry.

  “Sarah? Sarah!” I stared at the phone, but the connection was lost. Goddammit.

  Nine

  The trouble with being a biker in Boston is that while it’ll get you through traffic more quickly than a car—which is why Mercury specializes in downtown work—it’s still a lot slower overall. Especially if you happen to leave your bike in another neighborhood entirely.

  According to the schedule Sarah had given me, the ersatz “community watch” had been meeting on the Triplets’ turf this time. The Triplets didn’t quite run a protection racket. They’d put down roots in the community, but they didn’t really care too much about what went on in it, so long as they knew who was currently on top. They only dealt with organizations—gangs, families, parishioners—and they’d curse anyone for a fee. Not all the curses worked, which they freely admitted, and I’d heard Sarah speculate that the degree to which they did work depended on how much the Triplets valued the target and client both. But enough were effective that they brought in sufficient cash to own bits of other local businesses, thus making a legitimate living. (Which is more than can be said for most magicians.) Between that and a tacit agreement with some of the local Babalorishas, they had a quasi-symbiotic role with the neighborhood. They’d even been one of the first to acquiesce to Sarah’s community watch.

  They also didn’t like to come out in public. Which made arranging meetings on neutral territory difficult. If something had gone sour there—

  I cut off the thought and ran a red light, careening into a little alley off the main drag. The street was pretty run do
wn, with grates and locks over every storefront and the crumbling look that happens when neither the current owner nor the previous had any money to spare for upkeep. A Vietnamese grocery took up one corner of this skinny block, a car-repair shop took up the other, and in between—

  Well. In between was a crowd. Looking over their heads as I approached, I could see a little of the problem: the middle window of the upper story had been smashed in, and while I didn’t scent any magic immediately, a stifled, flat smell hung over the block, as if someone had tried but failed to complete an invocation. More important, there was already an ambulance on the far corner.

  I locked up my bike and tucked my helmet under my arm. Someone at the edge of the crowd glanced back, then did a double-take and nudged the guy next to him. Great. “What the hell happened here?” I asked before they could get away.

  They just gave me a wary look, but one of the guys with them was a lot more talkative. “You would not believe it—one moment we’re just sitting out front, minding our own business, then this crazy white guy in like a purple bathrobe ran up the road, pushed past us, and ran in yelling. Next thing we know he’s hitting people, saying they wrecked his place, and then he must have like thrown a chair or something because the window broke.”

  “That’s good glass too,” said the girl next to him. “Not supposed to break easy. And I didn’t see no chair.”

  “What, so he like, broke it with his mind?”

  “I didn’t say that,” the girl insisted, even as the two who’d first noticed me looked at each other. “Only that I didn’t see no chair.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and slid past them. Crazy guy in a purple bathrobe? Well, I knew plenty of crazy guys, but not their off-duty dress. Broken glass littered the sidewalk, and not just from the second-story window. The ground floor was a restaurant: GRILLED MEATS AND PICKLE, named by someone with a greater desire for honesty than for appealing marketing. And it, too, had a smashed window—broken right below the stenciled graffiti above the frame: three 3s, positioned so that they formed a triangle. “Goddammit,” I muttered.

  “Hound,” a deep voice said behind me. I turned to see a tall black man in a red hooded coat standing at the edge of the crowd. “You took a long time.”

  “Had a long way to come,” I said, racking my brain for his name. Haroun, that was it. Current liaison for the Triplets, though who knew how long that’d last. Others had been discarded for getting too full of themselves, promising what couldn’t be delivered, or skimming too much. And by “discarded” I mean that the former liaisons hadn’t been seen in Boston again. I used to know one man who claimed they were sold for parts, but that never seemed quite plausible. “What happened? Where’s Sarah?”

  “Sarah?” His lips curled. “You should be worried more about your other friend. The one who came here yelling.”

  Other friend? Who? “All I know is I got a call from Sarah—”

  “He came in here,” Haroun said, easily talking over me as if I were an unruly student and he the professor, “interrupted our discussions, and accused us of conspiring against him. And then he hit Younger in the face.”

  “Oh, shit.” It’s not a good idea to hit a magician, and I’m saying that as someone who’s done so in the past. With enthusiasm. The trouble isn’t that it gets you hurt right away, it’s that there tend to be consequences. Particularly if you’re attacking one of the Triplets. “Is Younger all right?” Haroun nodded. “And the other guy?”

  He made a gesture like flicking dust from his sleeve. “You’re sure you don’t know him?”

  “She knew him.”

  I turned to see Sarah, wrapped up in a brilliant pink coat and holding an icepack to her face. “Sarah! God, are you okay? Did he hurt you—”

  She took the pack away, revealing a bruise the color of raw steak all across her cheekbone. I made an inarticulate noise, but she didn’t seem to notice, staring at me hard instead. “Haroun, can you bring a light closer, or maybe one of those glass …” He handed her a shard of glass, silvered on one side, possibly from a mirror inside the restaurant. “Thank you.” Sarah held it up, angling it between us, and muttered something as she examined my reflection. “You’re all right,” she said wonderingly. “I’d thought—”

  “You thought right.” I took the glass from her hand—after the number of cuts she’d sustained there in the past, you’d think she’d be more careful—and closed my fingers over hers. “I’m okay now. There was a severing.”

  “Severing? But then you’re not okay, you’re just not getting worse.” She turned my hand over, held it out in front of the light from the store, and glanced at my shadow, as if expecting it to be faded. Well, after a few days more of the quarry spirit drawing on me, it would have been. “A severing doesn’t bring you back to yourself, it just stops whatever’s leeching off you—and how did you let something do that in the first place?”

  “I’m fine. Really. Now, how did you manage to get that shiner?”

  Sarah sighed and glanced at Haroun as if for confirmation. He drew breath to answer, but just then a new commotion started, this time at the front door. A wail of utter misery echoed from the door, followed by its maker—and two cops, one at each elbow. “My home,” cried a sad little man in, yes, a purple bathrobe, though now that I saw it I could recognize it as the kind of “ritual garment” that some of the stranger adepts wore: purple silk with characters embroidered on the edges, now stained with food and grease and worse. Definitely worse, I thought, taking a sniff. “My home, all my books, my loci, my pomegranates—”

  I took a step forward, even though I knew I couldn’t do anything. He turned as I did so, spotted me, and flinched away, into one of his escorts, who grumbled and pushed him upright again. “Hang on,” I said. “Wasn’t he at the docks when that boat caught fire? The Elect, or someone like that.”

  “Yes,” Sarah said, replacing the icepack on her eye. “He was the one who called me to let me know something was going on. Saw you pull Tessie out.” She sighed and balled up her other hand in the folds of her coat. “She’s out of the hospital, by the way.”

  “Good,” I said absently. The little man in purple seemed a threat about on the level of damp paper towels, but the police still bundled him into the car and drove off. “But if he was helping you then, why—”

  Sarah rubbed her unhurt eye, and for the first time I could tell how much this was draining her. The little squabbles may have been no more than she expected when she first got into this, but enough of those will sap your strength. “Someone trashed his place. I didn’t catch everything he said, but it sounded like an invocation of some kind.”

  Haroun cleared his throat. “An Hourglass Pinch, supplemented by a souring. It is a common curse, if you want to destroy a man’s possessions. He thought the Triplets were to blame.” Whatever changed on my face, it was enough to tick him off. “No, Hound. They were not. No more than Wassermann here was helping them.”

  “Sounds like he needed a scapegoat, then. Your bad luck it was you.”

  Haroun’s lip curled. “Luck,” he said. “You tell me now you believe in luck? You are in the wrong business, Hound.”

  I thought of Dina, of the bad bargains I’d made. “That’s very likely.”

  Haroun’s brows rose at that, and for a moment I thought he might even be softening a little. Sarah shook her head. “Look, wrong business or not, can you keep an eye on things here? Haroun and I—if we’ve got a chance of keeping a lid on this, we need to get down to the station.”

  “You’re kidding.” Put me in charge of anything? How the hell was I supposed to keep magicians from fighting, put them all in time out?

  “Right now we’ve got a few too many scavengers about,” Sarah added, tipping her head toward the crowd. “The Triplets’ wards will hold, since they’re in retreat right now, but I need you to do damage control. The last thing we need is—” She stopped, leaning forward. “What happened to your nose?”

  I rubbed at the skinn
ed spot. It still hurt. “Long story.”

  “You haven’t gotten in a fight again, have—? Never mind. Will you stay, just for a bit?”

  “Sarah, I don’t know—”

  “People listen to you. They’ll give you a chance.” She glanced over her shoulder and edged closer. “But only one chance, so don’t screw it up.”

  “Yes, thank you for that vote of confidence.” I switched my helmet to my other hand and ran my fingers through my hair. It was stiff from salt spray and greasy from the day’s sweat. “Okay. I’ll run interference for you.”

  She nodded. “Great. Haroun, we’ll take my car if that’s all right with you.”

  I could have warned him against the car; it was a beat-up beige hatchback that had probably last had a tune-up in the Cretaceous, but Haroun nodded, made a gesture to the storefront, and followed. He was good at this, I thought, as they got in and drove off. I hoped the Triplets would keep him on for a while; people with sense were always in short supply in the undercurrent.

  And right now I had to face some of the consequences of that. I turned to face the crowd and smiled brightly, and a few of the onlookers—the ones who’d just come to see the show, or who lived nearby and wanted to know what was up—smiled back. Unfortunately, that didn’t include the shadowcatchers who’d stopped by, and it certainly didn’t stop one particular voice in the back. “—the nerve, the absolute nerve to tell him to go away! And this after all that had happened—I don’t even see what the problem was, all he did was slap the boy, it wasn’t even that hard—”

  I made my way through the last of the crowd and put my hand on the speaker’s shoulder. “Madame Sosostris,” I said, showing all my teeth in something that wasn’t quite a smile. “So good to see you out and about.”

  Wheelwright turned white at the name—maybe hiding your real name is good for magicians, but for a charlatan it doesn’t help to have your stage name associated with outbursts like that—and choked on her next few words. I turned the glare on the people around her, but it faded as I recognized some of them: Kassia, a woman who worked pretty much the same racket as Wheelwright but under the Triplets’ protection; a guy in a green mechanic’s coverall, and Byron Chatterji, flipping his bowler hat between his hands as if he were about to pull a rabbit from it. “Got here a little late, didn’t you, Hound?” Wheelwright managed, choking up her grip on the huge purse she carried.