Soul Hunt (15 page)

“Nothing makes sense,” Dina snapped, her voice suddenly parting into three, like a unified voice splitting into a chord. “Nothing,” she repeated, again the tired woman I’d heard before. “But I could do something about it.”

That got my attention. What kind of idiot does “something” about it in these circumstances? “No,” I said. “That’s over and done with. Besides, none of this is going to make me trust you any more. If I’m going to find this—this thing for you—”

“It’s a sunstone, about the size of a Ping-Pong ball,” Roger said quietly, the timbre of his voice changing as he turned back to face me. “Polarized feldspar; it’ll show light through when held in the right direction. Useful for determining your position even on a cloudy day. Which was why, I believe, the Vikings prized them. Good for navigation.” Though I couldn’t see him, I had the sense that he was smiling.

“I’ve been without it so long.” She drew another breath, and though it was a quiet, unassuming sound, something about it still sawed against my bones. “Please. If you bring it back, I can give you back what was stolen—or, no, there is more. I can keep the Hunt from coming for you.”

I caught my breath. “You can do that?”

“I can. At the height of my power, I can. If I have the sunstone, I can.”

I closed my eyes. In the past, I’d made bad bargains, negotiated with people who didn’t have my best interests or even their own best interests at heart. But most of the time, when that had happened, it was because I’d been ignorant or overconfident. The worst scrapes I’d gotten into were mostly because I was convinced I could help someone. This wasn’t the same thing at all.

Someone had once said of me that I’d taken on a
geis,
an obligation, that I couldn’t turn down anyone who was genuinely in need. I couldn’t cling to that now. If I took this on, it would be a free choice on my part, and I’d have to suffer the consequences.

And this was a devil’s bargain. All I had to do to know that was trust my nose.

“I want your word,” I said, forcing the words out through lips like iron, “that you won’t hurt me or mine if I do this. My friends, my loved ones.” At least I could keep the fallout from touching them. “You won’t lay a hand on them, you won’t work to hurt them—nothing.”

Roger chuckled. “Suspicious, aren’t you?”

“I’m standing in a pitch-black room with a magician and a creature that can read my worst fears. I think a little suspicion is called for.”

“I will swear,” Dina said. “No harm to you or yours, and you bring me back the sunstone. By the gods of the earth and the sky and the harsh depths of the sea, I swear.”

“Okay,” I said. My skin had gone from cool to chilled, and I wrapped my arms around myself to keep from shivering. “I’ll do it, then. Where do I find it?”

The rustling started up again, drawing nearer and lighter, like skirts over stone but not nearly so heavy. “I can give you a token, something with which to find the thief.”

Her offhand confidence in me was less inspiring and more creepy. I stepped back, the heel of my sneaker scraping against the wall I’d followed into this room.

“Hold out your left hand.” Something nudged against my fingers a few times, as if she couldn’t quite see how to place it in my hand. Perhaps she was as blind as I. A thin bundle wrapped in stiff cloth pressed against my palm; something like two broken pencils. “That should lead you to the thief,” Dina said, and while her voice still sounded distant, the breath of her words stirred my hair. “Good luck.”

“Luck has nothing to do with it,” I said, and tucked the bundle into my jacket pocket.

She smiled—I couldn’t see it, but there’s a peculiar exhalation that comes with a certain kind of smile, and right then I could hear that puff of breath. “Don’t worry. Soon you’ll know.”

My breath caught again, and I sidled back, wanting to get away but unwilling to turn my back on her. My fingers brushed the wall, and I felt my way back, lichen and slime and weird iron hooks and latches dragging along my palm, until finally I turned the corner to see what little light remained at the end of the hall. Roger followed beside me, silent as a shadow.

The last glow of daylight had faded, and I quickened my pace. “I’m so sorry, Hound,” Roger said quietly. “If I’d known—”

“Shut up,” I said, and kept walking.

D
eke knew enough not to talk to me on the way back, though he paused as we tied up (at a real dock, not the weird little thing under the bridge) and turned to face me. “I told him you were good, Hound,” he said. “I know you’ll find it.”

“Thanks,” I said listlessly.

“Roger’s a good man,” he added, uncoiling a rope and throwing a loop over one of the posts on the dock that had a
RESERVED
sign on it. “Always visits when he comes by for his friend to … to recharge. This time I thought, you’re free now, the city’s free, maybe you can help him. So he doesn’t have to keep coming back here.”

I didn’t answer, just climbed up onto the dock. The ocean sloshed underfoot, and I had to shift from one foot to the other to keep my balance.

“And maybe if you can help him, then he can help me. That’s right, isn’t it, Hound?”

I slung my messenger bag into place and glanced back at him. “Why—what do you need help with, Deke?”

He huddled in the end of the boat, tipping it so that it lurched in the waves. Even in a craft that small, he seemed smaller, and the warm gold light from the waterfront didn’t help that. “I see things, sometimes,
in the fire … sometimes they don’t go away. That’s why I’ve made preparations. I’d want to go out like a Viking, me. I’d go properly.”

There’s a limit to how much I can be around adepts in a day before my brain starts to skip a groove, and I’d hit that limit a while back. “Okay, then. You take care, all right?”

He nodded and cast off again, headed to whatever pitiful shelter he’d made in that horrible old house by the bridge. I turned away, running my fingers through my hair as if to shake the last of the salt spray from it, and climbed up onto the marina.

The chill in the air didn’t seem to mean anything to the beautiful people of Boston; some charity had organized a jazz concert out on the waterfront, and the whole marina glittered with it. I passed by men in suits with martinis in hand and women in cocktail dresses and seriously inadequate shawls, all talking and laughing about things that probably meant a lot, outside the undercurrent. Only the waiters paid any attention to me in my beat-up jacket and scruffy biker gear, and they only did so to stay well away from me. Which was a pity, because for a moment I had the urge to snatch one of the glasses off their trays and forget what I’d just learned for a while.

I shook my head. That wasn’t the answer, not with everything else I had right now. The quarry spirit was severed, I was whole again, and now I had a chance at living past midwinter. It wouldn’t even be the first time I’d helped an entity of dubious morality. No one could call the Morrigan a good goddess, and yet I’d brought her back to wholeness. (And killed her again, but we could pass over that for now.)

I drew out the bundle of cloth, the token Dina had given me to find her thief, and examined it under the lights. Oilcloth, or something like it: soft, coarse cloth that had been soaked in some waxy substance for so long it didn’t feel quite like cloth anymore, although it wasn’t unpleasant against my skin.

My first impression of broken pencils hadn’t been far off, I thought as I unwrapped it; this looked like a very old, shriveled, oversized clothespin. Two shriveled, blackened sticks of uneven length stuck out of a slightly thicker lump about the same length. One side of it was ragged and more shriveled than the rest, and the whole thing stank of age and salt.

It wasn’t until I turned it over and saw the fingernails at the ends of the two sticks that I realized what I was holding.

I yelped, dropped the bundle, and then fumbled as it fell to keep it from skittering across the pier into the harbor. My fingers snagged on the oilcloth so that the mutilated hand ended up snuggled against my chest, like some zombie trying to cop a feel. I gagged and peeled it away, looking at it in the bright light. Now that I knew what it was, I could see the details more clearly: this was half of someone’s hand, mummified by age and desiccation. Whatever wound had torn away these fingers and section of palm, it had long shriveled up, peeling back at the edges to reveal bone turned brown from exposure to air and salt. The whole thing had shrunk a little; impossible to say now whether this had come from a man or a woman.

If this was Dina’s “token,” it was a wonder the sunstone had ever been stolen. I looked around to see if anyone had noticed me juggling body parts. Nothing, but I kept on walking anyway, following the water. If I remembered right, there was a little stub of a rose garden, just planted on the greenway now that the Central Artery was gone. I closed my hand over the fingers and headed in that direction. If I had to do my search using such a grisly token, I could at least do so from a point of protection.

There’s a magic to certain open spaces, and one that I’ve never quite understood. It’s not a natural magic in the sense of a spirit or a genius loci or the pattern of ley-lines, nor the consecrated space of a chapel or a gravel garden. But something to do with how the place
is kept and maintained—or even how it was built in the first place—tends to accrete its own magic. It’s similar to how Fenway Park has its own field about it, the result of generations of people pinning their hopes and their moods on what happened on that scrap of green. What it means in practical terms is that, simply, certain places have different affinities.

Boston Common, for all its role as a park, was best for travel or for starting journeys. There was a scrap of a playground in South Boston that, because of the care and the time and the emotions invested in it, had an affinity for change; you spent time there, and you came out wanting to alter your life in some way, usually for the good. And there was a tiny chapel on the waterfront, deconsecrated now and converted into some kind of utility station, that comforted people whose loved ones were away. That one, though, I knew only by hearsay, since most of my loved ones hadn’t moved away; they’d just died on me.

For a number of reasons like the ones I’ve mentioned, rose gardens are safe havens. I wouldn’t trust one to hide me from active pursuit, or even from a passive scrying, but something about the act of placing the roses, encompassing a small space with them, creates a bulwark against ill influences. In terms of protection, it’s probably on a par with a ditch, compared to, say, the six-foot walls and spiky bits that a proper ward provides. But it’s enough for me, most of the time.

Safely in the roses—a few of them still clinging to summer, thick with brilliant pink blossoms that practically glowed in this light—I unwrapped the fingers again and, grimacing, raised them to my face, seeking the scent that I could follow to Dina’s sunstone. Salt. Tar. No rot; just the dry, leathery smell of old skin and an undernote of bone that made my lips pull back from my teeth. All scents of a thing, of the disembodied fingers on their own, of this lump of mummified flesh. No trace of the person they’d belonged to.

I drew my knees up so that I was curled into a ball next to the roses, sitting with my back against one bush and my toes just brushing the edge of the path. With any luck I wasn’t all that visible; I didn’t know how long it would be before a police officer came by to inform me that I couldn’t sleep here, and right now I didn’t really want to deal with the cops. I laid the grisly scrap on my knees and regarded it, then took a deep breath and closed my eyes.

I’d done something like this before, sinking into a full trance to read the scent around me in an attempt to glean information that either was too faint or too fleeting to follow without heavy concentration. But then I’d been searching the broad spectrum of scents for one in particular, like a satellite scanning the streets of a city for one specific person. This was diving into one scent, one pattern, trying to find the original defining characteristic.

Deeper, down so that no scent beyond this one in front of me even penetrated my consciousness, deeper still … My ears began to feel as if I were trying to sneeze with both my nose and mouth shut. Salt and preservation and, faintly, the first echo of blood and rot …

There. I almost missed it, since it was so like what I’d been ignoring till now. Fish and tar and salt, but of a different quality than the salt that was part of the thing’s dead scent. This had a tang to it, like meat kept in brine, or olives … the hand had belonged to a sailor, or someone associated with the sea. Which made sense if I thought about it, since going back a few hundred years, most people had some kind of association with Boston’s shipping, hadn’t they?

The conscious thought started to pull me back up out of the well, nonverbal thought receding from me as if I’d accidentally caught hold of a passing buoy and now was being dragged up to the surface. And with it came something else: the sizzle of gunpowder, long wetted but not quite useless. Old magic, waking up.

My eyes snapped open, and for a moment the world shivered before me, the greenway’s lights becoming the dull glow of lanterns, the greasy glow of burning whale oil sliding across water … no. No, it was the greenway again, though the light jazz down the waterfront had faded. The rosebud that had brushed my forehead when I began now curled away from me, as if it had had time to grow and decided I was not a safe place.

I was inclined to agree. The fireworks scent of magic was gone, but it had been unmistakable, even if old and slow. Like stepping into a rusted bear trap … okay, no, I didn’t much like that metaphor. Like finding a letter to yourself from decades before you were born.

I realized I’d clasped the mummified fingers between my hands and pressed them close against my neck, so that their freakishly smooth surface (like old leather stretched over twigs, and oh God it was warm now from my own body heat) rested against the skin of my throat like a lover’s caress. I fumbled them away, then groaned as my muscles tried to seize up. Didn’t monks do this sort of thing? How did they manage to sit for hours and still get up afterward?