Wild Hunt (6 page)

By now, Sarah was in the midst of a very cogent plea for some sort of internal policing within Boston’s
undercurrent. I hunched over a little, gazing out across the slope of the park. Headlights limned the trees far to my left, and the sound of a car motor valiantly chugging up the hill followed them. I stretched a little, fumbled my jacket back into place, then froze as the headlights paused and someone played a merry staccato on the horn.

Far from scattering as I expected—hell, as I’d done in the past when someone drove up to a party that wasn’t exactly legal—the adepts merely glanced over their shoulders, if that, and kept talking. Sarah nodded to me, and I muttered a curse under my breath.
Sure, send the sane person to deal with the cops
.

Only it wasn’t the cops. It wasn’t even a curious local. As I reached the sidewalk, a man emerged from a tiny car and waved. “Glad I caught you!” Reverend Woodfin called, his voice carrying probably all the way to Worcester. “Sorry I’m late—I tried to drive up here on my own, but the old boat wouldn’t take the hill, and I had to go back to borrow Elizabeth’s car. You brought it?”

“Quiet. Yes, I brought it.” I slid the jacket off, wincing from the stickiness of it, and loosed my gun from its holster. “Can we make this quick? I’m not exactly comfortable with doing this out in public.”

“Oh, very nice.” Woodfin took up the gun and sighted down its barrel. “Yes, this is Yuen’s work.”

“Jesus,” I said, then stopped as he glared at me. “You could maybe be a little more careful about waving it around.”

“No one’s looking.” Woodfin laid the gun on a picnic table.

It gave me the cold shivers to see it there, not twenty feet from the playground. “Yeah, well, that’s not the point—”

“Pewter,” Woodfin announced. His hands moved over the gun with practiced ease, disassembling it as quickly as if it were made of Legos, despite the dim
light. “With just a flake of gold leaf…witch hazel? No, ginseng…” He stopped, peering into the innards of the gun, then regarded me a moment. I did my best to return his gaze without flinching. “You haven’t been taking care of this,” he said finally.

“Not really,” I admitted. The gun itself was perfectly legal, and I had the permits to prove it, but the ammunition was something else: Yuen’s own design, of the kind that might not kill everything I’d run into in the undercurrent but would at the very least slow it down. The gun itself didn’t work so well with normal bullets anymore, but then, I had no plans to use it in normal situations.

I glanced over my shoulder just in time to see one of the weedier adepts—the kind who could only aspire to Deke’s level—wander over to the water fountain and fill a plastic bottle. His eyes widened as he took in the gun and my shoulder holster, and he practically skipped back across the street in his desire to get away. I sighed and tried to block any more inadvertent glimpses of Woodfin’s work.

Woodfin finally snapped the gun back together and handed it to me by the barrel. “Put that away, and if it’s in bad condition in a year, you’ll have only yourself to blame.”

I slid the damn thing back into its holster and secured it. “Thanks.”

Woodfin waved over his shoulder as he walked back to Elizabeth’s little car. “Give me a couple of days, and I’ll have a clip to you.”

I watched him drive off, then stood by the tree at the top of the hill for a little while. A matron walking her puppy—no, it was a cat, and it practically dragged her across the road to get away from me—passed by, followed by a tired young man in Orthodox black. I shifted in place, trying to find a way that the gun didn’t hang heavily on me, then remembered my cell. Hadn’t someone called, earlier?

I pulled it out and checked it. Yes, and whoever had called had left a message. Still gazing down the hill, I dialed voice mail and waited.

Rena’s voice came over the line, scratchy and distracted by the office noise behind her. “Evie, it’s Rena. I’m still working—yes, hang on a moment, I’ll be there—” She paused, muffling the phone and talking to someone else. I smiled. “Yeah, still working on the case. But I wanted to tell you that Sun City Grill is doing their Kamikaze Karaoke night in a couple weeks. If I’m not done with this case by then, I’ll eat my badge—Shut up, Foster! I will too!—So what do you say? I know you can’t get enough of me embarrassing myself.”

“In a manner of speaking,” I murmured. Of the two of us, Rena was the one who really loved karaoke, but she’d only admit it after a couple beers. If I could just keep her from the Bonnie Tyler section of the song list, we’d be fine.

“So yeah, two weeks, Sun City.” She was almost laughing as she said it, and I could hear the relief in her voice at the thought of this light at the end of the tunnel. “We are on, girl!”

“We are on,” I repeated, and saved the message. I’d call her back later and confirm it. That would be something to look forward to after all this. I gazed down the hill at the gathered magicians and shook my head at what they were missing.

Sarah’s voice, raised in argument, drifted up from the hill. “—doesn’t matter if no one else—”

Christ
. I tugged my jacket shut again, then leaned against the tree.

“That’s a bit pathetic.”

I opened my eyes to see a blond young man in a double-breasted gray suit standing next to me with his hands clasped behind his back. He looked—well, there was only one word for it, and that was out of date: he looked dapper. Aware of my scrutiny, he tilted his head
to the side, as if I were a particularly difficult work of art that needed studying. “Is there a problem?” I said.

He smiled briefly, as if I’d made an appropriate but not particularly funny joke. “Not really. Not for me.” He nodded to the circle—no longer a circle, I noted, not now that it was starting to break up into hushed and vicious conversations. “Maybe for them.”

“You’re here for the meeting?” He shouldn’t have been able to sneak up on me like that, I thought; usually I have some vague idea of scent, even if I can’t quite verbalize it. But his scent seemed almost blank. Not in quite the same way Abigail’s had been; instead of effacing itself it just receded, lightly touched with fireworks, as if magic was something he’d given up a long time ago. Only he looked no more than eighteen, so he’d have had to give it up at ten…

“Oh yes, I heard about it.” He smiled. “Not my sort of thing.”

Well, I didn’t see that it was anybody’s thing, the way it was going. But that was another matter.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

Direct, for a magician. “Scelan,” I said. “Genevieve Scelan. Hound. You?”

A flicker ran over his face, shivering over his scent. There
was
a trace of real scent to him, I realized; it just faded into the background. “My mother named me Patrick.”

That wasn’t quite as evasive as I was used to. I nodded, a little mollified.

He turned and, with a somewhat mechanical grace, imitated my posture against the tree, so that we were now standing side by side. “Do you mind the company?” At my shrug, he smiled again, almost regretfully. “It’s not going to work.”

“Sorry?”

“This…the magic, the group. It’s not going to work.” He tipped his head back, eyes half lidded, serene as a Zen master. “You know that too, don’t you.”

It wasn’t a question. I shrugged again, a little needled that he’d put my own thoughts into words. “It might.”

“No. The thing is…magic ought to be respected. Not some debased thing, something that can be bartered and squandered and…stolen.” The last word seemed to catch in his teeth, momentarily spoiling his calm. “It’s a matter of respect.”

I thought of how the Fiana had taken a goddess and turned her into a decrepit old woman, how they had treated beings that ought to have inspired loyalty as if they were no more than servants. “If you say so,” I finally said, since he seemed to expect a response.

“I do.” He closed his eyes. He had very long eyelashes, just a few shades darker than his yellow hair. “Could you respect that down there? Any one of those chattering idiots?”

“A few.” Sarah, yes. Maybe Deke, in some circumstances. But the rest…hell, the sanest adept I knew spent most of the day facedown in gravel, convinced that she was all that held together the New Madrid fault line.

Patrick didn’t acknowledge the lie, though it sounded pretty transparent. “I think, perhaps, it might have been better back then.”

“Back when?”

“Back when people were scared. When they knew that there were things in this world no one could understand, and as a result, things that had to be respected.” He opened his eyes and met my expression with a confident smile. “Do you see what I mean?”

Yes
. “No,” I said. “Not really. I don’t think it was ever like that, good old days notwithstanding.”

Patrick tilted his head to the side, that white-noise scent of him fading a little, as if he no longer cared enough to keep his presence here. “If you say so.” He stood upright, nodded to me, and strode off down the hill.

I watched him leave. He was attractive, he seemed
sane, if a bit arrogant. Why couldn’t I be attracted to men like him instead of Nate? Even if that made me a cradle robber. At least I’d have some idea of what kind of crap a magician might pull on me. Or, if that didn’t work, why couldn’t I just swear off the whole matter entirely?

Maybe I was just picking up on the general air of frustration on the hill tonight. The magicians’ circle was finally breaking up, this time with epithets tossed back and forth despite Sarah’s attempts to smooth things over. I headed down the hill and met her by the rocks as the last few adepts wandered off. “Well,” she said as I reached her. “I think we’re making progress.”

“You’re kidding me, right?”

Sarah gave me one of her I-am-in-touch-with-my-inner-serenity-and-yet-you-still-persist-in-being-stupid looks. “That was a lot more than I expected. They’re talking at least, and no one accused anyone else of stealing loci or using the meeting for nefarious ends.” She sat down, then lay back to look at the sky and its ropes of cloud drifting across the stars. “I call that progress.”

I shook my head and joined her. The rock was warmer than it should have been; perhaps it’d kept the sun’s heat longer than the dirt. Or perhaps Deke had been fiddling with pyromancy again. “I suppose it helps to set the bar that low.”

“I’m just being realistic, Evie. Like you.”

For a moment we were silent. I thought about Nate, and about the cold weight of the gun against my shoulder, and about the dead. “Sarah,” I said finally. “Remember when we started to get caught up with—with what ended up being the Fiana?”

She raised a hand and flexed the fingers, one by one. “I’m not likely to forget.”

“When that started, I thought I was helping someone…Sarah, what if I want to help someone, but it’s likely to put me in danger?”

She rolled over so that she lay on her side. “Evie, I
know you. You’ll do it anyway, and you’ll do it even if I tell you not to.”

“I might not.” Right now, I wanted to stay out of it, maybe tell Abigail that I’d find a way around it that didn’t involve the dead.

Sarah made a
pfft
noise. “And I might say I’ll swear off sex, but that’s not gonna happen either.” She lay back. “Just promise me you won’t do something dumb without letting me tell you how to do it.”

Well, that was probably the biggest endorsement I was going to get. “I need to know how to call up the dead,” I said.

Sarah sat bolt upright. “You
what
?”

I grinned at her. “Told you.”

A
draining, heavy heat lay over Boston the next day, and my schedule only got worse. Tania sent me out to Mission Hill twice, the second time because some idiot had forgotten a document for the first packet. I nearly got hit by a van on my way down the hill the second time, I’d only had time for half a sandwich at lunch, and I still had to deal with the whole Abigail problem. Jumping into this sort of ritual cold was one of the most dangerous things I could do, and I wouldn’t even have considered it if not for the fact that it was even more dangerous for someone else.

At last I decided to bother the one person I knew who’d had dealings with the dead lately. I coasted into Chinatown, past the great red gate, and locked up my bike on the sidewalk. The heat had intensified the scents of frying food and spices, and I lost myself in the haze of it for a moment before shaking myself out of the trance. If I wasn’t careful, I’d end up drooling.

Technically, I was still on shift, but I’d managed to switch out with one of the other couriers. I’d done him a favor a little while back (advice: if you’re carrying packets of confidential documents across town, don’t stop for a drink). As long as Tania didn’t ask “me” to come in to the office, no one would know the difference.

Unfortunately, the Three Cranes was closed up tight, and the windows of the apartment above were dark. I muttered a curse as I reached the basement door and confirmed that yes, there was a
CLOSED
sign taped over it. I started to turn away, then stopped, hearing the faint thump of music through the wall.

I’d never heard music here before, but that wasn’t any indication that it was forbidden, and, after all, Elizabeth ran the place now, so she could play anything she liked, right? Only she didn’t strike me as the kind of person to listen to continuous soft rock. Or to have it cranked up to ear-bleeding levels.

I glanced over my shoulder. The only thing unusual in the street was a black Jeep Cherokee parked with its nose up against a fire hydrant. Unusual, but…I was rationalizing. I sidled up against the door to the shop.

Even through the wall, I could get some sense of what was inside just by scent, the same way that I’d been able to tell what was inside Yuen’s father’s jar. Spices and old silk, a strong medicinal reek—

I caught my breath and had to stifle a coughing fit. Yes, that was a smell native to the Three Cranes; it was the preserving solution for some of the weird stuff on the back shelves. But I’d only smelled it before when the jars had been opened, and never in this quantity.

The
CLOSED
sign had covered the top part of the lock, but it slid aside as I touched it, revealing the remnants of a padlock still hanging in place. The lock itself had been kicked to the side, into a pile of detritus where it looked so at home that I hadn’t noticed it before. Right. I eased my way inside, dragging the door back into place behind me.

The stink of preservation fluids intensified, followed by the high crunch of breaking glass. Something from a rack by the door brushed against my hand, and I picked it up—one of those bamboo parasols, the kind that lasts maybe a day. It wasn’t much, I thought as I took out my cell phone and switched the parasol to my other hand, but it’d do. And it was a lot better than
having my gun out. I didn’t want to bring that into an unknown situation.

No smell of magic. That at least was something.

I flattened myself along the wall. The back entrance to Yuen’s condo was shut and locked, and to my surprise someone had jammed a chair under the door-knob as if to barricade it, so that no one could wander from the apartment into the store. Whoever had done it had used a folding chair, so they weren’t as good at this as it seemed. Down the hall was the Three Cranes proper, and that’s where the scent came from.

I sidled along the wall until I was close enough to the entrance to see the first rack of boxes. Not everything had been packed up; a few jars of mushrooms, crammed in so they looked like grisly trophies, lined the top rack. I closed my eyes and inhaled, but there was too much scent here, and no sense to it. More than one person, probably, and while there wasn’t any of the acrid adrenaline of fear, the grubby, old corn-chip smell of the intruders made me grimace.

Another jar crunched to the floor, this one releasing a stink of preserved ginger. “Fuck it,” a man’s voice said. “Let’s go.”

“Quit worrying,” said another. “The place is closed, right? I say we get the pages too. That’s an extra two hundred apiece, in case you’re forgetting.”

“Fuck two hundred,” the first muttered, but not heatedly. I crouched and peered out.

Two young men—kids, really, barely out of their teens—stood on either side of the counter, one carrying a bulging bag, the other fidgeting with a utility knife. Both were in black T-shirts turned inside out; neither looked particularly bright, even for thugs. A third had his back to them, standing at the furthest rack, and he was meticulously opening jar after jar, setting each one aside after he looked inside. It would almost have been funny if not for the fourth person in the room: Elizabeth, masking tape over her mouth, tied to a chair with clothesline. She didn’t look scared;
she looked angry—no, not even that. Irritated. Annoyed that these three cretins had interrupted her day.

The third thug opened another jar, then sneezed. Black pepper; I pressed my arm against my face to stave off a similar reaction. “What the fuck are you doing?” asked the first guy, the one in a hurry.

“Could be anywhere,” the third guy said. “Rolled up in one of these things, maybe.”

“God, we’re gonna be here for-fucking-ever,” moaned the first guy.

Elizabeth rolled her eyes. I agreed.

“Then we’ll speed it up.” The second guy, who if beard scruff was anything to go by was the oldest, nodded to Elizabeth. “She’s gotta know where it is.”

The first guy’s expression went from frustration to shamed glee. I rose to my feet and shifted my grip on the parasol, just as the third guy opened another jar—not a spice this time, but preserved fish of some kind. I gagged, not quietly enough.

The second thug—I could just see him between the boxes, so long as he didn’t move too much—glanced over his shoulder. “Go check that out,” he said.

“I didn’t hear anything,” whined the first guy, but he slid out his knife and headed my way.

There had been a time not too long ago when I’d had the advantage in a hand-to-hand fight. Of course, then I’d had a battle goddess riding me, a goddess whose skill and ruthlessness had coursed through me like molten lead. Not only was she no longer with me, but now if I tried to remember how I’d fought then, the memory of what had happened after sickened me. Now all I had was the skill that I’d learned from having a lousy temper, just bar-brawl tactics.

Well, that and a parasol. I slid my grip back, loosening it just a bit, and waited for the thug to get closer.

He wasn’t nearly as observant as his buddies. “I told you I didn’t hear—” he whined as he reached my aisle, and I whacked him in the throat. He reeled back, breath wheezing through his mangled larynx, and
I struck him on the wrist, knocking the knife down among the boxes.

A faint frisson ran down my back, a memory perhaps of the Morrigan’s possession or perhaps just my own canine nature rising up. I bared my teeth in a grin and hit him a third time, this time in the crotch. He went down with a whimper, and I stepped to one side, careful not to turn my back on him.

The two remaining thugs stared at me, and I raised my phone. “I’ve got nine-one-one dialed and ready to go,” I said. “Move and I’ll have the cops here on you before you can think. I got your license number—”
yeah, license plate, that would have been a smart thing to notice back there,
“—and now I want your names.” The guy on the floor whimpered again, and I edged further away from him. “Drop your weapons and put your hands behind your heads.”

The bearded guy, the halfway competent one, eyed me with an air of calculation, and I noticed a little too late that his own knife was out and close to Elizabeth’s throat. (Elizabeth, for her part, looked even more annoyed with me. I could almost hear her thinking,
One more damn thing to worry about.
)

Things might have gone all to hell if the third thug, the methodical one, hadn’t been in such a hurry to comply with my orders that he dropped the jar he was holding. Camphor spilled out from the broken jar in a glutinous wave, and the scent of it hit me like a pickax between the eyes. I bent double, gagging. “Run!” yelled the thug I’d hit. I tried to stand up and shake off the sensory overload, but the second guy whacked me on the back of my head with his bag as he ran past, and I lurched forward, banging my knees on the concrete floor. Gray sparked across my sight. To top it off, the last guy out knocked over one more jar as he ran—pickled cabbage—throwing another sucker punch at my already vulnerable nose.

I staggered to my feet and ran after them, but didn’t make it halfway down the hall before I heard the Jeep
start up and drive off. Bastards. As I paused, fuming, Elizabeth yelled at me through her tape.

She had it nearly off by the time I stumbled back into the room. “Give me a hand here, Hound,” she said through the last of the tape, pushing it off with her tongue. “Get the ropes.”

I tried to respond, gagged on the camphor scent again, and stumbled around to the back of the chair. Crappy knot tiers, all of them; the Boy Scouts would have thrown them out for this (well, after throwing them out for all the other reasons first). “Sorry,” I said as I tugged the last knot free. “That turned out to be a pretty lousy rescue.”

Elizabeth shook her head, dislodging the last bit of tape. “I can’t believe you threatened them with the police. Do you know how laughable that is?” She rubbed the red spots at the corners of her mouth. “My father said you were something of an innocent, but he didn’t say you were an idiot.”

My head throbbed. “Maybe because I’m not,” I snapped. “Look, what was I supposed to do? Walk away from a break-in? I thought I could help, and yeah, they got away, but we both saw them. You can give a description to the police—”

Elizabeth got up from the chair, dusting off her skirt. “They broke in,” she said as if explaining to a child, “on the orders of someone who, I would guess, doesn’t answer to the police. How many magicians do you know who’d even bother to provide an alibi instead of just warding off their work?”

I was silent a moment.
Shit
. “You’re sure?”

“Don’t question me on this, Hound. Okay?” She picked up the tape and wadded it up, sighing as she scanned the mess the thugs had made. “I know what they were looking for, and only magicians would bother with it. God, I just packed up half of this stuff; I can’t believe I’ve got to go through that again…” She turned and saw my expression, and her own soft
ened a little. “I’m all right, Hound. This is just the sort of thing that’s been going on lately.”

“Lately?” The word stuck in my throat.

“Yes. Lately.” She bent to pick up the clothesline, wound it into a loose coil, and dropped it on the counter. “I know you think you did a good thing. I’d even agree with my father that, on balance, getting rid of the Bright Brotherhood was probably good for everyone in the long run. But we knew where we stood with them, even if that meant we were at the bottom of the heap.”

“But that can’t—You can’t possibly prefer that.”

“Did I say we did? But now there’s no solid ground. New talent comes in, they don’t know or care what the deal is or who’s got arrangements with whom, and they figure the best thing to do is jump in feetfirst.” She circled the counter and pulled open a drawer, then snapped her fingers and brought out a box instead. “I’m surprised no one’s tried to take you out yet,” she added as she stowed away the rope that had been used to bind her. “Maybe they think it’s better to stay on your good side for now.”

I was silent a long moment. The clamoring scents in my head didn’t do much for my clarity of thought, but overall the main thing that came through was that I’d fucked up again. “I didn’t know.”

“I kind of thought you didn’t.” She wiped dust off her hands, wrinkling her nose at the camphor scent. It wasn’t pleasant for her, but she at least could ignore it. “But that doesn’t change it. I’m sorry, Hound. And for what it’s worth, thanks. Those lumps weren’t magicians, but that could have gotten unpleasant.”

“You’re welcome.” I leaned against the counter and pressed my hands against my head.

Elizabeth watched me a moment in cold sympathy, then shook her head and began rummaging behind the counter. “Now. What did you come here for? I’m assuming you weren’t with them, and I very much doubt
you’d orchestrate such a clumsy scene just to win my friendship.”

I snorted, then giggled weakly. I couldn’t help it; the idea of stage-managing a debacle like that poked the raw spot over my funny bone. “Oh, God help me if I did…No, I wanted to ask about…it doesn’t matter.” I paused, thinking back over the conversation. “Hang on. How did you know what they wanted?”

She smiled. “They wouldn’t shut up. Didn’t say who’d hired them, but I do know such wonderful things as how the tall one got herpes from his girlfriend.” She bent down and hoisted a picture over the counter: the Wild West photo that had been in her father’s office. “I moved this down here because the reverend wanted a look. Those idiots never knew that the pages from the Unbound Book had been so close to them.”

I glanced at her, then down at the picture. “They wanted the pages from the back of this. The ones you burned.”

She nodded. “More reason not to regret what I did.”

Something about the casual way she said it made me think it wasn’t simple as that. I thought of Abigail and the nightmares that had told her she now owned stolen property, and touched the glass gently.

Elizabeth glanced at me again, then tapped the photo. “Notice anything?”

I followed her gesture. On a second glance, the photo wasn’t an average Wild West group: two of the men wore bowler hats and clothing more suited to New York City, completely out of place, and the youngest man on the end had Asian features. Yuen had spoken of his father while looking at the picture. “A relative?”