Wild Hunt (24 page)

It was like kissing a corpse. I gagged and reeled away, spitting into the brush. Abigail rubbed her wrist and sniffed at my ill manners. But I had the scent, and like a tendril of poison flowing through a river, it led on. “He’s close by. Maybe he was coming to see you…” Even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t true. Patrick—Prescott wasn’t looking for Abigail; he had a new prey, and he’d follow the same pattern he had once before.

That’s how he isolated us,
Skelling whispered.
Lured us out away from the rest, made his offer…Don’t let it happen again.

Another Green Line train rumbled by, this one traveling inbound, and Skelling pointed after it, the gesture less visible than tangible. I let go of Abigail’s hand, and for a moment she held it out there, as if unsure what to do with it. “Get someplace safe,” I told her. “The hospital—or no. There’s a lake down that way. The dead don’t like water, and I think Prescott won’t be an exception, given his posthumous history.”

“I refuse to hide myself in a kiddie pool,” Abigail snapped.

“Then find another place to hide,” I said, and took off running.

The train that had just passed us was stopped at the station just up ahead. I didn’t slow down—transit police might not pay attention to a running woman near the tracks, but a running woman with a gun was probably high on their list of things to watch out for.

In the back of my mind, I heard Skelling’s voice murmuring.
This is how we did it out West; you’d match your speed to them just for a moment—

Shit. He wasn’t asking me to do what I thought he was, was he?

The train in front of me blurred, doubling into an old-fashioned caboose, clacking down the tracks, and for a second I felt a cool emptiness surround me, mimicking my motions, coat flapping in the wind.
Like so,
Skelling murmured,
and then you catch on like this—DeWitt and I did this once, that was back before I met my wife, God rest her—

The idiot repetition of a lived moment, the hallmark of a ghost—but right now it was moving with me, adapting one to the other.
Bad idea,
I thought as I neared the end of the train and the bell sounded to signal the doors’ closing.
This is such a bad idea…

But hell. I was going to do it anyway.

The train began to pull away, and I jumped for it. My left foot landed on the little spur of metal that normally connected the cars, and I scrabbled for purchase on the smooth green-painted hull.

Like so.
Skelling’s hands guided mine, finding the crevices that should not have been there, and as if following a careful dance, my right foot twisted behind me, balancing on the connector. I clung to the end of the T car, the holster at my hip banging against it, too scared even to cuss. This was so going to get me arrested or hurt, and that was the
least
of my worries right now—

“Hound, I can assure you that my brother’s not currently a danger to anyone.”

I risked a glance up, pressing my cheek against the car as if an extra square inch of contact would keep me from falling off. Perched on top of the car, cane propped across her lap, sat Abigail. She still looked sick and worn down, but her posture carried a patrician calm that didn’t belong on top of a speeding T car. “What the fuck?” I managed.

“My brother isn’t going to hurt anyone. If you go looking for him, then yes, he may very well react badly to your presence, but if you’ll be good enough to stay out of his way for a little while, I can promise—”

“How in God’s name are you sitting up there?”

She sniffed at me. Sylvia at the Gardner could have taken lessons in disdainful sniffs from her. “My point is, even if your shifter friend does run into him, my brother is not in any position to do him harm.”

“The hell you say!”

Abigail waved one hand dismissively, ducking out of the way of a dangling electrical cable without even a backward glance. “At the very least, he cannot use the horn. That was my point, Hound; he’s powerless without the horn in its entirety. He might use it as he did on me, but the hounds can’t kill anyone in that capacity. It’s a matter of degree. Do you understand?”

I started to shake my head, thought better of it as the train lurched around a curve, and held on tighter.
This isn’t happening
, I thought.
I am not discussing magical theory while clinging to the back of a speeding Green Line train—

“One would think you understood nothing of catroptic theory. You see, the horn isn’t entirely real
qua
real, and so it’s not subject to the same laws as a reified object. It’s not even the same as a locus, which can be split and split again and still function. Remove any part of it, even a part that wouldn’t be important to an actual hunting horn, and you fragment the essential state of its being.”

—I am not
being lectured on
magical theory while clinging to the back of a speeding Green Line train—

“Thus by removing the baldric, I crippled the horn. Now, if you’ll be good enough to return it to me, I should be able to calm things down long enough for you to return the horn. I know my brother; I can get him out of your city with a minimum of fuss, and we should be able to take care of our own affairs from there. The baldric, please.” She held out her hand.

I stared up at her. My fingers were starting to ache with the strain of hanging on like this. “What are you talking about?”

“The baldric for the horn. I gave it to you with the emeralds. Remember?”

“What the hell is a baldric?”

“It’s a—” Abigail sighed. “The leather strap I wrapped the emeralds in. It’s part of the horn.”

I shook my head. “I handed all of that over to the police, after you were attacked.” Abigail’s face went dead white, paler than the clothes she wore. “Well, if you hadn’t been so goddamn cryptic—”

The train screeched and slowed to a crawl, and that was enough to disrupt my precarious balance, ghostly assistance or not. I lost my grip on the train, banging my forehead against one of the window ridges, and fell off just as the train slowed to a stop. One of my ankles hit the rail with a dull clang.

Abigail glanced over her shoulder. “It looks like there’s a signal ahead. Are you absolutely sure you handed it over?”

“Yes!” I climbed to my feet, made sure Skelling’s gun was still in its holster, and limped away. Someone shouted inside the train, but I didn’t turn back just yet.

We were in the midst of the Hammond Pond Reservation, the spot of greenery that Newton uses to prove it’s a suburb, and though the trains ran through it, the scent of deer and semi-wild creatures was strong. As pretty as it was, I didn’t like this place. I’d been here once before on a missing persons case—nothing of the
undercurrent, just generalized nastiness all around—and that hadn’t ended well. “Either the cops still have it,” I called over my shoulder, “or Prescott took it when he sicced the dogs on Foster.”

“Who?”

I snarled and quickened my pace, moving away from the tracks. Prescott was nearby. I could feel his scent on my skin—I’d become attuned somehow, the same way that Skelling had become attuned to me, and that first moment of disgust I’d felt when I’d seized the connection between the siblings was nothing to how it felt to carry that connection with me. I kept wanting to shake myself clean, to bare my teeth and snap at the air till it went away. Not good, Evie, I told myself.
If Nate can keep hold of himself, so can you.

And speaking of Nate—here he was, too close to Prescott. Nate’s scent didn’t have the same wildness as I remembered, but not the iron control either. He’d come into himself, just in time for Prescott to kill him for what someone else had been.

“Could I possibly convince you to retreat?” Abigail, just behind me again. The train lurched and moved on. “If what you’re telling me is true—”

“It’s true,” I said, and headed for a break in the chain-link fence. The holster got caught, but a second tug got me through.

Over the hills—what idiot put so many little hills in this part of Newton?—and through the swampy bits, past thickets that smelled of deer and stones that smelled of coyote. A wind followed me, heavy with the scent of oncoming rain, tossing the trees into disarray. I scrambled up an outcropping of lichen-encrusted rock and stopped dead, panting through my teeth.

In a hummock not far away stood a man in a gray peacoat, his yellow-bright hair gleaming in this overripe sunlight. At the sight of him, the glamour of his living and dead body broke whatever link I’d been following, and his scent resolved into the blank, folded-
together scent that I’d first sensed on Patrick, back on Summit Hill. Nate stood in front of him, hands out to his sides, tensed in a posture that I would not have recognized had I not seen it in a different shape.

“…simple matter,” Prescott said, the thrum of trucks downshifting on a nearby road drowning out some of his words. I tried to move closer without drawing his attention. “You’ve wanted to walk off with it too. I’ve been watching.” In his right hand, he held a black-and-white horn, the curve of it like a slash in the world, and from that horn came the scent of rotted flesh. It seemed to writhe in his hand, like a trapped snake.

“I don’t care what you’ve been watching,” Nate said. He still wore the faded clothes Katie had packed for him. “But you can stuff it.”

Katie, where was Katie? I glanced around—neither Prescott nor Nate had seen me yet, too devoted were they to their personal face-off, but a squeak from overhead caught my attention. Katie was up a tree, a little way behind Nate. He must have told her to hide as soon as Prescott showed, and she could wriggle up a tree faster than a squirrel. She stared at me, trembling, then back down at her brother.

Prescott—Patrick smiled and turned his head, as if listening to someone else. “That’s really too bad.” A little tic shivered over his face, like a roach scuttling across the floor. “Listen to me: This is the kind of thing that magicians these days lack, and that thieves should fear. You hate that sort of thing as much as I do. So why should it matter if I try to stop it in my way?” His hand tightened on the horn. “It’s about respect. How can you respect something that won’t hurt you? If we remind people how much it can hurt, how horrible the night can be, won’t they value the day more—”

“I don’t—” Nate drew a ragged breath. “Look. I don’t really care about any of this. But you have three
options right now. You can leave me and Evie alone. You can go to the reverend, and he’ll find some way to put you to rest.”

It was a noble thought, and one that would be right on target with most ghosts. But Prescott wasn’t quite having the same conversation. He was sliding in and out of the past, responding to a remembered conversation as much as to the current one. Erratic, Abigail had called him.

That meant I could surprise him. I slid my hand down to Skelling’s gun. Would he recognize it, having carried one like it for so long?

Patrick began to reply, but Nate stepped forward, hands held up. “Or you’ve got a third choice.” He swallowed. “You can say no, and I’ll…I will make you regret it.”

I glanced at Nate and all of a sudden realized what he was planning. “Son of a bitch,” I hissed, and tried to quicken my pace without tipping off Patrick. “Don’t you dare do this to me, Nate.”

Patrick shook his head, as if ridding it of a fly. “That’s really too…really…” He stopped, blinking hard, and his eyes seemed to go out of focus. “No,” he breathed. “No, didn’t I…I killed you already, didn’t I?”

Nate took another step, and I could see him steeling himself for what would happen. He wasn’t a killer—he didn’t have a killer’s instinct—but he’d try, just to keep this man out of our city.

Patrick raised the horn, and I jerked Skelling’s gun from its holster.

Abigail grabbed me by the wrist. “Stop,” she hissed. “Just wait, wait—”

I shook her off, but too late: Patrick had the horn at his lips, and though there was barely enough breath in him to speak, there was enough to blow the horn.

The sound that followed was so soft it was background to the rustle of wind against leaves, but it cut through me as if the horn had been placed against my
head. My teeth rattled with the sound, and for just a moment I had the urge to answer, to run where that horn bade me and hunt where it sent me.

I wasn’t the only hound to respond, though. The shadows flickered, and instead of keeping the hounds within their dark boundaries they bulged and spat, birthing emptiness into the world. Patrick raised his other hand and pointed at Nate, and I didn’t need to see the hounds to know that they had turned toward him, grinning.

“Nate!” I screamed. He turned, and for a fraction of a second his eyes met mine—

—and the world went gray around him, gray with hounds’ fur and wolves’ pelts and the colorless space in which the Wild Hunt chased its prey—

The bright sun recoiled from the air around them, and I could almost hear the rip as the path of the Gabriel Hounds opened up around them, the world parting to give them free rein in their chase. I sprang off the rock outcropping and after them, sobbing with rage and terror, but a colorless hand caught at my hair, dragging me down, yanking me back to the world—

—to the rock—

—to darkness, and a red-edged whirlpool of pain.

T
he first sense to come back wasn’t scent, or even the analog that matched it, but simple pain, pulling me back to myself. I tasted sour dirt, and an ammonia stink curled around me: skunks and scat and unclean things. It was just my good luck that the puddle I lay in smelled of nothing but mud.

I opened my eyes and immediately regretted it: my vision swam in and out of focus so drastically that it even hurt to blink, and my stomach heaved with each heartbeat. With the nausea came a memory that hurt more than the concussion: Nate, glancing back at me before the Gabriel Hounds chased him into nowhere. “Nate,” I whispered, and tried to sit up.

“He’s not here.” A shape passed in front of me, a colorless, bloodless scent distorting the world like a lens. Abigail, still barefoot and in her hospital gown. “I
trusted
you, Miss Scelan. I can’t believe you’ve repaid me this way.”

I flopped onto my stomach, then pulled myself into a kneeling position, bit by painful bit. “Where’s Nate?”

“It’s no good. He’s long gone.” The words started out sharp and angry, but dwindled off into unexpected softness. “And you would be too, if I hadn’t acted. Have the decency to thank me for that at least.”

I risked the nausea to lift my head. Sallow afternoon light shone through the branches of the trees, leaving Abigail and me in shadow. The rumble of traffic nearby made my head throb even worse, but it told me where we were: a culvert near the road, where the runoff drained down to Hammond Pond.
A whack on the back of the head,
I thought,
and then she dragged me here. How? She’s barely strong enough to walk…or she should be.

“It’s no good,” she said again, almost to herself. “Not now that the horn is whole.”

I put both hands to my head and drew a great, hiccupping breath.

“I can’t believe you didn’t hold on to the baldric. Do you know how much I trusted you? Do you have any idea?”

For about two seconds her tone did exactly what it was supposed to do: reduce me to a shivering, penitent wreck. I huddled closer to the ground. “If you had bothered to tell me—” I stopped as the rest of my brain began to wake up.

“Don’t you blame this on me,” she snapped. “I’ll acknowledge you had good intentions, but there’s only so much I can do to rectify the situation now that you’ve blundered into it.”

“No,” I said. “I am not going to sit around here arguing over who’s to blame. Not while Nate is out there.” I pulled myself to my feet, swayed a moment, and decided I could stand. “Now. Where is he?”

Abigail opened her mouth, then closed it again. “Dead.”

The word, short and blunt as a blackjack, hit me harder than Abigail’s rock had. I put my hands to my head, and while my body didn’t react—it had too much to deal with already—inside I felt as if I’d been knocked to the ground again.

“Or as good as,” she went on, and the part of me that had been curled up and screaming paused, waiting to hear more. “The Gabriel Hounds don’t give up
their prey. What we need to do now is make up for your error.” She paced back and forth, her bloody feet leaving no trace in the culvert. “I can rein in my brother, convince him to leave the horn in my keeping and then disable it again in the same way. What I need you to do is stay out of sight for a day or two. Probably it’d be best if you went to ground in a hotel; I can cover your bills. The one thing we don’t want is for him to notice you again.”

I closed my eyes. Not dead yet. Okay. I could work with that. I started to climb to the road, clutching the closest sapling to steady myself.

Abigail’s voice broke into my thoughts like a buzz saw through a cello. “This is
important
, Hound. I can work with him only so long as he’s mostly my brother. If you confront him directly, Prescott will come to the fore; he’s already obsessed with you and Skelling both. Wait a couple of days, and I’ll get Patrick out of town. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” I echoed. I understood all right. I’d been thinking with my head, juggling responsibilities like they were weighted pins, treating them all the same. I’d thought I could draw a line around my city, around my loved ones, and keep them safe so long as the line remained. But those lines meant nothing, not outside my own head. It was time to think with my blood. “I’m going.”

Abigail shook her finger in my face. “I owe you a debt, Miss Scelan, regardless of what failings you’ve had, and I don’t intend to lose the chance to pay you back through your folly.”

“My
—” There were limits. I grabbed her by the shoulders, ignoring the screech of pain in my head. “My folly? What about yours, Huston? How many people have died because your brother is walking around half dead?” She flinched, and I knew I’d guessed right. “How many of your own family have faded away and died, bit by bit, drained for loci, just because you brought him back?”

She lifted her chin and met my glare with a cool and weary defiance. “He’s my brother,” she said, but at the back of her eyes I saw a flicker, and knew. “You don’t understand.”

“Oh, I do. They didn’t die because you brought him back.” My skin started to crawl, and I wanted nothing more than to shove her away and scrub the feel of that family from my hands. “They died because you
kept
him alive. If you had stopped, if you’d cut him off and kept him from stealing more life, you’d have to admit you’d done something wrong in bringing him back. And you just couldn’t do that.”

Abigail’s eyes blazed white with fury, but the line of her mouth crinkled and wavered, and I knew I’d struck home. “I said as much to you—”

“You said you might have made a mistake. Might! Lady, that’s like saying this place might smell a little bad.” I shook her so hard her head rattled back and forth. “You kept your monster alive all these years—you even helped him get the goddamned horn, even when you knew what kind of man he was. Even after he went on about ‘respect’ and ‘the old chaos’—how could you imagine that he’d use the horn for anything good? And now, now he’s gone after Nate!”

She jerked out of my grip. “How dare you—”

Something rustled on the far side of the culvert, something larger than a chipmunk finding its way through the brush, and Abigail turned to look, puzzlement eclipsing her guilty rage. I took my chance. I knocked her cane away and kicked her feet out from under her so that she fell full-length in the mud, then caught a handful of her hair when she tried to rise. “Now,” I said, crouching down to whisper in her ear, “you are going to tell me how to get him back from the Hunt, and you are going to get the hell out of my way so I can put down that horror you call a brother. Do you hear me?”

She gave a shaky, sobbing gasp, and abruptly I realized that I was beating up an old woman in a hospi
tal gown. I relaxed my grip, and she slumped to the ground, panting in great wheezing rasps, the kind that no one with whole lungs makes.

“I knew you’d be here,” said a treble voice.

I turned. Katie stood at the side of the road, looking down at us. “Katie,” I said, and let go of Abigail entirely. “Are you all right?” God, I’d completely forgotten about her. How long had she been there, looking for me, alone and vulnerable?

“I’m fine,” she said with the carelessness of a kid describing a day at school. She skidded down the side of the culvert until she reached my side. “Evie—”

Abigail pointed a shaking finger at her. “How did you get here? How did you find us?”

Katie blinked—not abashed or shocked by the question, but genuinely surprised by it, as one would be surprised by one’s cat talking. She looked at me, as if asking permission to answer. “You got down from the tree okay?” I asked, getting to my feet.

She nodded, and when she answered, spoke only to me, turning a little away from Abigail. “When the…the dogs came out, I stayed up the tree and didn’t look. But when they were gone, you were too, and so I found a clear puddle and looked into it, the way Sarah showed me. And I saw you.” She stopped, huge gray eyes searching my face, but whatever she sought, she couldn’t find. Abigail made an impatient “go on” gesture, and Katie glanced at her again with that same puzzlement. “And I saw you, so I could figure out where you were from that.”

“Good work,” I said, mentally filing away
the way Sarah showed me
for later.

“Followed you,” Abigail said in a tone I knew well. Adepts always have the bad habit of stopping to process the implications of new magic even if they’re in danger. I suppose it could be fascinating to know how the demon devouring you got to this plane, but I’d never had the presence or absence of mind to care about such things. For Abigail, it was a way to keep
from dealing with the immediate consequences of her actions. “That makes some sense. I’d aligned myself with you, so maybe we’d be entangled—”

“‘Aligned’? What do you mean, ‘aligned’?” And how long had that been going on, for that matter? I didn’t like the idea of having an undercurrent chaperone when it was Skelling, and even less if it was Abigail.

She brushed off my question. “But there’s a binding on me, Hound. No one should have been able to find either one of us.”

I glanced over my shoulder at her. “You don’t know the half of it,” I said. “I’m the Hound, descendant of Sceolang the hound of Finn Mac Cool. No binding could hold him, and none can hold me, not unless I wish it.”

Abigail snorted. “Oh, yes, the great Hound. Which is why you have to have little girls coming to rescue you.”

It was a petty, useless retort, and I think she knew it. I turned to face her—the landscape wobbled, but not badly, and while the pain hadn’t lessened, I seemed to have gotten used to it. “She’s not rescuing me,” I said, and put a protective hand on Katie’s shoulder. “She’s just worried about her brother.”

Abigail actually flinched, and for a moment her scent flickered, as if her hold on existence had faltered. She took a few steps forward, reaching for Katie. “I’m so sorry—”

I stepped between them. “Don’t you touch her.”

“Evie, it’s okay.” Katie took my hand from her shoulder and walked up to Abigail. “She can’t hurt me. See?”

Before I could do anything, she stuck her hand out—right through Abigail’s stomach. Abigail winced but didn’t seem to be in pain, not even when Katie waved her hand back and forth, apparently encountering no resistance.

“She’s not really here.” Katie withdrew her hand. “I didn’t see her in the puddle either.”

Puddle or no, I knew what I’d felt when I hit her. I caught Abigail’s hand. It was bony and frail, but still solid under my touch. I could even feel a faint pulse under my fingers. “But—how did you drag me here, how can I touch you?”

“I’m aligned with you, idiot,” she snapped, though there was now a weariness in her voice, and her gaze kept returning to Katie. “I had to find an anchor to make it out here, and I knew I’d have to take the baldric back from you. So I’m present for you, if no one else.”

I shook my head. I’d heard of projection—hell, I’d read my share of woo-woo theory back when I first encountered the undercurrent. In some branches you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting someone who claimed to have mastered the art of astral projection (usually with an offer to demonstrate, for a fee). But I’d never had a reliable report of it. Even the Fiana, when they were powerful, hadn’t been said to do that.

How many loci had this woman absorbed over the years in order to pass them on to the thing in her brother’s shape? How much of those loci had stayed behind? Or—and the thought made the back of my neck go clammy—was it just a sign of how the link with her brother had unmoored her spirit? Had her link to a dead man made it easier for her to slip the bonds of the physical world?

I took Katie by the shoulder and pulled her back to my side. “Where’s the rest of you?” I asked, not sure I wanted to hear the answer.

Abigail plucked at the hospital gown. “Still in my bed, getting prodded with needles. I’m not
dead
, Hound.”

“Not yet,” Katie said.

The silence that followed her innocent declaration might have been funny under other circumstances. “Let’s go, Katie,” I said.

Abigail looked up, her eyes wide and bloodshot. “No. No, you have to stay under cover—if Patrick
finds you, if you go searching for him, he’ll have the advantage—”

“Goodbye.” I turned my back on her, and Katie and I began climbing up towards the road.

“You’ll only find his corpse!” she screamed after us. “He’s dead, they’ve killed him, and now you’re going to get yourself killed too!”

Katie closed her eyes and shuddered as Abigail’s shrieks faded behind us. “I don’t know if Nate’s alive,” she said in a small voice. “I couldn’t see.”

“Neither do I,” I said. “We can hope.”

I took her as far as the hospital lot, and Katie insisted on staying there. “Nate’s car is here,” she said. “I can wait in his car. Or…or I can just go and call Sarah from the desk. I’ll be
fine
, Evie.”

I knew that tone of voice; it was the same note that she’d had when explaining why she’d called me over several nights ago, the scary self-sufficiency that she’d developed, whether to deal with her Sight or her home life, I didn’t know. “Promise me you’ll call Sarah,” I said. “I don’t want you to be here in the car on your own.”

“Go get him. I’ll be fine.” She glared at me, her lip trembling. “I can be just as stubborn as he is, Evie.”

I agreed, but some things you made an eight-year-old promise, if you were human. If you wanted to stay human. I glanced at the sun. It was low in the sky, too low. I’d been unconscious too long, and Nate could easily have tired, the Gabriel Hounds could have caught him, the Hunt could have ended.

Or it might not have. I had to hang on to that. I knelt and put my hands on Katie’s shoulders. “I can’t waste any more time, Katie. Promise me.”

She nodded. “I promise. Good hunting.”

That won a smile from me, and I kissed her forehead. “I’ll see you soon.”

I stood and let my mind slide away from this place, from the scents that made it alive: Katie’s electric blue and the gritty gold of the parking lot and the ozone
of the oncoming thunderstorm, and even the hopeless, watered-down scent of Abigail’s projection. I sharpened my focus until only two scents remained: Nate’s trail, smooth like polished stone, and the far too familiar pack-scent of the Gabriel Hounds.