Soul Hunt (24 page)

He turned and extended his hand toward me, offering what he held: a long knife with a horn handle, dark with age. The blade had the dull sheen of old silver, but its edge was bright as a star. “It belongs to Aunt Venice,” he said after a moment, through my shocked silence. “She keeps her silver in good condition. I thought I’d borrow it, bring it home, and do this there, but I don’t think … I don’t know if I can keep the resolve.”

“Nate,” I began, my voice far too high, “what are you asking me to do?”

“My father hit me with a wolfskin girdle,” he said, and his hand under the knife was steady as stone. “That’s one way to pass on the curse, and because he was my father it stuck. I will not pass this on to any child of mine.” The corner of his mouth twitched, trying for a smile. “And that’s if I have any, mind you. But there is another way.”

I waited for him to elaborate, but he didn’t. This had happened before, I remembered, or something like it: Nate’s exposed throat, a knife offered to me. Then I’d rejected it. Now, though …

When I looked at him, when I held the sunstone and really looked, I could see two images, one laid over the other. Not the two shapes he owned. One was the man I knew, with that strange blurring around his middle, the point where skin and reality shifted. The other … the other was a monster. And it didn’t make it any better that it still looked like Nate.

“What do I have to do?” I asked, and took the knife from his hand. The handle was cool and smooth, not horn but bone, and even the little scrimshaw work along the edges made it no less stark in this light.

Nate exhaled, a great puff of steam that hung between us for a moment. “You have to cut the curse
away from me. I don’t know—I don’t think you’ll have to skin me entirely—”

“Jesus,
Nate—”

“—but yes, I think it’s going to get messy.”

“Nate, you don’t have to do this. You’ve come this far, you can control it—”

“It’s not a matter of controlling it. I know my own anger. I can—” He swallowed. “I may not be the best at handling that, but at least it’s my own. This—” He glanced back at the house briefly. “I could easily get used to it. And I’d forget that it was originally meant as a curse. My father got used to his, and I think … I think that was part of what made him who he is.”

He looked away. “Sometimes I think that I can only let go because I trust you not to let me go mad. And that’s not fair to you. And if you’re gone—” He stopped, and I touched the back of his hand. He clasped it in return, so hard it almost hurt. “If you’re gone, I don’t know whether I’d know how to keep myself in check.”

I swallowed. “There’s no guarantee I’ll always be around,” I said. “Even without the Hunt, there’s always something that could happen—I mean, you could find someone else,” I added, knowing I wasn’t making much sense. “Someone else to keep you in check.”

Nate’s teeth flashed in a grin, just for a moment. “Let’s pretend we’ve already had this conversation and I convinced you that I didn’t want that. Okay? Because I’m not sure I can convince you right now, and it’s too cold to waste time out here.”

I was silent a moment. I hadn’t realized how much Nate was trusting me not to let him run wild. I wasn’t sure how much I liked that. I thought of how my reaction to him just now hadn’t been fear but anger—maybe I was suited for it. “Nate,” I said slowly, “if I can stay—if I can make it so I won’t go, at midwinter, then you don’t have to—” He shook his head. “Nate, it won’t fix everything. You’ll still get angry.”

He let go of my hand. “That’s another thing. I can’t keep believing that the—the angry part of me is just the curse.” His skin was very white in the faint starlight above. “Please, Evie. I can’t be like this anymore.”

If I were a magician, I thought, and if I had the patience and the knowledge to work it out, I could understand the curse based on what I saw, know what bound him to his other shape. And if I were a magician, a really good one, I could probably extricate him from it without even hurting him.

But I wasn’t a magician. And this was not the kind of magic that the Elect or Roger or even Maryam dealt in. “All right,” I said.

Nate looked at me and shuddered, one skin peeling back to reveal the other, never taking his eyes off me. The hair on the back of my neck rose—even if I knew that I’d never have to run from him, the dumb monkey part of my brain wanted to get away from what registered very clearly as a predator.

With the sunstone in hand, I could see much more clearly the line where his skin didn’t quite match. A band all the way around his middle, unbroken … “Okay,” I said, and knelt next to him. “Hold still.”

I jammed the sunstone into my shirt, where I could keep contact with it, and grabbed a handful of rank fur. There wasn’t much to go by; in either form, Nate was underfed and far too bony. But there was just enough, and I didn’t wait for Nate to brace himself before slicing under the fold of skin I’d pulled up.

The wolf’s body bucked against mine, and a high yelp escaped from between its teeth. “Easy,” I said. Blood, black in the poor light, surged up around the knife blade, but I shifted my grip and drew the knife further up, along the line of its ribs. Skin parted easily under the blade, far more easily than it should have, so that it seemed as if I were simply prying a ribbon away. And under the skin, instead of peeled flesh, I saw Nate’s own pale skin. That meant I must be on the right track. Right?

Right track or no, blood welled up and over my hands, slicking the hilt of the knife. The wolf growled and flailed, trying to get away, and I flung my other arm around its shoulders—then, as that began to slip, wrestled it down to the ground with all of my body weight just to slice up a few more inches. “God,” I whispered. “God, Nate, hold still, I’m sorry—”

The wolf whipped around and snarled at me, its teeth clicking together an inch from my face. I jerked the knife further and its snarl turned into something closer to a whimper. The blood on my hands and shirt and jeans was cold, and that made no sense, not in this air. There should have been steam coming up from the blood, steam like the panting gasps the wolf struggled with. But this was a different magic, not spirit or blood or anything else but a horribly embodied magic, one that had knit itself into Nate’s bones. From a dispassionate, detached point of view, it made sense that a curse so embodied must have a similarly visceral method of breaking it.

Detachment was not something I was capable of just now. I was mumbling something over and over—I’m pretty sure it was “I’m sorry,” but at that point it could have been “hold still” or just plain curses—as I drew the knife over the wolf’s spine and down its ribs. The wolf writhed under me, and the cry it gave was neither a howl nor a scream but something between the two. My own voice joined with it, a wordless snarl more suited to a hound than the Hound, and I pushed myself away, flinging the knife to the side.

“No more,” I said. “Nate, I’m sorry, no more, I can’t
do
this.”

Skin beneath me shivered and twisted. Nate’s hand closed over my wrist, pale skin over red. “Evie—” he managed through gritted teeth.

“No. No, I’m sorry, but this is killing you.” I smeared a hand over my eyes, then blinked away the blood. “I
can’t.”

He drew a deep, shuddering breath, and for the first
time I saw what I’d done. Around his back, where I’d cut, a long line of red skin about three fingers wide stretched like a weal. It wasn’t bleeding, but it was raw, painful, and it hurt even to look at.

I dropped the knife and sat back on my heels. “I’m sorry,” I said again. “If you can—if I can find a way, one that won’t do this to you—I’ll ask Dina, I’ll change our bargain, get her to lift the curse. If anyone can do it, she can, and she’ll owe me for this—”

Nate blinked, slowly coming back to himself, and rose to his knees. “Dina?”

“She’s this—” Hearing the fracture in my voice, I forced myself to slow down. “Okay. Put on your clothes and I’ll tell you. Please.”

Nate was silent a moment, but there was no reproof in his eyes when he looked at me. Instead, he winced as the wind touched the long weal across his back, and for the first time the cold seemed to be hurting him. “Tell me,” he said, and went to get his clothes.

I summed up the gist of the deal with Dina: the sunstone for a chance at life after midwinter. My hands didn’t quite shake, but I smeared them over the grass and hoped that the blood would dry to unrecognizability before anyone came this way in the morning. “She’s strong,” I said, plucking at my sodden jacket, concentrating on the story to keep myself from really feeling the clamminess of bloody cloth. “She’s … well, she might be a demigod, from what I can tell. And she’ll owe me big for this. If I—if I push, I might be able to get her to lift your curse.”

Nate nodded, bending to pick up his socks and shoes. “Evie,” he said after a moment, pulling on his shirt and wincing when it touched the line of raw skin at his waist, “don’t do it. If you have one sure thing, then that’s enough.”

“It’s not a sure thing by any means.” I took out the sunstone, which though I’d groped for it with bloody hands remained unspotted, as if it repelled even the touch of blood. “Besides, I have something she wants.”
I thought of Meda’s plea to be a murderer, and shook my head. “And given what she offered me before—”

I stopped. Nate shrugged into his jacket and glanced back at me. “What?”

“Nate,” I said slowly, “there’s something I need to tell you.”

We walked back to the front porch, avoiding Venetia’s light for now. The nights out here were too quiet; there was no traffic or yelling or even just a siren to break the silence. The shadows of the branches moved over Nate’s face, somehow like his transformation and yet much more fragile. After a moment, he cleared a spot on the porch and sat down. “Go ahead.”

I sank down beside him. “Okay,” I said. “Do you remember at the quarry, when Patrick pushed you off the edge, and you fell into the water?”

“Barely. I remember hitting the water and then you giving me mouth-to-mouth.”

“Well. I think—I think you might have hit your head harder than you thought.” I took a deep breath. How did you go about telling someone he might have died? “Do you remember, too, why you were drawn to the quarry, but then you didn’t go in the water?”

He rubbed at his forehead. “Vaguely. I … it felt safe there, like it was meant as a sanctuary, but something about the water felt—I don’t know. Felt hungry.” He gave me a sheepish look as he said it, as if trying to make it something ridiculous.

It wasn’t, though. “That’s pretty accurate. The guardian of the quarry—it doesn’t know what it can and can’t take. It caught you, either when you fell or when you … when you hit your head.”

Nate’s hand reached up to touch the back of his head. I’d had my own hands back there more than once and never found so much as a goose egg, but I knew what he was looking for: some physical trace of what had happened.

“And when I confronted it, it asked what I would give to have you back. Like a bargain. And I wasn’t
having any of it, I just called it a son of a bitch, and it said something like, ‘I accept,’ and hit me with this wave …” I paused a moment, ready for the shudder and taste of ice water in the back of my throat at the thought of that wave, but nothing came.

Nate was still silent and unmoving. I cleared my throat. “And then it gave you back. Er. To me. I’m still not sure how badly you were hurt, but I didn’t have time to think of any other way—”

“‘Son of a bitch,’” he said quietly.

“That’s what I said to it. And Dina, she thinks that I was, just barely, um. Pregnant. And that the quarry took it. And that’s how it was, was draining me over the last few weeks. It didn’t even have to be real; some forms of magic are based on possibility, and I don’t think it even matters whether I was or not, but in the symbolic sense—” I was babbling. To make myself stop, I clasped the boards of the porch so hard splinters dug into my fingers.

Nate ran both hands through his hair and pressed them against the back of his neck. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I know, but it’s what—”

“No. I mean it doesn’t make physical sense. I don’t think—I mean, it’d been only a day. Less. I’m pretty sure conception takes a little more time to, you know, take. And it’d be a hell of a crapshoot for everything to line up just after that one time.”

I managed a smile. “It wasn’t just the one time, you know.”

“Okay. That one night. Whatever. But something’s still … I’m just not sure …” He glanced up at me, and whatever he saw made his expression soften. “Is that why you went into the Quabbin? To get our child back?”

“No,” I said immediately, then paused, startled by how easy that decision had been. “No. I don’t—I’m sorry, Nate, but I don’t want a kid. Even yours. Even
before I knew about midwinter. And that’s the more important thing right now.”

He paused, then shook his head. “You’re right. We should probably concentrate on the real problem.”

“Which real problem? The werewolf thing, the magic rock, or the mythical hounds coming to eat me in six weeks?”

At that he actually laughed, and for a moment I joined in, giggling—it was pretty damn ridiculous, even given my usual flexible relation to reality. I looked up at him, remembered how many times I’d decided that he didn’t deserve to get stuck with me, remembered how many times I’d ignored that. His hand was cool against mine.

After a moment, though, he let go and got to his feet. “I don’t know, Evie,” he said finally. “I don’t know how—how to feel about any of this. Especially because I’d always … well, I’d thought that what I did was some way of saving you. And now I find it just screwed you over more …” He ran both hands through his hair. “There really isn’t any way I can rescue you, is there?”

I thought of midwinter, of the ice water, of the way Nate’s head felt against the hollow between my shoulder and breast. “I—maybe I should go.” I stood up, checking behind me to make sure I hadn’t left stains on the porch. That would have taken more explaining than I thought Venetia would have patience for.

“You don’t—”

“I’m covered in blood, Nate. Your blood. I wouldn’t let me near Katie like this, and Venetia sure as hell shouldn’t.”