Soul Hunt (11 page)

I didn’t answer just yet. For a fraction of a second—nothing more than a blip—the patterns in the air became clearer, the scents coming into focus as if a lens had passed in front of them. Incense and green growing things and a pinprick scent like the center of a compass—the impression I’d always had of the Goddess Garden, returning in reality rather than memory. But no sooner had I registered and understood the scent than it was gone again, and with it the rest of my talent.

Goddammit. Losing it entirely might be better than this constant shifting back and forth. I felt like a dog on a leash, yanked in too many directions and away from the important stuff.

Katie wordlessly left Mulligatawny for Sarah, who went all misty-eyed and hugged her tight. “Hey there, small cute. How’s my girl?”

“Good,” Katie lied, muffled up against Sarah’s mighty bosom.

“She was scrying in the playground,” I said thickly, leaning a little on the counter to disguise how out of balance I felt. There weren’t any gray sparkles, not yet,
but the ice-water feeling had lodged nicely in the pit of my stomach.

Sarah stared, first at me, then at her. “Really?”

Katie drew back a step and nodded, staring at the floor.

Sarah put a hand on her shoulder, patting it absently. “How about you go on back and get me a Coke from the cooler, okay? And one for Evie and Duncan, all right?” The kid at the register—Duncan, apparently—started to protest, but he was smart enough to recognize a distraction when it was given. He retreated as well, even pulling out a pair of headphones to show just how little he was part of this conversation.

Sarah was silent a moment, hands smoothing her skirts. “Believe what you like of me,” she said finally, “but I did not teach her to use any puddle in a playground. That’s just asking for trouble.”

“Technically, she wasn’t using a puddle,” I admitted. “She’d brought a silver plate from home. I didn’t realize you’d gotten as far as metallurgical magic.”

Sarah’s hands paused on one box (TeenyVamp Anti-Sunlight Kits! the side read). “I hadn’t,” she said slowly. “I mean, she might have overheard me talking about it, but she’d have to make the connections and then put them into practice … She’s a smart kid.”

“That’s the problem. She’s too smart, and she doesn’t yet know what will bite her.”

“Kind of like someone else I know,” Sarah shot back. “What are you, her mom?”

“I’m
nobody’s
mother,” I snapped, louder and harsher than I meant to. Sarah’s head jerked up, and her eyes narrowed. “I mean, it’s none of your business what I am to her. Okay? What matters is that nobody, nobody should be teaching these things to a child.”

“She needs to know them,” Sarah said. “She can’t walk through it blind.”

“And how is it going to help, huh? Sarah, you know the undercurrent. You know what it is, and what it does to people. It’s poison, even if all your community-watch
stuff has wrapped it in fluff. Please tell me you haven’t forgotten that.”

“I haven’t.” She set the kits on a high shelf and turned to face me, eyes narrowed. “But I haven’t forgotten that you don’t treat it with kid gloves, either. For crying out loud, Evie, you’re the one who went around giving your real name to magicians and barging your way through the undercurrent like a, a Doberman in a nursery. And now you’re scared?
You?”

“I’m not—” I heard how high my voice sounded and stopped myself. “It’s got nothing to do with being scared.”

“No, scared doesn’t even begin to cover it,” she snapped. “For the love of all, what is
wrong
with you, Evie? You seemed okay for a while, you were finally getting some from your skinny-butt guy, you’d faced down worse things than I liked to think about, but then it just … you just drained away. It’s like you’re a bad recording of yourself.” She paused, as if hearing her words for the first time, and the lines on her brow began to shift, from anger to something else.

When had this turned into something about me?
Why
had this turned into something about me? “Katie’s the important thing,” I insisted, and the ice in my gut spread, sinking lower. “You can’t teach her magic like that without teaching her the downsides too. And, Jesus, Sarah, there are so many downsides it’s hard to find a way up.”

She wasn’t listening anymore. Instead she’d ducked back behind the counter and was rummaging through the shelves, picking up the imperfect crystals that she sold as Soul Lenses (twenty cents a pop at the local gem store, less if you have time and a rock tumbler). “Hang on,” she muttered, banging her head on the inside of the case, “hang on.”

“No. No hanging on, Sarah. You need to stop these lessons now. For Katie’s sake. For my—” I stopped. I could ask her, as a last wish, and she’d probably do it. But that would mean telling her about the Hunt, and
about midwinter. My mouth filled with water that tasted of ferns, and I swallowed it down, nearly choking. “Stop teaching her. Please.”

“But you were wrong,” Katie said quietly, and both of us turned to look at her. She stood in the doorway, a velvet drape sagging over her head, three hobbit-sized Cokes in her arms. “You’ve worked with magic for years. You invited it into your home. It’s part of you.”

“Don’t go any farther with this, Katie,” I said.

She shook her head. “You know it doesn’t have to be like that—like they were. You aren’t crazy. You’re not living in a drain. You have us, you have me, you have my brother—”

I had all those things, and most of my sanity to boot. So she had a point. I’d lived with my own blood-magic for thirty-odd years and used it openly for more than ten, and if there was any close parallel to her own Sight, then my talent came close. I was the best rebuttal she had.

And I was going to die in less than two months. Because of what I’d done in the undercurrent.

“You don’t know everything, kid,” I said, and turned away. Sarah caught my sleeve, and I jerked it free. “Don’t teach her any more, Sarah,” I said. “Have some goddamn pity.”

T
he sun was barely down by the time I got home, but for all the energy I had left it might as well have been midnight.

In some ways, I thought as I hung up my helmet, stripped rain from my jacket (dumping it into the little fountain by my desk, which burped and sizzled but didn’t burble to life as it usually did), and shook the last of the cold water from my hands, the last few weeks of slow time had been all right. It was a step better than running myself ragged, as I’d been doing in the weeks beforehand, and even if the undercurrent contracts had dwindled, the mainstream stuff was still coming in at its slow, dependable trickle. Some days I didn’t even feel up to handling that much, but I’d dragged myself out of bed anyway and gone off to Mercury Courier or off to the suburbs again.

I took a dry towel from the wardrobe and rubbed it over my head until my hair stood out in all directions. Maybe one problem fed into the other, though. Maybe I’d been so tired because there’d been so little work, or I’d gotten little work because I’d been too listless to search for more … either way, these last few weeks had been rough. And that wasn’t even counting the Sox. Goddamn.

I poured myself a glass of water from the tap,
glanced at the heap of paperwork on the desk—end-of-the-month bills, end-of-the-month invoices that mostly came back with excuses, research that needed to be done so I wouldn’t get caught off guard again, all the things that I just hadn’t had the heart for lately.

I wrapped the damp towel over my shoulders and curled up on the unmade futon. Rain and more rain … water and more water … I took a sip from my glass and grimaced. The water from the tap tasted downright foul, like something had died in it, and the smell wasn’t much better. Boston city utilities were clearly acting in their usual stellar fashion.

There were a dozen things I needed to do, half a dozen that I probably ought to get to, and I had energy for maybe three of them. I burrowed deeper into the towel, closing my eyes. Everything seemed so out of focus these days, as if I were perpetually seeing things through a film of something, like opening your eyes under water.

No. Not under water. I shuddered and sank deeper, but it didn’t do any good. The image of water over my eyes stayed, and my arms were too heavy to push it away. The smell of foul water, ice water, the taste of ferns and a cold stone in the pit of my stomach …

No.

Something nuzzled up against my hip, a cool but living bulk, and something else joined it along my shoulders. I opened my eyes to see a flicker of frost, fur so thick it was barely fur anymore, a flank that breathed as a red-eared head settled in next to me. One cold, depthless eye stared into my own.
This isn’t good,
the Gabriel Hound murmured.

“Like you give a damn,” I muttered in return, but I didn’t move. That on its own was a bad sign; if my flight reflexes weren’t kicking in by now, then the wiring in my brain had seriously short-circuited. I tugged one arm free and draped it over the closest Hound, the scar on my forearm where I’d fed it exposed to the orange light of sodium streetlights. “So
long as I’m there at midwinter, what do you care how I feel?”

Oh, you will be there at midwinter. Not even death could keep us from you. It licked its chops, almost meditatively. I shuddered, but pressing back only brought me closer to another Hound, and a second long muzzle nestled into the hollow between my hip and ribs. But what good is a hunt when there is only half of the prey? When the prey is weakened? The one who freed and fed us deserves to go out in better form.

We do care, said the one currently squashing my liver. We are not our masters. And we prefer a hunt to a slaughter.

“Nice to know,” I said drowsily. Strangely enough, it did help, in the same way that fresh water might help a prisoner.

Then take comfort here, and heal. For yourself as well as us. Their bodies were cold around me, not like Nate’s warmth, but there was something similar to be drawn from the contact. Sleep, and remember hunting. Come back, and remember hunting.

One shifted near my feet, and I felt a faint nip, like a needle stabbed and withdrawn so fast it was gone before the pain arrived. We are terror and chaos, but we are not what cloaks the city. And we do not like it. Nor do we like the patterns that are rising to pull you in—the old women your future is thick with, the old woman of the past, they worry us. It exhaled, and for a second the lights dimmed, became like sunlight filtered through smoke. Darkness in its proper place and time. Ware the old gray women.

“I’ll keep it in mind,” I said, and—I have no excuse for this other than I was dead tired and not in my right mind—reached down and scruffed the Gabriel Hound’s ears as if it were a puppy. It froze, and though the connection between us was severed, I could sense both amusement and worry in its posture. But sleep took me, and dreams of hunts that I would no longer follow.

In the morning I was still a mess, and that’s not counting the persistent doggy scent that would not come out of my hair. I showered and made my way down to Mercury Courier, still in the same fog.

There was a word for this, I thought as Tania yelled at me. Well, she didn’t yell, exactly. Tania doesn’t yell. Tania explains very seriously and at length why she is disappointed in you and what options she will need to pursue as a result, with frequent references to your track record and how uncharacteristic this is for you. But the cumulative effect is worse than getting yelled at. Normally I could defend myself, pointing to the amount of work I’d put in for Mercury Courier over the last few months and why I was the most reliable of their couriers. But this morning, with the gray wash over everything like dirty water slopped over the world by a careless laundress, I couldn’t even remember to nod in the right places.

Tania waved her hand in front of my face, and I realized she’d been waiting for an answer for some time. “Um,” I said. “Sorry. It won’t happen again.”

“Genevieve, honey, that is not what I—” She paused, giving me a long look, then to my surprise took my hand and led me to one of the few chairs in her office that wasn’t piled high with papers. “Honey, I don’t know what’s been wrong with you lately, but it is starting to worry me.”

I sat down, blinking until the world came back into focus. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

She squeezed my hand so hard it hurt, the pain sparking like a beacon’s spotlight. “Girl, I have one brother who’s been in the closet since God made him, one who’s dealing out of his apartment, and two sisters who are both bipolar. And every single one of them can tell me that and have me closer to believing it. So do not bullshit me, Genevieve, because I do not have the patience for bullshit.”

I met her eyes—big and dark, with yellowed whites from too many years with whatever condition meant
she needed those coke-bottle glasses to see a computer screen. “I don’t know,” I said finally. “I don’t know what it is. It’s not—” I stopped. It wasn’t the sentence from the Hunt, though damned if I could say why. It was something else, I realized. The grayouts were only a symptom of it.

“Don’t tell me what it’s not. Tell me you’re getting help for it.”

“I—”

I stopped, staring at the plate-glass window that separated her office from the main functions of Mercury Courier. Tania had long ago started treating it as a message board, and pages with important notes written forward and backward lined so much of the glass that you couldn’t even see much through it. But what I could see through it wasn’t nearly as important as what was reflected in it: Tania’s back, her desk, the mounds of paper … and where I was, barely a shadow.

Mirrors will show a lot of things. But mirrors are also very good at lying. For truth, you want a reflection that isn’t cast off silver, that comes from water or ice or good polished steel. Or, in a pinch, glass that’s forgotten it’s glass.

“I’ll go to someone,” I said slowly, and shifted in place. The little engraved mirror for Business of the Month above the door showed a flicker, but not much else. “I’ll go today. I didn’t—Tania, I didn’t quite realize that it was a problem.”