Soul Hunt

by Margaret Ronald

  “Rena, it’s just Sarah—”

  “I know. This is useless anyway. I emptied it.” She hefted the gun and tried to put it away, hissing as her leg brushed mine. “When I saw what that thing could do—if it made me do that, I didn’t want it to have anything else it could turn against me.”

  “What did it do?”

  For a moment Rena met my eyes, then shook her head. “I don’t think I want to tell you that, Evie.”

  Sarah had only gotten as far as the edge of the clearing, and she waved a hand in front of her as if either beckoning or waving us away. “Katie!” she called, and a gull responded mournfully, out somewhere to sea. “Katie!”

  “She’s back with Alison,” I said, getting to my feet. “They’re both fine. We’ll get you back to them soon enough.”

  “No, she’s not. Evie—” She took another step toward us, close enough that I could finally see her face clearly.

  Sarah’s eyes were wide and blank, filmed over with a white that wasn’t the white of cataracts but of marble. I stifled a curse, and Rena made a gesture that wasn’t quite crossing herself. “You don’t understand,” Sarah whispered, those sightless eyes roving as if to discover my face. “Katie—she said we were in the wrong place, and I poured out the ink—”

  “Hang on,” I said, and took Sarah by both hands. The touch seemed to calm her, and she drew a shuddering breath. “Dina’s run off—I can probably find her, but you two need to get somewhere safe.” I guided Sarah to Rena’s side, then took off my coat and slung it over Rena’s shoulders. “And you, you’re going into shock. Keep this.”

  “Oh, fuck you, Evie.” Rena tried to sit up, then slumped against the wall. “There’s a ranger cabin nearby—there’s gotta be. I’ll get there and use their radio to call for backup.”

  I’d seen better plans in fortune cookies. “No. You stay down—keep the goddamned coat—and I’ll go after that thing. You want to get more people shot?”

  “That’s not the problem,” Sarah interrupted, her tone returning to its usual half lecture. “We had a stowaway. Well, you did, I knew she was there—”

  I shook my head. “Later. Wait till we can get you to safety—” I paused, her words finally registering. “You’re not saying—”

  “As a matter of fact, that is exactly what I am saying.” She looked around, as if her eyes might spontaneously repair themselves and reveal Katie standing safe and sound nearby. “She talked me into it—said Nate had a plan, and that she had to come with us.”

  I remembered how careful Sarah had been in the boat, how she’d asked me not to watch her saying goodbye. “Goddammit, Sarah, she’s a child! How could you bring her out here!”

  “Because she asked,” Sarah replied, her chin up and defiant. “And because I’m her teacher. And after I gave you so much crap for trying to get me to stay away, I wasn’t about to do the same to her. Besides, it turned out she was right—when you got out onto Georges, she told me to stay. She said we were in the wrong place, that what would happen would be somewhere else. So I got out the ink—”

  “Sarah, she’s nine goddamn years old! A nine-year-old shouldn’t know how to do this sort of thing!”

  “She knows it already, it’s just a matter of—” Sarah stopped, took a deep breath, and shook her head. “We’ll have this conversation another time.”

  “I sure hope so,” I muttered, and the peevish nature of the comment failed to disguise my real misgivings: that there might not be time, later, for us to have this conversation.

  Sarah bowed her head a moment, then went on. “I had her look in the ink, and she directed me over here. Sam tied up at the dock, we got out, and that’s when I saw you.”

  “Me? But—”

  “I know, Evie, I know, but she looked like you. This woman, I didn’t even think to look away, and when she took off her veil she looked like you, and—” She took a deep breath. “Evie, I can’t see.”

  “We guessed,” Rena said dryly. “And the girl?”

  “I don’t know. She bolted as soon as we left the boat; I was following her when I saw you. I think she might have escaped.”

  “This is an island,” Rena said. “Escape isn’t really an option. Not unless she’s back on the boat.”

  “Doubt it,” Sarah said, and fumbled for my hand. With her other hand she lifted something heavy from her purse: the black iron hook. “Katie said you might need this. I don’t know what for, there’s nothing magic about it.”

  I took the hook and, in return, pressed the unsplintered end of the baseball bat into her empty hand. “Here. Trade you.”

  “What is—” She stopped, running her fingers over it. “Dammit, Evie! Now’s not the time for baseball—” She stopped, fiddling with the splintered end. “Fine. Fine. What kind of wood is it?”

  I shrugged, then realized she couldn’t see. “Ought to be ash,” I said. “Dina smashed it up pretty good, though, so don’t put too much faith in it.” I shifted the hook to my right hand, where it settled comfortably against my palm. At the very least I’d make a good fake pirate. Better than Roger’s real one.

  “I got other things to put in it,” Sarah muttered. “Go. Go and stop that thing.”

  I got to my feet. “Sarah?”

  She looked up, her blind eyes questing after me.

  “How do I kill it?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t.” She huddled a little deeper into her coat. “But I really hope you can.”

  “And do it fast,” Rena added, staring over her shoulder at the empty barracks. For a fraction of a second I had an idea of what face Dina had donned for her. “Not everyone’s willing to leave themselves defenseless so that they don’t give it a weapon.”

  I nodded, not quite sure I understood, but the emptied gun spoke for itself. “I’ll do what I can.” I turned and oriented myself on Dina’s scent, out into the skeletal sumac.

  The path led out onto a bare spit of land, a skinny length between the rise I’d come out on and a forested lump at the far end of the island. I had a guess where I was now: Lovells, the island that had claimed many ships, where Meda had spent her first night in sight of Boston. Maybe Dina had been here even then; maybe Meda had begun to construct her plan then.

  Only she and Colin had partly failed. They’d stolen the sunstone, weakening Dina and keeping her from directly preying on the harbor, but in doing so they’d inextricably tied themselves to her. Too much humanity could taint even a monster.

  Shells and tiny stones rattled together underfoot in a treble chorus. I slid and scrambled over them, the wind and fog cutting right through my shirt. Into the trees and down, into a valley cut into the middle of the island. Not a natural one, either; the concrete and stone of Army work was present here, only here it was overgrown and reclaimed by the wild. Blackberry canes, the only trace of their fruit a few wizened pips, dragged at my legs like claws.

  A wide plaza opened up on my right: a crumbling concrete structure chiseled out of the hillside. The remnants of a plinth stood in the middle: a gun emplacement, I realized belatedly, set there to watch for incoming enemy aircraft. They’d packed up the gun itself but left the traces of their work.

  For a fraction of a second I thought I saw a shadow like a stag’s skull, heard an echo like water falling, and something like the memory of pain coiled in the back of my throat, cold and stony. I stumbled over my own feet, but shook my head. No, that was gone and done with. I’d have given more to get Nate back, regardless of where he was now.

  I hoped he was out of Dina’s grasp.

  I emerged onto a flat, swampy spot that must have been inundated twice a year when hurricane season hit. A dull, marshy scent rose up from it, thick with salt and sick fish, magnified by the fog that clustered over the island, wrapping it in a cocoon against the world. A person—or a dead entity—could hide here and never be found. Or make a home here, reaching out through the harbor to the city, feeding on the fear it stoked.

  Katie’s scent, sparking and
electric, clung to a tiny red shed that was the only visible structure on this part of the island—she’d stopped here, but not for long. Across the marsh stood another copse, smaller than the ones I’d come through, clumped and clustered and unwilling to let any light in. She was in there, somewhere.

  And so was Dina.

  I shifted my grip on the hook. I didn’t have many advantages here. Dina had been around since the days when my ancestors were running around hitting each other on the head with rocks (though, granted, we were still up for that these days too) and all I had was scrap iron and hope. Oh yes, and a fragmented, crippled soul, even if Sam claimed I had healed.

  Maybe nothing I did would be enough to save me, come midwinter. Maybe everything I did would unravel within a week, and the grand plan of protecting the city would fall back into the Great Unworkable Ideas list of the decade. Maybe all this was just so much screaming at the tide.

  Maybe all that was true. But at this point I was slowly realizing that I didn’t give a flying fuck. I still needed to try.

  Katie’s scent led into the trees. I followed it up a steep path, pushing dry branches out of my way with the hook. A deaf stump could have heard me coming up the hill, but I no longer cared. Besides, I knew my relative skill in staying quiet; any attempts to minimize the noise would do nothing but slow me down.

  I was just using that to justify my lack of stealth when I remembered that I’d passed a couple of artificial cliffs already, and who was to say those were the only emplacements on the island? How did I know I wasn’t about to fall into another?

  The realization came a second too late: the leaves under my foot fell away into nothingness. I stumbled back, crashing against a tree. Below me gaped another pocket of crumbling concrete, but this one was rounder, shallower, and more given over to nature. The slabs were broken where saplings had grown up through the cracks, and vines and roots laced down the walls in patterns more suited to temples in the jungle. Here, the fog held back, preferring to coast over this hollow rather than sink in.

  In the center of this little amphitheater knelt Katie, bent over a little pool of black rainwater thick with fallen leaves and detritus of the summer. She had to have heard me approach, but instead of looking up or even moving, she held on to the edge of the pool so hard her knuckles had turned white. Her eyes were wide and dark, and an empty paper bag—one with stickers on it, the kind Nate used to pack her lunch—lay at her feet.

  Remembering Sarah’s eyes, I suddenly wondered if she could move. “Katie!” I whispered, then scrambled down the side of the emplacement, skidding on steps that had long since dissolved into sand. “Katie, it’s Evie. Are you all right?”

  No answer. The surface rippled, stirred by something other than her shallow breaths. I reached for her shoulder, then thought better of it. There was a scent about her—not the gunpowder stink of magic, but something similar, like the residue inside a soaked bullet, like a cracked ballpoint pen, metal and sweet at the same time. “Oh, kid, what did you do?” I whispered, and looked over her shoulder into the water.

  Something flickered there, something gray and red and moving too fast for my eye to catch. From the way Katie’s shoulders tensed and relaxed and tensed again, I knew she had to be making sense of it, but it meant nothing to me.

  Whatever magic she had called on, it was greater than just this pool. I wouldn’t interrupt her; though I might not agree with what she was doing, I was not about to break that connection. Not unless I knew something was wrong. Instead, fired by the thought of Deke and of Sarah’s stone eyes and Rena’s wound, I straightened up and walked to the edge of this little amphitheater. Facing the thicket of woods—the woods that now reeked of stone and blood and everything else I’d come here to find—I drew a deep breath. “Dina!” I yelled. “Gray One! Deino, Enyo, Persis, I name you and call you out!”

  For a long moment only Katie’s choked breathing answered me, the slow drip of condensation off the withered trees, the roar of the ocean through the arched gate off to my right. The gate, I realized must once have served for jeeps, trucks, and other on-island vehicles. Now it was hung with greenery, an arch beneath which greenmen might live or apprentice trolls practice their skills. I thought I saw a flicker of gray, and moved to see better.

  “Hound,” Dina said behind me, mimicking my tone, though her voice seemed almost like Roger’s now, sliding from his rough tones to hers and back. “Scelan, Genevieve, Bitch. So brave and so wounded, so unaware of the holes in your own soul.”

  A shadow moved and leaped down into the amphitheater, veils fluttering like Sarah’s skirts. That on its own was enough to piss me off even more. She regarded me with a mocking smile, only just visible through the thin gray cloth of her veil.

  “Yeah? Mind telling me what good awareness did Roger before you killed him?”

  “I haven’t killed anyone.” She touched her chest, and for a moment the veils rippled, the shape becoming more angular, narrower at hip and breast, broader overall. “What was best of him—” her voice shifted, briefly becoming his, “—is here.”

  Christ. You found magicians in love with their work, but this was sick. “And Deke?”

  She shrugged. “Nothing there worth keeping.”

  “Picky eater.”

  Her smile dropped away, one moment visible through the veil, the next no more than a blank. “At least I’m not a gullible little bitch.”

  I started to bare my teeth, then paused. Entities like her—old as the Hunt, if not older—shouldn’t have bothered with sniping like this. She’d learned that from Roger, I realized; she’d been too much immersed in the world of humans. And if she could take pleasure in this sort of taunting, she could be cajoled or distracted or appeased. Possibly fooled. And, maybe, killed.

  I shifted my grip on the hook, curling my fingers over the end. “And you broke our bargain,” I said, hoping that at least might distract her.

  “I? I seem to remember you hurting me, or at the very least attacking me. I am justified in returning force, if you broke the bargain first.” Dina circled the pond, long fingers reaching out to stroke a tree that had grown up through the concrete. “Which is why it amazes me,” she went on, musingly, “that you’d call me out here—”

  I raised the hook and lunged.

  “—with a suitable hostage so close to hand.”

  Her hand, twisted into a claw, shot for Katie. But I’d guessed right, and I was there in time, grabbing her by the wrist with one hand and, as she brought her other hand down, catching that against the curve of the boathook. Dina hissed, though the hook barely scratched her flesh, and jerked away. Katie didn’t move, though she drew a sudden, whistling gasp. “Oh no,” I whispered. “No, you don’t get to do that. You broke the bargain first, Dina. You hurt Deke, and Rena, and Sarah. You hurt my city.”

  “Are they yours, then?” She cradled her scratched hand against her chest and briefly caressed my forearm with the other. “That’s a lot for you to claim. The whole city, you and yours?”

  “Yes.” I reversed the hook and punched her in the face. She reeled backward, but my knuckles stung as if I’d dragged them along asphalt. “Yes. The city and everyone in it. Me and mine.”

  Dina twisted away, successfully this time. “You arrogant bitch!” she spat. “You think that matters? Your bargain meant nothing. You mean nothing.”

  I stepped back, away from Katie, but my left hand brushed the fluff of the kid’s hair. Abruptly, the taste of ice water and ferns filled my mouth, and as if through water a man’s face swam in front of me, incandescent with fury: Nate, madder than I’d ever seen him but stripped of the bearshirt rage. Whatever this was, it was purely human, and no less frightening for that. My hand dropped away, and the vision—the fragment of Katie’s vision—did so as well, leaving only the lingering taste of ice.

  I shook my head and stepped away from Katie, leaving her to her work, to whatever needed to be done. I trusted her, and Nate, too. You can’t save me from this, I’d told
him, and there were some things I couldn’t save him from. Nor could I try, without diminishing him.

  “No,” I said, as much to my own fears as to her. “You don’t get it. I don’t own them, I don’t get to tell everyone what to do. Hell, I don’t want them to do what I tell them. That’s not what it means to be one of mine.”

  Dina stood with one hand raised again, her scent crackling with something like the air before a storm. I feinted for her head, and when she ducked away, punched her in the stomach. “What it means,” I whispered as she doubled over, “is that I am theirs, when I can be, when it counts. That’s all. Nothing more.”

  She caught at my shoulder as if I’d knocked the wind from her, but the blow had done no real damage—the way my fist stung told me that, at least. There was something more than flesh beneath those veils. “Not just nothing more,” she murmured back, raising her face to mine as if to draw me into a kiss, “but nothing at all.”

  Her other hand reached up. I ducked away, but she hadn’t been reaching for me. Instead she pulled the veils back, revealing her face.

  A blank expanse of gray stone, slick and gleaming, met my gaze. The sunstone from the bottom of the Quabbin, the eye that I’d gone to retrieve, turned into a face.

  This was what had turned Sarah’s eyes to stone, what had shown Rena something so horrible she’d shot herself in the leg. This was the power that had altered Deke to the point of unrecognizability, that had stolen Roger till he was stone. This was why they were the Gray Ones; the blank dread of not knowing, the fog of real and imagined fears. My limbs went dull and unmoving, struck by the frozen fear of not knowing which way to move. This was the power Dina had siphoned off the paranoia of Boston, the confusion and fear that led to no good result.

  Deke had said it himself—there’s fear that keeps you safe, and fear that warns you, and then there’s fear of another sort. The kind that makes you turn on your friends, that irises the world down to one frightened person. I’d had the world collapse in like that before, and my heart chilled at the thought of it happening again.