Wild Hunt (4 page)

I leaned down, grabbed his shirt, and dragged him to his feet. “Stop working magic. Not in my house.” I gave him a quick shake, then pushed him toward the door. “Both of you, out. I don’t care what you want to ask me; if you’re going to work magic on me you lose all right of audience.”

“I protest,” the shorter one said, the words coming out in a bleat. “I have worked no magic in your presence.”

“But it’ll be a while till that ward wears off,” I pointed out. “Maybe some other time.”

Mollified, the shorter one went, with one last glance at the fountain. The taller, to his credit, didn’t try for one last stare-off, but bowed his head and murmured a meaningless courtesy as he passed me. I closed the door behind them and waited till I heard the outer door latch, then turned to face Sarah. “What the hell is wrong with those guys? I can’t turn around without running into half-baked adepts these days.”

She let out a long breath. “Boston’s changing, Evie.” She folded her hands in her lap and didn’t smile when I looked at her. “You have to have noticed it.”

I’d noticed a few things, but in all honesty I’d hoped to stay out of the worst of it. I was still, as most of these guys perceived matters, relatively powerless. Blood-magic could only get you so far, and since I limited any excursions into ritual or spirit magic to the minor invocations—well, these days I did, and involuntary possession doesn’t count—I thought I’d stayed a minor player in this game.

The trouble was that it wasn’t quite as true as I’d have liked. I couldn’t turn off my talent anymore—couldn’t keep from noticing the scents that everything carried, in a way that was more distracting than a bus-load of kindergartners in a chamber-music concert. And, it now seemed, my own opinion of my status didn’t matter nearly as much as other people’s opinions. “You heard them. They were sizing me up. They think
I
—” I shook my head, almost nauseated by the thought. “They think I’m the reason the Fiana fell.”

“Well? Aren’t you?”

“No! Not alone, anyway!” Sarah raised an eyebrow, and I glared at her. “You know what I mean.”

“Maybe. I never did get the whole story out of you.”

“Yeah. Well.” I glanced down at her hands. It hadn’t
been more than a couple of weeks since the bandages had come off, and though all her fingers and tendons were where they ought to be, it could easily have gone the other way.

Sarah and I had both been part of the whole cataclysm that pulled down the last remnants of the Fiana. Granted, we’d been working at cross purposes for a lot of that, due to several miscommunications, but when it came down to it we were allies, and more important, still friends. But while I’d walked away with no ill effects (physically, at least; the jury was still out on emotional and magical matters), Sarah had gotten the equivalent of a heap of broken glass in her hands. She’d made it out like it was no big deal, claiming that it just gave her an excuse to stick her assistant on counter duty more often, but it didn’t take any great degree of empathy to see that she’d been rattled pretty badly.

“That’s not the point,” I said finally. “They were here to check me out. To see what brought down the Fiana. Sarah, that’s beyond creepy. That’s bordering on perilously fucked up.”

“Exactly.” She got to her feet. “Evie, they’re not the only ones. We have a serious power vacuum in the city, and just because there aren’t many other magical organizations out there—”

“Or magicians who can organize worth a damn,” I muttered. Most magicians were what Sarah calls “entropogenic,” the kind of people who automatically destabilize any situation they come into contact with. And on top of that, the undercurrent is a paranoid place, one that almost completely precludes cooperation. You don’t see jackals working together for much the same reason.

“It doesn’t make us any safer.” She reached back and fiddled with her bun, dislodging more of the curls that had never wanted to be there in the first place. “I’ve been in touch with some of the coven members, and the others. Like Deke, and the Roxbury families. We’re trying to start a, a neighborhood watch.”

“In the undercurrent? Good fucking luck. Magicians don’t work together, Sarah. You taught me that, and Fiana aside, it’s still true.” The only reason the Fiana had held together for as long as they had was the unnatural amount of power they had been able to draw on, a locus as bright as the sun and as dangerous. But that locus—that goddess—was dead or free, depending on how you looked at it, and there was no way the Fiana could pull together again. As for enlightened self-interest, I’d look for that in a cat before I’d look for it in magicians. “What are you going to promise them? Join the watch and get a free toaster?”

“We’ve got you.”

I choked on my next retort. Sarah watched me intently. She was serious, I realized.

“You brought down—or appeared to bring down—the Fiana. You’re known, like it or not. People will listen to you, at least for a little while. And if we get everyone in one place, we might have a chance of putting something together. It’d be very low key, like a code of conduct—no poaching loci, no more screwing each other over.”

“You might as well ask them to stop breathing.”

“Evie, it’s not just possible, it’s necessary. Those two, they were the nicest of the guys coming in from out of town. We’re going to have newcomers, and not all of them are going to be good additions to our fair city.” She smiled as she said the last bit, and I tried to smile back. “Will you at least give it a try?”

I shook my head. “Sarah…”

“Just invite some of the locals. I’m having an organizational meeting tomorrow evening at Summit Hill, in Brookline. It’s neutral ground; the seer enclave’s vouched for it. If you just ask a few people, spread the word, then they’ll come. I know it.”

I rubbed my hand over my face. It was true that people had gotten dragged into the undercurrent and hurt just because there wasn’t any fellow-feeling among magicians. Even a half-assed honor code might
be better than nothing. I looked down at Sarah’s hands again, at the network of scars. “Okay. Fine. But you’re going to be out a lot of punch and cookies if this doesn’t work.”

She grinned at me. “Thanks for the support. Can I ask you to do something more for me?” She fumbled around in her purse—I’d never seen the point of carrying anything smaller than a messenger bag, but Sarah seemed to cram everything into a reticule the size of a biscuit—and produced a stack of flyers, the kind that wouldn’t last more than ten minutes if they were stuck up on a telephone pole. “Just pass this around, if you can, and I’ll spread the word through my own channels…How’s the research going?”

“Oh, hell.” I nudged
A Survey of Deities
with my foot. “I’m not cut out for studying. And there’s a crap-load of hounds out there. Seems like every single European nation has its own batch.”

“Well, they were an important animal to primitive people,” she said, writing on the back of the flyers. “And you still are.”

“Arf.” I took the flyers and set them on top of the books. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

She smiled. “This time, I think I do.”

I let her out, then stood by the window for a while, only barely registering the flow of the game in the background. I didn’t want to admit it to myself, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to admit it to Sarah, but I could feel a flicker of hope. Maybe we could put something together. Maybe being in the undercurrent didn’t have to mean that you were on your own.

It was a scary kind of hope.

I sighed, then cursed as I finally heard what the radio was telling me. The Red Sox had gone even further into the hole, twelve-two. Goddammit.

T
he next morning Tania demanded to know why I’d missed the last deliveries from the day before, then stuck me with an extra shift to make up for it. Not even that could dent my mood; I’d woken up smiling, full of hope for both Sarah’s plan and the Sox’s postseason outlook. I rode out on my rounds with Sarah’s flyers tucked into the front flap of my courier bag.

One of the advantages this job had over waitressing (which was what I’d done to fill in the cracks before the finder work had really taken off) was that I could use the scraps of time I had to make contacts all over the city. My first run was down to the Longwood area, so it made sense to stop by the drain under the River-way where I knew Deke was living these days. Deke wasn’t technically homeless, but he didn’t like sleeping at home more than two nights in a row. For a more attractive guy this might not be a problem; for Deke it meant the drains.

He was practicing the T. E. Lawrence trick with a Zippo as I scrambled down into the culvert. “Heya, Deke. Things better than they were?”

“You know not to ask me that,” he said serenely, not taking his eyes from the flame. Deke always smelled slightly burnt, although I knew he was careful
with his fires, or at least when they got out of control they didn’t hurt anyone else. I didn’t mind the smoky scent, partly because it mitigated his natural damp-woodchuck smell.

I didn’t “know not to ask him,” but you don’t argue with crazies and adepts. “Sarah asked me to drop this off for you.” I put the flyer on top of his sleeping bag, getting just enough dew on it so that he wouldn’t immediately use it for kindling. “She’s holding a meeting tonight.”

“I know,” he said. “So she’s serious about it.”

“Serious as Sarah ever gets.”

Deke grunted in reply. I hitched my bag back into place and started up the hill, thinking our conversation was over. “Hound?” he called after me.

I turned. “Yeah?”

Deke had found a pencil from somewhere and had used it to drag the flyer closer. “Will you be there?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Huh.” He gave me a long look, first one eye then the other, then closed up the Zippo and nodded. “All right.”

Well, that was encouraging. So I followed the same pattern for the rest of my day. I dropped off packets for lawyers on the waterfront and handed a flyer to Tessie, who hadn’t stepped off her boat in twenty years but whose contacts ranged all over the docks. I took copies into the North End and dropped in at the court at Tomato Gianni’s (and mooched a piece of their garlic bread while I was at it). I weighed a flyer down with a brick so that Maryam would see it when she crawled off her bed of gravel, and I gave three identically creased copies to the Triplets down in Dorchester.

And the more I did this, the more I got the sense that Sarah was right: Boston had changed. It wasn’t anything you could point to on a map or note down in a survey, but it was there, even if only a few people were positioned to notice it. If I’d been inclined toward poetry, I’d have called it a sense of absence; if I were
more practical, I’d have called it too many presences. As it was, I called it a damn nuisance.

I’d gotten through my first sixteen years in this city without noticing the big magical presence that pulled most of the undercurrent’s strings in Boston, like a cyclist paying attention only to the road right in front of her and not the tractor-trailer coming up on her left. But just as there were some doors that opened only one way, there were some things that stayed noticed once you learned to notice them. And acknowledging the Fiana meant that I couldn’t ignore the way things had changed after their fall.

There was a lot of new talent in town, for starters. It wasn’t just a matter of shadowcatchers on street corners, though I still found a few and did my damnedest to send them off somewhere they could recover. No, the recent arrivals included low-class wardwatchers and fire-eaters, people with just enough talent to stand out but not enough to defend themselves against more savvy adepts. Who had also moved into town, drawn partly by the influx of prey and partly by the new territory up for grabs. And then there were the home-grown adepts, the ones who’d had the sense to get out when the Fiana were in power and now discovered they could actually come home again.

And pretty much everyone who came into town had heard something about me. The reverse was not necessarily true.

By the end of the second shift, I was starting to get that boneless feeling that twelve hours of Boston potholes will do to you (if they don’t dislocate your goddamn shoulder first). But my last stop was in Chinatown, and so as much as I dreaded it, I stopped in at the Three Cranes.

I don’t know what I’d expected, but the huge moving truck blocking half the street was not it. Yuen’s wife directed a small army of movers, screaming like a drill sergeant at any who got out of line. I locked up my bike and edged past the truck, scraping
my butt against the wall, and headed down the steps to the Three Cranes.

A couple of movers who’d escaped from above worked on strapping what looked like Saran Wrap around a rack of boxes, and a third tested the weight of a crate before setting it down and shaking his head. Most of the assorted jars and tanks on the racks had been boxed up, and the ceiling looked a lot higher now that it didn’t have bundles of unnamable plants strung up to dry. I realized I was crouching, not out of habit but as a reaction to the weird openness above me; the unexpected space made me feel unnaturally vulnerable. It smelled of dust in here, dust kicked up after many years, and that was enough to hide most other scents from me.

At the far end of the shop, where Yuen had held his informal court, a woman in a pin-striped suit and an older man in black bent together over a glass case. He pointed at something inside, and she nodded, speaking too quietly for me to hear.

“Hi,” I said, then stopped, recognizing Elizabeth Yuen’s muted scent before I made the connection between her and this sharp young woman. She’d cut her long black hair into a bob, and the suit, while it looked good on her, was a far cry from her earlier traditional white clothes. She didn’t look like anyone’s daughter now. “Miss—” I tried, uncertain how to address her.

The old man stood up, laying his hands on the case as if protecting it from a blow. Elizabeth turned to see me and nodded. “Hound.” She gestured to me. “This is the one I was telling you about. When you didn’t show, we had to make other arrangements, and she had to take your place.”

“You couldn’t even wait a day?” the old man asked. He was shorter than me, with that stooped look some people get as they grow older. What was left of his hair was a white-gray fuzz from one ear to the other, and liver spots dotted his already-dark skin. I could catch a little of his scent through the dust: oil of some kind, not
unpleasant, and a furry undertone to it that for some reason reminded me of weak coffee in paper cups.

“No, we couldn’t,” Elizabeth said, searching through the papers on the desk.

“Hm,” said the old man. He produced a pair of glasses from his breast pocket and put them on. “How’d she do?”

“Um,” I said, and took a flyer from my bag, hoping that it would draw some attention. Well, how
do
you interrupt people who seem determined to talk about you like you’re not there?

“Well enough, on short notice.”
High praise
, I thought, then kicked myself for it. This woman’s father had died the other day; I had no cause to be getting snotty with her.

The man looked me up and down, eyes narrowed, as if either committing my features to memory or checking them against a list. “What’s her name?”

“Scelan,” I said. “Genevieve Scelan. And yours?”

“This is Reverend James Woodfin,” Yuen’s daughter said. Woodfin’s expression softened a little, and he smiled at her. “You brought your weapon?”

“I—what?” I glanced back at the movers. “No, that’s not why I’m here. It’s this—there’s a meeting, and I thought you might be interested in it.”

Elizabeth took the flyer out of my hand, gave it a glance, and shook her head. “Idiots.”

“It’s all right,” Woodfin said. “I can work with the specs you gave me.”

Specs?
I caught the flyer as Elizabeth was about to toss it away. “Mind telling me what’s going on?”

Elizabeth glanced at me as if surprised to find me still there. “He’ll be handling the last of the obligations my father incurred. I’m discharging my debts, Hound,” she added as she tugged the flyer from my hand and folded it in half. “I did say I would.”

“But my weapon—” This was an iffy subject for me these days. While the gun I had on hand for the
difficult cases no longer felt like it would burn my fingers, it still felt like what it was: a murder weapon. I’d never been comfortable carrying it, never mind the legal trouble I could get into for the modifications I’d had made (concealed weapons permits were very picky about things like unconventional ammunition). But somehow knowing how
not
to use it had made a difference. Now, though, I couldn’t make that distinction. I’d used that gun to kill a man, and that would always be part of the weapon.

“The reverend is a gunsmith,” Elizabeth explained. She nodded to the case, and I took a step closer to see that it was a display case, fronted with glass. Six niches each held an old-fashioned revolver, although one of them was melted down to a lump with charred grips and another looked like it had been dipped in ink. I craned my neck to see past the glare off the glass, but could only make out the writing below one of the intact guns:
Skelling
. “I promised you I’d find someone to fill in for my father,” Elizabeth added. “For the armaments, at least.”

“Don’t throw that away,” Woodfin said, catching the flyer before it could hit the trash. “If this lady’s going to be there, then I can meet her there. I can get a look at the in-practice marks on her weapon then.”

“Sorry? You want me to carry a gun into a meeting of magicians?”

Woodfin shrugged and settled into one of the chairs behind the counter with a grunt, then nodded to Elizabeth. “Will that work for you?”

“I suppose so. Bring the gun with you tonight, Hound. The reverend will meet you there.” She glanced at the flyer again, and her lip curled. Woodfin muttered something to her in what sounded like Chinese, and she responded in kind. I felt a flare of monolingual jealousy and quickly stifled it. All this weird shit lately had gotten to me: who was I to expect every person in the undercurrent to acknowledge me?

Granted, I thought, that might make it easier to keep track of who was about to do something monumentally stupid.

I pulled up in front of my office and gazed at it blankly. I had maybe two hours before Sarah’s meeting, and originally I’d planned to use the time to take care of the last household tasks for the week (I had a jar of pickles and half a gallon of lumpy milk in the fridge, and the hamper was so full of dirty clothes that they sprang out onto the floor when I opened it). But just now I felt a little too drained—and, somehow, insulted—to put that time to any good use.

“Excuse me?” said a woman’s voice, just over my shoulder.

I jumped—for a moment I’d mistaken her for Mrs. Heppelwhite, the neighborhood scold. Mrs. Heppelwhite’s notice would have been all I needed to turn this day lousy. But the speaker wasn’t her: instead, a dainty, pale woman in her sixties smiled at me from the end of the walk.

Her face was wide and young-looking, but with worry lines at her temples and mouth, and her hair looked as if it had once been an indiscriminate shade between brown and blonde and was now an indiscriminate shade between brown and gray. It was cut short, shorter than mine was these days, and had a simple sweep to it that made me think of pictures from the 1940s. She smiled at me, a little awkwardly. “I’d like to get through, please.”

“Oh…sorry.” I got off my bike and pulled it out of her way.

“Thank you. Oh—one other thing.” She reached into her purse—she was even wearing gloves, I noticed, which just added to her general air of anachronism—and took out a slip of paper. “Could you tell me whether Number Ninety-three is on this side of the street?”

“This is Number Ninety-three.” I was Number Ninety-three, apartment 1B. “Who are you looking for?”

“Someone by the name of G. Scelan. Do you know him?”

I smiled. A client, I thought, and not just that, but a client who despite her old-fashioned dress seemed pretty much normal. Which meant I might have a chance at a simple hunt to recharge me. “I’m her. Genevieve Scelan.” I shook her hand. Her fingers were as slender as reeds and probably about as strong. “Come on in; I’ll need a moment to get settled.”

I showed her in and pulled a jacket over my sweaty courier gear. She took a seat, purse propped in front of her, legs crossed at the ankles, and waited for me to settle into the chair on the far side of the desk. “Right,” I said. “What’s your name, and how can I help you?”

“Abigail Huston. Pleased to meet you.” She smiled again, and despite the lack of laugh lines in her face, there was a twinkly quality to it.

“And how do you like Boston, Abigail?”

She blinked, startled, then laughed. “No, I suppose I don’t look like a native.”

“Not really.”

“My brother always claims I can blend in anywhere.” She smiled. “He’s a flatterer. No, this is my first time here; the closest I ever got before now was out in Central Massachusetts.” Her smile thinned a little, as if it wasn’t a good memory, but the moment passed.

“Ah. How long are you here for?” Smile or no, there was something I couldn’t quite catch…I shifted a little in the chair. Was it the light in here?

“Well, that rather depends. You see, it’s somewhat of a long story—my mother passed away some years ago, and her executor finally transferred some of her possessions to me…”

Not the light. Not her voice either. I sniffed, and Abigail paused. I shook my head. “Go on. Please.”

She hesitated, then fidgeted, pulling off her gloves one finger at a time. “Well, one of the things that
was deeded to me was a set of chests belonging to my great-great-grandmother. I’ve only just started cataloguing the contents, and unfortunately, I think some of the items within might be stolen property.”