Soul Hunt

by Margaret Ronald

  Instead of taking us up the steps to the harbor, she turned and staggered up a plank that had been set between the boardwalk and a rusting green boat. “She’s here!” she called, and another person emerged from the boat, hurrying up to us.

  “Hang on,” the man with her added to me, helping Rena over the side and toward the hatch. “It’s going to be all right.”

  “Says you,” said another voice—a woman’s, an older woman’s. For a dizzying moment I thought I’d see either Meda or Venetia when I turned. Instead the dancing light from the burning bridge house fell on a lined, tired face.

  “Do you have any idea,” Maryam said, “how many people I’ve put at risk so that I can see you?”

  Fifteen

  Maryam.” I started to step back, thought better of it as my balance shifted, and followed her down the stairs, leaning on her as much as on the railing. “Maryam, what are you doing here?”

  She snorted. “I’m a geomancer, Genevieve, not an erdgeist. There’s usually plenty of dirt between me and bedrock; you think I can’t take a little water?”

  Trust an adept to assume I’m asking an academic question. What was she doing on a boat in the first place? With a few exceptions, magicians didn’t like being over water. With a few notable exceptions. “Tessie,” I said, trying to think through the frost riming the inside of my skull. “You and Tessie—”

  “We got in touch when Sam needed a place to stay.”

  “Sam?”

  “Get inside; you’re freezing.”

  Well, she was right about that. I stumbled down the steps into the boat, blinking in the warm gold light as the space belowdecks opened up into a tiny, messy room with red-upholstered furniture bolted into the floor and walls covered with pictures of Tessie in her better days, before she’d become a magician. I lurched a little and caught myself against the door frame, unsure if the floor was rocking with the waves or just trying to trip me. “Rena—”

  “She’s going to be fine.” The man who’d carried her in stood at the farther door, a blanket in his arms. I managed to make it through the maze of furniture to see him wrap the blanket over Rena’s shoulders. Her lips were blue, and her teeth chattered together like nuts in a hull, but her eyes were open and responsive. “Just fine,” he repeated, taking a bowl of something from the closest table and cupping it in his hands.

  “No. We need to get her to a hospital.” I hadn’t forgotten that sudden blood on her chest, even if I didn’t know how deep the wound was. “Both of us need a hospital, and—”

  “No point,” he said, and held out the bowl to Rena. She managed to shake her head, and behind me Maryam thumped down the steps and closed the hatch behind her.

  No point? I was not going to leave Rena to the mercy of some creepy guy off the street, no matter what Maryam and Tessie said. “Hell with you,” I said, and grabbed him by the shoulder.

  He turned, and I stared. I knew this face—but the last time I’d seen it, it had been marked by lines of ink, runes and Ogham script and the invocations of a thousand bindings, meant to keep a single entity in place. “Finn …” I whispered, then shook my head. “No. What was your name? He told me …”

  “My name’s Sam MacAllister,” he said. And yes, it was a voice very similar to that of the man I’d called cousin. The mob calling itself the Fiana had consolidated its power in a number of heinous ways, one of which was to catch the spirits of their old land and imprison them within people, turning both vessel and spirit into nothing more than an ambulatory locus. They’d caught Finn Mac Cool, cousin and master to Sceolang the hound, but Finn had come looking for help … and afterward, said that he would leave his vessel, return the man’s life to him.

  From the looks of this man, he’d had a rough time since then. “You said—Finn said you had a daughter, that you were going to find her.”

  “I did.” He looked down, away from me, then put on a brave smile. “That’s past now. And I can tell you,” he continued, “that this woman will be all right. Tess, all good? Mar-bird?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, though it was with the same tone that someone might use when they really do have someplace to go but know there’s no chance they’ll be able to get there in time. “Just give me a moment.” She settled in at the table, where a shallow tray full of sand took up most of the space. It looked more than a little like a litter box, but it smelled only like the sand and gravel that filled it—a replica in miniature of her usual bed. Absently, she traced a few patterns in the sand.

  My sodden clothes abruptly warmed up; not much more than skin heat, but after the chill of the harbor that was a hell of an improvement. Enough that I didn’t mind the faint spark of magic rising from Maryam’s box. I took a deep breath, and the air seemed to clutch at my chest a little less. “So that’s how you kept warm no matter the weather, Maryam,” I mumbled. “Always wondered how you managed.”

  Rena stirred, steam likewise rising from her clothes. She glanced at me, blinking, then at Sam. “Evie, is this—are we safe?”

  I nodded and tried to sit next to her, but my balance completely deserted me and I resorted to leaning up against the door frame instead. “Yes. This man, he worked for the Fiana once, but they turned him into a … a vessel—”

  “More bruja shit,” Rena muttered, but she clasped the blanket and began to breathe more easily. “Where did the pyro get to? He—my chest—”

  “He got out,” I said. “Probably heading to Georges now.” Rena put her head down and muttered something that I didn’t have to hear to understand. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’d thought he was harmless.”

  “He looks into the future,” Tessie said, sinking into the closest chair. “That’s never harmless. Trust me on this.”

  “Finn is the one who was worried about you,” Sam said. “After he—after we released each other, we struck a bargain to still speak, now and then. As much as that’s possible,” he added with a faint smile. “He may be dreaming beneath the Hill of Allen, but he does stay aware of what his family’s doing, and you have been injured.”

  “What, you noticed?” I snapped, but settled into the chair anyway. As long as I didn’t have to get up for a bit, I’d be fine.

  Sam chuckled. “No, this was a while ago—he’d only noticed at the turn of the year from light half to dark half.” He took the bowl from the table again, whispered over it, and held it out to Rena. “Drink,” he said. Rena glanced at me, and I nodded; Finn had healed me and Nate by a similar method once, and Sam might have some residual skill. Shaking her head, she put the bowl to her lips. “You were wounded,” he went on, “and while you’ve been healed since—a soul can be regrown, like the principle of severance and return—it was a wound that nearly killed you. And likely it’s what attracted predators.”

  “Predators?” I shivered, and Maryam made some adjustment to her work. “How’d you knew where to find me?”

  “That was me,” Maryam said, and for a moment the warmth in my still-drying clothes fluctuated, iron hot and back to normal in the space of a second. Rena hissed, shaking her arms as if trying to get them free of her sleeves. “The stone you carried,” Maryam said. “The gray one. It’s gone, then?”

  “Yes, but—” I shook my head. “Hang on. How did you know? I didn’t know it even existed till a few days back.”

  She shrugged. “A number of things. Mainly, though, it’s in my nature to know stone, even when it’s free of the earth. I knew when it entered the city.”

  “Well, it’s gone now.” Along with any leverage I had against Dina, any chance of getting her to hold up her end of the bargain. “And you told Fi—Sam?”

  She nodded, and for just a fragment of a second I caught a look very like one I’d seen on her niece’s face, the terrible guilt of something left undone, uncared for. But her scent was unchanged. “I owed him. And we—the three of us got in touch a little while ago.”

  “That’s a very tame way to put it,” Tess remarked, and winked at me. “Maryam here ha
d some old skeletons, and Sam knew where they were, and me, well, I just had some convenient connections. Even if I’m in bad shape these days.”

  The corners of Sam’s ears turned pink, and the steam rising off our clothes made him cough. Maryam, though, twisted her hands in her lap. “I—owe you, Genevieve, and I owed them no less. I told you I had some knowledge of stones that pass through the city.”

  “Yes, but—” I stopped. This wasn’t the first time I’d carried a stone linked to power. The Fiana, before they’d moved on to the vessels like Sam, had imprisoned the Morrigan using old magic, binding her with what they called chain stones. I’d always thought of them as pure magic—having a splinter of one in my forearm for a while probably colored my views on them a bit—but they were, ultimately, stones as well. “The chain stones,” I said. “The bindings on the Morrigan.”

  Maryam nodded, haggard with guilt. “I knew they were there. And I did nothing. They paid me to do nothing.” She nodded to Sam, who bowed his head (hard to remember that he too had worked for the Fiana before becoming their victim). “But now …” She looked away, then back at Sam, and I turned away so as not to see the look that passed between them. Tessie shook her head, smiling faintly.

  “You worked for the Fiana,” I said, and though I tried to keep the edge out of it, I failed.

  For just a fraction of a second I caught the sense of stone from her—not the chain stones or the sunstone, but plain granite. Maryam, Venetia, Meda … there was something there, the three gray women arrayed against something else, their human grimness keeping something at bay … “I did not work against them, rather. But a sin of omission is still heavy, and I would pay back that debt before I pass on. So when I sensed this new stone in the city, I went to those I knew could help.”

  “That’s also overstating matters. Maybe I could have helped once,” Tessie added, “but these days all I can do is be on hand when people tell me to. But,” she added, raising one finger, “I figured it out. The fire. It wasn’t just an accident.”

  “No,” Rena said, still crouched over the bowl. “No, it wasn’t. And it wasn’t just arson either, even if they used the same accelerant as your pyro friend did.” She sat up, slowly, and put one hand to her chest as if expecting to find glass shards still in it. “It was destruction of evidence.”

  I turned to look at her. Tessie cocked her head to the side. “Well, I was going to say it was a burnt offering, but yours sounds so much nicer.”

  That got a chuckle from Rena, even if she still sounded weak. “Neither of those makes any sense,” I said. “Why would Deke burn his friend’s boat? Besides, Roger said he was with Deke the whole time—”

  “It wasn’t his,” Rena said. She handed the bowl back to Sam, then shook out her shoulders and got to her feet. “That yacht was last registered to an Australian family. They went missing about eight months back.”

  The smile faded from Tessie’s lips, and Sam looked away. “Missing?” I said. “You mean someone stole their boat and kidnapped them—”

  “I mean missing at sea, Evie. Most likely they were boarded, the family killed, and the yacht taken.”

  “You’re not serious,” I said. “Pirates?”

  “Of a sort. Call them marine thieves if you like, if it’ll shed the image of someone with a pegleg going ‘arr.’ Foster and I got stuck with the liaison when harbor patrol noticed the yacht, only it went up in flames before we could find out more.” She shrugged and settled in at the table next to Maryam, eyeing the tray of sand warily. “About the sort of thing we get these days.”

  Jesus. I thought back to Roger carrying Deke out—he may have been saving his friend, but only after placing him in danger in the first place. No wonder he’d been so casual about the loss of his boat.

  And I’d let him work magic on me. My skin crawled at the thought of his genial grin. He’d enacted the severance on me, which had been a good deed on its own but, more important, had given him some idea what the quarry spirit had taken. And when Dina had made her first offer, she’d gone straight to what the quarry had taken …

  “That rotten son of a—” I got to my feet and only then realized I was shaking. Not with terror, or cold, or the backlash of adrenaline, although I could feel all of those things hovering at the top of my spine, ready to settle in as soon as I let them. “I’m going to go kick the living shit out of him.” As plans went, it lacked something, but I figured I’d wing it on the rest.

  Sam gave me a wary look. “Are you certain?”

  “As much as I can be. And—” I paused. Dina was another matter. Roger had used her, as much as he’d used me, but that didn’t mean she’d be on my side. Or even that she wasn’t part of the whole plan from the beginning … but she’d been the one to make the bargain with me, not him. That might be enough to make her keep to it. “And I need to get what I was promised.”

  “Then I’ll help you.” He held up both hands. “I owe you, as much as Finn owes you.”

  “Unless you can take me out to Georges—” I stopped. “Can you?”

  He thought about it a moment, gazing at Tessie. Tessie spread her hands. “I have no objections, and it’d pay off my debt to you nicely, Hound. But I’d have to stay below. I can provide limited protection from there, and now that I’ve spent a night on land, I’d be a liability if I were on deck in sight of the open sea. But Sam can navigate.” Sam made an unhappy noise, and she grinned. “I trust you, babe.”

  Sam exhaled, looking for a moment very like my cousin in one of his dubious moments, then cracked his knuckles. “Ten minutes. And we put Mar-bird ashore.”

  That sounded about right, at least for Rena and me to finish warming up. I turned and glanced at her. “If you want to come—”

  “I’ve just lost my case,” she said, gazing at the sand under Maryam’s fingers. “There’s no way … I hadn’t even told Foster that I’d followed this guy, you understand? He’s happy handling it as a series of vandalism incidents, and he thought … he thought I needed a break when I told him about your undercurrent.” She shivered, but it didn’t have anything to do with the cold, and put one hand to her chest, where Deke had smashed his glass ball. “He’s right. There’s no way I can make this look good. But I want to see it through anyway.”

  “I can’t guarantee anything,” I said.

  “Fuck guarantees. The only guarantee I can come up with is that if I end up dead out there, at least it’ll get someone’s attention.” She folded up the blanket, her clothes still steaming, then settled down across from Maryam and began checking her gun.

  I waited while my clothes exhaled their last wisp of steam and Tessie and Sam retreated to the inner workings of the boat. After a moment Rena muttered something and held up a spare clip. “Still good. I can probably account for the water damage to the other.”

  “That’s luck.” Especially since mine was somewhere with Deke.

  “Not really.” Rena glanced at me, and for a moment I thought she might smile.

  Maryam cried out, sudden and shocked, as if one of us had stabbed her. The tray of sand teetered, then spilled out across the floor. Sam ran in from the back room, hands full of charts, and dropped them all as he saw her. “That’s the stone,” she panted. “That’s what I feared. Genevieve—” She groaned, the sound rising to a second scream.

  And just then someone hammered at the hatch.

  Maryam continued to scream. “Sam, shut her up!” I yelled and ran to the stairs. Rena followed me, slamming the clip back into her gun. We paused for a moment on either side of the steps. “You sure you’ll need that?”

  “After tonight?” Rena shook her head. “I’m not sure of anything.”

  I nodded, then leaned forward and slid the bolt back. The door slammed back, and for a moment all I could see was brilliant pink, bizarrely out of place in the middle of all this. But the scent—sandalwood incense and funky shampoo—was clearer than any sight. “Sarah?”

  She practically fell down the steps, stumbling o
ver the hem of her twinkling skirt as she tried to get inside. “Evie? You okay? I called your phone, but got no signal, and I thought Nate—”

  I held up my waterlogged phone. “Had a bit of a problem,” I said over Maryam’s wails. “Did you call?”

  “Not when I saw the place was on fire! Katie led me to you, but after what Nate said I figured he’d be here too.” She craned around me, and her eyes widened as she saw first Maryam and then Rena. “What’s going on here?”

  “Negotiations. Hang on.” I started up the ladder, squinting a little. The fog had gotten heavier—or no, something else was wrong. And it wasn’t just the glow of the dying fire of the bridge house or the glitter of blue and white lights as the fire trucks finally started hosing down what was left of it. “Sorry, Sarah. I kind of had to jump in, and my phone’s now shot, and, well, things went kind of wrong—”

  “Screw that. You’re okay?”

  “Parbroiled and frozen, but that seems to be passing now.” I managed a smile, first at her, then at Alison and Katie, who stood just at the edge of the pier. Katie clutched a huge bag to her chest—my messenger bag, far too large for her. “What the hell was that about Nate?”

  “Said he was going to rescue you.” Alison shrugged, an eloquent gesture on her. “That was before he dropped small cute off with us,” she added, and put her hand on Katie’s shoulder. Katie leaned against her, clutching the bag as if it were a lifejacket.

  “Evie! Need you down here!” Rena poked her head out of the hatch. “The crazy rocks lady is doing something weird again.”

  Shit. I crouched next to the hatch, trying to see down into the room. Sam still held Maryam, putting some of the larger stones in her hand, closing her fingers over them. “Tell me what’s wrong,” he said, his tone calm and soothing. “Tess is here, and I’m here, and we’re not going anywhere. Tell us. Please.”