Soul Hunt (36 page)

Yes. There was Nate too.

We stayed most nights together, either on the cramped bed in his tiny apartment or, when Katie stayed over with Sarah and Alison, on the lumpy futon in my office, and he didn’t mind that I tangled up the sheets when I dreamed of running, or that I woke up muttering about the Red Sox. (I didn’t tell him that he did the same on occasion.) We made love, slow and languorous, reveling in the touch of skin and the scent of sweat, or quick and wild, clinging to each other as if we meant to fuse together, or breaking up halfway through to a flood of laughter as one or both of us proved inconveniently ticklish.

The night after the fight on Lovells, I told him about what he’d done, the soul returned to me, and how I’d used it to destroy Dina—and that I hadn’t used it to sever the Hunt’s hold on me. “So I guess you were right about me having some kind of death wish,” I ended, drawing my knees up till I was a little ball sitting on his bed. “I’m sorry, Nate. I had my chance, and I threw it away.”

Nate was silent for a long time, but eventually he sat up and put his arm around me. “If you hadn’t,” he said in my ear, “you wouldn’t be Evie. Infuriating as you are.” He kissed me, and eventually we lay back down together, but it was still a long time before either of us could relax enough for sleep.

I didn’t want to go. But December rolled in, and the carols blared from every store, and the days shortened to thin gray heartbeats. And on Midwinter Eve, I walked out to Boston Common. There were a few holdouts on the Frog Pond, attempting to skate through the first flakes of the first real snow of the season, but picturesque or not, the carolers who’d staked out the best spots had disappeared into the local Dunkin’ Donuts for hot chocolate. A giant spruce tree loomed over the square where I’d once met Deke, where I’d begun hunt after hunt.

I put my hands in the pockets of my coat and closed my eyes, turning my face up to the snow. The flakes were so large they thumped softly against my skin, but they didn’t muffle scent the way they muffled sound. The pattern of the city spread out around me, intricate at every level and unmappable even to me, brilliant like Celtic knotwork expanded into every dimension and whole, unshadowed, for this moment at least, if not forever. And familiar, close and familiar …

I smiled without opening my eyes. “Come to see me off?”

“You could call it that,” Nate said. His footsteps creaked on the new snow, and the warm scent of him curled close around me. I opened my eyes and grinned
at him. “I’m not yet convinced, you know,” he added. “They might still change their minds.”

“I knew it. Ditch your curse and immediately you retreat to the world of the rational. Not that I blame you.” I nudged him with my elbow, and he nudged back. He’d left his hat at home, and snow caught in his hair, not yet melting. “Katie hasn’t guessed, has she?”

He shrugged. “Hard to tell. She’s with Aunt Venice for the weekend; I told them I was doing some lastminute shopping. She asked if you’ll be joining us for Christmas.”

I was silent a moment. That hurt. “I’m not really good at Christmas, Nate. Even without this.”

“I wondered. But I don’t think she’s seen anything.”

“That’s something, at least. She and Sarah … I was most afraid they’d try to stop me. I mean, it’s not as if—” I stopped. “I don’t
want
to go, you understand.”

“But you don’t argue with demigods.” He shook his head. “Evie, you argue with damn near everyone else.”

“I don’t!” Nate gave me a look, and I sighed. “Okay. Okay, bad answer. But this is for real, Nate. This is … The undercurrent makes such a big deal about being transient. Magic washes so many things away. I think … I think that’s what turned the Gray Ones into something like Dina. Magic shouldn’t be the debased thing we have in the undercurrent. It shouldn’t be—shouldn’t be the sort of thing you can get out of with some handwaving and a correct sacrifice.” I’d told Katie there had been no such thing as a Golden Age of magic. Maybe so. Maybe it was just how you looked at it, or how you used it.

He didn’t answer, only put his arm around me. We circled the hill, toward the field where in summer bands played and endless soccer games took place. The trees blocked most sound, and I had to concentrate to hear the traffic close by.

“That’s why I gave the Horn back in the first place, Nate. I can’t just use magic as a shortcut.” That was
what Roger did, and Patrick, and the Fiana … the magicians who approached it as just another tool, one more trick to get themselves out of trouble, a get-out-of-jail-free card. “I have to accept the consequences. One of them was taking care of the city. The other is this.” I stopped and turned to face him. “Do you understand?”

Nate looked at me for a long moment, a strange little smile tugging at the corner of his lips, as if he’d just remembered something funny and couldn’t tell me the joke because it would hurt me somehow. “You know,” he said, “if we … if things had ever settled down to the point where no one was trying to kill either of us, I’d thought about making this a little more official. Between us.”

I shook my head. “Going by the last year, ‘people trying to kill us’ is kind of the default setting. It doesn’t get more settled. Not with us.”

“Yeah, I should have figured that.” He dislodged snow from his hair, shaking it from the tips of his fingers. “Yes. I understand what you mean. More than you know.”

“Then do me a favor and kiss me quick, because I can’t hear traffic and we should have come around the other side of the hill two minutes ago.”

He glanced past me to where the asphalt path we’d followed petered out into dirt and then nothing. The trees above us were still the great oaks of the Common—if I carved an initial into one now, I’d be able to find it the next morning. Well,
I
wouldn’t have. But someone else would. But the ground wasn’t the ground of the Common anymore, and the only sound was the hush of falling snow. The remaining glow was partly streetlight and partly reflection, that pinkish cast of light that lingers over every hill in this kind of snowfall.

I held out my hand to Nate, and he took it, his fingers cool and human against mine. With the touch came a soft call above us like a flock of geese, distant
at first but growing. “There are letters,” I said, rushing my words now. “You’ve got a key to my office; they’re on my desk, signed and stamped and everything. For Sarah and Rena and, and my father, and there’s one for Katie too—” And there was one for Nate himself, but he wouldn’t need to know that till he found it.

“I’ll take care of them,” he promised.

I nodded and folded my other hand around his.
You should leave,
I wanted to say. But I couldn’t make myself let him go.

The cry of the Gabriel Hounds rose to a halloo, and the snow shivered, as if someone had tapped the other side of the sky. The scent of frost rose up around me, heavy with dead leaves and darkness and the end of the year, and with it came the Hunt.

Every Hunt.

The Gabriel Hounds, in their perpetually shifting shapes, crept through the trees to ring me. I’d swear one of them was wagging its tail.
And here you are,
one said.

For our appointment, said another.

We missed you,
said a third, and somehow it managed to be both endearing and threatening. I laughed; what else could I do?

Shapes appeared in the snow, manifesting in the spaces between flakes, creating themselves as they approached. A man all in gray with a crown of steel, riding a horse that was barely more real than he, paced out from between the closest trees. Next to him stood another king, though this one went uncrowned and wore a tunic that had no seam. Behind him walked a grizzled man with one eye who seemed to stare at Nate first, though his expression was so stony as to be unreadable. To my left a broad, grinning woman on a huge horse chuckled; to my right walked another woman, glimmering between brilliant white and shadow gray, her face perpetually invisible. And ahead of me, back so far in the trees that he might have been one of their shadows, stood a man
half again my height with a profile that was anything but human and a branching rack of horns like the king of stags.

And more, more from between every pair of trees, till even this scrap of otherworld that mirrored the Common groaned with the pressure of so many figures, mythic and folkloric and plain fictional, who claimed a space here. Who claimed a piece of me in return for the power I’d called on.

“You are ready?” one of them, or maybe all of them, said. I drew a deep breath, then started to work my hand free of Nate’s.

He let go first. “I fought to get her soul back,” he said, and for a moment I thought he was talking to me and referring to someone else. “I gave up my birthright to save her. Does anyone here deny it?”

The assembled Hunters remained silent. I thought I saw the one-eyed one smile for a moment, but it was gone with the swiftness of a falling blade.

Nate took another breath, his word puffing into clouds in the air. “Then that gives me a claim here tonight as well. More, what she did, she did to save me, and so I share in her blame as well. Does anyone here deny it?”

“Nate,” I said, “what are you doing? Don’t—”

You’re the one who was our prey,
said one of the Hounds.
The one who escaped. That happens rarely.
It licked its chops with a long, black-spotted tongue.

He has a claim,
another said—I thought it might be the one who’d seemed most glad to see me, but it was hard to tell.

“Then listen.” Nate looked down at me, and though he swallowed before speaking, his voice was steady. “She had the power to get out of this. And she didn’t. Does that count for nothing?”

The assembled Hunters didn’t move. The Hounds milled about us, unhappy.
The Hunt must run.

“But after her?”

You’d offer another quarry?
the closest one rumbled. “That’s none of my choice,” Nate said evenly, meeting its gaze.

To my shock, the Hound was the first to look away. “Nate, what are you doing?”

“Where she goes, I go,” he said simply.

“What?”
I stumbled away from him, as if insanity might be catching. “Nate, you can’t be serious, you can’t—” Any other circumstances, and I’d have been touched; there was even a silly, selfish part of me that leaped to its feet and danced. But not here, not now, and not Nate!

“Evie,” he said, and the way he said my name made me catch my words short. “Do you trust me?”

Of all the questions to ask me … but that was one thing I’d learned. I did trust him. I had to trust him to do what was right for him. But oh, Katie, I couldn’t take him away … “I do,” I said. “But—”

“Then trust me.” He held out his hand.

I let out my breath shakily and took his hand. “Okay,” I said. “We’ll do this the way we did before. I held them off once, I can do it again. You, run.”

“You will both run,” said one of the Hunters—the hatchet-faced man with a spear, wearing clothes that were one step up from pelts stitched together. “And we will decide.” He raised a horn to his lips, a cracked, curled thing the color of sour milk. All around us, the Hunters of the Wild Hunt raised their own horns, steel or jeweled or curved ramshorn, and the air shuddered and turned silver.

“Oh, hell,” I said. “It was worth it.” Nate nodded. The call, the Horn’s cry, went out in a chorus like the note that summoned Creation, and I took off, Nate’s hand in mine. Around us, the Gabriel Hounds milled, charged, ran behind us—

—and around us, and all about us—

—and
with
us.

The Hunt raged about us and swallowed us up, and
though we ran, we did not run as the quarry. We ran as hunters, as hounds and huntsmen among them, as part of the Hunt itself.

It was gift and punishment both; to lose my autonomy in this flight, to be used as I had used the Horn, to be part of the great chaos of which this was only one manifestation.

I raised my hands and let out a yell, and it came out as a halloo of a hound, a cry comparable to any my great ancestor might have made in whatever form. Nate snarled, and the Hounds roared in return,
not bad for once-prey, now part of our timeless company.
Horsemen—or maybe it was one horseman, or maybe we rode horses that were made of nothing but the chill force of the northern wind—charged about us, in silence or clamor, in both, the many Hunts all taking their turn, as they had not for so long. More than the Horn had been freed when I returned it.

There was no time in this Hunt. Only the endless Midwinter night, the sky thick with snow, brilliant with stars, endlessly dark with only the moon to light it. We charged after a stag as pale as a ghost, after a flock of sheep unlucky enough to have found their way out on this of all nights, after a drunken band of students who would find one another huddled in haystacks in the morning and swear never to speak of this, after a golden glowing ball that made the hair on the backs of my arms sizzle.

We were fury and joy and chaos incarnate, and we were none of these. Nate and I ran, humans caught up in the Hunt, and if I had had any space to think I would have thought that yes, he knows this, this is the part of his curse that was no curse at all. This was the joy of letting go.

But I had no word for that. Instead I caught him as we ran and pressed a cold and passionate kiss against his lips, and we were off again, two of us, woman and man, hound and hunter, running through till the end of time.

Dawn came sudden and soon, the first lights of the new half of the year leaking in around the edges of the Hounds’ silver road. I barely recognized the trees of the Common till we were in the midst of them, and Nate didn’t seem to pay any attention as he slumped against one. I sank to my knees, oblivious to the Gabriel Hounds whispering canine farewells as they nosed about me, and my skin steamed where it touched the fallen snow.

One of the Hunters remained: the great shape back in the trees, the man crowned with a king stag’s horns. “This is what we claim, and what we give,” he said, the words not so much heard as written into the space behind my eyes. “For the presumption of using the Horn, and the deed of returning it. That you run with us, once and every Midwinter, from now until the end.”