Soul Hunt

by Margaret Ronald

  “That’s what we’re counting on,” I said.

  City Hall Plaza isn’t a pretty space even on the best of days, and tonight it was pretty damn bleak. Unrelieved stretches of concrete, the looming block of brutalist architecture in the background, and, if I listened or stretched my senses, the faint sounds of the local pubs still holding out till last call.

  “Why here?” Nate asked as I locked my bike to one of the racks by the road. “It seems a little weird to do it right out in the middle of everything.”

  “Because this is a goddamned desert at night,” I said, smacking the lock into place and walking out into the plaza. “And I don’t know of any other places where we can count on few people showing up. Not on Halloween.”

  “Maybe a school? Office building?”

  “You’re kidding, right?” I glanced over my shoulder at him. “Remember high school? Two years running I snuck into the science labs and set shit on fire. No, this will do because it’s out in the open.” And tonight, tonight I wanted this out where it wasn’t hidden. So much magic went on furtively, in the interstices, that I wanted to draw a distinction between that and what I did.

  Because I wasn’t a magician. As much as I’d been a part of the undercurrent, as much as I depended on it and used it and craved the hunt that my talent gave me—or had given me—I’d always kept that distinction in place. It wasn’t much, and it sure as hell hadn’t kept the taint of the undercurrent from me, but it was enough. A magician would have kept the Hounds to hand, would have reveled in the kind of power they provided; a magician would have warded her home and summoned entities to do her work at the first sign of the grayouts.

  A magician wouldn’t have bothered to return the Horn of the Wild Hunt.

  I glanced around as we descended into the plaza at Government Center. Empty plaza, check, a few stragglers heading home, check … okay, not quite empty. Even though it was cold enough that my fingers were starting to go numb, a few people had staked out a spot right by the plaza. “Okay,” I said, looking back the way we’d come. “So it wasn’t such a good plan. Let’s see, the Common’s out, but if we wait maybe an hour we should be all right—”

  Nate didn’t hear me. When I turned back, he was already headed toward the little group, shoulders hunched down into his ill-fitting jacket. I cursed and followed, skipping a little to catch up.

  Trouble is, the man’s got longer legs than I do, and he’s surprisingly quick when he wants to be. Which meant that I got there a little after he did, just as he was asking if they wouldn’t mind moving on, just so he could clear out the space before tonight. Most of them looked like office workers, maybe spilling out from a party of their own, come to bitch about their bosses and pass around a bottle of something. Not too far from what I used to do with a few friends back before I went on the wagon, except without the ties and with Mad Dog instead of whatever pretty white wine was currently sending up a fresh tang through the frost. Anyway, they looked like they didn’t quite buy Nate’s story of needing to check the area before a concert tomorrow, but most of them looked as cold as I was, so they weren’t arguing.

  All except for one, a doughy guy in shirtsleeves and a wide purple tie with Mickey Mouse printed on the end in a pose that was probably meant to be ironic. I didn’t need my talent to smell the booze coming off him, and for whatever reason—maybe he knew that this was technically illegal—he wasn’t having any of it. “Bullshit,” he said as I reached them. “There’s no concert here tomorrow. You’re fulla shit.”

  “Vinny, please,” one of the women muttered. “I’m cold.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said, catching up to Nate. “Look, it’s a nice night, there’s a bar right there where you can get a decent drink—”

  Nate, though, still wasn’t listening. “Do you have a problem with it?” he said, shrugging his shoulders back just a little.

  “No. No, I got a problem with you.” Vinny jabbed a finger at Nate, then at me, then back at Nate, as if trying to count us and failing.

  “Then you’re welcome to take it up with me,” Nate said, still in that same quiet, cool voice. I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. If I concentrated, I could just make out his scent, gone cold and strange.

  Vinny hesitated—contrary to some beliefs, drunks do have self-preservation instincts; they’re just not very strong and usually pointed in the wrong direction—and squared his shoulders. “Yeah, maybe I will. Whaddaya gonna do, huh?”

  “Vinny, please,” one of his friends said, but the others hung back, maybe used to this by now, maybe too drunk themselves to bother.

  Nate didn’t move. Instead, he shifted just slightly, so that his feet were squared against the ground, and he crouched just a little. Somehow this didn’t do anything to mask his height; if anything, the man loomed more, his lack of bulk suddenly less of a handicap and more a sign of starvation, of hunger.

  The headlights of a passing car washed over his face and away, and I saw the flash of teeth as his lips pulled back. To Vinny and his friends, it probably looked like a smile.

  It wasn’t. And I knew that posture. I’d seen it before, used by a different man to the same effect. Nate’s father had been very good at intimidating just by calling on a few shifts in his physique—the result of what he called a “bearshirt” curse, a legacy of the berserkers of the old North, who fought just as well using teeth and claws as with any weapon they carried. He’d rarely needed to change all the way, not when a little did so much.

  He’d passed on that same curse to Nate, when he needed to be rid of it. Nate had, I’d thought, adjusted to it. But there was a difference between adjusting to it and enjoying it. And if I’d been able to scent him, I knew I’d sense that undercurrent of wildness, his curse not so far beneath his skin as it ought to be.

  I stepped between them, one hand on Nate’s chest, the other extended to Vinny, two twenties in it. “Forty bucks says there’s a better beer selection at the Black Rose down the street. Okay?” Even through the jacket, I could feel a shiver run through Nate at my touch.

  Vinny blinked at me, then looked past me at Nate. Whatever he saw there made him blanch, just for a second. “I’ll remember this, pal,” he grunted, taking the money.

  “I won’t,” Nate said, and Vinny turned red, but whatever he’d seen was still enough to spook him, and the money gave him cover for retreating. He muttered something more and waved off his friend as she started to hand him his jacket.

  I let out a long breath, the vapor disappearing into the diamond-hard air. Only then did I glance back at Nate. His smile had faded, but that strange tension was still in his bones. “I had it under control,” he said.

  “Bullshit. Yeah, you could have won that fight. We both know that. You probably could have left him dead on the sidewalk. But that’s not what’s called for right now.” My hands dropped to my side. I was suddenly cold in an entirely mundane way, one that had nothing to do with grayouts or the Hunt or anything else. “I mean, Jesus, Nate. I already lost you once, I don’t want to lose you to an assault charge too.”

  He blinked, and a little of the man I knew returned to his eyes. “You’re right. Sorry. That was—I’m just a little worried about what we’re doing tonight. I mean, you and I both have fought these things, remember?”

  Yes, we had, if anyone human (or curse-ridden, or Hound) could be said to have fought the Gabriel Hounds. And it had almost killed him. Two months back, in the last hot spell of the summer and the dying end of August, Nate had run to an old stone quarry in the first throes of his father’s curse, and I’d tracked him there. That had been one of the better conclusions to a hunt, even with the guardian spirit of the now water-filled quarry trying to beguile us both.

  And then I’d faced down the Wild Hunt on the banks of that same quarry. Nate had been with me—he’d been the original prey for the Hunt, in fact—and in the fray he’d fallen from the cliff. I still didn’t know how badly he’d been hurt, because the spirit of the quarry had caug
ht him. And I, bedraggled, wounded, and furious, had demanded it give him back.

  It had. But it had claimed to do so as part of a bargain. And I didn’t know what it had taken from me in return.

  A flicker of a thought surfaced at the back of my mind, and I stepped on it, ignoring the twinge low in my gut. I didn’t know. Couldn’t.

  Bad bargain, the Gabriel Hounds had said at the time, though I’d bargained nothing away. Nothing.

  As if summoned by my memory of them, the Hounds stirred, first at the back of my mind, then as flickers around us, no more than shadows in the mingled moon and streetlight. It was a bad bargain, one said, pressing against me as it paced like a huge cat. Bad enough that we fear for you, as you carry us.

  Nate drew a sharp breath, and one of the Hounds grinned at him, a flash of teeth that was there and gone before either of us could properly focus on it. “Evie—”

  “Yes,” I said. “They’re here.” Who was I to argue with Nate about the possibility of attacking someone? I had these hounds at my command; I could probably tear apart a regiment. The thought made me ill and—worse—hungry. “And you won’t have to worry about me anymore,” I added, addressing them. “We’re putting an end to this now.”

  I unfolded the paper Sarah had given me, read it over, then motioned Nate closer. “Okay. Here’s what we do. Take this—” I handed him a stick of plain sidewalk chalk, nothing fancy about it, “—and draw a circle around us. Doesn’t have to be perfect, just has to encompass the two of us.”

  Nate complied. The chalk skipped and snagged over the bricks, making an uneven circle. “It’s not complete,” he said, poking at one of the breaks where the space between bricks hadn’t taken chalk.

  “That’s not a problem. Not for us.” Though it would be, if we were doing this by the usual, careful rules. “It’s just to outline the space.” I tucked the list under my arm and unclasped my utility knife, then looked from one hand to the other, considering.

  Nate rose to his feet. “Is that for what I think?”

  “Yep.” Both arms were still healing from the wounds they’d received a couple of months ago: one was a long slash that I’d inflicted myself in order to draw the Hounds to me, the other a jagged wound that had been the result of drawing the Hounds to me. Neither one had been serious, but they’d only just gotten to the point where steering my bike didn’t hurt anymore. I didn’t really want to reinjure either arm. “Okay. Here are the rules.” I set the point of my pocketknife against the scar at my throat, gritted my teeth, and pressed down. The scar shifted—for a moment I had the weird feeling of something under my skin trying to get away from the steel; not a comfortable feeling, let me tell you—and parted with a faint sting, like a trapped wasp.

  The Hounds, silent beside us, sighed gently at the scent of blood, a sound like the wind through a gibbet.

  I smudged my finger against my throat, nodded at the blood—black in the streetlight—then bent to smear it on the brick just outside the circle. “Don’t say your name, even if asked. You can say mine, but no one else’s. In fact, it’s better if you don’t speak at all. Don’t shed any of your own blood. And don’t step outside the circle.”

  Nate glanced at the smeary pink chalk. “It doesn’t look like much.”

  “It’s not.” Another smudge of blood, across from the first. North, south, east, west. Or close enough. So far, no trace of magic, only blood and chalk and the piss-and-cement smell of Government Center. And that was hoping I’d be able to identify any change when it happened … “But it’s better than nothing.”

  He nodded slowly. “I’d thought that magic would be a bit more … well, elaborate.”

  “It usually is.” I straightened up, wiped the blood off my knife with a spare tissue, then pressed that against the cut until it stopped bleeding. “For the same reason that OSHA regulations are elaborate.” Nate gave me a baffled look. “Safety. Security. Most magicians aren’t just going out and calling on any entity they can find; they have a specific goal in mind, and specific protections, and multiple ways out if something goes wrong.” Magic 101, the basics of it.

  “This just seems … I don’t know. Too easy.”

  “It’s only easy,” I said, “because I have this.” And I tapped the scar of the Horn again. “Like calls to like; the Horn will call to the hunters. And the rest of it’s easy because I’m not going to hide myself.” I glanced at him, thought about the danger I was exposing him to, the danger I’d already put him in, the trust he put in me. “If I’m going to give this back properly, I have to do it with my real name, my real soul on the line. I owe them that much respect.”

  And I owed myself that respect. Call it a stubborn streak, but I would not do this as a magician. I would do it as Genevieve Scelan.

  Nate nodded, then put his arms around me for a moment. I rested against him, then stepped away and unfolded the list.

  The invocation was almost clownishly simple: blood, incantation, then a list of names. But that was what was dangerous about this: I recognized only a few of them, but some of these names were ones that called directly to the spirits involved, rather than dancing around with euphemism and flattery as most invocations did. This was dangerous precisely because it was simple: there was no room for safety in this kind of invocation, no careful hedging about of protection for the summoner. Maybe it was because forbidding any one entity, for whatever reason, would diminish the power of the summoning.

  The Horn of the Wild Hunt was something that didn’t exist. There was no unified Hunt, no single Hunter. But a woman named Abigail Huston, with the help of her perfidious son, had used that very lack to conjure up something new: a central reflection of all other hunts, an axis where there had been none, a focus for the energies of all Hunts. The Hounds it called up weren’t the Seven Whistlers or Wuotis Heer or the hosts of Herlethingus; they were all of them, and more, and unnameable ones as well. To return the Horn, I had to call up all of these Hunters, all of those who led the Wild Hunt, and I couldn’t do so with any barrier between me and them.

  “Hecate,” I said, and it was not my imagination that made the minimal moonlight above shudder slightly. “Herle. Black Matilda. Red Edric. Come and hear me. Wodan. Comte Arnau. Perchta. Come and hear me.”

  Name after name, names that I knew and names that I didn’t and names for which Sarah had scribbled a helpful phonetic guide just above. I kept my eyes on the paper, trying not to miss a name. “Evie,” Nate said.

  I held up my free hand, still spotted with blood. “Herne. Diana. Gwyn. Come and hear me.” The air went heavy and thick, like a lead blanket had dropped over us. And at the back of it—

  “Evie!”

  —at the back of it, slow and heavy like a fuse burning, the scent of magic.

  I could have cried for the return of scent—even this minimal touch of my usual senses was like the first few glimmers of light after imprisonment. Instead, the last name still ringing in my mouth, I looked up. Nate pointed across the plaza. “Looks like Vinny’s back for more.”

  Crap. I turned to see a man in shirtsleeves and a loosened tie—but this man was shorter than Vinny had been, and thinner. He wore a Phantom of the Opera mask, gleaming white under the lights, and the eyeholes of the mask remained dark as he turned to face us. “Okay. Don’t leave the circle, but let me do the talking. If we’re lucky he’ll just take a piss and move on—”

  I stopped. Beyond the man, at the next cross street, a woman in a black bustier over a shiny cheap polyester dress emerged. She wore a red sequined mask that didn’t quite match the rest of her clothes, and she too was facing us. Another flicker of movement caught my eye: someone walking toward us without breaking stride or slowing, dressed in the blue button-down shirt that was the unofficial uniform of men in the financial district, with a full-face rubber mask of JFK.

  “Oh, shit,” I muttered.

  “You mentioned getting attention,” Nate murmured, and I turned to look where he pointed: more people in costume, inclu
ding a little kid in foil armor with the visor down, descending the stairs from the T entrance. “I think we’ve got it.”

  “If it helps,” I managed, “you can think of them as conduits. Manifestations, rather than the real thing. If the real thing were here—well, the world couldn’t take that.”

  Nate came to stand beside me. “It doesn’t help,” he said after a moment.

  “No, not really.” More figures followed, one by one, left and right. Maybe fifty, I thought, then rejected it; maybe a hundred people, all in costume. Were they illusions wearing the faces of others, or real people, ridden by whatever entity had chosen them for this? I glanced at the rank of children who’d moved to the front, some in those plastic smock-costumes that were the last resort of tired parents, and shivered. I hoped it wasn’t the latter; this was the sort of magic that should not come close to children.

  I crumpled Sarah’s list of names against my leg. The last few stragglers—a ninja, a guy in a hockey mask, and a woman in what could only be described as a Little Red Riding Crop costume—joined the silent, waiting assembly. It should have been ridiculous, but that intent hush pushed it over into the uncanny.

  “I am Genevieve Scelan,” I announced. “Called Hound. I have something of yours.”

  “Hound,” said one of them, a man in a dinner suit with a brilliant green mask, and the others took up the word. “Hounds.” Their eyes focused on me, and abruptly the pressure increased, till my vision darkened—or maybe that was just their attention darkening the world. The attention of the dark half of the year, of the stub of midwinter, the nights drawing in and the cries in the heavens, old chaos woken from a sleep of centuries. I staggered and fell to one knee, and at the back of my throat, I tasted ice again. Not now, I thought, trying to catch my breath.

  “No!” Nate pushed me away from the edge. His shoulders heaved, and I caught a trace of his scent changing, altering along the lines of his curse.