Soul Hunt (2 page)

The Hounds were not a part of me and my heritage, nothing to do with my talent save a shared name. Well, and a canine echo in my past; an ancestor of mine way back had spent most of his life as a hound, and passed on some of his talents to a few of his descendants. But he hadn’t, to my knowledge, had anything to do with the Gabriel Hounds. That was all my doing; they were a burden I’d taken up after claiming the Horn of the Wild Hunt from a walking dead man. At the time, I’d thought that I had no choice but to claim it; these days, I was less sure.

Moments like this just brought that regret home.
“No,”
I said, and Devin’s girl, maybe hearing an echo of the Gabble Retchets in my voice, fled. “No, I just need to find whoever it was that was scared.”

You mean other than yourself?
The Hound’s amusement was almost manifest: a doggy grin, made much less friendly by the sheer amount of teeth in that mouth. But it withdrew, though I could feel it and the rest of that chaos-pack watching, awake and aware now.

It didn’t matter, I told myself, even as a new wave of dizziness washed over me. I lurched to the stairs, hung on to a railing for a moment while the world shifted in
and out of focus, and dragged myself up into smoke. Devin and his girl were gone, though I could still hear her yelling, and from the relief in her voice I guessed they were on the docks. Good. But someone else, someone scared, someone whose fear was like anise to the Hounds …

When I’m hunting, properly hunting, the world dwindles down to that one scent, and I can focus solely on it. This wasn’t like that. It was as if the smell of smoke, omnipresent now and thick with melted plastic and oil, washed out everything else, save that one harsh burr of dread—

I turned to face the burning yacht. The boat I stood on might be saved, but that one would be a loss—and just then, someone emerged from the hatch that mirrored the one I stood at.

It wasn’t Tessie; that much I could tell right off. For one thing, Tessie kept her hair cut short, not back in a thick gray ponytail; for another—and more important—Tessie had never had a beard that impressive. The man was bent double, probably tall to begin with but stooped under the burden he carried slung over both shoulders. I scrambled to the edge of the fishing boat, staring. He was carrying a man.

Worse, I knew that man. A sting of damp woodchuck and ash touched my nose, somehow aligned on the same thread of fear that I’d followed, and that was a smell I’d know anywhere: Deke, the pyromancer of the Common, the man who could see anything in a candle flame. The graybeard yelled something to him, but Deke hung limply over his shoulder. “Deke!” I called, but just then a gust of smoke hit me smack in the face, and the smell alone was enough to send me reeling.

The graybeard, one foot on the far rail of the yacht, glanced back at me. His eyes narrowed. “Stay back, girl!” he shouted. “She’s going down.”

I coughed black muck over my sleeve and tried to follow, but he crouched, still with Deke over his shoulders,
and leaped off the yacht, landing on the next boat over, sending it rocking like a rowboat in a gale. Deke’s scent (still alive, I could tell that much) and the scent of fear receded with him.

Well, now you know how the fire started,
a dry, cynical voice said in the back of my mind. I snorted, then stopped. Where was Tessie? I risked a glance at the pier, where two fire trucks were already unspooling their hoses. No sign of her. As for scent—

I shook my head and spat again. Nothing. Even the smell of smoke was muted, subsumed by the taste of ice water in the back of my throat. “Shit,” I muttered, and gauged the distance between the fishing boat and the yacht. It couldn’t be that far; the yacht was snuggled up between the two boats to either side, and that man had made the jump with Deke on his back—

No one has ever accused me of good judgment. I ran for the edge and jumped, landing on a coil of smoldering rope. My ankle turned, and I went sprawling, smothering the fire under my leg. (Not the best firefighting technique, I’ll say that right now.) Here the fire wasn’t so bad, but Tessie wasn’t up top. She had to be somewhere below, in the hold where the smoke would be worse—

I didn’t let myself think. Instead I slid down the steps the graybeard had come up, trying to scent for Tessie—or anything, anything beyond the encroaching feeling in my own gut.

This is bad.
A canine murmur settled around me, and for a moment I didn’t just feel the shifting of the Horn under my skin, I saw the Gabble Retchets, the hounds of the Wild Hunt flickering in and out of existence, their shapes never quite congruent with real space.
We knew you were foolish, that you could make bad bargains, but not that you would throw yourself into the fire so.

“Like you care,” I said, pushing aside crates and charred boxes to reach the door.

We do care,
another Hound said, brushing against
me as it paced past a fresh flame. You carry the Horn. We do not want it turned to ash.

“Yeah, well, I’m not happy about carrying it either. You’ll get it back soon enough.” I was sweating under my courier gear, and the smoke—God, the smoke was going to kill me soon, and if it was bad for me, then how bad did Tessie have it? I turned in place, trying to scent her, or at the very least figure out where she’d come in with regards to where I was now. “For now I just need to find her.”

We could hunt her for you.

That turned the air cold, or maybe it was just the sweat on my skin freezing. “What?”

We could hunt her. Sound the Horn, call us forth, and we will hunt her for you. The closest Hound, the one currently in the shape of a great ashen thing with bloodied ears, grinned up at me. It is what we are made for. Like you.

That was not a comparison I cared to hear, now or later, but it didn’t change the pressure at my throat. I didn’t have to reach up to recognize that the scar had shifted, become a horn on a strap of leather slung round my shoulder, its weight light but insistent. I swallowed. “If I sent you to hunt her, you’d tear her throat out.”

The Hound grinned wider.
Maybe not.

Another snapped at the flames behind me. You have already sounded the Horn once, incurring the Hunter’s wrath. What is it to do so again?

“More than I’m willing to do,” I snapped, and pushed past them, my hands encountering nothing but cool air and shadow as they swept through. Even that, though, was enough to both chill and preserve me. I kicked a sack out of the way to find another ladder leading down into the hold. “Listen, I’m no more happy with this than you are, okay?”

The Hounds paused, fading.
Whatever gave you the impression that we were unhappy with you?
one asked, its head cocked to the side.

And that right there was another thing I didn’t want to think about. Besides, there was Tessie, standing in the middle of a low-ceilinged, open room. This one was empty, stripped to the bare metal of the hull, and Tessie stood frozen in the middle of it, oblivious to the smoke curling around her head. I crouched and ran to her. “Tessie!”

“It’s not here,” she said vaguely, staring off into the smoke. “I’d thought—”

“Tessie, this boat’s going up, and you need to—dammit.” I caught her arm and pulled her down, so that her head was no longer wreathed in smoke.

She blinked at me, the whites of her eyes gone yellow and watery. “Don’t,” she whispered, though I doubted she was actually addressing me. “They might be out there—if we stay still, they won’t see us—”

“If we stay still we are going to end up well done. Or maybe brined, depending on whether this boat sinks first. Come
on!”

She shuddered, staggered, then leaned heavily on me. It was enough of an assent; I pulled her arm over my shoulders and practically dragged her to the ladder. The Hounds were gone—well, technically, they were still with me, but at least they had the tact to remain silent—and the next room was thick with smoke. But cool daylight shone through the way I’d come in, and I dragged Tessie toward the upper ladder.

We’d gotten maybe two steps from the top of the ladder before the first blast of water from the firehoses hit the decks, and with it came a last billow of smoke and oil scent. The stink of dead fireworks hit me like a cosh to the back of the head, and I stumbled out into light, losing my grip on Tessie and collapsing straight into the puddled water on deck.

I
came out of it propped up against what felt like a piling and with the feeling that something was missing. It didn’t help that the first thing that met my eyes seemed to be a two-headed, human-sized cat talking to a blue rock. I squinted, tried to shake my head, then winced as my brain banged against the inside of my skull. Someone had put a dry blanket over my shoulders, and I pulled it up one-handed, rubbing it over my head until my hair stood up in spikes. That was one advantage to having short hair these days; with the braid I’d lost a few months back, I’d have been cold for hours.

“Of course she was here,” a woman’s voice said, high and clipped and with that edge that meant her patience was about to run out. Sarah. “I’d asked her to keep an eye out for any sort of trouble like this—Evie’s always out and about, so it makes sense to have her on point and alert. I don’t know why you see this as a problem.” Sarah, lying her ass off.

I dragged the blanket off my head and into my lap and rubbed my eyes until they decided to function. The two-headed cat-thing was still there, but it was now revealed as Sarah, wearing a bright green coat and a cat-mask, the latter pushed up over her face so that it was out of her way. She must have come straight from her shop, the Goddess Garden, without bothering to ditch her Halloween gear.

How had she known to get out here so fast? I hadn’t called, and Tessie certainly wouldn’t have bothered.

Tessie. I pushed aside the blanket and got to my feet, digging my fingers into the piling to keep myself steady. I was on the dock, facing the water now, and from here I could tell two things: one, that yacht couldn’t have been legally moored so close to those two boats, and two, that wouldn’t matter anymore because there wasn’t much of a yacht left. The fiberglass hull was cracked and charred, the deck no more than blackened boards, and the—whatever you call that little steering part near the front, over the hatch where I’d gone in for Tessie—was a melted lump of slag. Smoke still rose off the wreckage in damp black wisps, forlorn as the severed, ashy rigging, and a couple of firefighters stood on the dock, arguing over whether to go on board or not.

I didn’t see Tessie immediately, but there was an ambulance not so far away. If I’d made it off the boat, then she must have too, right? I closed my eyes and tried to get a sense of the trail, since that at least would tell me which way she’d gone, then stopped.

I couldn’t scent anything.

A chill coiled in my chest. No. No, I couldn’t have lost my talent, it was the only thing that I knew I could rely on, it was the one thing that made me who I was. I swallowed down my panic and concentrated, hoping that I’d just been mistaken.

After a moment—a moment like groping blindly through an unfamiliar room for a light switch that might not even be there—I realized that I wasn’t quite lost. But the scents that I was so used to following, the patterns that I as Hound could discern, were distant, as if behind a thick blanket of fog. Tessie’s mantle of diesel fuel and makeup hung in the air, but to get a hold on it, I had to concentrate hard, shutting out everything else. Even the smoke, which was still so omnipresent that my clothes stank of it, was muffled.

I shuddered and opened my eyes. The grayouts, I was getting used to; the bad mornings where it
was difficult to even decide to get out of bed, I could handle. But this—my talent, the one constant I’d always depended on, fading just like everything else—this, I couldn’t stand.

“And furthermore,” Sarah said behind me, “I think it’s unconscionable that you’re giving such a hard time to someone who under any other circumstances would be considered a hero. Is it official policy to interrogate anyone who drags a friend out of a fire?”

“That is not what we’re doing, ma’am,” another woman said, and my stomach turned over. I knew that voice. “And I think maybe you ought to let her speak for herself.”

Crap. Not that I’d had any real chance of getting out of this anyway, but still … I turned around, leaning back against the piling again so that I was partly sitting on it. Sarah turned, pushing the cat mask a little further up her forehead, and the woman she was talking to—the one I’d misidentified as a blue rock, with perhaps some justification, tilted up her chin as she looked at me.

Lieutenant—or whatever rank she now held—Rena Santesteban of the BPD. Just the last person I wanted to see, and I suspected I was the same for her.

Sarah and Rena were, for a while, the closest things I had to friends, and a good example of why the periphery of the undercurrent is so unpredictable. You wouldn’t think to link the two of them together in any other circumstances, but both have brushed up against the nasties of the Boston undercurrent often enough that they know to stay out of the depths, and both of them have, on occasion, expressed impatience with me. And just at the moment, they wore remarkably similar expressions.

That’s where any connection ended, though. Sarah dealt in fringy stuff, the edges of the undercurrent that were so powerless you couldn’t even move a handkerchief with them, and the New Age elements that even New Agers don’t buy. But beneath that façade of
fuzzy-headed optimism was a diamond-hard core of bullheaded idealism, with sprinkles on top.

Case in point: faced with the fragmenting chaos that was the undercurrent without the Fiana in charge, Sarah’s approach had been to try to create a community watch, something for magicians and small-timers to be a part of so that they wouldn’t always have to watch their backs. In theory a good idea, in practice less so, and in reality about as easy as yoking ferrets to pull a sled. Sarah knew better than to dabble in the scary parts of magic—and she’d been scared away from the truly numinous aspects of it, a fact that I still shared some blame for—but she still believed that we could, in time, all pull together.