Soul Hunt (27 page)

I glanced at Deke. “What the hell were you doing?”

He jammed his hands into the pockets of his dreadful old coat. “I told you,” he said, less pleading than peevish now, shuffling his feet against the boards. “I’m scared.”

“Yes, but that’s no reason—” I sighed. “Okay. Rena, go on.”

“That would have just gone under the radar, if Foster hadn’t checked out the accelerant he was using, and found a very interesting link.” She grinned, a
more feral grin than either Nate or I could have managed, even with our canine associations. “And that’s not getting into who really owned that boat.”

I hesitated—and Deke, who had been standing there forgotten for too long, gave out a shriek like a maimed horse and shoved me aside. I took a step back, my arms pinwheeling as my foot failed to come down on anything, and went sprawling across the floor, boards snapping and creaking under me. Rena turned to Deke, and he slammed his hand against her chest.

No. Not just his hand. I yanked my foot out from the gap in the floorboards and scrambled up in time to see Deke step back, still holding what looked like one of those silver glass balls that people use for Christmas ornaments. Only this one had shattered, and the jagged edges were now the same red as the first few blossoms on Rena’s shirt. A murky substance spread out from them, mixing with her blood.

Rena stared at the mark, unable to sense the stink of fireworks that came from it. Her eyes rolled up, and a pinkish froth spilled from the corners of her mouth as she crumpled.

I yelled and struggled to my feet, stumbling over the broken boards. Deke didn’t even look at me; he just took a baby food jar from his pocket and tossed it. The lid came off in flight, and the contents—tar, and seawater, and something that smelled like what you’d find at the bottom of a cistern—struck me across the chest.

Gunpowder scent wreathed me like a shroud. I stumbled, the world closing in around me until all I could see was Deke’s face.

He was sobbing, and that didn’t change even as I blacked out.

Unconsciousness tastes like salt.

I’d just managed that much of a thought before realizing that I shouldn’t have even been capable of thought, being, you know, unconscious. But even
though the world was still black around me—I wasn’t even alert enough to feel pain—there was still some part of me aware of what was going on.

Unfortunately, “what was going on” in this case didn’t seem to have much to do with my external surroundings. I saw—or whatever; sight wasn’t quite the sense that was being inflicted on me here—Colin as a younger man, stepping out of a boat, both hands whole, a pistol at his belt and a boat hook hanging next to it. The sky above him was the color of brass. He glanced behind him toward the water, and I knew that he was looking back at Boston and the girl he’d left behind, the girl who’d told him what to do in the belief that she’d be with him when the time came …

Something was pulling me away from the sight, like a hook in my flesh, like the pressure of the Quabbin. A scent, curling around me but not yet so present as to be identifiable. I shook my head—or whatever—and pushed recognition away for now, because with recognition would come consciousness, and I’d no longer be able to see Colin, now turning his back on the shore and pushing aside waist-high grass, walking with the stride of someone who knows that this is only the first task of many …

The scent dragged at me again, pulling me away. I was rising, above a flat lake, gleaming the color of Roger’s hair, a lake with an eye at the bottom, a reservoir with a sunstone, flat and greasy-looking and now dissolving into rainbow patterns, unhealthy rainbows like unconsciousness or …

I drew a breath and choked on the heavy air.

… or gasoline.

My eyes snapped open, and the rainbows stayed a moment longer, flickering off the surface of a slick pool not so very far away. I was flat on my face, one arm wedged under me, the other flung out and stinking of tar from where Deke’s locus had hit me. The arm that was free felt wrenched, as if someone had
dragged me in the wrong direction, or as if someone had tried to pull my jacket off.

The sunstone. I fumbled in my jacket, but it was gone. The stone was gone, my holster was empty, and the air stank of gasoline. “Deke,” I groaned, and pushed myself up to my elbows. “Deke, what—”

I shouldn’t have had to ask. This was Deke, after all. A slop of gasoline smeared the floor from end to end of the bridge house, leading to a pair of leaking cans by the great chains of machinery. Not alight yet, but they didn’t need to be alight to incapacitate me. There were downsides to having a powerful sense of smell. Deke himself was at the far end of the room, by the last remaining windows. “Oh, God,” he muttered, fumbling with a rope bolted to the sill, “oh God, oh God, oh God.”

“What the fuck are you doing?”

His head jerked up, and his eyes were wide and weeping. “Hound, I’m sorry,” he said, and clasped the sunstone to his breast as if it might protect him. “I’m so sorry. But I’m scared. I’ve never been so scared.” With the hand that wasn’t holding the stone, he held up his lighter.

“No!” I struggled to my knees, my limbs like lead ingots tacked on at hip and shoulder. “Deke, you don’t have to do this. You don’t—”

His face contorted in pity and sorrow and terrible determination. “Sorry,” he said again, and dropped the lighter.

The gasoline went up with a
thump.
I fell back and landed against Rena, who groaned weakly. “God damn you, Deke!”

He didn’t answer, only swung himself out the window. I didn’t hear a splash—of course, over the roaring in my ears, I wouldn’t have heard anything. Instead I turned and tried to get an arm under Rena’s shoulders. She’d made a noise, that had to mean she was all right, didn’t it?

Well, as all right as one could be, stuck in a burning
building. Her eyelids flickered, and she managed to focus on me for a second, raising one hand to fumble at her chest. “Evie,” she said, or tried to; the froth at her lips now took on a deeper, red tinge.

“Fuck!” I yelled, and coughed as the smoke dove into my lungs. I got her by one arm—whatever magic had been in the tar, it was burning off, as was most of everything else in the bridge house—and dragged her up, hoping like hell that whatever damage had been done would fade as the locus faded, that I wasn’t just hurting her further. “Stay with me, Rena,” I said, and lurched across the floor, half-dragging her.

I took a moment to glance around and immediately regretted it. The building hadn’t needed the gasoline to get the fire going: it was old, dry, and had been weatherproofed with tarpaper for years. The flames had already seized on the wall where Deke had been, devouring his rope, and they were headed our way. “Rena, did you have a boat? How did you get out here?”

No answer. She slumped against my side, even heavier now. The fire reached the spot where I’d lain just a moment ago, and any minute now, I was going to go up too.

I cursed under my breath, hitched Rena further onto my shoulder, and stumbled to the door, dragging her over the holes in the floor. Her weight nearly overbalanced me as I leaned back to kick the door open, but the force of the kick did enough to keep me upright. And not a moment too soon—the back of my sweater was starting to singe, its acrid scent worse somehow than the gasoline itself, and the backs of my legs went hot, as if I’d been lying in the sun too long.

I reached the porch just in time to see that the fire had outflanked us. The rickety walkway that had brought me here caught, the old wood burning gleefully, as if it’d finally found its purpose in life. “Oh God,” I whispered, knowing I was echoing Deke and not caring.

Someone on shore yelled—finally!—and I raised my head. But any help coming from shore would reach us well after we’d been nicely roasted, and though I could see a few shocked faces watching us from the ferry docks and the waterfront, none seemed to be moving toward rescue.

I looked down, still struggling for breath. Below us were the remnants of the pilings from when this had been a larger house, or from the porch that had long since disappeared into the harbor. Their jagged, mossy ends poked up through the flat water below, now golden with reflected light. Even at low tide, this was still a channel, still had to be deep enough to accommodate ferries, right? Right?

“Sorry about this, Rena,” I said, and pulled her with me as I jumped.

The water hit me so hard that at first I thought I’d missed and struck one of the pilings. Rena jerked out of my grasp, but I caught at her and got one arm around her.

That was a mistake; I was still headed down, and the water had gone from a shock to bone-freezing cold. The burns on the backs of my legs tried to lock up, and my shoes—now full of water—were dragging me further down. I got us up to the surface long enough for me to draw a couple of tortured breaths and drag Rena’s head above water. The froth at her mouth had been washed away, but she still choked on it, wheezing for breath, and the muck of the locus still clung to her.

Behind and above us, the bridge house was wholly alight. I struck out toward the closest pier, choking on filthy seawater.

The good people of the waterfront had all clustered at the railing to watch the fire and see whether they’d need to worry about their own safety (depending on the wind, even an isolated building could send burning brands into any one of the luxury towers to either side). If one of them was worried about the draggled
women clinging to the floating dock, he raised no outcry. “Hey!” I yelled, then broke down coughing. “Hey, we need some help—”

Sooner or later, someone would have to look this way, right? I tried to get one arm under Rena, but either the waters of the Atlantic were a lot worse than the Quabbin or the fire and everything else were worsening incipient hypothermia. My hands didn’t seem to want to work right, and though Rena was starting to come around, we didn’t really have time to wait. “Someone—” I tried again.

The boards of the dock shuddered, and I clutched at them, trying to hold on to Rena. “This way!” a hoarse voice called.

I stared and squinted. There seemed to be two people heading our way, but I couldn’t make sense of their shapes. Finally I settled on the scents instead: something like scraped vellum and sanded-down boards, and paint and rust and—makeup?

“Your timing’s wonderful, Hound,” the first person rasped as she knelt next to me. “Here I thought I’d have an hour to relax before getting back to work.”

I shook wet hair out of my eyes. “Tessie?”

“What is it with you and fire, anyway? Get her arms,” she added to the man beside her. For some reason, his arms and face seemed curiously blank—not featureless, but as if I should have seen more, as if they should have been marked up. The two of them pulled Rena up onto the boards, then, as the man helped Rena up, Tessie took my hands. “Come on,” she added, helping me out of the water.

Instead of taking us up the steps to the harbor, she turned and staggered up a plank that had been set between the boardwalk and a rusting green boat. “She’s here!” she called, and another person emerged from the boat, hurrying up to us.

“Hang on,” the man with her added to me, helping Rena over the side and toward the hatch. “It’s going to be all right.”

“Says you,” said another voice—a woman’s, an older woman’s. For a dizzying moment I thought I’d see either Meda or Venetia when I turned. Instead the dancing light from the burning bridge house fell on a lined, tired face.

“Do you have any idea,” Maryam said, “how many people I’ve put at risk so that I can see you?”

M
aryam.” I started to step back, thought better of it as my balance shifted, and followed her down the stairs, leaning on her as much as on the railing. “Maryam, what are you doing here?”

She snorted. “I’m a geomancer, Genevieve, not an erdgeist. There’s usually plenty of dirt between me and bedrock; you think I can’t take a little water?”

Trust an adept to assume I’m asking an academic question. What was she doing on a boat in the first place? With a few exceptions, magicians didn’t like being over water. With a few notable exceptions. “Tessie,” I said, trying to think through the frost riming the inside of my skull. “You and Tessie—”

“We got in touch when Sam needed a place to stay.”

“Sam?”

“Get inside; you’re freezing.”

Well, she was right about that. I stumbled down the steps into the boat, blinking in the warm gold light as the space belowdecks opened up into a tiny, messy room with red-upholstered furniture bolted into the floor and walls covered with pictures of Tessie in her better days, before she’d become a magician. I lurched a little and caught myself against the door frame, unsure if the floor was rocking with the waves or just trying to trip me. “Rena—”

“She’s going to be fine.” The man who’d carried her in stood at the farther door, a blanket in his arms. I managed to make it through the maze of furniture to see him wrap the blanket over Rena’s shoulders. Her lips were blue, and her teeth chattered together like nuts in a hull, but her eyes were open and responsive. “Just fine,” he repeated, taking a bowl of something from the closest table and cupping it in his hands.

“No. We need to get her to a hospital.” I hadn’t forgotten that sudden blood on her chest, even if I didn’t know how deep the wound was. “Both of us need a hospital, and—”

“No point,” he said, and held out the bowl to Rena. She managed to shake her head, and behind me Maryam thumped down the steps and closed the hatch behind her.

No point? I was not going to leave Rena to the mercy of some creepy guy off the street, no matter what Maryam and Tessie said. “Hell with you,” I said, and grabbed him by the shoulder.

He turned, and I stared. I knew this face—but the last time I’d seen it, it had been marked by lines of ink, runes and Ogham script and the invocations of a thousand bindings, meant to keep a single entity in place. “Finn …” I whispered, then shook my head. “No. What was your name? He told me …”

“My name’s Sam MacAllister,” he said. And yes, it was a voice very similar to that of the man I’d called cousin. The mob calling itself the Fiana had consolidated its power in a number of heinous ways, one of which was to catch the spirits of their old land and imprison them within people, turning both vessel and spirit into nothing more than an ambulatory locus. They’d caught Finn Mac Cool, cousin and master to Sceolang the hound, but Finn had come looking for help … and afterward, said that he would leave his vessel, return the man’s life to him.