Wild Hunt (26 page)

The timbre of its growl shifted, and a shiver or ripple passed through it. “
No
,” it said in that voice like frost. “
You fed us, you freed us, but you do not have us. And he still has the horn.
”

The one beside it turned to look at me, jaw dropping open in a hungry and devious grin. “
If we were fully free, if we ran, we could make him the first of our kill
.”

I didn’t like the eager, longing look in the hound’s eye, or its use of the word
first
. Swiping rain out of my eyes, I withdrew my hand from the hound nearest me. It sighed, almost languorously. Time to hope I’d kept my powder dry.

Patrick pulled at his collar, clawing at it, and the high line of cloth showed a dark stain. “It’s a novel way of breaking the Hunt,” he said, still casually, as if all of this mattered not at all. “And I suspect you could do it again, and again. But you only have so much blood in you.”

“At least I’m better off than you,” I snapped, and yanked Skelling’s gun from its holster. It felt natural in my hand, as if Skelling were guiding me, and I pulled the trigger.

Click
. Nothing. A misfire, an antique called on to do too much. Patrick smiled—absently, as if I’d made a weak pun—and his questing fingers found what they sought. His hand clenched, not on his collar but on the skin beneath, and surely it was my imagination that provided that horrible wet ripping sound as he pulled something free from the hollow of his throat.

For a moment it looked like a scrap of damp paper, flapping in his hand. Then lightning shivered from one end of the sky to the other, and Patrick held the Harlequin Horn.

No wonder the hounds were mortal. Patrick had hidden the horn in his own dead flesh, in that prison of preserved mortality, and the death that he could not stave off fully had seeped into them. The sight of that shredded, flapping skin at the base of his throat turned my stomach as much as the sacrilege of it did.

The Gabriel Hounds tensed, and on that connection we shared, the tenuous taste of blood in our mouths, I could feel how they both longed for this and loathed it, craved the hunt and despised the man who’d called them to it. But they were the Wild Hunt, and they’d go where the horn sent them. And I no longer had any space to run, or the breath to do so anymore.

Patrick shook rain off the horn, then drew breath, a strangely deliberate motion for someone who didn’t usually breathe—then lurched forward, falling to his knees. A grimy, rain-slick hand closed around his ankle and pulled. The Harlequin Horn flew from his hands, into the bushes.

Naked and streaming with blood and rain, Nate dragged himself over the edge of the outcropping. Patrick scrambled away, but not fast enough, and Nate caught him by his ruined throat.

I raised Skelling’s gun for a second shot, but couldn’t see enough to aim—or perhaps…perhaps that was a cool, ghostly hand on mine, staying it, saying,
Wait
.

“Not this time!” I yelled, and Nate answered me with a cry that only just clung to humanity. Patrick’s head rocked back on his neck with a sickening crunch, but even more sickening was the crackle as he swung upright again, glaring at Nate with the fury of the dead.

I stumbled closer and aimed again, just as lightning struck so close that there was no space between the blinding light and shock of thunder. Scent returned before vision, thick with fireworks, and I raised the gun blindly.

Patrick’s hands glowed red—the remnant of locus after locus, absorbed into his flesh and used to fuel his unnatural death—and I had just enough time to catch a glimpse of Nate’s face, lit from below like a kid using a flashlight to tell a scary story. No resignation or farewell in his expression now; this was plain fury—and it did not change, even as the light in Patrick’s hands exploded.

There had to be sound, I knew that there had to have been some sound, but all I remember is the pale smudge of Nate’s body flying back off the cliff, over the steel-gray water. I screamed—I couldn’t hear it, but I felt it in the pain in my throat—and scrambled to the edge. Nothing. Not even the splash of a body striking water.

It’s not that far a drop,
I told myself,
not that far a drop, and into water—he’s all right, he’s got to be all right—
I switched the gun to my other hand and dropped to a crouch, trying to find a way down.

“Your shifter’s dead, Skelling.” Patrick straightened up behind me, vertebrae crackling as they slid into their proper place.

I turned, raising my gun. “I’ll kill you for this.”

He laughed—he’d edged closer to where the horn had fallen, and the wound between throat and chest where he’d pried it free still flapped like the edges of a torn shirt. “You can’t. No one can, Skelling, something your little shifter forgot. Just give me the horn and I’ll let you be.”

Give him the Horn? Skelling?
It was as if liquid nitrogen ran down my back, turning my entire body into something hard and brittle. He’d called me Skelling—not the name he knew was mine. Patrick had broken in the midst of the fight, lost with the horn and whatever strength Nate had knocked from him; this was Prescott, the ghost in the midst of him, and he had a ghost’s memory and reactions.

This was how he’d responded after Skelling’s wife had attacked, after she’d lost her patience with this man and inflicted the bite that would kill him in time. For a moment I remembered her face, wished her ghost well in whatever world it had gone to.

To either side of me, the Gabriel Hounds waited, uninterested. This had nothing to do with them, not until the horn was winded again. They could wait.

Just behind Patrick, standing where Nate had been thrown from the cliff, a shape blurred through the
rain. I caught my breath, but the shape became clearer: a figure in a long duster and broad-brimmed hat, a shape close to my own in posture and form and even face, if you ignored the whole ghost part and the mustache. It spoke, and I matched its words with my own. “I didn’t think you were an idiot, Prescott.”

Patrick—Prescott—turned as if pulled by an invisible string, facing the ghost of the man he’d killed. “What are you talking about?” He turned back to face me, directing the question to both of us.

I spoke in unison with Skelling’s ghost. “Only an idiot would think I’d let you go now.” Skelling raised his gun, turning to the side a little, and I did the same, mirroring him. Had Patrick not been there, we might have resembled a pair of duelists.

“Let me go? You don’t have a choice in it, Skelling!” Prescott shouted. “I’ll still give you a chance—don’t pretend you can’t be bought!”

“You killed her,” Skelling said, and “You hurt him,” I said, praying inwardly that history had not repeated, that Nate was all right, even now swimming to shore. “Five months across the country, and you killed her for one little horn.”

“It’s mine! I made that thieving whore invoke it, I taught her how—it’d have been mine long since if she hadn’t fled!”

“Do you really think I give a shit?” For this, at least, I didn’t have to imitate Skelling; we shared the same exhausted contempt.

Patrick snarled, a sound almost pitiful after the howls I’d heard this night, and that same light began to build between his fingers. He spun, half a turn, half a turn again, staring first at me and then at Skelling, unable to decide which of us was the real one.

Thunder rumbled on the far side of the quarry, the last vestiges of the storm. The rain opened around me as it had around Patrick, peeling back like a curtain, and like an image from a broken mirror, Abigail Huston walked through me and to her brother.

Maybe that decided him. Maybe not. For whatever reason, he chose the wrong hound—the dead one, Skelling’s ghost—to attack. Both guns—real and unreal—went off at once, and though I couldn’t see which one hit him, I’ll go to my grave believing it was both.

Patrick staggered back, his shoulders bowing inward around the ruined mess of his chest. Abigail caught her brother in her arms as he fell, and for a moment they were two children, together against the world. Then the rain swept over them both, and she was gone, and his body slumped to the ground, inanimate at last.

Skelling looked at me—directly in the eye, the first time he’d done that—and touched the brim of his hat in either thanks or the acceptance of thanks. The last of the rain trembled, and he was gone.

I stuffed Skelling’s revolver into its holster and scrambled toward the edge of the cliff. Behind me the Gabriel Hounds slid over the ground like shadows, congregating. They did not even acknowledge Patrick’s body as meat; it had been too long dead for that.

The horn of the Wild Hunt hung from a wild rosebush a foot away from me, twisting slightly, beaded with rain. I stared at it for a moment, then dragged it from the thorns. It didn’t tingle in my hand so much as subside, as if it had been resonating up till then and my touch stilled it.

I slung its baldric over my shoulder, then scrambled down the bank, rocks and mud following in my path. The rain had stopped, but the sky was as dark as before, clouds giving way to late evening. And the damned water didn’t reflect a thing.

“Nate!” I clambered over the rocks at the foot of the cliff, trying to guess where he’d hit the water. His scent—bloodied and thick with adrenaline—was around here somewhere, but the water and the remnants of the Hunt had muddled it, and I couldn’t spare the time to stop and sort out trail from trail. “Nate! Goddammit, Nate, answer me!”

He didn’t answer. But something else did. The water
at my feet rippled away from me, snaking toward the center of the quarry.

A low growl emerged from the Gabriel Hounds, and I turned just as the tines of a stag’s skull broke the water’s surface, rising up like a bad memory. The empty sockets of the skull shouldn’t have been visible, not in the lack of light, but somehow the shadows of bone on bone were clear, as if they’d been etched into the sky.

Cradled against the pillar of water, like a child’s toy or a broken piece of driftwood, was Nate. I cried out and stumbled into the water, trudging through the weeds that grabbed at my feet.

“I caught him
,” the spirit of the quarry said. “
I caught him. I wanted…I thought—”

Nate’s face was turned away from me, but his arms and legs hung limp as any discarded doll’s. I couldn’t see if he was moving. I couldn’t tell if he was breathing.

“I caught him
,” it repeated, and I remembered what it had said, how it had grown from a guardian into something that didn’t quite understand what it was, how its power and innocence made it unaware that there were things it should not take. The quarry had grown in power from the gifts of loyalty and love given it by those who came to this place, but the sacrifice of a life was much, much more powerful than that slow accretion of magic. It’d be a temptation to older and stronger spirits than this one.

“Don’t
.” The words came not from the water but from the hounds behind me, their fire-pit eyes staring out at me. “
Don’t.
”

“Hell with you!” I yelled, slogging forward till I was waist deep, the rocks underfoot threatening to drop away into hidden depths. “Give him back! He’s not yours!”

The stag’s skull turned to one side. “
What will you give me in return for him?”

I howled and thumped at the water with my fists, doing nothing but splashing myself. Even if Nate had
only fallen in, if the blast hadn’t hurt him, how long had he been in the water? Was it already too late? “You son of a bitch,” I gasped. “Just give him back to me.”

The quarry spirit paused, its waters as motionless as Nate’s body, then bowed, curling over him like a wave. “
I accept
.”

It dropped back into the water as if a string had been cut, taking Nate with it. I shouted and splashed forward, then stopped as the water suddenly receded.

A wave rose up, higher than my head, high as the cliffs around us. I backed away, but too late: the wave struck me in the face, then passed through me as if I were no more than a net. For a moment icy water surrounded me, invading all the way down to the bottom of my lungs, and then it was gone, leaving me with only the lingering taste of ferns and stone.

I floundered backward, blinking water out of my eyes. Something silvery flickered under the surface, like the gleam of fish scales, darting away toward the murky shape of the stag’s skull, deep under the water. Then there was only the reflection of the moon, wan and mottled through the clouds.

Nate lay on the shore in a gray heap. I half ran, half swam toward him and dropped to my knees beside him. Turning him over, I pressed my fingers to his throat.

“That was a bad bargain you made
.” One of the hounds circled me and snorted at Nate’s body.

Bargain?
“Shut up,” I said. He still had a pulse, unless I was mistaking my own heartbeat for his. But he wasn’t breathing, even if he no longer had the frightening bonelessness of before.

Another hound nosed at Nate’s hair. “
He’s the only one of our given prey to survive our chase
,” it murmured, in a tone that might have been thoughtful coming from a human throat.

“Unusual
,” said the first. “
Yes. But you still should not have bartered that.”

“Bartered what? Get out of my way.” I tilted Nate’s head back, praying that I still remembered how to do this, and put my mouth to his.

It seemed forever, but it could only have been a few breaths before Nate twitched against me—then shoved me away from him. I fell back, landing on my mauled arm, and Nate rolled over and vomited a long stream of black water. Panting, he turned to look at me over his shoulder.

“You utter idiot—” I started, the words cracking and failing me.

“You damned irresponsible—” he said at the same time.

“—ever put yourself in danger like that—”

“—never do that to me again.”

I don’t remember which of us moved first, but then we were clinging together, pressed so tight there was almost no room to breathe. “…couldn’t take it,” I heard myself saying, and turned so that I spoke against his skin. “I couldn’t stand losing you, not like that, not at all.”