Soul Hunt
Authors: Margaret Ronald
MARGARET
RONALD
SOUL HUNT
For my parents, who let me get as many
books as I could carry from the library
Praise for Margaret Ronald’s first Evie Scelan novel,
T
here aren’t too many days when I wish I had never heard of the undercurrent, but Halloween’s close to the top of the list, right after Marathon Monday and just before the date of the seer enclave’s damn holiday picnic.
Halloween traffic for a bicycle courier is usually not much different from your basic day-to-day Boston mess: taxis, buses, SUVs resolutely ignoring the narrow nature of city streets, and an awful lot of cyclist-shaped blind spots. But there’s enough of the undercurrent awake and in motion on Halloween that it’s a perpetual distraction, and this year was no different. In the past, I’d had either a clubbing binge with Rena or Sarah’s Samhain party to look forward to; this year, Sarah was so busy with managing her “community watch” that she’d had no time for the party, and Rena, well, Rena and I weren’t speaking. On top of that, I had my own plans, which were not something to look forward to either.
All of this meant that on this particular Halloween, instead of threading my way back to Mercury Courier for another job on my beat-up loaner bike (the replacement ever since a curse-riddled jackass had turned my old bike into aluminum salad), I needed to stop for a moment’s rest. Not that it helped much; even the salt
tang of the harbor couldn’t quite cut through the day’s murk. I locked up my bike by the Boston Aquarium, made my way through a screaming gaggle of kids on their way to see the seals, and damn near collapsed out on the end of the dock.
Slumping against a piling, I closed my eyes. The air smelled of dead fish and kelp—the famous sea breeze that some people find so refreshing—and, below that, the many scents that my talent could distinguish, the ones that didn’t quite exist in a rational sense. Burnt ginger, clinging to a woman in a business suit stumbling over the uneven paving stones; mud and cheap newsprint, following an entire tour group as they hurried to catch up with their umbrella-wielding guide; damp cats and cinnamon, hovering over the entrance to a building as if it were waiting for someone. Every scent had its meaning, though I could only understand them by association, and every scent laid a trail for someone like me—someone like the Hound—to follow.
Even in my worse moments, and there had been a lot of those lately, I could still focus on those scents, the pattern that they laid over the world, the sense they made. I sighed and blew on my hands, trying to make them feel a little less like they’d been immersed in ice water.
“Scelan,” a woman’s voice called somewhere below me. I ignored it, trying to hold on to the pattern a little longer. The scents sharpened, and a tang of fireworks crept through them. I opened my eyes, briefly cringing at the sunlight. No obvious, immediate source, though someone nearby was working magic. That scent is distinctive enough that it’ll pull me out of anything else.
“Scelan! Hound! Are you even awake?”
I scanned the docks, then glanced down to see a figure in a heavy parka sitting in a motorboat just at the edge of the dock. The person pushed back her hood to reveal ash-blonde hair streaked with gray and
a lined but carefully made-up face. “Tessie?” I said. “What are you doing off your boat?”
“Technically I’m not off it,” she said, thumping the hull. “Are you free, girl? Something’s wrong up the Mystic, and I might need your nose.”
I hesitated—I was free, at least until Tania from Mercury Courier called to find out why I hadn’t checked in yet. But there are things you don’t do in the undercurrent, and one of those is favors for an unspecified return. It leaves the scales unbalanced—and a favor is a dangerous thing to owe. “You sure you need me?”
Tessie pointed, and I followed her gesture to see a thin line of smoke rising past the buildings. “I’ll pay your standard rate, contract and everything,” she called. “Just hurry up and come along.”
“Coming,” I said, and scrambled down the ladder into the boat. Tessie fired up the motor, and we skidded off across the harbor, skirting the yachts and boats drawn up along the shore for the season.
“I didn’t catch it till just now either,” she yelled over the roar of the motor. “It might be nothing, but my nets were tangled this morning, and I found two broken hooks in them—”
“In English, please,” I called back. “I don’t speak oracular.”
“Could be nothing. Could be bad.” She shrugged.
That was the problem with magic that let you get a look at the future. Most of the time it was so opaque as to be almost useless. Of the diviners I knew, Tessie made the most sense, and that wasn’t saying much.
But how had I missed the scent of smoke? I’d even been actively using my talent a moment ago, and this much smoke should have caught my attention immediately. Granted, I’d been having off days these last few weeks, and today was no exception, but I was the Hound, dammit. I should have noticed.
I touched the knot of scar tissue at my throat, where a little horn-shaped mark deformed the notch in
my collarbone. These days, I was more than just one Hound, if you wanted to look at it that way. “Tessie,” I said, scooting forward and immediately regretting it as we hit the wake of a returning tugboat. “What do you need me for?”
She frowned and pulled up the hood of her parka, even though it couldn’t have been nearly as cold for her as it was for me in my courier gear. “Depends on what we find. Mostly I just want someone on hand in case I have trouble.”
Tessie’s one of the fixtures of the magical undercurrent of Boston, though like everyone who made it through the years of the Fiana, she prefers to keep a low profile. (I’m the poster child for why doing otherwise is a bad idea.) As long as I’d known her, she’d never set foot on land, although the docks, the boats, and pretty much anything along the water’s edge were hers to look after. Although I didn’t entirely trust her—most magic is founded on stealing pieces of other people’s souls and using them to subvert the laws of nature, so anyone in the undercurrent might regard you as a renewable resource—she rarely gave anyone any trouble. Come to think of it, this was the most agitated I’d seen her.
“Just keep your eyes open,” she said finally as we coasted below the Tobin Bridge into the mouth of the Mystic River. “If something looks really wrong—holy shit.”
That was an understatement. A small ship, maybe a yacht—from the looks of it more suited to the high-class marinas we’d just left—had been moored at the end of a commercial dock, next to several fishing boats. Heavy black smoke obscured the entire back end, orange glints sparking along the dock to the other boats. As we approached, a flapping, burning cable smacked across onto the closest fishing boat, leaving a trail of flame that rapidly expanded. “This is what you meant by bad?” I called, fumbling for my phone.
Tessie shook her head thoughtfully, though her
hand on the tiller didn’t slacken. “Not quite. I thought … no.”
A blare of sirens echoed across the water, and the sullen glow of the fire was joined by flashing red and white lights. Someone must have called it in before it really got going. I started to relax my grip on my phone, but stopped as a fresh gust of wind carried both smoke and scent across the water to us. Smoke, the char of things that were not intended to burn, and under it an acrid tang that I knew well: sweat and fear. “Someone’s in there!”
Tessie bared her teeth, then shook her head. “There’ll be more in a moment. Hound, can you steer?”
“What? No—not well anyway—”
“Then I’ll let you off.” She did something to the engine, and we skidded across the tops of the waves, right up to the side of the fishing boat. “You take care of any people, and I’ll start a patterning to hold off anything else in the fire. And keep your senses open—tell me what you scent!”
I stood and caught at the ladder hanging off the end of the fishing boat, then had to lock my arms around a rung as my head swam. It wasn’t seasickness, or even a head rush, but it also wasn’t unfamiliar; I’d been having bad grayouts for a few weeks now. It was, however, poorly timed. Before I could call to Tessie, she’d steered to the side of the burning yacht, caught hold of the hull, and scrambled up, parka billowing behind her. For a woman so much older than me, she was surprisingly nimble.
I shook my head until the fog retreated a little, then hooked my arm around the next rung and hauled myself up, smearing salt and greasy residue all down my front. It didn’t smell so much like fish as of predigested fish, and if I hadn’t been nauseated before, this would have done it.
Somewhere here, though, amid the sparking fire—too much for me to put out, now, and the sirens were
already coming close enough—someone was very scared. I turned my back on the fire and tried to catch that scent a second time, concentrating on the pattern, the pattern that had eluded me before and that
I should have noticed, dammit, even before Tessie found me—
There. Not the stink of fear, strangely enough, but a clearly human scent, just ahead of me. I ran to the little door leading into the main part of the boat and slammed my shoulder against it.
Of course, it wasn’t locked. I fell into the room, almost sprawling against the far wall. Someone shrieked so close to my ear I jerked away.
Blinking, I realized that whatever the fear had been, it probably hadn’t come from here. A skinny teenage boy with his shirt off jumped away from a bunk with an even skinnier teenage girl on it. “Jesus!” the boy yelled, scrabbling for his clothes. “Jesus, who the hell are you—”
Good to know someone had even worse timing when it came to romance than I did. “There’s a fire,” I said, and pointed to the hatch. A few tendrils of smoke drifted across the light, proving my point. “Get your clothes and get out.”
With the self-preservation instinct common to all teenagers, the kid backed off and glared at me instead. “This boat’s private property, lady.”
“Shut up, Devin,” the girl said, yanking her shirt over her head. “How bad’s the fire? My dad’s gonna kill me if anything happens—”
“Not bad yet. But you want to get out of here, now.” I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate again. Devin and his slightly more sensible girlfriend (“Shut the fuck up, Devin, and get your coat,” she told him without even a backward glance) might be a lot of things, but they weren’t the source of the fear-stink I’d caught.
Not here,
I thought, searching for the source of it, that familiar tang,
but close, close …
The scar at my collarbone shifted like a trapped
snake under my skin, and my eyes snapped open.
You are hunting,
a voice like the cold breath of winter whispered in the back of my mind, and a chorus of murmurs followed it, like the shifting noises of a crowded kennel.
“I’m trying to,” I muttered back. Devin’s girl, having shooed him most of the way up the stairs, turned back to give me a wary look. I ignored her—but the Gabriel Hounds, the Whistlers, the Gabble Retchets whose mark I carried in my bone and whose Horn I had once called, they didn’t. At the back of my mind, where the distinction between my own thoughts and those of this spectral pack blurred, I-or-one-of-them briefly wondered what her flesh would taste like torn from bone, what a chase she could lead us.