Soul Hunt

by Margaret Ronald

  The mists receded just enough to let us see more half-imagined shapes, and I saw Rena shudder and look away from one. But at last Georges slid into view, its dock black and slick with moisture. “I’ll wait here for you,” Sam said. “I’m not—I was never much of a magician, and without my longtime passenger, I have little power in myself.”

  “Just keep yourself safe.” I stepped out of the boat, slipping a little on the boards, and steadied myself against a piling. The faint scent of burnt matchheads curled around the docks, not far from here, and I didn’t need to look to know that the little boat Deke had used was tied up close by. “He’s been here,” I said. “I can scent him.”

  “Well, that’s a relief.” Rena accepted my help out of the boat, snagging a flashlight out of Sam’s hand on the way. “I’d feel like an idiot if you’d led us the wrong way.” She glanced back over her shoulder, and her eyes narrowed as she saw Deke’s boat. “I take that back. You’ve never led me wrong, Evie. You might have refused to lead, but you’ve usually got the right end in sight.”

  “Thanks.”

  She nodded, then thumped me on the shoulder so hard I stumbled forward. “So don’t screw up your record this time.”

  “There’s still plenty of time for that,” I said. “And there’s more. Roger’s here, and—” I sniffed. “Gunpowder. Could be magic, could be the gun Deke took.”

  “You’re unarmed?” Sam asked.

  “Got my good looks.”

  Rena snorted. Sam shook his head and reached under the steering. “Take this,” he said, and handed me a chipped baseball bat. “Not much, but you can shatter a few kneecaps, right?”

  “Jesus.” I took it, and Sam grinned—the kind of a grin that reminded you he had once been part of a criminal organization. I glanced back at Sarah, who had started to follow but hesitated, one foot jammed against the heap of tarps and blankets and ropes in the back of the boat. “You said you’d stay back if anything went wrong. I’d say that’s already happened.”

  “I—yes.” She paused a moment, one foot nudging the heap, then nodded. “Yeah. I’ll stay here.”

  Rena gaped at her. “Seriously? You made all that fuss, and you’re not even going to get out of the boat?”

  Sarah looked torn, as if it wasn’t her decision to make, but she still sat back down, implacable and unhurried, a strange kind of stability setting over her even as the boat rocked. “I’ll do what I can from here.”

  I’d expected her to argue, too—but if it kept her back here, safe with Sam and Tessie, I wasn’t about to ask twice. “Okay. Keep an eye out for anything—and I mean on the island or off. If you have to, stay on the water, but don’t go back out into the harbor. I don’t trust those things to stay on their gibbet.”

  Rena shuddered at that, but Sarah only tucked her skirts around her ankles a bit more closely. I nodded to her and turned to the island.

  There weren’t lights on the path, but the refracted light through the fog had its own faint glow, enough to tell when a tree was looming out at me. Rena loosed her gun in its holster and followed behind me, undoubtedly taking in a lot more than I was seeing. I had my talent, but she had years of experience, and she knew what to look for.

  Deke had been here, but there wasn’t much of a fresh scent. He hadn’t left, at least not by boat. I didn’t have any handle on the stone, nor on Dina’s own bloody scent, though I kept expecting the latter to billow out at me from behind the next dark tree. Roger, though … he’d been here, had met Deke, and then walked with him …

  I hefted the bat, silently thanking Sam for it. Behind me, Rena made a disgusted noise, though when I glanced back she was still scanning the mists. “Let’s go Red Sox,” she murmured. “You’re not seriously bringing that, are you?”

  “Better than my fists, if it comes to it. Unless you wanna loan me your gun.”

  “Shit, if I’m in trouble now, I’d be in so much more …” She shook her head, but there was a feral, vicious grin tugging at the corners of her mouth.

  I returned the grin. “Missed you, Rena.”

  “Missed you too, bitch.” She was silent a moment. “I haven’t been clubbing in ages. Missed the Extruded Plastic Dingus show too.”

  “They were in town?” God, I’d missed a lot.

  Rena nodded. “First thing I thought when I saw the ad was, I gotta tell Evie … Foster thought I’d run over a puppy, that’s how low I was for a while.” The road led down, toward the gates of the fort, and Deke’s scent did as well, like a line of cigarette smoke. “Guess we can’t really go back to doing that again,” she added.

  “Yeah, probably not.” I nodded—she was right—and started forward, to the open gates into the fort. Rena followed, flashlight in hand. “Don’t turn that on just yet,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’ll spoil our night vision.” I pointed across the green, to the empty black hole where I’d found Dina before, where Deke’s scent led. “And we’ll need it more in there.”

  Rena muttered something under her breath, but followed.

  Deke’s scent was fading, as if he’d somehow found a way off the island—or Roger had set up multiple wards. I could find my way through them in time, but it’d slow me down. Condensation gathered on the stones and dripped off in steady, almost subaudible beats.

  “You know more about this guy than I do,” Rena said at last. “Why’d he turn on you like that? I thought you were friends.”

  “We weren’t. But we were allies, of a sort. I think … I think something spooked him. You make bad decisions when you’re scared.” I paused at the edge of the doorway into the fort proper, just where the last of the light made a feeble attempt to reach inside. There was something wrong about the scent within, something like salt rubbed on skin, or bloody shale, organic and stony at the same time.

  “Won’t argue with you there,” she said and switched on the flashlight. I winced, but the beam turned an uneven, impossible floor into mere flagstones with debris caught in their cracks.

  The beam swept across empty doorways, graffiti scrawled in black pen, a heap of sticks … “Hang on. Go back.”

  Rena did so, and I knelt next to the heap. It was mostly driftwood, but on top lay a wooden recorder, its mouthpiece stained and grayish. I didn’t know much about musical instruments, but I had a guess that this one would sound very like the one I’d heard before. “She was here,” I said, dropping my voice down to just above a whisper. “So was Roger. But Deke … I don’t know; his scent is all garbled up and faded. And there’s something else, something I haven’t smelled before.”

  “But he came through here?”

  “He did.” That much was clear, if cold. The stony scent had turned smoky and metallic both—something like an overcooked sausage, something like charcoal that had gotten dunked in a sewer and then dried out on a stove. If there was magic to it, it wasn’t a kind I recognized. And what I’d first registered as gunpowder was no less strong, though it was flattened, as if processed through some kind of filter.

  I got to my feet, brushed off my knees with the hand that didn’t hold the bat, and used the bat to point at one of the arched doorways. “He went this way. Roger did too, but he’s not there now, and he didn’t come back … I don’t understand, the boat was still here, and there’s nowhere else for them to go.” Rena followed me through the doorway, sweeping the flashlight’s beam back and forth as if she were casting a semicircle. I briefly remembered Roger’s Gebelin circle, and my skin prickled. “But none of them are here now,” I went on, “which is what worries—”

  I stopped as Rena cast the light into the center of the room—the room that had been so hollow and empty when I was here before, that had served as nothing more than an echo chamber for Dina’s music. It wasn’t empty now.

  Rena drew a sharp breath as her light revealed the thing hanging from the arched center of the room, picking out every detail of the open mouth, the spike driven through the neck, the chain from which it hun
g, the coat hanging open to reveal a long slash and the … the mess hanging down from that into a grisly, glistening heap on the floor.

  I stared, this time not just smelling but tasting the dead-fireworks scent that filled the room. The realization of what it meant hit me, and I turned and retched. Even in the midst of it, I couldn’t stop scenting, couldn’t push away what my nose was telling me. The stink of gunpowder struck me like a fist to the face, along with the sight of the exploded wounds in Deke’s shoulders—one each, and one to each thigh, leisurely potshots meant to hurt rather than kill immediately, and I didn’t need to search to know whose gun had been used.

  But worse than any of that, worse than the strangeness of Deke’s scent that I was only just beginning to understand, was Roger’s scent. He’d been here. He’d had the gun. And his scent was utterly unchanged—he hadn’t even done so much as broken a sweat while shooting his friend and stringing him up.

  Seventeen

  Rena carried the light past me, leaving me in darkness. “It’s him, all right.” She circled the hanging corpse, edging around the spatters on the floor. “Just a guess, but I’d say he hasn’t been dead too long.”

  “No.” I wiped my mouth—you’d think that I had nothing left to throw up, considering how long it’d been since I’d eaten, but apparently my body felt otherwise. “No, that’s not it.” I made myself look at him, at the thing they’d hung up. “He doesn’t smell like Deke anymore.”

  Rena gave me a look that clearly questioned my sanity. “Of course not. He’s dead.”

  “That’s not how it works.” I walked up to Deke’s body, over the blood—and it too lacked the right scent, lacked even the tackiness that drying blood ought to have. “Death changes a scent, but not by this much. He—Roger and Dina did something to him, Rena. They made him not Deke anymore, she changed him so much that he didn’t even smell human. And then they left him to die.” I rubbed my nose, briefly glad even for the stink of bile on my breath, just because it blocked out what Deke’s scent had become. “I don’t even sense him as a corpse.”

  I touched his arm, just below where a shot had ruined the bones. It was hard and glossy, cold as stone. However you tried to categorize it, you couldn’t describe it as human, not in any sense. Deke had been right to be scared. I see things, sometimes, in the fire, he had said. Sometimes they don’t go away. That’s why I’ve made preparations. He’d known. Or he’d guessed. Or feared.

  “I am going to find Roger,” I said, vowing it to Rena and Deke as much as to myself, “and I am going to put his fucking head on a platter.”

  “You’ll have help,” Rena said, but she sounded preoccupied. I turned to see her crouching just where the blood ended, examining it with the tip of her fingernail. “Something’s wrong with this.”

  “Well, yes, I just said—”

  “No. Wrong in a real way.” Just barely audible above the sound of wind outside and the constant drip of condensation came the echo of a faint sizzling—or no, it hadn’t just started, it must have been going on for a while and I was only just noticing it now. “There ought to be a lot more blood with these wounds, and it should be splashed around a lot more. This is concentrated, and the edge is regular, like the fringes have been pared away. Foster would know … What you said about not making him human—could that have paralyzed him, maybe?”

  “Maybe.” I didn’t quite know what had been done to him, though, and the difference in the scent was all I had to go by. The sizzling intensified, and I looked away, toward the closest patch of blood. Rena held the flashlight so that it cast a shadow both of Deke and of his entrails, long black streaks across the brick floor. I squinted, and for just a second, caught a thin line of smoke rising up at the edge of it, as the blood charred and burned away into powder. The metallic scent sharpened, like the gasoline scent in the bridge house.

  I’d want to go out like a Viking, me. I’d go properly.

  “Rena—” I backed away from Deke’s body, but Rena was too close. She’d gotten closer to the body but hadn’t noticed the change at her feet, the line of smoke racing inward and gaining speed. I caught the first spark of gunpowder (faint but real, and the last mark of Deke’s burnt magic I’d ever encounter) and took that as my cue to tackle Rena away from the body.

  “What the hell—” Rena began. I fumbled for her face and managed to get my hand over her eyes just as the room went incandescent white. I caught my breath and held it, not for the oxygen but to keep the scents away. It didn’t work: burnt feathers and cloth and the foully simple scent of what Deke had become all blazed up in one second of cold brilliance. There was no answering thump of combustion, no spark catching at me as the bridge house fire had; this was Deke’s fire and Deke’s alone.

  Even with my eyes shut tight, the afterimages still blinded me. Rena groaned and shoved me off her with both hands. “Goddammit,” she muttered. “Your magicians and their cavalier attitude toward evidence—” She sat up, blinking, her vision returning at the same slow tempo as mine. After a second, she spat a curse I’d never heard before and snatched up the flashlight, directing its beam to the empty hook. “He was just here, right?” she demanded, the beam shaking so much it practically strobed the room. “I didn’t just imagine that—that body—”

  “It was how he wanted to go,” I said, getting to my feet. “If he couldn’t—if he didn’t have a better death, then at least he had this.” Small comfort; no comfort, really. But I could understand the need for it in that kind of despairing situation.

  “Fuck,” Rena said in a small voice. “Crazy sand ladies I can take, even the creeps out on the water, but this …”

  “He was here,” I reassured her, and she exhaled and stilled the flashlight with both hands. I bent and touched the ground again. “He was here,” I repeated.

  Nothing was now left of Deke save a heap of gray ash, slowly sifting down to the spot where his guts had been. Still blinking from the flash, I crouched next to it and sniffed. Tar and the tang of fireworks, magic and, somewhere, Roger. “Here,” I said, and reached into the ash, the heat of it sliding over my fingers like Maryam’s sand and dissipating much more quickly than real heat would have. “There’s a grate here … looks like the lock melted, if it was ever there.” I put both hands into the ash, shifted my weight, and pulled. A plain iron grate about two feet wide, stained with rust and now shiny patches where the flare of Deke’s pyre had burned through, slid free with a ferrous groan.

  Rena came to help, and we set the grate down together, wincing in unison at the clang. She shone the flashlight beam into the pit below, revealing a line of rungs stretching down. “Sewers?”

  “Doesn’t smell like it.” Besides, the grate and the rungs themselves didn’t quite look like the rest of the fort; not just newer than the 1850s architecture but with an institutional austerity to them. “But Roger’s scent leads this way.”

  For a moment both of us had the same visual image—Roger, leaving Deke to hang, pulling the grate closed behind him along with a few loops of his guts—and though my stomach lurched again, I didn’t throw up this time. Rena just nodded; either the dead bodies she’d seen over the course of her career had made this easier, or she was just better at setting it aside. “All right,” she said. “I’ll bring the light; you follow me.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m the one with the gun, Evie. I go first. You can, I don’t know, do something with that bat.”

  “Something” turned out to be tucking it halfway under one arm and half into the pocket of my coat, so that I could almost use both arms. Rena just turned off the flashlight entirely and descended in darkness. After a moment, and as I was swinging down onto the first rungs, I heard a quiet “ah,” and a thump. “I’ve hit bottom,” she said, and switched the flashlight back on. I dropped the last few feet when the bat started to slide out from under my arm, and ended up dropping it anyway. The clatter didn’t echo, but the sound still seemed to go on a lot longer than it ought to. I picked up the
stupid thing, then turned and saw why.

  Gray concrete walls, veined with white where salt had begun to seep through, rose up on either side to a flat, low ceiling. The long, lightless space beyond stretched out farther than the beam could reach. “Looks like a tunnel,” Rena said, as if it were no more than another address, another crime scene. “Old army or navy work, I’d say.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m not.” She pointed the beam to what looked like just a niche in the concrete with a shelf halfway up, and it took me a moment to recognize that there were wires coming out of the wall just above the shelf. “See? Phone hookups. It’s just a guess, but there were army and navy setups out here, during World War Two and after.” She ran a hand over the wall, starting down the tunnel. “That’s why Gallop Island’s closed off; too much asbestos from the old facilities. Makes sense that they’d add something to Georges as well.”

  “Weird kind of sense,” I said, but I followed, baseball bat in hand. No wonder I’d had no sense of Dina outside the fort; she hadn’t needed to leave it in order to come and go.

  The tunnel had one advantage over the halls above: no doors opening out onto darkened rooms. And I had the advantage that I could tell no one was behind us, so there wasn’t that problem—even if Rena did keep turning back and blinding me with the damn flashlight. We walked, still following the tunnel downward, as the walls got damper and more crusted with salt deposits, and the scent of heavy ocean water sank into my bones. “This doesn’t make any sense,” I said at last. “There’s no way we’re still under the island, and it takes heavy magic to cause displacement on this scale—I mean, I’ve only seen that once and that was the Fiana—”

  Rena shook her head. “Who said you needed magic for this? We’re under the harbor now, Evie.”

  “Under—” I admit it; I looked up, as if that’d show me the fish above. The ceiling didn’t look any different from the other concrete we’d seen up till now; maybe a little damper, but certainly no more than a plain slab. Not my ideal bulwark against a billion tons of seawater. “Can we maybe start moving faster?”