Soul Hunt (14 page)

Roger’s salt-and-granite scent approached, echoed by the crunch of footsteps on gravel, and when I opened my eyes he held out a beer. “Thanks for coming out.”

“Welcome. But no thanks,” I added. “Swore off some time ago.”

He shrugged. “More for an old sailor, then.” He leaned back against the wall, watching Deke.

There was something about him that made you believe you were in on the joke too. I didn’t much like charisma, and I’ve always hated charm, but Roger had something else about him that didn’t fall easily into either category. Which made me wonder what he was doing with Deke. “So what is it you need found?”

He opened the beer and hunkered down against the
wall, taking a long sip. “You know,” he said, “time was I thought Cam was nuts too. Nice, but, you know, nuts. Then I joined up and … well. Being out on the sea does different things to different men. I’ve known some Marines who got religion and some who became flat-out atheists, and both from the same thing happening to them. Me, I just kept my eyes open, and … you learn a few things that way.”

I thought about what I knew of the sea and magic. You can’t magic the ocean; it’s too wide and too varied, and the water in it flows from too many different streams for you to name and bind it. Kind of like the Wild Hunt, come to think of it. But that didn’t mean there weren’t powers out there, ones that I didn’t know the first thing about dealing with.

“So about then I start thinking that you know, maybe there’s something to what Cam was always talking about way back when.” He gave a long sigh, then creaked to his feet. “And then there’s how I got into it, but that’s another story.”

“I believe it,” I said fervently, and followed him back to the grill. Deke had found several dry sticks—don’t ask me where; there wasn’t much cover on this side of the island—and stuck their ends in the coals, like a blacksmith with his irons.

“Then what I say will make more sense to you than it would to most other people. I’m not like Cam here.” This he punctuated with another slap on Deke’s back, and Deke punched his friend in the arm weakly. “I don’t have the spark for it. Most I’ve ever seen was a man on my crew a little while back who had a touch of the Evil Eye. Worked in our favor, then. But I don’t have that advantage. And I’m just a grunt, when it comes down to it. Just a simple sailor man.” He winked at me.

“Sure,” I said. “And I’m just a biker girl.”

“No shit? I always wanted me a Harley.” I opened my mouth to say that that wasn’t what I meant, then let it pass. “Not that I could use one much, things
being what they are—” he gestured to the surrounding ocean as if that explained it, which I suppose it did in a way. “Anyway. What I did for you back on the mainland is probably the extent of the book learning I’ve got. Never had the patience for it, never got my hands on a copy of the Unbound, never could stand any of the dipshit discount Crowleys drawing their circles and chanting their mantras.” I thought of the Elect or Chatterji. Yeah, I’d lack patience in that situation as well. “So I took the other option: I made allies.”

Allies. I’d once heard magic could be split into three categories, blood-magic, like Deke’s and Katie’s sight and my own talent; ritual magic, like the Elect and Sarah’s work and the majority of adepts; and spirit magic, which depended on entities that ranged from gods to mauled ghosts. The categories weren’t perfect; they blended back and forth with worrying regularity (case in point: the Fiana had been ritual magicians, but they’d used spirits—chained, betrayed spirits kept in vessels of flesh—as their source of power), but they would do for a quick glance. And of the three, I considered spirit magic the least reliable, because if you didn’t have the upper hand at all times, you were essentially dependent on the goodwill of something inhuman. I touched the shiny patch of new skin at my throat, where the Horn had rested. “And that’s why you’re stuck out here,” I said.

Roger shot a narrow glance at me. “Yeah. Yeah, it is. Not the worst of the bargains I’ve made by a long shot—and don’t think I’m going to tell you the rest—but it does have some problems. Like now, for example.”

He handed one of the sticks to Deke, who reverently accepted the fire and began turning it back and forth, searching with haunted eyes. “I’ve currently got an ally,” he said, nudging the foil-wrapped packets out of the coals and giving them a poke. “And she’s got a bit of a problem. If she didn’t, I’d be back in Malacca right now, but that’s neither here nor there …
anyway, she’s injured. Old wound, but one that’s been draining her for some time.”

“Sounds like you should have chosen a better ally.”

“Hey, I don’t turn down offers. Besides, usually she’s fine, just needs to recharge now and then. That’s why I make it up to Boston on a regular basis; that’s where she got hurt, and where she feels better. Like being close to what was stolen helps her, a bit. Only this time we had that trouble in the harbor, and now I don’t have a ship. But Cam tells me that not only is Boston no longer
terra non grata,
but that you might be able to fix things for my ally. Like permanently.” He snorted, then carefully extracted both packets and slapped them on the picnic table. The wood charred and smoked, but didn’t catch. “Cam! Fries are up.”

“Thanks,” Deke muttered, and jammed the unburnt ends of the sticks in the ground, so that they continued to smolder, like poor attempts at tiki torches.

Roger prised open the foil with thick, bent fingernails. “I only made enough for two, but you’re welcome to a bite. Better than the noodles Cam brought up; I don’t know what I’ll do with those.”

“Don’t knock the ramen.” I usually ended up living on the stuff in March and April, when my courier budget finally ran out. “But no. Thanks.”

Roger gave me a sideways glance. “Smart. You don’t like incurring debts of any kind … very smart. All right, here’s one thing I’ll swear right now, on my mother’s dear gone soul, and on the waters of Oceanus the mighty. Neither I nor my allies will do harm to you or yours.”

That was … well, easier than I’d expected. And now for the tough part. “And what do I get in return for my work?”

“Dina can tell you.” He finished off his fish with a couple of bites, then licked his fingers. “Cam, watch the fire, would you? I’m going to take her into the fort.”

Deke nodded, still looking from fire to fish and back.

“You’re a cautious woman,” Roger said as he led me back along the path to the dock. “So I should warn you about this now: Dina’s a little scary.”

“Scary?”

“Oh, she’s harmless. Especially now. But she doesn’t like to be seen, and she’s … well. Best to let you find out for yourself; I can see you won’t believe what I tell you.” He led me to the huge gate in the stone wall that we’d passed on the way over, and gestured within. “Fort Warren. Not that it’s much of a fort; it was more of a prison back in the Civil War, and they did some stuff with it in World War Two, but that’s about it. Still, good enough for a place to crash.”

It was enough of a fort for me: huge stone walls encompassed a wide expanse of green lawn, streaked with trails from the tourists who wandered over it in summertime. Beyond the walls, waves crashed on the stones, their impacts muffled only slightly. “She’s here?”

“Sort of. Listen.”

I did. The sounds here were mostly wind, punctuated by the slow, mournful note of a beacon out in the harbor and the clang of buoys. But … there. One moment present, the next caught by the wind and reduced to only a memory, the thin sound of a flute wound up from the fort, a hollow, aimless reel like that of a lost Pied Piper. Every other note dissipated on the wind, but it was there. “That’s her?”

“That’s her.” He led me to the thick far wall, which was notched with doors and gaps, some of them set with lights, some not. “Barracks were this way, once. And when it was a prison, the mess hall. But there’s not much here now.”

He pointed to the ceiling—no electric lights on this entrance, as opposed to the one a few yards down—and a warning sign saying that people who ventured into the fort did so at their own risk. “You got a light?” I said.

“She doesn’t like it.” He grinned. “I’ll be right beside you,” he said, and stepped into the darkness. I hesitated, cursed, and followed.

The flute hesitated briefly, as if the player had heard me, but continued. I edged forward, one hand on the wall, opening my eyes wide as if that might help bring in more light. The dimness of the unlit corridor faded further into total blackness, and my hand slid off the wall into nothingness.

I did have a light on my keychain, the little red lights that certain pocketknives have in the place of the tweezers everyone loses in the first two months. But it hadn’t worked in a while—not since I’d used it to guide my steps up to the top of the tower in Mount Auburn Cemetery, come to think of it. Maybe the stress of the later encounters had broken the bulb. It didn’t matter; what was important now was that I had no way of seeing who I was supposed to be meeting.

I shouldn’t need to, though. Closing my eyes—the difference was negligible—I turned to the right, reaching out to trail my fingers against a wall that receded out of reach within the first few steps. The scent here was of damp leaves and dust, cobwebs that had never been rained on but nevertheless had the same clumped, sticky feeling just from the pervasive dampness. The flute echoed in here, and I suddenly realized I was in a much larger room than I’d expected.

I took a deep breath, trying to figure out where I was, what this room might have been. The scuffed salt-stone scent was still there, just muted beneath the layers of decay and neglect, and Roger’s salt and sweat was still present, a few feet ahead of me. And beyond that …

My eyes snapped open, even though there was nothing to see. Beyond those scents was another, akin to the scents outside but somehow magnified, as if seen through a lens of bloody water. Seawater. Black sand. Even, somehow, the scent of splintered wood. And a
dull, corroded scent that I knew at once, even if it was as immaterial as the ghost scent that so marked this fort, even if it was only a psychic scent rather than a real one. It was a signifier only, not a trace of reality, but it still made my spine tingle all the way down to my tailbone.

Whoever was playing that flute smelled of corpses, long dead and rotted. “Roger—”

“It’s okay,” he rumbled somewhere ahead of me. He didn’t have any trouble finding his way, at least. “I promise.”

The reel hadn’t changed since I stepped into the dark. I waited while the flute player continued, winding through the last few phrases as if fumbling its way through a labyrinth (far too apt an analogy for the moment, but it stayed with me), and, when the last note died and its echoes strangled on themselves, Roger clapped.

“Thank you,” said a woman’s voice. She wasn’t close, perhaps at the other end of this wide room, but her voice was clear and unaccented. She sounded old, not cracked or anything like that, but without the tics and swiftness of a younger woman’s speech.

“Hello,” I said.

“You’re here,” the woman said. “I’m so tired,” she added, and I realized she wasn’t talking to me.

“I know, Dina,” Roger said. “It’ll be all right. I’ve brought someone who can find it.”

“Find it.” She took a deep breath, and I heard a slight scuffling around, like … rats … or, no, like someone finding a case and putting an instrument away. Right? “You … you are a mother, yes?”

“What? No! No, I’m not.”

“But—” She hesitated, her scent somehow static even as I could hear her moving. “I see. You have severed that.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about—” My voice went high, and I clamped my mouth shut to keep from embarrassing myself further.

“You lost something, didn’t you?”

I saw in memory—as if it were projected on the blackness before me—Nate falling from the cliff above the quarry, blown back by an explosion, his body fading.

“You bargained something away.”

What will you give me in return for him?
the spirit of the quarry had asked, cradling Nate against the column of falling water that was its body. And then a wall of water, striking me, passing through me, leaving only the taste of dead leaves and ice in the back of my throat and a cold, coiling presence in my gut.

“I didn’t bargain,” I said through dry lips. “I didn’t offer anything to it. It just said it accepted and gave him back. And how do you know all this, anyway?”

“How do you know where the scent leads? How do you know how to raise your eyes to the sun?” There was a faint rustling: petticoats, I thought briefly, then revised that to leaves, or papers, or something that made more sense in here. “We both have our inborn talents. This is one of mine. Think back. It asked what you would give it, and you cried out …” She slowed, as if reviewing the scene in her head. “You called it …”

A cold, gnawing feeling rose up in my stomach—no, not my stomach but lower, like a cramp that wouldn’t fade. “I called it a son of a bitch.”

Dina was silent, but it was the silence of a teacher, waiting for a student to draw some connection. Beside me, Roger drew breath sharply.

For a moment I didn’t understand. For another moment after that, I didn’t want to. Then, “Oh, no. No. That can’t—”

“Can’t it?”

“That makes no sense,” I said, and my voice came out as more a plea than a statement. I cleared my throat. “No sense at all. There’d have to be so many factors that worked just right—I’d have had to, to catch it right away, and I’d have noticed—”

“It’s what you’re afraid of,” Dina said.

“It makes no sense,” I said again, more weakly. It did—just in an undercurrent fashion. Son of a bitch. And I was the Hound, the queen bitch. A spirit could purposefully misinterpret that, turn it against me, claim the possibility—there didn’t even need to be a reality, and the blood I’d shed a week after that night indicated there had not been—of a child and make that its link to me. And then, month by month, the quarry spirit would have stolen more of my life, in the same way that a growing fetus draws on its mother’s strength.

My stomach lurched. I was suddenly very glad I hadn’t taken Roger’s offer of the fish.