Soul Hunt (35 page)

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 hand. “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.

B
y 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.

Katie let go and slid to the ground. Nate crossed the street and, without bothering to speak, caught me in a tight embrace.

Too tight. I yelped and moved his hand. “Sorry—ribs. They taped them up at the hospital, but they’re still bad.”

I shifted my arms around him, trying to find a better way to hold him back, and he hissed as I grazed his waist. “Still raw,” he said through his teeth. “Sorry.”

“But you’re okay?” I leaned back a little to look at him, ignoring the twinge of pain.

“Yeah. You?”

“Yeah.”

Carefully, trying to avoid the many little hurts, we shifted into a new configuration, one that ended up with my cheek resting on his collarbone and his hands at the small of my back. “I was wrong,” I said into his ear. “You could save me after all.”

“Only from this,” he said, his breath stirring the hair on the nape of my neck. “And only for a little while. But it worked.”

And for now, that was enough.

After a moment, we pulled back enough to remember the rest of the world. Katie stood mutely to the side, smiling what I’d started to think of as a seer’s smile, one that responded to something the rest of us weren’t aware of. “You did well,” Nate said, bending down to scruff his sister’s hair. She batted his hand away, her ears turning pink with happy embarrassment. “You’re all right?” he added, tilting her chin up.

“Fine,” she said, somehow managing to imply that he was silly for even asking. Kid was gonna be a terror when she hit her teens.

“Good. Because tomorrow’s a school day, and you’ve got to get to bed.” He ignored her groan and patted her on the back, steering her toward the porch. “As for me,” he added as we crossed the street, following Katie’s theatrically dejected slump, “I can’t seem to remember anything I’ve got tomorrow that I can’t get out of.”

I thought a moment about cracked ribs and healing wounds, then shrugged. You could work around anything, with enough forethought. “I’ll call in sick.”

It took at least three weeks before the emergency call Sarah had put out was finally revoked, due mainly to the paranoid nature of the undercurrent. Not that this had any ill effects for most of the population, or even the undercurrent; the ones who suffered the most were the adepts who refused to come out of their hiding places until they’d gotten repeated assurances of the world’s return to normality. The Elect in particular had holed up in the foundations of the Masonic Hall and had to be extracted by Chatterji and Wheelwright working together. (This ultimately resulted in one of the weirder relationships I’d ever encountered, and that was including whatever Tessie and Sam and Maryam had worked out.) If anything, it meant Sarah had a few weeks of rest in which the most annoying parts of the neighborhood watch were out of commission.

She’d taken it upon herself to explain exactly what had happened to anyone who asked, and she hadn’t left anything out. I was a little nervous about that, but apparently the message that got out wasn’t so much centered on how much the situation had been my fault as on how I had single-handedly taken down the Gray One. Not exactly the message I wanted, but it’d do. So Sarah was building at least some of the watch’s reputation on my back. I could deal with that. It wasn’t as if it’d have enough time to become a burden.

And though Sarah was working overtime cleaning
up after this, she wasn’t as driven as before. I thought Alison had more to do with that than our experiences out on Lovells, but maybe that time she’d spent blind had given Sarah a new appreciation for what she had.

Rena and I were on better terms. We wouldn’t be going out clubbing again—that was over, and there was too much space between us now—but we met occasionally for coffee (on my part) and cigarettes (on hers), usually out by the harbor. The cold wind coming off the sea did a lot to clear out the detritus between us, and a lot of those meetings ended up being long stretches of companionable silence.

“I still don’t want anything to do with the kind of
bruja
shit you get into,” Rena said, one afternoon in early December. The hotel behind us was decked out in twinkly lights and green banners, and the coffee shop had tried to sell me a mocha-ginger-nog latte. I’d glared the barista into silence and gotten something that resembled my usual road tar instead, even if it did have happy reindeer on the cup. Rena just had her cigarettes—I suspected that this was the only time she let herself smoke now. One bad habit to go with a bad influence. “But I like being unprepared even less.”

“I can understand that.” Even though I was unprepared most of the time, I’d only gotten used to it; I hadn’t gotten to like it at all. “I can tell you what I know, if you want.”

“You think I want that? Fuck.” She took another drag off her cigarette, exhaling smoke and steam and staring out into the harbor. Today the clouds were low and heavy, a flat line of gray hanging overhead, stretching out over the airport and the islands. Neither of us could see the line of Lovells from here, but both of us had our faces turned toward it.

Through the end of November, the snows had held off, giving way to rain or bitter cold or just the endless near-freezing, never-quite-winter days that November was famous for. December hadn’t decided to alter that pattern just yet. I was grateful for that, at least; when
the snow started in, my days with Mercury would dwindle down to nothing, and though I supposed I didn’t need January’s rent, the thrift my mother had ground into me meant that I wanted to go as long as I could without losing a source of income.

Rena shook her head and sighed. “Just warn me. When you can.”

I took another sip of reindeer coffee and made a face. “I will. But …” I glanced down at the marina, the floating platforms, the boats swathed up in plastic for the winter. Tessie had moved hers upriver, and if she’d minded the excursion, I hadn’t heard about it yet. “There’s something you ought to know.”

“You lie to me again and I’ll tip you into the goddamn harbor.”

I snorted. “And I’d deserve it. No, it’s just … there are lies you tell by not saying anything, you know? So I … I figure you ought to know this. Because while I’ll warn you of what I can, I’m only going to be able to do so for a little while.”

Rena turned to look at me, but I didn’t meet her eyes. Instead I turned toward the scaffolding that had replaced the charred remains of the bridge house, and I told her about midwinter. I sketched in the details of why—the Hunt, the horn that I’d carried, the price to pay. At first she looked like she didn’t believe me, then, as I fell silent, her expression turned to outright anger. “Jesus Christ, Evie! That’s just a couple of weeks from now!”

“Two and a half.” Not that I was counting the days. In fact, I’d made a point of getting rid of the calendars in my office.

“Well, what the—that doesn’t make any sense! Why would he punish you, if you’re the one who gave it back?”

“Because—” Because gods and demigods didn’t follow the same kind of logic that humans did, or when they did, it inevitably had a sting to it. “Because a price has to be paid, and by using the Horn,
I usurped a power that wasn’t mine. You don’t get to come back from that unscathed. You just don’t.”

“Bullshit. You could find a way—”

I shook my head. Funny, how much easier it was to take these questions now, now that I’d gotten my own shouting and raging over with. “That’s not how it works, Rena. Maybe for magicians like Roger, or Deke—or even the little ones in Sarah’s community watch. They’re all good at getting out of the consequences. But someone has to take these things seriously. I’m sorry. This is just one of those things.”

She stared at me, then cursed and chucked her cigarette into the harbor. “So why aren’t you off spending all your cash, going to Vegas, whatever it is people do when they know they’ve only got a little time left?”

I shrugged. “I don’t really want to.” Yeah, I wanted to cling to life, hold on to these things with both hands and never let go—but I didn’t want to do that by drowning in excess. There was enough joy to be found in making my rounds, in hunting for lost books and missing keys, in coming home to Nate’s place to curl up with him, in slow mornings and late nights. Maybe that was setting my sights too low, maybe I was just frittering away my time, but this too felt right.

For the first time I thought I realized why my mother had kept her illness secret for a long time, why she’d kept working, why she’d enjoyed the last few months in her own way. Maybe what I’d done over the last few weeks was a tribute of sorts.

“Shit.” Rena shook her head and gave me a quick, one-armed hug. “This doesn’t get you out of anything, you realize.”

“I know.” I punched her in the shoulder. “But thanks.”

I’d told Rena. I didn’t tell Sarah, because she’d have turned her brain inside out trying to find a loophole. Rena knew there were sometimes things you couldn’t do anything about, and even if she didn’t like it, she was used to it. Sarah knew a thousand ways of arguing
and a thousand ways of searching, and she’d have spent the weeks trying to find a solution and failing, and she’d have taken it on herself when it finally happened.

Besides, if I told Sarah, she’d tell Katie. And I couldn’t do that to her. Already, I was wary that she’d see something, that her Sight would catch some of what was headed my way. But it didn’t seem to have, yet, at least.

We’d figured out an arrangement with her and Nate and Sarah: no scrying in the house or anywhere that someone could track her to (and that included school, because the one thing her school didn’t need was scary adepts waiting outside to see where that last scrying had come from), scrying only with Sarah or Nate on hand, and never on any of her peers. New rules, new approaches to the whole matter. I’d thought the restrictions harsh, but Katie had been spooked by the monsters that had come out of the woodwork, and she didn’t question them. I couldn’t blame her for turning her Sight elsewhere for now.

I even called up the seer enclave and pretty much leaned on them to find a safe way to teach her, but they stalled, telling me not till the next equinox at least. I didn’t ask why—you don’t, with seers, unless you want one of the really crazy answers—but marked it down and made sure Nate had the number.