Soul Hunt

by Margaret Ronald

  The smooth stone turned slightly, light no longer passing through it but reflecting off. There weren’t even any features—the smiles I thought I’d seen must have been something she projected, or else I’d just conjured up the expression that went with her tone …

  I’d followed that thought for a full second before I realized that there was no other effect on me. No blindness, no paralysis—the moment of terror notwithstanding—nothing but the remembered feel of the slick sunstone in my hands as I raised it above the Quabbin, yelling triumph. Nothing but the taste of brassy sunlight, the smell of the hearth where Colin and Meda had lived their lives. I chuckled, and Dina froze, her hand on my shoulder going rigid as a bundle of sticks. “Sorry,” I said, and kicked her feet out from under her.

  She didn’t fall—she and Roger were still magicians, and still stronger than I would ever be—but her posture as she recovered was unsteady and without the liquid grace she’d shown before. “You—” she began, speaking without a mouth.

  “I’ve held the stone. I’ve carried your damn Eye. Uh-uh.” I shifted the hook and lunged again. “You’ll have to do better than that, Gray One.”

  The veils fell across her face again, and for a moment I caught a glimpse of features that didn’t exist, contorted in a snarl. “Oh, I will.”

  I didn’t wait for her magic to become manifest. Instead I put my shoulders down and charged, knocking her off the edge of the emplacement. We fell together, onto the hard ground a few feet down.

  There is a way for an untrained person to fight a talented magician and have a decent chance of winning: get in close and keep hitting, so that you keep them off balance. I’d used it before, those times when I tangled with the Fiana, and the fact that I was still alive was a point in favor of the theory. However, it presupposed two things: one, that you’d be fighting a normal magician, one who needed time to invoke her loci, to cast her circles. Dina didn’t. I was keeping her off balance, unable to summon the power to blast me out of existence, but she didn’t need to step back and regroup. Even as I knocked her down, wrestled her to the ground, smeared mud across her stone face, she could still work her magic—freezing my skin, charring the wall behind us, sending electricity through me so that my muscles shivered and spasmed.

  The second problem was that fighting assumed I was actually doing some damage. But every blow that landed had as much effect as if I’d swung against a brick wall, and the blood running from my knuckles proved that it wasn’t just my imagination. The hook, when it landed, shredded Dina’s diaphanous veils like a dragon skinning a princess, but it threw up sparks from the skin that looked so human beneath. If it was hurting her—and I suspected it might be, just a lot less than I’d hoped—it wasn’t doing enough damage to stop her.

  I swung again, only to catch a blast of something that stank of onions and dead crows. My hair sizzled and crisped, and when I focused on Dina again, the world was red and blurry. A scratch had opened up on my forehead somewhere—okay, deeper than a scratch, judging by the slick feeling running down my cheek— and the rest of my face felt as if I’d just stuck it in a blast furnace. Sunburn in November, I thought fuzzily. Gonna have fun explaining this one.

  “I always knew I’d have to put you down once this was over, Hound.” She darted forward, her hands still glowing white. I ducked out of the way and brought my laced fists down on the back of her neck. She grunted and stumbled, but didn’t fall. “I just thought—”

  I drove my foot against the inside of her knee, and she fell against the other side of the arch, light splashing up around her like a gout of flaming oil. It didn’t stop her, though; a new scent of corroded copper and vomit now rose up around her, and when she turned the smile was clear under her veil.

  “—it’d be kinder to do it quickly. But you’ve convinced me otherwise.” She clapped her hands, and the greenery around me withered. “I think I’ll enjoy this.”

  Fuck you, I tried to say, but my throat was too dry. I drew a ragged breath and attacked again—just as Katie cried out. Dina turned slightly, and I jammed the hook into her neck as Katie plunged her hand into the water. She drew something out, something clear and bright, but just then I had other things to worry about.

  Dina choked, gurgled, and then gave me a look over her shoulder that, veil or no, was clearly meant to say You don’t seriously mean this, do you? She knocked my hand away as if it were no more than a spider, then tugged the hook out of her neck—the sound it made was that of a chisel against stone—and dropped it. “Fool,” she whispered.

  “Evie!” Katie’s cry caught me like the call of a horn, and I turned to see her run to the edge of the emplacement. “He’s got it!” she yelled, and flung something at me.

  I put my hands up to catch what she’d thrown—a water bottle, open at one end, spilling as it tumbled—and missed entirely. The water splashed over me, icy and clear and—

  —and I was elsewhere, the world distorted by a lens of water. I stood on the surface of a lake far from here—no, not a lake. A quarry. The place where I’d lost my soul.

  I was not alone. I stood within a pillar of water, and above me hung the bleached-white skull of a stag, horns branching like tributaries. The confused shape of a guardian that was too powerful and too young to understand what it was and what it could not do.

  Through the water, through the distortion and the haze and the darkness above, a figure on the shore rose up, a pale wisp of a man, the color of bone in the starlight. Nate, as I’d last seen him before I left him on Venetia’s porch. No—not just as I’d seen him; he’d left shirt and shoes somewhere else, and though I couldn’t see him clearly I could know the gooseflesh that must be rising on him, know it as well as if it were on my own skin.

  “Give it back!” he yelled, unknowingly echoing what I’d yelled months ago, when the quarry spirit held his body. “You stole the Hound’s soul. Give it back to her!”

  The waters around me swirled. It’s mine, it said. She gave it to me.

  “Liar!” Nate strode out into the water, ignoring the way it fizzled at his touch, the way the waves ran away from him as if scared. “She gave you nothing!”

  The quarry spirit paused, and for a moment I could even feel its wakening apprehension, the worry that maybe it had done something wrong. “It’s mine,” it repeated, defensive and guilty as a child with a stolen toy.

  “Then I’ll take it back.” Nate grinned, and I saw in that grin not just the bearshirt his father had made him but the wicked, dogged, amazing man I had known for a long, long time. “Because if I understand all this right, you stole her soul in a way that didn’t just bind you to her. It bound you to me. Me, and my family line.”

  And with that he charged, shifting as he ran. By all rights he should have gone straight through the water, should have splashed into the depths on the far side, but instead the quarry spirit squealed as his jaws seized just below the stag’s skull.

  What happened next I could not quite make out, but it involved a lot of snarling, of froth and foam, blood of two kinds swirling like party streamers. At one point I saw Nate again, fully human, grimacing as he tore something from his side. “Here,” he said through clenched teeth, seemingly oblivious to the blood, “take this instead, and fucking choke on it!”

  With that he shoved a strip of coarse, bloody hide into the jaws of the skull. The quarry spirit gagged, water churning through it in frantic, panicky currents. A silvery glow, like an afterthought of the moon, rose through it, up to the surface—

  And abruptly I was back where I’d been, drenched in quarry water, the worn and dented bottle at my feet. Apologies, the quarry spirit whispered in my ear, apologies, I did not know, I could not know, make him stop!

  Well, there was only so much I could do from here, and it’s not as if I was inclined to make Nate stop. But with the plea came a sudden link, like a cable thrown around me, a conduit to the mainland and the place where a man I loved fought for my soul. Water to water, the link from one to ano
ther.

  I had just enough time to remember Chatterji’s description of severance and return before a flame blossomed in my chest, a mantle of power settling over me like a cloak of gold. So this is why they do it, I thought through the haze of sudden power; this is what all the adepts are trying for. For a moment I felt a rush of sympathy; for another I was tempted to follow that path, to find ways to sever and steal and claim a soul for my own, if only to keep experiencing this.

  This was why Meda had led me to the stone. Not to bring it back to Dina, not to hide it again, but because she knew only someone who’d lost much of her soul would have the chance to regain it, and thus have the strength to do what needed to be done. Even now Dina approached Katie, still seeing her as a so-convenient hostage, raising one hand to her veil; even now I began to understand the pattern Meda had wrought in stone and water and hope.

  But more, I could see—scent, even, because here was the point where senses blurred and only magic mattered—the pattern linking me to the Wild Hunt, the chain that bound me as securely as any golden chain of the Fiana, the sentence of midwinter. With this sudden power, I could sever that, cut my ties to the hundred Hunters and their claim on me, walk free of it and live.

  Live past midwinter.

  I might even be able to save Katie after that. There was so much strength here, so much that had been leached from me day after gray day. I could save myself, save Katie, heal Sarah and Rena, and let Dina run off licking her wounds, never to return to Boston.

  I could do all that. No magician could ask for more of a task, and any magician worth her salt would have taken that option. Never mind Meda’s pattern, reduced by time to only a plea, a request that I could choose to ignore without consequence. A magician would use this power to claim as much as possible—any adept knew that this was the basis of much of magic, using it to get out of whatever obligations you’d promised.

  I wasn’t a magician. I closed my eyes, tasting the water that ran down my face, the blood mingled with it, the tang of frost and fog and salt in the air. It would have been nice to at least see another Sox game, I thought, and let go of my sense of the Hunt’s hold on me, turning instead to the matter at hand.

  I stepped in front of Katie—so easy, so quick, with this to draw on!—and knocked Dina aside, backhanding her into the wall of the arch. “Stay here, Katie,” I said, and marveled that my voice didn’t crack the concrete. She nodded, careful not to look at either of us, and scrambled back to the edge of the pool.

  My ears roared with the rush of blood and power; the scent of the island suddenly seemed writ in luminous script before me. With it came a continuous, querulous murmur that was like a welcome pebble in my shoe; something that was not scent nor sound but both.

  I smiled, letting my talent recognize that murmur even as conscious thought let it go, then bent and picked up the hook. It seemed soft under my fingers, malleable even, and for a second I was tempted to shape it into something else—I didn’t know the magic for such a changing, but brute force could do it. Instead I glanced up at Dina as she backed away, through the arch to the shore.

  She seemed to recognize that something had happened—perhaps the backhand had done it. I followed her, but she’d already made it to the edge of the waves, where the damp sand afforded her just enough contact with seawater. She swept the veils back from her face once more, and though the stone did not strike me the same way, it still slowed my steps. “Not what I’d have preferred,” she spat. “But I’m whole now, and that’s all that matters—even if I leave your rotten city behind, there are cities and coasts and so many haunts—”

  She paused, and I did too, one foot on the broken boulders that made up most of the beach here. Off to my left, closer than it had been, the murmur that I’d heard earlier rose, now clear enough that it was sound in truth, separating out into individual voices.

  “… left! I said left, goddammit, my left, you dumb dyke—” Rena’s voice, ragged but clear.

  “You keep calling me that, and I’m going to think you don’t like me very much.” Sarah, out of breath and unfazed.

  The pair of them hobbled across the beach toward us, Rena’s arm slung over Sarah’s shoulders, Sarah walking for two and Rena seeing for two. Rena raised her head, her expression too far away to make out but clearly seeing us. “I see them,” she called. “I—there’s something strange about Evie—”

  Dina spat again and turned her back on me, raising her hands to the sea. The waves warped and twisted into a funnel that I could tell would carry her wherever she wished, wherever she could plan revenge or simply feast on the fear that we so obligingly provided.

  “No!” Sarah raised her hand, and the remnants of the baseball bat caught and shredded the mist like a fan. She’d drawn symbols on it, runes that straggled and strayed but were written in sticky red, powerful for all that. It was, after all, ashwood, and Sarah knew her twice-nine runes and names. No one knew the small magics better than she did. “Forseti and Nerthus and Donbettyr bind you, the net of Kratalis Trienos keep you and reject you.”

  Ash flared into flame, and Sarah gasped but held on. It wouldn’t last long—it was a binding meant for other, homelier things, but it had Dina pinned for now. “Thief!” she screamed. “You, you rotten thief—” I jumped onto the last rock behind her and caught her by the veils. “Not a thief,” I whispered, and brought the hook around to her throat.

  For a fraction of a second, it was a cruel, curved knife, a harpe, a knife meant for one purpose only. It should not have cut as deeply as it did, but I had the strength of my severed soul, and Meda’s help, and Sarah’s, and this had been done before, long before.

  Dina’s body slumped to the sand, and the saltwater shied away from the blood, even as it sank down and was gone. The bloody mess of stone and hair and veils sagged in my hand, and I flung it into the ocean. It hit the water far out—farther out than I should have been able to see, given the mist, and on a flatter ocean than the Atlantic had any right to be—and sank. With the last of the power that the quarry had given back, I sank the hook into the sand and consigned it to the island.

  The sand closed over my hands, and all that was left was seawater, cold and stinging where I’d skinned my knuckles. I let out a long breath, watching as the light from above brightened, becoming once again only the gray light of a cloudy day. The cool light of winter approaching, of days drawing in.

  I sat back on my heels and scrubbed my hands over my face, ignoring the salt, ignoring the sting, then stood and turned to Rena and Sarah.

  The crumbling bat fell from Sarah’s hands. Rena slid off her shoulders to the closest rock, her wounded leg out in front of her. Neither spoke as I approached; Sarah rubbed at her pale eyes, and Rena looked from me to the red sand that was all that remained of Dina. Finally, her lips parted. “This is one of those things,” she said as I reached her side, “that I’m just going to have to accept, isn’t it?”

  I nodded and offered her my hand. “I’m afraid so.”

  She looked at me for a long moment. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.” But she didn’t take my hand.

  Sarah had turned to face the ocean, flexing her burnt and blistered hand. “Don’t do that,” I said, and turned her toward the west, to the city. “Sarah, the mist is clearing. Can you see it?”

  “Of course I can’t, I—” She stopped. At the corner of her eyes, there was a gleam that was flesh, not stone, and with every blink the sheen of life returned. “Evie,” she said slowly, still staring out at the water.

  The mist drifted away as if it had never been, and the skyline of Boston rose up on the horizon, distant and real. “Katie!” I called over my shoulder. “It’s okay. You can come out now.”

  “You found her,” Sarah said.

  “She led me to Dina.” I glanced over my shoulder to see Katie emerge from the arch, squinting to see us better. “She saved my life. She and Nate.”

  I sank down onto the rock next to Rena as Katie came up and took Sarah’s han
d. “We’ll get both of you to a hospital,” I said softly.

  “It feels better already,” Rena said.

  “Really?”

  “No.” She tapped the belt ruefully, then froze as the first few notes of music sounded behind us. Flute music, recorder music, the same melancholy air that I’d heard once below Georges.

  “Don’t,” I said as she started to rise. “She’s gone … it’s an echo, of sorts.”

  “Echo,” she said. “I … all right.” She put her hand on my shoulder and used that to hoist herself up.

  “Let’s get you home,” I said.

  Nineteen

  By the time we got back to the city, took Rena to a hospital, and had the rest of our wounds seen to, the last of the fog had burned off and night had fallen. I took Sarah home (where Alison had been waiting up, so nervous she’d finished three days’ worth of work), then walked with Katie back into Allston. After a couple of blocks, I bent to carry her piggyback, even though it grated the pain in my ribs. But she’d been up all night, and even after all this I had a little more strength left in me.

  “I’m sorry,” she said as I shifted her weight to compensate. “I should have told you I was coming with you.”

  “’s all right,” I said. “I wouldn’t have let you.” I tipped my head back so that I could see her clearly. “And where would I be then, huh?”

  Katie smiled and hugged me. I stifled a grunt; I wouldn’t be able to carry her like this much longer. For now I could, though.

  I can’t say I didn’t know what I’d find. But I still paused when I reached the end of Nate’s street. He was sitting on the porch, his elbows resting on his knees, tired but apparently unhurt. He no longer had the burnt-hair, shifter edge to his scent, but the center of it, the sun-warmed-wood scent, was the same, and not even the faint traces of ferns and ice and everything else his battle with the quarry had left could change that. And if the polish of his scent now had something akin to the unridged flesh of a scar, if there was a stiffness in the way he got to his feet, it still suited him, and still left him Nate.