Soul Hunt

by Margaret Ronald

  “What, you claustrophobic?”

  I managed a laugh. “No, I just have trouble with enclosed spaces that have an entire fucking ocean outside them.”

  Rena muttered something under her breath, then stopped, raising the flashlight. I didn’t have to immediately look to know something was wrong; the way we suddenly had a bit more ambient light was enough. “Shit,” she said, and hurried down the tunnel to where a slump of rock and slabs of concrete blocked most of the passage.

  I paused, back where the light didn’t yet reflect. Something about the way it glanced off the rock seemed wrong—not seawater damp, but irregular in a way that didn’t match fallen rock. And the scent was wrong: not concrete, but a different kind of stone, too close to the thing that had been Deke. “Rena, stop!” I yelled, my voice rattling down the tunnel.

  She stopped and turned back to face me—just as a hand shot up from the rubble and seized her wrist. The flashlight dropped and rolled away, sending crazy sparks in every direction, but not before I saw the fragmented rubble crease and shift into a weathered face, a beard no longer gray but stony, keen blue eyes.

  “Oh, you’re a firecracker, aren’t you?” The flashlight was pointed away from Roger, but enough light reflected off the walls to show him ensconced in the broken slabs, not buried but part of them. Whatever had happened to Deke had happened here as well— but where Deke had been shot and hung up like a hog before it changed him into something inhuman, Roger was still alert and alive.

  Dina had turned on him. Or—no, this wasn’t the act of an imprisoned spirit against her captor. This had the sense of something done with love, even a kind of twisted, consuming love. I thought back to my assumptions about Dina, what she’d be like if healed, what I could expect from her. I’d been very, very wrong … and she and Roger had been well matched.

  Roger’s other hand, gnarled and knotted like pudding stone on the shore, dropped something that clattered down beside the flashlight, and he reached up to touch Rena’s forehead, drawing a symbol I didn’t know. “Strong enough to get me out of here, maybe?” he went on.

  Rena jerked away, but his grip was tight as a shackle, and her eyes went wide and glassy. The spark of fireworks drifted down the passage to me, sharp as a stiletto.

  It wasn’t the only gunpowder smell, though. I ran over and scooped up what lay beside the flashlight.

  My gun felt as if someone had rubbed cheap alcohol over it and left it in a freezer: cold and stinging. But it was still mine, and I still had decent aim, at least at point-blank range. I put the muzzle of the gun against the mass of rock where Roger’s wrist should have been and fired.

  The shot rang down both ends of the tunnel, louder than a thunderclap and a lot closer. Worse for me, though, was the sudden stink of hot stone and blood and shattered flesh that rose up from the wound, and though Roger’s mouth opened in a roar I couldn’t hear a thing. Rena pulled away, crumbled stone falling from her wrist, and the stink of whatever magic he’d tried to work on her faded like mildew in sunlight.

  “Bitch,” Roger said, almost amiably, and though my ears were abused from that shot I still heard him as if we were having a conversation out on the pier. “And I don’t suppose you’d volunteer to give me some of your life either? Figures.”

  Rena, stunned but still herself, caught my shoulder. She pointed to him, mouthing something, but the ringing in my ears was still too much. “I don’t know what happened to him,” I said, or tried to. Rena shook her head and cursed—I didn’t need to be a lip-reader to understand that.

  “What happened to me is that my alliance got a little uneven.” He chuckled, the sound like stones rattling together, and in the back of my mind I wondered how I could hear him. Was it because he didn’t quite have lungs anymore, because in some way this wasn’t speech but the words of the stone he had become? “Perhaps she thought we’d become a little too close—after all, I couldn’t expect her to associate with me now that she was whole again. Women,” he added, grinning like a split boulder, “always wanting to change you.”

  I raised the gun a second time, but to no effect. He’d used up most of clip taking potshots at Deke. I put the safety back on and tucked the gun away in my salt-stiff holster, then nudged Rena. She hadn’t stopped staring, horrified, at Roger, and though I knew she couldn’t hear him, I thought the expressions on our faces must have been similar. I pointed down the tunnel—we’d have to climb over what had once been Roger’s feet, but there was a way through—and handed her the flashlight.

  “And you thought,” he went on, the laughter now rattling stones loose above him, “that it was only wholeness she needed, that she’d be all better and kind and no more a monster if she was all put together again! My Deino, my Enyo, my Persis, my lovely, lovely gray lady …” He shivered, or would have, and even pressing against the wall to get away from him I felt unclean. “Almost worth it, to have ended like this, touched by her. But kindness? Oh, puppy, it doesn’t work that way. My allies are never less than monsters; no one else is worth bothering with.”

  “Except for Deke,” I said, and even though I still couldn’t hear my own words, I could feel them in my throat.

  Roger’s head turned with a creak. “Cam,” he said, and now I could see that the mess I’d made of his arm was spreading, a stain like dry rot eating away at him. Or perhaps it was just a stain, just blood loss, that made him sound almost dreamy. “Do you know, he kept coming back to me? Always so scared, always needing a protector … and I was his good friend. Just like a puppy, coming back every time …”

  “And you killed him,” I said, and Rena looked back at me. Her hearing must have started to return.

  Roger nodded, and his face creased into something like a landslide, like a scar on the side of a mountain. “Yes,” he said, and the last breath passed out of him. I waited a moment, till what was left of him wasn’t even anything like a body. Maybe, if I looked long enough and discounted what my talent told me was real, I could find a few rocks that, from a certain angle, looked like a man.

  Rena nudged me, then pointed ahead. I shook my head, not understanding. She turned the flashlight off and then back on, and I finally saw what she meant: the passage beyond Roger was not quite pitch-black. Somewhere ahead, a little light had faded the dark. I hurried ahead, clutching the baseball bat.

  The tunnel ended in a room little better than the one back in Georges; big, square, and with a step down to another grate, though this one smelled only of water, foul and black with the corrosion of years. A few forlorn wires stuck out of the walls, similar to the phone hookup at the far end of the tunnel. This couldn’t have been a radio room; we were too far away from any signal for that to work. But it had been similar. I imagined Cold War troops down here, listening for submarines that never bothered to attack Boston, passing cups of strong coffee … okay, maybe the coffee was a stretch. But somehow imagining it helped.

  On the opposite side of the room, steps led up to two separate doors, black metal smeared with rust and hanging off their hinges. I started for one, then stopped, cursing, as my jacket caught on an exposed tangle of wires. Rena, though, pushed the closer door open.

  Her eyes widened, and she aimed the gun at something beyond the door—something high and to the left. “Stay here!” she yelled, or something like it; her voice still sounded as if it was under water. “There’s more than we thought!”

  “More? What—”

  She shouted something else—could have been an order, could have been a curse—and ran.

  I blinked in the sudden darkness and blindly turned toward the faded gray smudge that I hoped led to sunlight. “Rena?” I called. No answer but receding footsteps, and the heavy dampness of fog. I fumbled my way to the door, trying to focus.

  A white, faceless figure loomed out of the darkness at me, and I yelped before realizing that it was the other door, now hanging open. Some kids had painted a silhouette on it, doubtless for the purpose of scaring the crap out of people like me. Great;
I’d find them and kick their asses for it, but right now I had to follow Rena.

  Up that set of stairs, then, baseball bat banging against the wall as I ran. The stairs ended on a landing that split into several different rooms, all dark and featureless as far as my light-deprived eyes could tell. I swore under my breath, searching for Rena’s scent. There; mingling with fresh air, through the room on my right, again following that same concrete regularity. Barracks, I thought, or some other army establishment. Only there wasn’t room for any of that on Georges Island. We’d made it to another island entirely. For a fraction of a second I remembered that flash of Colin, back when his hand was whole, dragging his boat onto a gravelly shore under a heavy, ugly sky.

  I started to follow Rena’s scent, then froze as the first real sound made its way through the ringing in my ears: a splintering crack as the flashlight shattered somewhere. “Rena!” I yelled, and Rena answered me with an inarticulate cry—followed by gunshots.

  I stumbled, landed on a tangle of bottles, one of which cracked and slid along my calf in a thin line of pain, and clawed my way back up the wall. Fresh air, there was air in front of me, and wasn’t it just barely lighter out there?

  Another gunshot sounded, followed by a quick succession of them, their echo somehow flatter now. “Rena!” I shouted again, and thought I heard a faint curse in return. I emerged into open air, onto hard-packed earth pocked with stones. Mist curled about me, masking any sight of this new island, revealing shadows of branches, walls, other buildings that might have been wholly nonexistent or might have been part of this army site. Rena’s scent was close, but now there was another scent, one I knew too well. Fresh blood.

  With the scent came a voice, cool and amused. “Is that her name?” Dina said from somewhere above me, and I could almost see the smile as she spoke.

  “Dina!” I turned in place, but she only laughed—above me, on some kind of terrace. I climbed another set of crumbling stairs, then paused, trying to see where she was, where I could go from here. The roar of the ocean was close, and I could see the long branches of dead scrub clinging to the embankment. Below me was an open green, about fifteen feet down, hidden and revealed in turns by the billowing fog. For a second I thought I saw Rena, or at least someone, on the green below, but the mists blew over her, hiding her again. “Dina!” I yelled, and heard a chuckle behind me—no, to my left—

  “Call me all you like, you have no claim on me.”

  “No claim? I brought back your damn sunstone!”

  She laughed. “And I should pay you for my property? My eye, long gone and tainted by time away from the salt? Be glad I don’t act as your idiot hunters did and take it out of your hide.”

  My breath whistled between my teeth. Too trusting, Evie. Too trusting by far.

  Some things in the undercurrent are too single-minded to be of much danger. But if they’re too human, if they’re too close, they get corrupted. I thought of the Morrigan, tainted by the vulnerability she’d used to get close to me, of Patrick and the Horn of the Wild Hunt, and of the sunstone, so long away from Dina, so long in the care of humans … Dina had been corrupted long since.

  “But I did promise no harm to you or yours,” she went on. “So I suggest you leave. I have matters to attend to, and you, you have someone in need of help.”

  She was ahead of me and to the left. Two steps. “Rena will be all right,” I said, tossing the words off as if they were less than the prayer I made them.

  “Really? But you should see—”

  I whirled and slammed the bat into the mist—too late. A shape, human but shrouded, vanished into an empty arch.

  “You should see what she feared,” she continued. “Really, I didn’t think she had the imagination for it—then again, I didn’t think you’d have your particular trigger—”

  “Is that what the stone does?” I snapped, and swung again, blindly this time. Something, though, stepped out of the way, drifting closer. “Lets you see people’s fears?”

  “Hush. Hush. Listen.”

  I did—but I did more than listen, I scented, and that was worse. At the edge of hearing, just making its way through the ringing that still echoed in my ears, a woman’s voice called. Not Rena’s, and certainly that thread of incense and greenery wasn’t her scent (though the blood, the blood had to be hers, and there was far too much of it).

  Sarah’s.

  I froze, straining for her voice. She couldn’t be here. I’d told her to stay behind, and she’d agreed, she’d agreed. I backed up a step, trying to hear her, understand why she was calling out, what she was calling for.

  But this was Dina before me, and whatever she’d shown Rena had also been bad enough, convincing enough, to draw her out. “No,” I said. “No, you can’t fool me that way.”

  A shape emerged from the mist. I couldn’t quite get a clear look at her—she spoke with the same voice as in the dark room in Georges, but the mists seemed to hang about her, making what looked first like a winter parka become a denim jacket, what could have been heels become Doc Martens, and back again … It wasn’t that she was changing shape; there was no external magic to it. I just couldn’t focus. Like the forms in fog, she was unreadable. Worst of all was her face: the closest impression I got was a veil like that of a bride, held in place with a ring of dark metal utterly unlike a crown. “No, I suppose not,” Dina said.

  Her hand snaked out, catching the end of the baseball bat.

  “However, it did do one thing,” she went on. Her fingers tightened, and ashwood splintered under them, twisting and giving way as if the bat were no more than cardboard. “It did get you closer to the edge.” Her other hand struck me on the shoulder, not hard, but enough to make me stumble back onto empty air.

  It wasn’t very far to fall, but it felt like an age.

  Eighteen

  I hit the ground hard enough that something went crunch along my rib cage, and stars sparked across my vision as my head struck earth. Soft earth, though, close to mud, and instead of knocking me straight out it just stuck to my hair and, as I turned over, to one side of my face.

  The remnants of the baseball bat bounced off my leg, the bruise just one more pain among the chorus. I stared up at the blank sky, trying to catch my breath with lungs that felt like they’d been flattened to two dimensions.

  Somewhere up on the cliff, Dina paused in mid laugh, as if she’d heard something. “Oh, that’s tender,” she said, or something like it, and her scent faded into the fog.

  She might have said more, but just then I’d tried to roll over on the wrong side, and my mind whited out from pain. “Fuck,” I mumbled, and heard an answering groan from off to my right. “Rena?”

  “Evie?” Now the smell of spilled blood was heavier, tangling with the mists in ways I didn’t like. “Get over here, please.”

  I pushed myself up, gritting my teeth against the pain. I didn’t have double vision, though, and nothing beyond a goose egg from what I could tell. But two inches from where my head had hit, a lump of rock poked up out of the ground at the very edge of a campfire pit. I stared at it for a second, aware of the chill of winter behind me and the Hounds’ mark on me, then shook myself and headed for Rena’s voice.

  Rena sat crouched in the door of one of the army buildings, clutching her right leg with both hands. “Take off your belt,” she grated as soon as I got close.

  “My belt?”

  “It’s not bad—just a graze—but I want to stop the bleeding.” She glanced at me, teeth bared in a vicious, pained smile. “Don’t you know any first aid at all?”

  “Not enough to deal with you,” I said, and handed her the belt.

  She laughed through her teeth and shifted position, so that I could now see the dark stain that spread across the back of her calf. “Put your hands here and keep pressing while I tie this.”

  I did so. The blood was already sticky, and it didn’t seem to be coming out in a rush, so it must have missed the arteries. In fact, it seemed li
ke a pretty shallow wound. How she’d gotten it, though—

  Something crackled behind me, and the scent of incense curled about us. Dina’s illusion—no. No, she might be able to distract Rena, but I’d always trusted my nose and I could do so now. “Sarah?” I called over my shoulder, still holding on to the belt. “That’s really you, isn’t it?”

  There was a long pause—Rena fumbled with the belt, swearing quietly—then, soft and querulous above the drone of the ocean: “Evie?”

  “Jesus Christ, Sarah, what are you doing here? I told you to stay on the boat!”

  “Evie,” Sarah repeated instead of answering me. “Who … what was the Sox score tonight?”

  What the hell? “What are you talking about? Baseball season’s long over—the Sox caved way back in the playoffs. They’re not scoring anything for a while. And they won’t, not with that offense.”

  “It is you. God, Evie, I thought—” A gust of wind carried a fresh billow of mist into the hollow between the barracks, but it also revealed something fluttering and too pink to be any part of the gray foliage on this island. Sarah, coming up the path, slow and hesitant, fumbling her way from one tree to the next.

  “More pressure, Evie,” Rena grated. I complied, and she looped the belt just above the wound, yanked it so tight her lips went white, pulled it tighter still, then tied it off. “You can talk baseball later.”

  “It’s not that.” I sighed and eased the pressure on the wound, and though the iron seep of blood still stung my nose, it wasn’t nearly as bad now. “Sarah, we’re over here. What the hell was all that about the Sox?”

  “Wanted to make sure you were you.”

  Rena let go of the belt, sighing. “I don’t blame her,” she added, and reached for something at her side: her gun, cast aside and still smelling of the shots fired.