Soul Hunt (30 page)

“Evie,” Sarah said quietly, “don’t stop what you’re doing, but would you happen to have any iron on you?”

“Got a pocketknife.” I stopped and, foolishly, opened my eyes. The patterns of scent receded, not out of reach—but that wasn’t the problem.

I’d been right about the little island, barely a shoulder of land sticking out of the ocean and yes, covered in gull crap. Someone had thoughtfully put a beacon out here, warning ships away, but the light at the top flickered like a guttering green flame. Around it, a
scaffold like a shaved-down wooden henge stood. Six dead bodies hung from it, swinging gently in a breeze that had nothing to do with this time and place.

“Nix’s Mate,” Sam said softly. “Where smugglers were once hanged.”

No more dead men lingering at Nix’s Mate.
Colin had hoped, had maybe lost a friend or two here, and now their—ghosts? imprints?—had been called back. Thieves and smugglers.

Be not thief but murderer.
The old women of my past and present, and Meda’s plea unmet. I tried to look away from the hanged men and could not.

“They’re not real, are they?” Rena asked, and though it’d take a lot to make her actually sound nervous, I thought I heard an edge to it, like an engine starting to overheat. “Tell me they’re not real.”

“They’re illusions,” I said. “Nothing more.”

One of the dead men creaked around on its rope to face us, mist pouring from its mouth like rain from a gargoyle. I couldn’t quite see its face, but something about the dark shadow where eyes had once been made me a little less certain. “Not quite,” Sarah said. “Which is why I’m asking about the iron.”

I started to shake my head, unable to take my eyes off the dead thing, then stopped. “Yes,” I said, fumbling in the bag by my feet. “If I didn’t lose it—yes.” Rough metal snagged on my fingers, and my shoulder twinged at the touch. “Here,” I said, holding out the rough iron hook that Meda had jabbed into my shoulder. I backed up, still watching the men on the gibbet, hoping Sarah could reach me.

She took it without looking—none of us could look away now, and the creaking grew as one by one the hanged men turned to face us. The hull of the boat slapped against the waves, quieter now, drawn unceasingly closer to the rocks. “By iron I charge you,” Sarah said, and held up the hook. “By what you were I charge you. By the speech of ravens I charge you. Let us pass.”

“That’s really going to work?” Rena asked. “Just because we ask nicely?”

“It’s all in how you do it,” Sarah said, still holding the hook up as if it were a passport.

For a moment the dead men, or their illusions, held still. Then one raised a hand, pointing to the hook, and again the wound in my shoulder twinged.
Iron,
it said, or
I am,
or something that Colin might have understood but I did not. And it closed its mouth and turned away, the motion shifting its fellows enough so that their gaze was broken.

“Now,” Sam murmured, able to look away at last, and gunned the engine. We shot across the flat water, back into the fog. I sat back hard on the deck, sliding on the damp planks, and just remembered in time to point away from the nearest scent of land.

The mists receded just enough to let us see more half-imagined shapes, and I saw Rena shudder and look away from one. But at last Georges slid into view, its dock black and slick with moisture. “I’ll wait here for you,” Sam said. “I’m not—I was never much of a magician, and without my longtime passenger, I have little power in myself.”

“Just keep yourself safe.” I stepped out of the boat, slipping a little on the boards, and steadied myself against a piling. The faint scent of burnt matchheads curled around the docks, not far from here, and I didn’t need to look to know that the little boat Deke had used was tied up close by. “He’s been here,” I said. “I can scent him.”

“Well, that’s a relief.” Rena accepted my help out of the boat, snagging a flashlight out of Sam’s hand on the way. “I’d feel like an idiot if you’d led us the wrong way.” She glanced back over her shoulder, and her eyes narrowed as she saw Deke’s boat. “I take that back. You’ve never led me wrong, Evie. You might have refused to lead, but you’ve usually got the right end in sight.”

“Thanks.”

She nodded, then thumped me on the shoulder so hard I stumbled forward. “So don’t screw up your record this time.”

“There’s still plenty of time for that,” I said. “And there’s more. Roger’s here, and—” I sniffed. “Gunpowder. Could be magic, could be the gun Deke took.”

“You’re unarmed?” Sam asked.

“Got my good looks.”

Rena snorted. Sam shook his head and reached under the steering. “Take this,” he said, and handed me a chipped baseball bat. “Not much, but you can shatter a few kneecaps, right?”

“Jesus.” I took it, and Sam grinned—the kind of a grin that reminded you he had once been part of a criminal organization. I glanced back at Sarah, who had started to follow but hesitated, one foot jammed against the heap of tarps and blankets and ropes in the back of the boat. “You said you’d stay back if anything went wrong. I’d say that’s already happened.”

“I—yes.” She paused a moment, one foot nudging the heap, then nodded. “Yeah. I’ll stay here.”

Rena gaped at her. “Seriously? You made all that fuss, and you’re not even going to get out of the boat?”

Sarah looked torn, as if it wasn’t her decision to make, but she still sat back down, implacable and unhurried, a strange kind of stability setting over her even as the boat rocked. “I’ll do what I can from here.”

I’d expected her to argue, too—but if it kept her back here, safe with Sam and Tessie, I wasn’t about to ask twice. “Okay. Keep an eye out for anything—and I mean on the island or off. If you have to, stay on the water, but don’t go back out into the harbor. I don’t trust those things to stay on their gibbet.”

Rena shuddered at that, but Sarah only tucked her skirts around her ankles a bit more closely. I nodded to her and turned to the island.

There weren’t lights on the path, but the refracted
light through the fog had its own faint glow, enough to tell when a tree was looming out at me. Rena loosed her gun in its holster and followed behind me, undoubtedly taking in a lot more than I was seeing. I had my talent, but she had years of experience, and she knew what to look for.

Deke had been here, but there wasn’t much of a fresh scent. He hadn’t left, at least not by boat. I didn’t have any handle on the stone, nor on Dina’s own bloody scent, though I kept expecting the latter to billow out at me from behind the next dark tree. Roger, though … he’d been here, had met Deke, and then walked with him …

I hefted the bat, silently thanking Sam for it. Behind me, Rena made a disgusted noise, though when I glanced back she was still scanning the mists. “Let’s go Red Sox,” she murmured. “You’re not seriously bringing that, are you?”

“Better than my fists, if it comes to it. Unless you wanna loan me your gun.”

“Shit, if I’m in trouble now, I’d be in so much more …” She shook her head, but there was a feral, vicious grin tugging at the corners of her mouth.

I returned the grin. “Missed you, Rena.”

“Missed you too, bitch.” She was silent a moment. “I haven’t been clubbing in ages. Missed the Extruded Plastic Dingus show too.”

“They were in town?” God, I’d missed a lot.

Rena nodded. “First thing I thought when I saw the ad was, I gotta tell Evie … Foster thought I’d run over a puppy, that’s how low I was for a while.” The road led down, toward the gates of the fort, and Deke’s scent did as well, like a line of cigarette smoke. “Guess we can’t really go back to doing that again,” she added.

“Yeah, probably not.” I nodded—she was right—and started forward, to the open gates into the fort. Rena followed, flashlight in hand. “Don’t turn that on just yet,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Because it’ll spoil our night vision.” I pointed across the green, to the empty black hole where I’d found Dina before, where Deke’s scent led. “And we’ll need it more in there.”

Rena muttered something under her breath, but followed.

Deke’s scent was fading, as if he’d somehow found a way off the island—or Roger had set up multiple wards. I could find my way through them in time, but it’d slow me down. Condensation gathered on the stones and dripped off in steady, almost subaudible beats.

“You know more about this guy than I do,” Rena said at last. “Why’d he turn on you like that? I thought you were friends.”

“We weren’t. But we were allies, of a sort. I think … I think something spooked him. You make bad decisions when you’re scared.” I paused at the edge of the doorway into the fort proper, just where the last of the light made a feeble attempt to reach inside. There was something wrong about the scent within, something like salt rubbed on skin, or bloody shale, organic and stony at the same time.

“Won’t argue with you there,” she said and switched on the flashlight. I winced, but the beam turned an uneven, impossible floor into mere flagstones with debris caught in their cracks.

The beam swept across empty doorways, graffiti scrawled in black pen, a heap of sticks … “Hang on. Go back.”

Rena did so, and I knelt next to the heap. It was mostly driftwood, but on top lay a wooden recorder, its mouthpiece stained and grayish. I didn’t know much about musical instruments, but I had a guess that this one would sound very like the one I’d heard before. “She was here,” I said, dropping my voice down to just above a whisper. “So was Roger. But Deke … I don’t know; his scent is all garbled up and
faded. And there’s something else, something I haven’t smelled before.”

“But he came through here?”

“He did.” That much was clear, if cold. The stony scent had turned smoky and metallic both—something like an overcooked sausage, something like charcoal that had gotten dunked in a sewer and then dried out on a stove. If there was magic to it, it wasn’t a kind I recognized. And what I’d first registered as gunpowder was no less strong, though it was flattened, as if processed through some kind of filter.

I got to my feet, brushed off my knees with the hand that didn’t hold the bat, and used the bat to point at one of the arched doorways. “He went this way. Roger did too, but he’s not there now, and he didn’t come back … I don’t understand, the boat was still here, and there’s nowhere else for them to go.” Rena followed me through the doorway, sweeping the flashlight’s beam back and forth as if she were casting a semicircle. I briefly remembered Roger’s Gebelin circle, and my skin prickled. “But none of them are here now,” I went on, “which is what worries—”

I stopped as Rena cast the light into the center of the room—the room that had been so hollow and empty when I was here before, that had served as nothing more than an echo chamber for Dina’s music. It wasn’t empty now.

Rena drew a sharp breath as her light revealed the thing hanging from the arched center of the room, picking out every detail of the open mouth, the spike driven through the neck, the chain from which it hung, the coat hanging open to reveal a long slash and the … the mess hanging down from that into a grisly, glistening heap on the floor.

I stared, this time not just smelling but tasting the dead-fireworks scent that filled the room. The realization of what it meant hit me, and I turned and retched. Even in the midst of it, I couldn’t stop scenting, couldn’t push away what my nose was telling me. The
stink of gunpowder struck me like a fist to the face, along with the sight of the exploded wounds in Deke’s shoulders—one each, and one to each thigh, leisurely potshots meant to hurt rather than kill immediately, and I didn’t need to search to know whose gun had been used.

But worse than any of that, worse than the strangeness of Deke’s scent that I was only just beginning to understand, was Roger’s scent. He’d been here. He’d had the gun. And his scent was utterly unchanged—he hadn’t even done so much as broken a sweat while shooting his friend and stringing him up.

R
ena carried the light past me, leaving me in darkness. “It’s him, all right.” She circled the hanging corpse, edging around the spatters on the floor. “Just a guess, but I’d say he hasn’t been dead too long.”

“No.” I wiped my mouth—you’d think that I had nothing left to throw up, considering how long it’d been since I’d eaten, but apparently my body felt otherwise. “No, that’s not it.” I made myself look at him, at the thing they’d hung up. “He doesn’t smell like Deke anymore.”

Rena gave me a look that clearly questioned my sanity. “Of course not. He’s dead.”

“That’s not how it works.” I walked up to Deke’s body, over the blood—and it too lacked the right scent, lacked even the tackiness that drying blood ought to have. “Death changes a scent, but not by this much. He—Roger and Dina did something to him, Rena. They made him not Deke anymore, she changed him so much that he didn’t even smell human. And then they left him to die.” I rubbed my nose, briefly glad even for the stink of bile on my breath, just because it blocked out what Deke’s scent had become. “I don’t even sense him as a corpse.”

I touched his arm, just below where a shot had ruined the bones. It was hard and glossy, cold as stone.
However you tried to categorize it, you couldn’t describe it as human, not in any sense. Deke had been right to be scared.
I see things, sometimes, in the fire,
he had said.
Sometimes they don’t go away. That’s why I’ve made preparations.
He’d known. Or he’d guessed. Or feared.

“I am going to find Roger,” I said, vowing it to Rena and Deke as much as to myself, “and I am going to put his fucking head on a platter.”

“You’ll have help,” Rena said, but she sounded preoccupied. I turned to see her crouching just where the blood ended, examining it with the tip of her fingernail. “Something’s wrong with this.”

“Well, yes, I just
said—
”

“No. Wrong in a real way.” Just barely audible above the sound of wind outside and the constant drip of condensation came the echo of a faint sizzling—or no, it hadn’t just started, it must have been going on for a while and I was only just noticing it now. “There ought to be a lot more blood with these wounds, and it should be splashed around a lot more. This is concentrated, and the edge is regular, like the fringes have been pared away. Foster would know … What you said about not making him human—could that have paralyzed him, maybe?”