It wasn’t quite a lie, I told myself as I dialed Mercury Courier; it just left out several major facts, the first being that my business relationship with Mercury was completely unrelated to my other work. “Hi, Tania? This is Genevieve. Where do you need me to go?”
I could hear Tania rustling through the mountain of papers on her desk. I’d only seen it once, but the image had burned itself into my mind. “Genevieve? Honey, you’re not on shift just yet.”
“I always work the Tuesday morning—”
“Schedule changes. The new system has you for the eleven-to-eight shift today.”
“Is this the same new system that wanted me to run a package out to Worcester?”
“There’s still a few bugs to work out, honey. Call me at eleven and I’ll send you out.”
I clicked the phone shut and stuffed it away. So much for getting work done early. On the other hand, that meant I had some time to work for my other job … or at least to see what the hell had been up with Frank last night.
There wasn’t any address listing for him, which was small surprise. Of the other F. McDermots in the phone book, though, one had an address in Southie that I recognized from way back. I got my courier bag, in case Tania called with yet another schedule change, and headed out.
Rush hour was well under way, with the coffee-propelled masses of commuters already filling the streets. I slid out into traffic, darting between two SUVs and a truck to make it into the far lane. Cars honked, but mostly out of jealousy.
I wasn’t the only one zipping through the lanes this morning. The bright weather had brought other cyclists out, and there’d be more as June wore on, until the hot spells descended and commuters could no longer ride to work without arriving soaked in sweat. Today, though, the air was crisp and cool. Perfect hunting weather.
I paused at a light near an orange-fenced yard of cement monoliths: the remnants of the Central Artery highway, now demolished as the Big Dig brought the highways underground. Two high school kids and a woman walking a pair of enthusiastic Labradors stopped at the light as well, next to an old professor-looking guy in a tweed jacket that’d seen better days. One of the Labs lurched toward me, tail whipping back and forth, and the woman hauled on its leash to keep from falling over. The man next to her chuckled, seemingly content to just enjoy the sunlight. He didn’t even bother to cross as the light changed, just stood there in the sun, waving what looked like a wide-mouthed pipe made of dull metal.
I’d gotten about twenty yards down the road before I realized he’d been holding a silver sieve.
I yanked the bike into a U-turn, bumping up onto the sidewalk and veering around a stroller full of kids. The man didn’t notice me as I hurtled back to his corner, so intent was he on the sharp-edged morning shadows.
The bike stopped at the curb. I didn’t; I leaped off, dragged it by its crossbar over the curb, and snatched the sieve from the man’s hand. “Did you catch any?” I demanded.
He made a startled, squeaking noise as I took the sieve, like a baby deprived of a toy. “Wha?”
I leaned in close, until the brim of my helmet tapped his forehead. “Did you catch any?” I repeated, waving the sieve under his nose.
A few of the people at the crosswalk gave us baffled looks. He returned them shamefacedly, sinking his hands in his pockets. “No,” he whined as the light changed and the tide of pedestrians flowed past us again.
“Good.” I smashed the sieve against the handlebars of my bike, tearing the fine mesh. He cried out, as if I’d hit him with it. I glanced up at him, and he fell silent. “This is no good,” I said, jamming the broken sieve into a nearby trash bin for emphasis. “Hell, even if it were, this is no way to go about it.”
“I needed it,” said the shadowcatcher sullenly. “I needed a locus.”
“Yeah, well, did you ever happen to think that maybe those people need their shadows too? Maybe more than you need your goddamn locus?” I sniffed the air around him on the off chance that he was lying. There was always a chance that he’d succeeded and some poor bastard had walked away missing part of his shadow, unknowingly fated to go nuts for a while, or be unable to see in color for a few weeks.
The shadowcatcher shoved his hands further into his pockets, hunching over so that his chin disappeared into the folds of his collar. He wasn’t that old, I realized; not more than forty. Which meant that he must have fallen very fast.
If it’d been anything else, I’d have tried to send him to detox. But detox is no good when people don’t believe what you’re addicted to exists.
Still, I couldn’t just walk away from him. “Christ. Here.” I pulled a scrap of paper from my pocket and scrawled three names on it. “The Buddhist place is downtown. The Carmelites are in Roxbury; even if they can’t let you stay in the nunnery they’ll have some place for you. Society of St. John is across the river; that’s best if you really think you’ll relapse. Being across water helps.” None of them could cleanse him, not unless he outright asked, but the bindings around each place would keep off the worst of it. There were a few other places that might actively try to wean him off the stuff, but of the people that ran them I only trusted Sarah, and the ambient magic at her shop would be no help to someone still in denial.
“Fuck you,” the shadowcatcher said, but he took the paper.
“Get some help. Shadowcatching, man, that’s the bottom of the goddamn ladder.” I wrangled my bike back into a reasonable position. “This is going to kill you.”
The shadowcatcher grinned. He was missing two front teeth, and one had been replaced with wood—not rowan, of course. Probably something he’d been told was mistletoe. “I’m not sure I care anymore.”
As I rode off, a faint reek of overturned trash followed me. I didn’t turn back, because I knew I’d see him scraping through the refuse, searching for his sieve.
Aside from when work called me there, I hadn’t been back to Southie in years. It had changed, and it was hard to say whether that was for the better. Different, I thought, and left it at that.
I made my way to the western end of South Boston and chained my bike to a house railing right in the middle of a changing neighborhood. Across the street, another triple-decker had been torn down, and billboards announced new condos coming to the space in August. August seemed an optimistic date; the house’s frame was up but still skeletal, and the carpenters didn’t seem in any hurry. A couple of them eyed me warily, but stopped when their boss came over.
Some of the other houses on this side of the street also looked redone; I didn’t remember seeing more than a postage stamp of a front yard throughout most of my childhood, but these had enough for a little garden. A mutt was chained up in one yard, and I clucked my tongue at him. He perked up and ambled over to lick my hand, then settled down to some serious napping.
The houses across the way probably hadn’t been renovated in years but kept a dignified facade, like a sick man determined to put a good face on everything. Two of them had little gardens out front, one with roses, the other with tomatoes, but the one I went up to remained bare. I glanced down at the gravel, once raked but now in disarray, and decided I’d probably come to the right place.
A woman in her early sixties came to the door when I rang. She gave me a suspicious, pinch-lipped look through the screen door. “Mrs. McDermot?” I said.
“Yes.” Her expression didn’t change.
“My name’s Genevieve Scelan. I used to know your son Frank.”
A bewildering range of expressions contorted her face when I said his name: shame, hope, anger, bitterness. She stuck with the last. “He doesn’t live here.”
“I know that, I—”
“Beth? Who is it?” A tall man emerged into the hall and came to stand beside her. I fought down a wave of déjà vu; the resemblance between Frank and his father was so strong that it could have been an older version of Frank in front of me, minus the junkie hollows. “Who’s this, now?”
I steadied myself. “Mr
. McDermot, your son called me last night.” His eyebrows twitched, and the same mix of emotions raced over his face, settling into uncertain sorrow. “I was a—a friend of his a long time ago. The call I got was—was kind of weird, and so I was wondering if you might know where he is or if he’s okay.”
“He doesn’t live here,” Frank’s mom repeated angrily, as if that were my fault.
Hell, it might be, I thought.
“We haven’t been in contact with him in a long time,” Frank’s dad said. “You probably know more than we do about whether he’s okay.”
He isn’t okay, I thought. He’s decidedly not okay.
On a hunch, I sniffed. Most of the smells were plain normal, a sure sign that Frank had not been here: dust, old furniture, sawdust from across the street, and a lingering damp reek. And sweat. Frank’s mom glared at me, but she was sweating.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” I said over the sound of a car pulling up to the sidewalk behind me, and the nervous scent from her doubled. “Thanks very much.”
“Wait,” Frank’s dad said. Frank’s mom glanced from him to the street, then me. She took her husband’s arm, but he wasn’t paying attention to her. “If you do find anything, please let us know. Please.”
“I will,” I said, and it wasn’t quite a lie. If Frank had gotten further into the undercurrent, it might be kinder not to let them know.
I turned and nearly walked straight into the man coming up the stairs. He stumbled back and caught hold of the railing to keep from losing his balance, and the scent of his cologne hit me like a damp pillow. He was about my height, considerably broader across the shoulders, and bald as an egg, with that prickly look around the edges that suggested he’d shaved it rather than display a changing hairline. It suited him well, though. If he’d looked a little scruffier, I’d have taken him for a bouncer in some high-class club; as it was, it was clear that he was much higher on the social ladder. “Excuse me,” he said.
“Excused,” I said through the fog of scent. “Sorry.”
He gave me a curious look as I slipped past him, but turned back to the McDermots.
I glanced back at their door as I unlocked my bike. The bald man spoke quietly to Frank’s parents, who opened the screen door and ushered him in. Frank’s mom, no longer smelling nervous (even though the cologne still dulled my nose, I could scent that much) took his arm, and his father closed the door behind them.
Strange. I left my bike where it was for the moment and walked over to the bald man’s car. It was expensive, but dirty, and that was the extent of what I could tell about it.
A dog howled nearby as I was writing down the license number. A second later, another followed suit. I looked up to see the mutt in the yard two doors up the street sitting on his haunches and sniffing at the air. He bared his teeth at nothing, then yelped and scrambled away as if he’d been hit, tail between his legs. “What’s the matter—” I began, and then it hit me too.
A blast of damp gunpowder scent struck me in the face, and with it came a screeching in my ears like ten subway trains coming to a halt. I threw up my hands in an ineffective guard, but the worst had passed, like a ripple in the air, over me and then gone. As I stood there panting, the howls started up again, this time from behind me as the ripple spread over the city, scaring the hell out of every dog it hit. Like a dog whistle with a blast radius, I thought, or the opposite of a dog whistle.
The mutt cowered against the closest fence, scraping at it as if to dig his way out. I shushed him and stroked his head, and he calmed down enough to lick my hand a second time. “Okay,” I said, more to myself than the dog, “anyone want to tell me what the hell that was?”
“Jesus Christ. Is that Evie Scelan?”
I froze. The voice had come from behind me, and it was loud enough to carry to the next city block. “Who’s asking?” I said, and turned.
The boss from the construction site edged around the fence and grinned at me. “Bet you don’t recognize me. Hey, I wouldn’ta recognized you either if it wasn’t for that black braid you got.”
Involuntarily, one hand went to my braid. I was self-conscious about it, but it kept my hair out of my eyes and out from under the bike helmet. Even if it did make me look like I had an electrical cable stapled to the back of my head.
“Yeah. You still got it, huh? Looks like you made up for all the hair I lost.” He rubbed one ruddy hand over his thinning hair. “Hey, remember when I played that trick on you in chemistry?”
I remembered an incident with a Bunsen burner and a lab partner who liked laughing at me. I also remembered the six days’ detention I got for banging the culprit’s head against the lab table. Half of the reason I’d done it was for the stink of burnt hair. I hadn’t been able to smell anything for a week. “You’d be … Billy?”
“Will,” he said, turning slightly redder under his sunburn. He jerked his head back toward the workmen. “Don’t let these guys hear you call me Billy, okay?”
“Got it.” He hadn’t been affected by the ripple, I realized, nor had the workmen. The mutt, though, still cowered in a ball at the end of his chain, and I’d broken out in a sweat just from that sound.
And the scent. The scent was unmistakable.
Will grinned, apparently relieved that I wasn’t going to bang his head against anything this time. “So what are you up to these days?”
“Not much.” I glanced over my shoulder at the Mc-Dermots’ door and bit back a curse. The bald man was already on his way out, escorted by Frank’s dad.
“Waiting for somebody? … Hey, you know, there’s a bunch of us all from school who get together at this bar downtown. Everyone’d be thrilled to see you.”
“I’m sure they would, but this isn’t really a good time—” Too late. The bald man had seen me, and his eyes narrowed. “Maybe later?”
“Later’s good. Tonight’s better. Here; I’ll write down the name of the place for you.” Billy—Will—took a pen from his shirt pocket and patted at his other pockets, frowning.
“Excuse me.” The bald man had paused at the edge of the street, his hands clasped behind his back. “I can’t shake the feeling that I know you from somewhere. Are you a local?”
“Ha!” Will grinned at him. “Always shows in the face, don’t it, Evie? Yeah, she used to be a local, same as me, but she sure as hell isn’t around here near as often as you. I know everyone around here, Evie,” he added as he handed me a folded receipt with a name scratched on the back. “Even know this guy, great guy. Carson, right?”
“Corrigan,” the bald man corrected, but absently.
I sighed. “Genevieve Scelan,” I said, and shook his hand. His palm was strangely uncalloused, with the exception of rough flesh around the ring on his middle finger. It was a plain gold band like a wedding ring, with a pattern of crude spirals scratched into it, and it was just slightly warmer than his skin.
“Scelan?” he said, one eyebrow raised. “I think I may have heard of you, then. Are you …” He paused and glanced at Will, who was happily oblivious to any subtleties in the conversation. “Are you sometimes called Hound?”
I took my hand out of his, too aware of how cold my fingers had gone. “Sometimes,” I said, and dragged my bike upright.
“Hound?” Will grinned. “What kind of a name is that?”
I got on my bike. “Better than ‘Bitch,’” I said, and left before they could snare me further.
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
HARPER Voyager
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Copyright © 2011 by Margaret Ronald
Cover art by Don
Sipley
ISBN 978-0-06-166243-0
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