Soul Hunt

by Margaret Ronald

  So we did. Katie sat on the steps to the back door, her knees drawn up and her arms locked around them, gazing at Maryam with the same worried, thoughtful gaze. At least I’d got her thinking. It started to rain after a little while, a thin drizzle that was more of a mist than actual rain, and I shed my coat to drape it over Maryam. She stirred as I did so, a treble clatter of pebbles alerting us as her right hand closed, then opened again. She sighed, seemed to press herself even more closely into the stones, then brought her hands out in front of her and pushed herself up to her knees. “Oh,” she said, brushing a few stray pebbles from her face. “That was a nasty one.”

  “Handled it well, though.” I waved, mostly to let her know we were here. Maryam’s eyesight wasn’t so good.

  She blinked a few times, then caught at my coat as it started to slip from her shoulders. “Genevieve,” she said slowly, a smile gradually lighting her face. “Oh yes, I handled it. Managed to redirect most of the pressure into northern Greenland, but I can’t say that it’ll hold for too long.” She edged backward, off the bed of gravel, and rocked to her feet, wincing as each muscle protested. “Either they’re getting worse, or I’m getting older.”

  “Could be both,” I said, coming forward to help her with the coat. Katie leaped up and tagged along beside me, practically holding on to my sleeve.

  “Could be.” She accepted my help, sliding one skinny arm and then the other into the sleeves, then blinked. “This isn’t mine … Did Natalie forget to leave my jacket out again?”

  “She’s at the store.” I offered my arm.

  Maryam took it and leaned on me, stretching her legs, making sure she could walk. “Then she should have left it—ah.” She opened the storm door, but instead of going inside, took a heavy wool coat from a peg just inside the door. “Can’t stay out long, not if I want to get some sleep,” she said, shrugging out of my coat and into hers. “Natalie’s been nagging me to spend the nights inside these days. I tried explaining things to her, but, well.” She settled down on the stoop and patted the space beside her. “Have a seat, Genevieve. I haven’t seen you in ages.”

  “I was talking to Tessie this morning, and she mentioned you.” Which was probably why I’d thought of taking Katie here in the first place.

  Maryam raised a hand to her mouth to cover a smile, a strangely girlish gesture for a woman in her late fifties. “Oh, yes. Tessie and the gentleman. I’m so glad that worked out.”

  It had? The thought of Tessie and Maryam sharing girl-talk over some new man was amusing in a libido-shriveling way.

  Katie, perhaps impatient at this grown-up diversion, held out her hand. “It’s very nice to meet you, Miz Maryam.”

  Maryam started, then clasped Katie’s hand with both of hers. “And nice to meet you as well, young lady. Who is this, Genevieve? Your daughter?”

  “No,” I said quickly, and Katie gave me a funny look. “She’s a friend of mine. I thought I’d show her around a bit.”

  “Around? Hm. Hm, yes. Would you like tea? I could ask Natalie—no, you said she was out.”

  Maryam always offered me tea when I visited, and after the first few times I’d learned to say no. She wouldn’t have the chance to make it, anyway. “I’ll pass on tea, Maryam, thanks. Besides, we can’t stay for too long. How are you doing these days?”

  “Oh, fine, fine. There was a brief flare-up in the upper mantle last week, but nothing I couldn’t handle. The trick of it is managing the magnetism at the same time as you leave the ley-lines where they were.” She glanced over her shoulder at me. “You don’t ever want to touch those. I learned that early on, when I was just starting out. Scrambled a few, and, well, let’s just say that there’s a reason the exits at Newton Corner are always a mess. And you? I’d heard you were up to big things lately. Brought down the Bright Brotherhood, I hear.”

  I managed a smile. Trust Maryam to be several months behind. Or maybe it took something that big to make her take any kind of notice. “It wasn’t just me.”

  “Good, good.” Maryam sank her hands into the deep pockets of her overcoat, then frowned and extracted a small thermos. “Ha! Knew I’d prepared. Genevieve’s friend,” she added, unscrewing the top of the thermos, “do you know the secret to good hot cocoa?”

  Katie shook her head.

  “You melt a whole chocolate bar into it.” She winked at Katie, who grinned back, then poured a splash of lukewarm cocoa into the cup. “Now. Are you a magician?”

  “Yes,” Katie said just as I said “No.” Maryam’s eyes crinkled up at the corners, and Katie glared at me. “No, she’s not,” I said.

  “Good.” Maryam nodded. “Good. Because you’re still growing, girl. You need to have a good sense of self before you begin any sort of work, otherwise your Self becomes the Work. Do you understand?” Katie nodded hesitantly. “Good. Now, Hermes Trismegistus’ laws of the microcosm are all well and good, but if you start treating them like the sum of all knowledge, then you’ll run into trouble. Don’t you agree, Genevieve?” She took a sip and passed the cup.

  “Oh, trouble, yes,” I agreed. The cocoa was so thick it barely poured, but it tasted a bit stale—whenever she’d prepared it, I doubted it had been this morning. I passed it to Katie anyway. She took a long drink, getting chocolate on her nose, then leaned across me and presented it to Maryam with both hands.

  Maryam took the cup gravely and nodded, as if Katie had just passed some test. “Trismegistus was fine for his times, but we know so much more now. And it’s not just the microbiology of the body that matters in the sense of the Work, it’s—” She stopped, cocoa halfway to her lips.

  “Maryam?” I reached out just in time to catch the cup as she let go. Warm cocoa splashed out over my hand and onto the step.

  Maryam stood up, her eyes going unfocused. “Flare of some kind …” she muttered. “Lynn volcanics acting up again.”

  Without another word, she dropped the thermos—Katie scooped it up before more than a second splash could spill—and flung herself onto the bed of stones. Pebbles sprayed out around her as she hit the rocks, and her hands flexed, as if she wanted to dig herself deeper. The muscles of her back and neck tensed, and she let out a slow exhalation like a moan, the breath seeping out of her. After a moment her breathing slowed, her hands ceased grasping at nothing, and the tense lines of her back eased. She was as she had been when we arrived.

  Katie edged to the side of the gravel box. “What was she—”

  “Plate tectonics don’t stop for cocoa breaks.” I took the thermos from her, shook out the last of the dregs, and screwed the top back into place. “And she’s strongly attuned to any changes. This is probably the longest conversation I’ve had with her.” I set the thermos next to her, so she’d see it when she got up, and went back to the screen door. “Or maybe she just has a broken synapse somewhere.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Why not?” I opened the door and took down a couple of scarves from the second peg, then returned to Maryam’s side. “I respect Maryam,” I said, tucking the scarves over the old geomancer’s exposed hands. “I like her too. That’s not usual in the undercurrent, because most adepts will backstab you—or, if not, just generally be unpleasant. But even though Maryam’s a good person, she’s not reliable for anything that isn’t a mile beneath the earth’s crust.”

  The drizzle had started up again, damping Maryam’s hair down into a gray matted mass, like sodden felt. Katie’s hand crept into mine, and I squeezed it gently. A rustling came from behind me, and I turned to see Natalie come around the side of the house, lugging several grocery bags. Her face fell as she saw Maryam. “She’s still like that?”

  “She got up for a bit,” I said. “She’ll be all right.”

  “Oh. Good.” Natalie gazed at her charge for a long moment, then sighed and set the bags down. “Thank you for keeping an eye on her.”

  Katie went up to her. “Could you thank her for the hot cocoa, when she gets up?” She had a smudge of chocola
te on her upper lip, I noticed. Natalie nodded absently and went to the side of the gravel bed, where she took a big porch umbrella and started setting it in place above Maryam.

  We left without saying more, and the drizzle solidified into something colder and nastier. I tugged Katie’s hood up over her head. “This is the thing about magic, Katie. It’s like saltwater. It corrodes. You might think it’s just a handy shortcut or something to pass the time, but so much of magic is built on getting out of something you shouldn’t that it turns your sense of karma inside out. And the magic itself … the natural end of it is never pretty.”

  “Maybe—” Katie hurried ahead of me so that she could turn and face me. “Maybe it wasn’t always like that.”

  “Maybe. But it’s that way now.” She gave me an exasperated look, those gray Hunter eyes far too piercing. “Look, you want to theorize about a Golden Age, be my guest. But we’re not in it. Magic stopped being the province of the numinous some time ago, and now it’s with the opportunists. You invite magic into your life, and this is what you’re inviting as well. Deke, Maryam, Chatterji—all of them are best-case scenarios. It never turns out well, Katie. It never turns out well.”

  Katie swallowed and looked down at the sidewalk. We walked back in silence to the Goddess Garden, Sarah’s little shop.

  I sometimes wonder why someone who knows almost as much about the sillier aspects of the undercurrent as I do runs a store that specializes in said silliness. Even the pagans that I’ve met agree that most of the wares in the store verge on the ridiculous, and that’s quite a feat considering that pagans in general hate to agree on anything. The contents of the store aren’t, by any objective measure, much worse than what you’d get in a tacky New Age store in the mall, but something about them just pushes the whole thing over into a weird ironic self-awareness. That, in itself, accounted for some of Sarah’s younger customers, the same way that kitsch has its own enthusiasts.

  But even so, Sarah knows the undercurrent, she keeps contacts with the few adepts who can handle human interaction, and she knows her way around loci and basic invocations, to the point that she stays away from them. Therefore she ought to know better than to stock crap like The Divine Bull: How Mithras Influences Wall Street or Freya’s Futhark Friends.

  I suspect that’s a major reason why she keeps it the way it is. It’s a statement on her part, a way of saying Yes, I know that there’s this deep undercurrent full of esoteric meaning, and I reject it. When I first encountered the store, not long after Sarah had moved to Boston full of enterprising spirit, I’d assumed it was a front, that she was hiding behind a completely obvious mask in order to run her business with the undercurrent unhindered. That led to a few misunderstandings that were a lot funnier in hindsight—I had a rash from her poison-ivy trick for months—and, eventually, to our current relationship. (It’s very hard to get through an evening stuck in the middle of Jamaica Plain covered in mud and thistles and not come out of it either fast friends or mortal enemies, and luckily for me Sarah had chosen the former.) And for all the work she does in the undercurrent, I was pretty sure that it was the cheap crap that kept the store afloat.

  “Welcome to the Garden,” droned one of Sarah’s interchangeable assistants when I opened the door, ducking around the orange-and-black streamers that festooned the entire front section of the store. This one was a guy—apparently the latest Black T-Shirt Girl hadn’t worked out—and I was surprised he could see me through the greasy bangs that hung over his eyes. “Blessings on you and would you care to try our new line of Karma Kosmetics?”

  “No,” I said. Sarah’s orange thug of a cat Mulligatawny jumped down from his perch on a Laughing Buddha’s head and stalked up to me. We exchanged glares, and Mulligatawny immediately turned his back on me and began washing himself. Yeah, I felt the same way about him. Katie, of course, hunkered down next to him and offered her hand, which Mulligatawny sniffed but didn’t deign to lick. “We need to talk to Sarah.”

  “Miss Wassermann is busy right now—”

  “Bullshit. It’s Wednesday, and she never leaves before eight on Wednesdays. If she’s not up front, she’s in the back. And we—” I gestured to include Katie, who shrank away from my hand as if I held a weapon, “—need to have a talk with her.”

  The kid gave me a long look, then made a show of taking the phone from under the counter. “What did you say your name was?”

  “Genevieve. Genevieve Scelan.”

  The last name got him, and he set the phone back down, not even pretending to call. “Oh. She mentioned you.”

  “Did she say to keep me away?”

  “No, she said if I got in your way she wouldn’t pay for the dental work.”

  At that I had to smile. “Then let her know we’re here, all right?”

  He ducked through the heavy velvet drapes that had replaced the door to the back room a little while ago (probably not long after a well-meaning jackass had held me at gunpoint in that very space, and I suspected because of that) and yelled something. After a moment I heard a theatrical sigh, and Sarah entered, smoothing down the flutters of her skirt as the velvet caught at them. “Evie, you’re a marvel. The second I tell myself you’re not coming and I really ought to get that inventory done, you show up. I don’t know whether I should bitch you out for keeping me from work or thank you for saving me from the dullest part of the day.”

  I didn’t answer just yet. For a fraction of a second—nothing more than a blip—the patterns in the air became clearer, the scents coming into focus as if a lens had passed in front of them. Incense and green growing things and a pinprick scent like the center of a compass—the impression I’d always had of the Goddess Garden, returning in reality rather than memory. But no sooner had I registered and understood the scent than it was gone again, and with it the rest of my talent.

  Goddammit. Losing it entirely might be better than this constant shifting back and forth. I felt like a dog on a leash, yanked in too many directions and away from the important stuff.

  Katie wordlessly left Mulligatawny for Sarah, who went all misty-eyed and hugged her tight. “Hey there, small cute. How’s my girl?”

  “Good,” Katie lied, muffled up against Sarah’s mighty bosom.

  “She was scrying in the playground,” I said thickly, leaning a little on the counter to disguise how out of balance I felt. There weren’t any gray sparkles, not yet, but the ice-water feeling had lodged nicely in the pit of my stomach.

  Sarah stared, first at me, then at her. “Really?”

  Katie drew back a step and nodded, staring at the floor.

  Sarah put a hand on her shoulder, patting it absently. “How about you go on back and get me a Coke from the cooler, okay? And one for Evie and Duncan, all right?” The kid at the register—Duncan, apparently—started to protest, but he was smart enough to recognize a distraction when it was given. He retreated as well, even pulling out a pair of headphones to show just how little he was part of this conversation.

  Sarah was silent a moment, hands smoothing her skirts. “Believe what you like of me,” she said finally, “but I did not teach her to use any puddle in a playground. That’s just asking for trouble.”

  “Technically, she wasn’t using a puddle,” I admitted. “She’d brought a silver plate from home. I didn’t realize you’d gotten as far as metallurgical magic.”

  Sarah’s hands paused on one box (TeenyVamp Anti-Sunlight Kits! the side read). “I hadn’t,” she said slowly. “I mean, she might have overheard me talking about it, but she’d have to make the connections and then put them into practice … She’s a smart kid.”

  “That’s the problem. She’s too smart, and she doesn’t yet know what will bite her.”

  “Kind of like someone else I know,” Sarah shot back. “What are you, her mom?”

  “I’m nobody’s mother,” I snapped, louder and harsher than I meant to. Sarah’s head jerked up, and her eyes narrowed. “I mean, it’s none of your business what I am to he
r. Okay? What matters is that nobody, nobody should be teaching these things to a child.”

  “She needs to know them,” Sarah said. “She can’t walk through it blind.”

  “And how is it going to help, huh? Sarah, you know the undercurrent. You know what it is, and what it does to people. It’s poison, even if all your community-watch stuff has wrapped it in fluff. Please tell me you haven’t forgotten that.”

  “I haven’t.” She set the kits on a high shelf and turned to face me, eyes narrowed. “But I haven’t forgotten that you don’t treat it with kid gloves, either. For crying out loud, Evie, you’re the one who went around giving your real name to magicians and barging your way through the undercurrent like a, a Doberman in a nursery. And now you’re scared? You?”

  “I’m not—” I heard how high my voice sounded and stopped myself. “It’s got nothing to do with being scared.”

  “No, scared doesn’t even begin to cover it,” she snapped. “For the love of all, what is wrong with you, Evie? You seemed okay for a while, you were finally getting some from your skinny-butt guy, you’d faced down worse things than I liked to think about, but then it just … you just drained away. It’s like you’re a bad recording of yourself.” She paused, as if hearing her words for the first time, and the lines on her brow began to shift, from anger to something else.

  When had this turned into something about me? Why had this turned into something about me? “Katie’s the important thing,” I insisted, and the ice in my gut spread, sinking lower. “You can’t teach her magic like that without teaching her the downsides too. And, Jesus, Sarah, there are so many downsides it’s hard to find a way up.”

  She wasn’t listening anymore. Instead she’d ducked back behind the counter and was rummaging through the shelves, picking up the imperfect crystals that she sold as Soul Lenses (twenty cents a pop at the local gem store, less if you have time and a rock tumbler). “Hang on,” she muttered, banging her head on the inside of the case, “hang on.”