“No. No hanging on, Sarah. You need to stop these lessons now. For Katie’s sake. For my—” I stopped. I could ask her, as a last wish, and she’d probably do it. But that would mean telling her about the Hunt, and about midwinter. My mouth filled with water that tasted of ferns, and I swallowed it down, nearly choking. “Stop teaching her. Please.”
“But you were wrong,” Katie said quietly, and both of us turned to look at her. She stood in the doorway, a velvet drape sagging over her head, three hobbit-sized Cokes in her arms. “You’ve worked with magic for years. You invited it into your home. It’s part of you.”
“Don’t go any farther with this, Katie,” I said.
She shook her head. “You know it doesn’t have to be like that—like they were. You aren’t crazy. You’re not living in a drain. You have us, you have me, you have my brother—”
I had all those things, and most of my sanity to boot. So she had a point. I’d lived with my own blood-magic for thirty-odd years and used it openly for more than ten, and if there was any close parallel to her own Sight, then my talent came close. I was the best rebuttal she had.
And I was going to die in less than two months. Because of what I’d done in the undercurrent.
“You don’t know everything, kid,” I said, and turned away. Sarah caught my sleeve, and I jerked it free. “Don’t teach her any more, Sarah,” I said. “Have some goddamn pity.”
Six
The sun was barely down by the time I got home, but for all the energy I had left it might as well have been midnight.
In some ways, I thought as I hung up my helmet, stripped rain from my jacket (dumping it into the little fountain by my desk, which burped and sizzled but didn’t burble to life as it usually did), and shook the last of the cold water from my hands, the last few weeks of slow time had been all right. It was a step better than running myself ragged, as I’d been doing in the weeks beforehand, and even if the undercurrent contracts had dwindled, the mainstream stuff was still coming in at its slow, dependable trickle. Some days I didn’t even feel up to handling that much, but I’d dragged myself out of bed anyway and gone off to Mercury Courier or off to the suburbs again.
I took a dry towel from the wardrobe and rubbed it over my head until my hair stood out in all directions. Maybe one problem fed into the other, though. Maybe I’d been so tired because there’d been so little work, or I’d gotten little work because I’d been too listless to search for more … either way, these last few weeks had been rough. And that wasn’t even counting the Sox. Goddamn.
I poured myself a glass of water from the tap, glanced at the heap of paperwork on the desk—end-of-the-month bills, end-of-the-month invoices that mostly came back with excuses, research that needed to be done so I wouldn’t get caught off guard again, all the things that I just hadn’t had the heart for lately.
I wrapped the damp towel over my shoulders and curled up on the unmade futon. Rain and more rain … water and more water … I took a sip from my glass and grimaced. The water from the tap tasted downright foul, like something had died in it, and the smell wasn’t much better. Boston city utilities were clearly acting in their usual stellar fashion.
There were a dozen things I needed to do, half a dozen that I probably ought to get to, and I had energy for maybe three of them. I burrowed deeper into the towel, closing my eyes. Everything seemed so out of focus these days, as if I were perpetually seeing things through a film of something, like opening your eyes under water.
No. Not under water. I shuddered and sank deeper, but it didn’t do any good. The image of water over my eyes stayed, and my arms were too heavy to push it away. The smell of foul water, ice water, the taste of ferns and a cold stone in the pit of my stomach …
No.
Something nuzzled up against my hip, a cool but living bulk, and something else joined it along my shoulders. I opened my eyes to see a flicker of frost, fur so thick it was barely fur anymore, a flank that breathed as a red-eared head settled in next to me. One cold, depthless eye stared into my own. This isn’t good, the Gabriel Hound murmured.
“Like you give a damn,” I muttered in return, but I didn’t move. That on its own was a bad sign; if my flight reflexes weren’t kicking in by now, then the wiring in my brain had seriously short-circuited. I tugged one arm free and draped it over the closest Hound, the scar on my forearm where I’d fed it exposed to the orange light of sodium streetlights. “So long as I’m there at midwinter, what do you care how I feel?”
Oh, you will be there at midwinter. Not even death could keep us from you. It licked its chops, almost meditatively. I shuddered, but pressing back only brought me closer to another Hound, and a second long muzzle nestled into the hollow between my hip and ribs. But what good is a hunt when there is only half of the prey? When the prey is weakened? The one who freed and fed us deserves to go out in better form.
We do care, said the one currently squashing my liver. We are not our masters. And we prefer a hunt to a slaughter.
“Nice to know,” I said drowsily. Strangely enough, it did help, in the same way that fresh water might help a prisoner.
Then take comfort here, and heal. For yourself as well as us. Their bodies were cold around me, not like Nate’s warmth, but there was something similar to be drawn from the contact. Sleep, and remember hunting. Come back, and remember hunting.
One shifted near my feet, and I felt a faint nip, like a needle stabbed and withdrawn so fast it was gone before the pain arrived. We are terror and chaos, but we are not what cloaks the city. And we do not like it. Nor do we like the patterns that are rising to pull you in—the old women your future is thick with, the old woman of the past, they worry us. It exhaled, and for a second the lights dimmed, became like sunlight filtered through smoke. Darkness in its proper place and time. Ware the old gray women.
“I’ll keep it in mind,” I said, and—I have no excuse for this other than I was dead tired and not in my right mind—reached down and scruffed the Gabriel Hound’s ears as if it were a puppy. It froze, and though the connection between us was severed, I could sense both amusement and worry in its posture. But sleep took me, and dreams of hunts that I would no longer follow.
In the morning I was still a mess, and that’s not counting the persistent doggy scent that would not come out of my hair. I showered and made my way down to Mercury Courier, still in the same fog.
There was a word for this, I thought as Tania yelled at me. Well, she didn’t yell, exactly. Tania doesn’t yell. Tania explains very seriously and at length why she is disappointed in you and what options she will need to pursue as a result, with frequent references to your track record and how uncharacteristic this is for you. But the cumulative effect is worse than getting yelled at. Normally I could defend myself, pointing to the amount of work I’d put in for Mercury Courier over the last few months and why I was the most reliable of their couriers. But this morning, with the gray wash over everything like dirty water slopped over the world by a careless laundress, I couldn’t even remember to nod in the right places.
Tania waved her hand in front of my face, and I realized she’d been waiting for an answer for some time. “Um,” I said. “Sorry. It won’t happen again.”
“Genevieve, honey, that is not what I—” She paused, giving me a long look, then to my surprise took my hand and led me to one of the few chairs in her office that wasn’t piled high with papers. “Honey, I don’t know what’s been wrong with you lately, but it is starting to worry me.”
I sat down, blinking until the world came back into focus. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”
She squeezed my hand so hard it hurt, the pain sparking like a beacon’s spotlight. “Girl, I have one brother who’s been in the closet since God made him, one who’s dealing out of his apartment, and two sisters who are both bipolar. And every single one of them can tell me that and have me closer to believing it. So do not bullshit me, Genevieve, because I do not have the patience for bullshit.�
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I met her eyes—big and dark, with yellowed whites from too many years with whatever condition meant she needed those coke-bottle glasses to see a computer screen. “I don’t know,” I said finally. “I don’t know what it is. It’s not—” I stopped. It wasn’t the sentence from the Hunt, though damned if I could say why. It was something else, I realized. The grayouts were only a symptom of it.
“Don’t tell me what it’s not. Tell me you’re getting help for it.”
“I—”
I stopped, staring at the plate-glass window that separated her office from the main functions of Mercury Courier. Tania had long ago started treating it as a message board, and pages with important notes written forward and backward lined so much of the glass that you couldn’t even see much through it. But what I could see through it wasn’t nearly as important as what was reflected in it: Tania’s back, her desk, the mounds of paper … and where I was, barely a shadow.
Mirrors will show a lot of things. But mirrors are also very good at lying. For truth, you want a reflection that isn’t cast off silver, that comes from water or ice or good polished steel. Or, in a pinch, glass that’s forgotten it’s glass.
“I’ll go to someone,” I said slowly, and shifted in place. The little engraved mirror for Business of the Month above the door showed a flicker, but not much else. “I’ll go today. I didn’t—Tania, I didn’t quite realize that it was a problem.”
Her lips twisted. “That’s always the case.”
“No, I mean—” Christ, I’d even said as much to Katie yesterday. How did most magicians work? By getting loci. How did they get loci? By stealing pieces of people’s souls.
And what happened to the people whose souls had been stolen?
Tania, perhaps seeing what I did even if she’d mistaken it for something else, patted my hand, then returned to her desk, unearthed a time sheet, and handed it to me. “Genevieve, if I needed all Mercury’s boys to be on an even keel the whole time, I’d have no employees left. But that doesn’t mean I don’t mind when you go off the rails. So get yourself cleaned up—I don’t care what you have to do for it, just do—and try to remember that you can rely on someone else.”
“I will.” I’d have to, to break this.
There’s a difference, however, between knowing that something is wrong and being able to do something about it. Doubly so when the problem is all in your head—and by that I don’t mean that it’s not real. I’ve seen magics work that had effects only in someone’s head—some geisa, for example, did nothing but make their targets obsess over one particular task, and some hauntings only took place in people’s nightmares. You want to tell me the bloodshed that came out of those magics wasn’t real?
Somehow I made it to the Common after my shift. The evenings were earlier now, and the first few streetlights had begun to come on as I arrived at Park Street. A few of the downtown retailers had jumped the gun and were swapping out pumpkins with Santas, and the remnants of some rally were draining away from the street in front of the State House. I ignored them in favor of the Common itself. Solid ground, the center of the city, the place where I should have felt most at home.
And I did, in a way. I hooked up my bike to a convenient rack, glanced at a couple of the newer bikes with envy, and walked on. A big fountain stood at this part of the Common, one that had been dry for years, and around it lingered a few clusters of people: college kids waiting for one last friend to join them, tourists squinting at a map of the city, homeless men arguing with each other. I sank down onto the rim of it, fumbling for my phone. Sarah, I had to call Sarah—she had some idea of what was wrong with me, or at least I could explain it to her once I’d apologized—
“Hey! See, I told you, I saw she’d be here, look!” The rasp of a voice was one I knew, though I’d rarely heard it this cheerful. Deke wasn’t cheerful as a rule; seers rarely are. I raised my head—the color had drained from the world again, really not good—and focused on the little figure vaulting the fence from the grass, and the big man behind him.
Deke scurried up to me. “Hound? Hound, I got a job for you. A good one, too. I can pay, or Roger can pay, and so can his partner. What was it you said, you can tell her what she lost? More?”
“Can’t do it,” I started to say, but Deke wasn’t listening.
A shadow fell over me, no cooler than the air but somehow stiller. “I don’t think she’s in much shape to help us, Cam,” Roger rumbled.
“She can too—she can find anything, right, Hound? I told you, we have a real treasure here in Boston, we’re not just the scatterdust we were—”
“I believe you. But look at her. Really look.” Roger knelt down next to me and put two fingers under my chin. I instinctively winced away from him, and he nodded. “How long has it been?”
I started to tell him to fuck off, that it was none of his business and that besides I didn’t know what he was talking about, but just then I looked down at his other hand. He was scratching an arc into the dirt at the base of the fountain, a segment of a circle marked with lines and shapes and letters in several scripts. If I was recognizing it right, it was part of a Gebelin circle. I’d seen one too many adepts attempt smalltime summonings with a similar circle, outfitted to the nines, and then lose all their loci and power without even getting any real answers. But this circle was different; the lettering around it was in different scripts—Cyrillic, Greek, something that looked like Urdu, and a rounded, simple hand that should have been English but kept sliding away from my eyes.
Roger hadn’t just learned to draw a Gebelin circle, he’d improved on it. “You’re an adept,” I said.
“That what they’re calling it? Yeah, all right. How long?”
I thought back to the last time I’d tasted ice water and stone that hadn’t come from nowhere, to the abandoned and filled-in stone quarry and its nascent spirit. To the spirit that had caught Nate, even if only for a moment, and given him back to me. For a price. “A little over two months.”
“And you’re still walking? Damn.” He stood up and murmured quietly to Deke for a moment. “Okay, let’s get this straight. I am doing this out of sheer curiosity, and you are under no obligation because of it. Got it?”
I raised my head. “Doing what?”
Deke scampered off to the edge of this little plaza and eyed the trash cans as if judging them. Roger, meanwhile, scuffed the heel of his boot over the Gebelin arc and redrew it with the toe, only a segment this time and turned inside out. “Well, you don’t have many options, do you? You’ve sustained a soulwound as bad as anyone who stayed too long near a shadowcatcher’s net. Normally I’d say rah-rah, let’s go back and get it, dive in guns blazing, but you’re in no shape to do that. And the other ways of breaking it involve staying nine days and nights surrounded by iron, and you don’t have time to do that.”
No. No, I didn’t. I got to my feet and glanced back at Deke, who was busily dragging another trash can to the edge of the plaza. “Soulwounds heal,” I managed. “You recover from them eventually.”
“Yours isn’t healing. Whatever got its hooks into you hasn’t drawn them back out.” He paused as he drew another segment on the far side, eyeing me with furrowed brow. (Which made it a little difficult to take him seriously; he looked like a long white caterpillar had settled in above his eyes.) “Makes me wonder if it took something else … no, you’d be in worse shape.”
“Hard to imagine that,” I muttered. “But look—you can’t do this, here, out in the middle of everywhere—”
“Rather we hid it away somewhere?” Roger grinned at me, and I remembered with chagrin a very similar conversation I’d had out here with a member of the Fiana, a man who’d been trying to draw me into his net. Only that time, I’d been the one unafraid of working out in the open. “No, like I said, this is just an experiment. And the experiment in question,” he added as Deke nodded to him, “is how long it takes to get arrested. Now.”
Deke dropped a match into the first tra
sh can, and sodden as it must have been after yesterday, it still caught fire. The segment of a circle Roger had drawn flickered, and though I could have easily written it off as an optical illusion from the fire, I knew better. Get out, I thought, get out, you know better than to let someone encircle you even if they mean well—
But at that moment two things happened: a dull, cramping pain sank into my stomach, and the first traces of fireworks scent touched my nose. Somewhere, the quarry still had hold of me, but I had my talent—I was my talent, I could make it through.
Deke lit another can, and across the Common I heard a shout from a cop. We didn’t have much time. Nearby, the few people who’d remained in the circle of trash cans were looking around as well, some blinking as if they’d just heard a wake-up call, some patting their pockets as if they’d lost something. A severance circle, I realized, and smiled; Roger didn’t do things by half measures.
Which was a good thing, because this cramp wasn’t going away. I sat back down, hard, on the lip of the fountain, and curled up tight, arms wrapped around my belly as if holding myself together. The taste of ice water filled my mouth, and I swallowed it back down, refusing to vomit.
The quarry spirit had taken part of me, I finally acknowledged. It had taken part of my soul, my reflection, my sight—and it had kept taking. That was what had caused the grayouts, the fog over my talent, the lethargy. I made myself let go, got to my feet, and tipped my head back. More fire, now, ringing me in four points, and if the cops hadn’t shown up yet then they sure as hell would in a moment.
For just a second I heard a cry, a high wail that was no more than possibility. I drew a deep, shuddering breath, tipped my head back—
—and yelled a stream of curses at the sky.
Roger guffawed, and I thought I heard Deke yelp, but those were lost in the snap of something parting, some strain finally broken, some thick invisible membrane breaking around me. And with it came a rush of scent, the patterns of the world reestablishing themselves.
Soul Hunt Page 9
