His lips parted, and an unintelligible whisper passed them. I leaned closer, and he shivered. “I’m scared, Hound.”
“I don’t blame you. Rena, what the hell have you done to him?”
“I didn’t do anything. He sat down the minute we got out here and he’s been like that since.”
I got to my feet. There wasn’t much in the way of an intact floor, but there was enough space in front of Deke for me to stand between them. “Then why is Deke so scared he’s practically shitting himself?”
“You’d have to ask him that,” Rena said levelly.
Like that was going to do much good right now. “Deke’s harmless, Rena. Yes, he’s kind of a pyro, but he’s never started anything big. Worst he’s ever done is burn some trash. That’s not nearly enough to bring you out here.”
“You may want to think about what you’re saying,” Rena said. “Especially if you’re going to defend him.”
“Given the choice between the person with a gun and the weak little guy in the corner, yeah, I think I know who I’d defend,” I snapped. “Besides, what do you care? You gonna read me my Miranda rights?”
Rena was silent a moment. The lantern flickered, and for a second the white glare of the fog outside seemed to press closer, changing her expression even as she remained still.
An idea started to rise in the back of my mind. “Where’s Foster?”
That was it. Rena blinked, and for just a fraction of a second, her scent was no longer the block of blue ice that it was when she put on that badge, but something pricklier, like broken glass. “Does it matter?”
“It should. He’s your partner, right? Shouldn’t he be your backup in case one skinny bike messenger and a half-baked pyromaniac decide to get violent? Or maybe you didn’t want him here.” I took a step closer, rethought it as the boards creaked, and moved to my left instead. “Maybe this isn’t as official as I thought.”
Now Rena’s hands shifted—her index finger moving closer to the trigger. Crap. “If I did come alone,” she said, “and there’s no guarantee that I did, let’s say I had a hunch about who’d show up when Deke met with his boss—”
“Boss? Deke doesn’t have a boss. None of us do; you know that, Rena.” I pressed one hand to the back of my head, trying to stave off headache and panic both. “I don’t have time for this. Look, let me finish this exchange—” let me get out from under the damn death sentence, “—and we’ll talk. I’ll tell you everything right down to the ground, you want it that way. But not right now.”
I held my hands out further, trying to demonstrate that I really had nothing to hide. Unfortunately, that had the wrong effect entirely—my jacket opened a little too far, and I saw Rena’s eyes flick to the shoulder holster that wasn’t quite out of view. Shit.
“God damn you, Evie,” she snapped. Whatever chance I’d had, it was now gone. “I was really, really hoping you wouldn’t be part of this. I guess I should have known—”
“No. No, that was—Rena, I swear to God I’m telling the truth.”
“There’s no way I can believe you,” she said, and I knew it was true. I’d left too much out in our dealings in the past, left her in the dark too often. At the time I’d thought it was for her own good, that telling her more about the undercurrent would only drag her into it—it had done that to Nate, hadn’t it?—but as it turned out I’d just been laying another stone on the road to hell.
I closed my eyes. “No,” I said. “There isn’t any way I can convince you either. But I’ll tell you the truth anyway, and then you can tell me whether I’m under arrest. Okay? If so, I’ll go quietly. Just—can we not go back along the boardwalk? I hated walking over that.”
The corner of Rena’s lips turned up just slightly, but she nodded—then shifted the gun to point at Deke as he got to his feet, wringing his hands. “No,” he stage-whispered. “No, she won’t understand.”
“Goddammit, Deke, I’m in it and I don’t understand.” I lowered my hands. “Okay, Rena. What happened is this: I got myself in some trouble. Bruja trouble, and big. Enough that I got scared.” Blood in the water, I thought, remembering the Hounds’ assessment of me. “The short way to put it is that it’s a curse. Deke, here, has a friend—the one with the boat, the guy who owned it before it caught fire. And no, I didn’t know him when we talked before. But now I do, and he—Roger—knows someone who says she can remove that curse, if I do something for her.” I glanced at Deke, ashamed of what else I had to say. “Only I got spooked and thought I could get a little more for the job. I wanted to … to see if she’d lift another curse as well. That’s why I said all that on the phone. I was, shit, I guess it was extortion after all.”
Deke’s hands twisted as if he was trying to scrub something off them. “You didn’t have to. She said, she said she’d get it back for you. From the quarry. Roger told me, he told me about the child—”
“There was no child, Deke, okay? And Roger had no business telling you that.” I sighed and glanced back at Rena, whose expression had gone from stoic disbelief to outright shock. “That was Dina’s first offer,” I told her. “She—she told me I’d been pregnant. And that a, an embodiment of the … Goddammit. A nixie, call it that. It had stolen the child.” Christ, it sounded even worse telling Rena like this. At any moment I expected her to point and laugh, or at the very least give up on me entirely.
Instead she blinked and lowered the gun. “You’re kidding.” I shook my head. “You’re not kidding.”
“No. And look, that whole part doesn’t matter, okay? What matters is that I said yes, and I found this for her.”
I reached into my coat for the sunstone, too late remembering the gun, but Rena didn’t move. My fingers slid over the sunstone, and for a moment I could barely see—Deke’s fear, so huge and shapeless, loomed up like a tumor on an X-ray, and all I could perceive was that miasma of dread. He hadn’t been kidding about being scared.
But more than that, I saw Rena, grayed out, her face made of stone, her hands perpetually frozen around the gun. Which made it even stranger when she snapped the safety back on and holstered it. “Okay. Okay, Evie, you can shut up now.”
I started to protest, then stopped as the words became clear. “What?”
“You’re an idiot—I’ll believe that till the day I die—and you really should have checked with me before carrying a firearm, and I think there’s a lot more to this story, but I’ll believe you for now.” She edged around a gap in the boards and reached forward to clasp my shoulder for balance.
“Seriously?” What had I said? I closed my hand around the sunstone, trying to ignore the stink of abject terror now coming off Deke—what in God’s name did he have to be scared of, we were both on his side—and tried to look like I’d expected it.
It didn’t work; Rena didn’t do anything so obvious as smile, but the corners of her eyes crinkled. “Okay. Here’s the situation as I see it. This guy—” a nod toward Deke, who flinched even though she was a yard away, “—got caught setting a fire at a psychic’s. Not so different from the other vandalisms lately. So we thought he might have something to do with the rest.”
I glanced at Deke. “What the hell were you doing?”
He jammed his hands into the pockets of his dreadful old coat. “I told you,” he said, less pleading than peevish now, shuffling his feet against the boards. “I’m scared.”
“Yes, but that’s no reason—” I sighed. “Okay. Rena, go on.”
“That would have just gone under the radar, if Foster hadn’t checked out the accelerant he was using, and found a very interesting link.” She grinned, a more feral grin than either Nate or I could have managed, even with our canine associations. “And that’s not getting into who really owned that boat.”
I hesitated—and Deke, who had been standing there forgotten for too long, gave out a shriek like a maimed horse and shoved me aside. I took a step back, my arms pinwheeling as my foot failed to come down on anything, and went sprawling across the
floor, boards snapping and creaking under me. Rena turned to Deke, and he slammed his hand against her chest.
No. Not just his hand. I yanked my foot out from the gap in the floorboards and scrambled up in time to see Deke step back, still holding what looked like one of those silver glass balls that people use for Christmas ornaments. Only this one had shattered, and the jagged edges were now the same red as the first few blossoms on Rena’s shirt. A murky substance spread out from them, mixing with her blood.
Rena stared at the mark, unable to sense the stink of fireworks that came from it. Her eyes rolled up, and a pinkish froth spilled from the corners of her mouth as she crumpled.
I yelled and struggled to my feet, stumbling over the broken boards. Deke didn’t even look at me; he just took a baby food jar from his pocket and tossed it. The lid came off in flight, and the contents—tar, and seawater, and something that smelled like what you’d find at the bottom of a cistern—struck me across the chest.
Gunpowder scent wreathed me like a shroud. I stumbled, the world closing in around me until all I could see was Deke’s face.
He was sobbing, and that didn’t change even as I blacked out.
Unconsciousness tastes like salt.
I’d just managed that much of a thought before realizing that I shouldn’t have even been capable of thought, being, you know, unconscious. But even though the world was still black around me—I wasn’t even alert enough to feel pain—there was still some part of me aware of what was going on.
Unfortunately, “what was going on” in this case didn’t seem to have much to do with my external surroundings. I saw—or whatever; sight wasn’t quite the sense that was being inflicted on me here—Colin as a younger man, stepping out of a boat, both hands whole, a pistol at his belt and a boat hook hanging next to it. The sky above him was the color of brass. He glanced behind him toward the water, and I knew that he was looking back at Boston and the girl he’d left behind, the girl who’d told him what to do in the belief that she’d be with him when the time came …
Something was pulling me away from the sight, like a hook in my flesh, like the pressure of the Quabbin. A scent, curling around me but not yet so present as to be identifiable. I shook my head—or whatever—and pushed recognition away for now, because with recognition would come consciousness, and I’d no longer be able to see Colin, now turning his back on the shore and pushing aside waist-high grass, walking with the stride of someone who knows that this is only the first task of many …
The scent dragged at me again, pulling me away. I was rising, above a flat lake, gleaming the color of Roger’s hair, a lake with an eye at the bottom, a reservoir with a sunstone, flat and greasy-looking and now dissolving into rainbow patterns, unhealthy rainbows like unconsciousness or …
I drew a breath and choked on the heavy air.
… or gasoline.
My eyes snapped open, and the rainbows stayed a moment longer, flickering off the surface of a slick pool not so very far away. I was flat on my face, one arm wedged under me, the other flung out and stinking of tar from where Deke’s locus had hit me. The arm that was free felt wrenched, as if someone had dragged me in the wrong direction, or as if someone had tried to pull my jacket off.
The sunstone. I fumbled in my jacket, but it was gone. The stone was gone, my holster was empty, and the air stank of gasoline. “Deke,” I groaned, and pushed myself up to my elbows. “Deke, what—”
I shouldn’t have had to ask. This was Deke, after all. A slop of gasoline smeared the floor from end to end of the bridge house, leading to a pair of leaking cans by the great chains of machinery. Not alight yet, but they didn’t need to be alight to incapacitate me. There were downsides to having a powerful sense of smell. Deke himself was at the far end of the room, by the last remaining windows. “Oh, God,” he muttered, fumbling with a rope bolted to the sill, “oh God, oh God, oh God.”
“What the fuck are you doing?”
His head jerked up, and his eyes were wide and weeping. “Hound, I’m sorry,” he said, and clasped the sunstone to his breast as if it might protect him. “I’m so sorry. But I’m scared. I’ve never been so scared.” With the hand that wasn’t holding the stone, he held up his lighter.
“No!” I struggled to my knees, my limbs like lead ingots tacked on at hip and shoulder. “Deke, you don’t have to do this. You don’t—”
His face contorted in pity and sorrow and terrible determination. “Sorry,” he said again, and dropped the lighter.
The gasoline went up with a thump. I fell back and landed against Rena, who groaned weakly. “God damn you, Deke!”
He didn’t answer, only swung himself out the window. I didn’t hear a splash—of course, over the roaring in my ears, I wouldn’t have heard anything. Instead I turned and tried to get an arm under Rena’s shoulders. She’d made a noise, that had to mean she was all right, didn’t it?
Well, as all right as one could be, stuck in a burning building. Her eyelids flickered, and she managed to focus on me for a second, raising one hand to fumble at her chest. “Evie,” she said, or tried to; the froth at her lips now took on a deeper, red tinge.
“Fuck!” I yelled, and coughed as the smoke dove into my lungs. I got her by one arm—whatever magic had been in the tar, it was burning off, as was most of everything else in the bridge house—and dragged her up, hoping like hell that whatever damage had been done would fade as the locus faded, that I wasn’t just hurting her further. “Stay with me, Rena,” I said, and lurched across the floor, half-dragging her.
I took a moment to glance around and immediately regretted it. The building hadn’t needed the gasoline to get the fire going: it was old, dry, and had been weatherproofed with tarpaper for years. The flames had already seized on the wall where Deke had been, devouring his rope, and they were headed our way. “Rena, did you have a boat? How did you get out here?”
No answer. She slumped against my side, even heavier now. The fire reached the spot where I’d lain just a moment ago, and any minute now, I was going to go up too.
I cursed under my breath, hitched Rena further onto my shoulder, and stumbled to the door, dragging her over the holes in the floor. Her weight nearly overbalanced me as I leaned back to kick the door open, but the force of the kick did enough to keep me upright. And not a moment too soon—the back of my sweater was starting to singe, its acrid scent worse somehow than the gasoline itself, and the backs of my legs went hot, as if I’d been lying in the sun too long.
I reached the porch just in time to see that the fire had outflanked us. The rickety walkway that had brought me here caught, the old wood burning gleefully, as if it’d finally found its purpose in life. “Oh God,” I whispered, knowing I was echoing Deke and not caring.
Someone on shore yelled—finally!—and I raised my head. But any help coming from shore would reach us well after we’d been nicely roasted, and though I could see a few shocked faces watching us from the ferry docks and the waterfront, none seemed to be moving toward rescue.
I looked down, still struggling for breath. Below us were the remnants of the pilings from when this had been a larger house, or from the porch that had long since disappeared into the harbor. Their jagged, mossy ends poked up through the flat water below, now golden with reflected light. Even at low tide, this was still a channel, still had to be deep enough to accommodate ferries, right? Right?
“Sorry about this, Rena,” I said, and pulled her with me as I jumped.
The water hit me so hard that at first I thought I’d missed and struck one of the pilings. Rena jerked out of my grasp, but I caught at her and got one arm around her.
That was a mistake; I was still headed down, and the water had gone from a shock to bone-freezing cold. The burns on the backs of my legs tried to lock up, and my shoes—now full of water—were dragging me further down. I got us up to the surface long enough for me to draw a couple of tortured breaths and drag Rena’s head above water. The froth at her mouth had been w
ashed away, but she still choked on it, wheezing for breath, and the muck of the locus still clung to her.
Behind and above us, the bridge house was wholly alight. I struck out toward the closest pier, choking on filthy seawater.
The good people of the waterfront had all clustered at the railing to watch the fire and see whether they’d need to worry about their own safety (depending on the wind, even an isolated building could send burning brands into any one of the luxury towers to either side). If one of them was worried about the draggled women clinging to the floating dock, he raised no outcry. “Hey!” I yelled, then broke down coughing. “Hey, we need some help—”
Sooner or later, someone would have to look this way, right? I tried to get one arm under Rena, but either the waters of the Atlantic were a lot worse than the Quabbin or the fire and everything else were worsening incipient hypothermia. My hands didn’t seem to want to work right, and though Rena was starting to come around, we didn’t really have time to wait. “Someone—” I tried again.
The boards of the dock shuddered, and I clutched at them, trying to hold on to Rena. “This way!” a hoarse voice called.
I stared and squinted. There seemed to be two people heading our way, but I couldn’t make sense of their shapes. Finally I settled on the scents instead: something like scraped vellum and sanded-down boards, and paint and rust and—makeup?
“Your timing’s wonderful, Hound,” the first person rasped as she knelt next to me. “Here I thought I’d have an hour to relax before getting back to work.”
I shook wet hair out of my eyes. “Tessie?”
“What is it with you and fire, anyway? Get her arms,” she added to the man beside her. For some reason, his arms and face seemed curiously blank—not featureless, but as if I should have seen more, as if they should have been marked up. The two of them pulled Rena up onto the boards, then, as the man helped Rena up, Tessie took my hands. “Come on,” she added, helping me out of the water.
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