Soul Hunt (32 page)

Her eyes widened, and she aimed the gun at something beyond the door—something high and to the left. “Stay here!” she yelled, or something like it; her voice still sounded as if it was under water. “There’s more than we thought!”

“More? What—”

She shouted something else—could have been an order, could have been a curse—and ran.

I blinked in the sudden darkness and blindly turned toward the faded gray smudge that I hoped led to sunlight. “Rena?” I called. No answer but receding footsteps, and the heavy dampness of fog. I fumbled my way to the door, trying to focus.

A white, faceless figure loomed out of the darkness at me, and I yelped before realizing that it was the other door, now hanging open. Some kids had painted a silhouette on it, doubtless for the purpose of scaring the crap out of people like me. Great; I’d find them and kick their asses for it, but right now I had to follow Rena.

Up that set of stairs, then, baseball bat banging against the wall as I ran. The stairs ended on a landing that split into several different rooms, all dark and featureless as far as my light-deprived eyes could tell. I swore under my breath, searching for Rena’s scent. There; mingling with fresh air, through the room on my right, again following that same concrete regularity. Barracks, I thought, or some other army establishment. Only there wasn’t room for any of that on Georges Island. We’d made it to another island entirely. For a fraction of a second I remembered that
flash of Colin, back when his hand was whole, dragging his boat onto a gravelly shore under a heavy, ugly sky.

I started to follow Rena’s scent, then froze as the first real sound made its way through the ringing in my ears: a splintering crack as the flashlight shattered somewhere. “Rena!” I yelled, and Rena answered me with an inarticulate cry—followed by gunshots.

I stumbled, landed on a tangle of bottles, one of which cracked and slid along my calf in a thin line of pain, and clawed my way back up the wall. Fresh air, there was air in front of me, and wasn’t it just barely lighter out there?

Another gunshot sounded, followed by a quick succession of them, their echo somehow flatter now. “Rena!” I shouted again, and thought I heard a faint curse in return. I emerged into open air, onto hard-packed earth pocked with stones. Mist curled about me, masking any sight of this new island, revealing shadows of branches, walls, other buildings that might have been wholly nonexistent or might have been part of this army site. Rena’s scent was close, but now there was another scent, one I knew too well. Fresh blood.

With the scent came a voice, cool and amused. “Is that her name?” Dina said from somewhere above me, and I could almost see the smile as she spoke.

“Dina!” I turned in place, but she only laughed—above me, on some kind of terrace. I climbed another set of crumbling stairs, then paused, trying to see where she was, where I could go from here. The roar of the ocean was close, and I could see the long branches of dead scrub clinging to the embankment. Below me was an open green, about fifteen feet down, hidden and revealed in turns by the billowing fog. For a second I thought I saw Rena, or at least someone, on the green below, but the mists blew over her, hiding her again. “Dina!” I yelled, and heard a chuckle behind me—no, to my left—

“Call me all you like, you have no claim on me.”

“No claim? I brought back your damn sunstone!”

She laughed. “And I should pay
you
for
my
property? My eye, long gone and tainted by time away from the salt? Be glad I don’t act as your idiot hunters did and take it out of your hide.”

My breath whistled between my teeth. Too trusting, Evie. Too trusting by far.

Some things in the undercurrent are too single-minded to be of much danger. But if they’re too human, if they’re too close, they get corrupted. I thought of the Morrigan, tainted by the vulnerability she’d used to get close to me, of Patrick and the Horn of the Wild Hunt, and of the sunstone, so long away from Dina, so long in the care of humans … Dina had been corrupted long since.

“But I did promise no harm to you or yours,” she went on. “So I suggest you leave. I have matters to attend to, and you, you have someone in need of help.”

She was ahead of me and to the left. Two steps. “Rena will be all right,” I said, tossing the words off as if they were less than the prayer I made them.

“Really? But you should see—”

I whirled and slammed the bat into the mist—too late. A shape, human but shrouded, vanished into an empty arch.

“You should see what she feared,” she continued. “Really, I didn’t think she had the imagination for it—then again, I didn’t think you’d have your particular trigger—”

“Is that what the stone does?” I snapped, and swung again, blindly this time. Something, though, stepped out of the way, drifting closer. “Lets you see people’s fears?”

“Hush. Hush. Listen.”

I did—but I did more than listen, I scented, and that was worse. At the edge of hearing, just making its way through the ringing that still echoed in my ears, a woman’s voice called. Not Rena’s, and certainly that thread of incense and greenery wasn’t her scent
(though the blood, the blood had to be hers, and there was far too much of it).

Sarah’s.

I froze, straining for her voice. She couldn’t be here. I’d told her to stay behind, and she’d agreed, she’d
agreed.
I backed up a step, trying to hear her, understand why she was calling out, what she was calling for.

But this was Dina before me, and whatever she’d shown Rena had also been bad enough, convincing enough, to draw her out. “No,” I said. “No, you can’t fool me that way.”

A shape emerged from the mist. I couldn’t quite get a clear look at her—she spoke with the same voice as in the dark room in Georges, but the mists seemed to hang about her, making what looked first like a winter parka become a denim jacket, what could have been heels become Doc Martens, and back again … It wasn’t that she was changing shape; there was no external magic to it. I just couldn’t focus. Like the forms in fog, she was unreadable. Worst of all was her face: the closest impression I got was a veil like that of a bride, held in place with a ring of dark metal utterly unlike a crown. “No, I suppose not,” Dina said.

Her hand snaked out, catching the end of the baseball bat.

“However, it did do one thing,” she went on. Her fingers tightened, and ashwood splintered under them, twisting and giving way as if the bat were no more than cardboard. “It did get you closer to the edge.” Her other hand struck me on the shoulder, not hard, but enough to make me stumble back onto empty air.

It wasn’t very far to fall, but it felt like an age.

I
hit the ground hard enough that something went
crunch
along my rib cage, and stars sparked across my vision as my head struck earth. Soft earth, though, close to mud, and instead of knocking me straight out it just stuck to my hair and, as I turned over, to one side of my face.

The remnants of the baseball bat bounced off my leg, the bruise just one more pain among the chorus. I stared up at the blank sky, trying to catch my breath with lungs that felt like they’d been flattened to two dimensions.

Somewhere up on the cliff, Dina paused in mid laugh, as if she’d heard something. “Oh,
that’s
tender,” she said, or something like it, and her scent faded into the fog.

She might have said more, but just then I’d tried to roll over on the wrong side, and my mind whited out from pain. “Fuck,” I mumbled, and heard an answering groan from off to my right. “Rena?”

“Evie?” Now the smell of spilled blood was heavier, tangling with the mists in ways I didn’t like. “Get over here, please.”

I pushed myself up, gritting my teeth against the pain. I didn’t have double vision, though, and nothing beyond a goose egg from what I could tell. But
two inches from where my head had hit, a lump of rock poked up out of the ground at the very edge of a campfire pit. I stared at it for a second, aware of the chill of winter behind me and the Hounds’ mark on me, then shook myself and headed for Rena’s voice.

Rena sat crouched in the door of one of the army buildings, clutching her right leg with both hands. “Take off your belt,” she grated as soon as I got close.

“My belt?”

“It’s not bad—just a graze—but I want to stop the bleeding.” She glanced at me, teeth bared in a vicious, pained smile. “Don’t you know any first aid at all?”

“Not enough to deal with you,” I said, and handed her the belt.

She laughed through her teeth and shifted position, so that I could now see the dark stain that spread across the back of her calf. “Put your hands here and keep pressing while I tie this.”

I did so. The blood was already sticky, and it didn’t seem to be coming out in a rush, so it must have missed the arteries. In fact, it seemed like a pretty shallow wound. How she’d gotten it, though—

Something crackled behind me, and the scent of incense curled about us. Dina’s illusion—no. No, she might be able to distract Rena, but I’d always trusted my nose and I could do so now. “Sarah?” I called over my shoulder, still holding on to the belt. “That’s really you, isn’t it?”

There was a long pause—Rena fumbled with the belt, swearing quietly—then, soft and querulous above the drone of the ocean: “Evie?”

“Jesus Christ, Sarah, what are you doing here? I told you to stay on the boat!”

“Evie,” Sarah repeated instead of answering me. “Who … what was the Sox score tonight?”

What the hell?
“What are you talking about? Baseball season’s long over—the Sox caved way back in the playoffs. They’re not scoring anything for a while. And they won’t, not with that offense.”

“It
is
you. God, Evie, I thought—” A gust of wind carried a fresh billow of mist into the hollow between the barracks, but it also revealed something fluttering and too pink to be any part of the gray foliage on this island. Sarah, coming up the path, slow and hesitant, fumbling her way from one tree to the next.

“More pressure, Evie,” Rena grated. I complied, and she looped the belt just above the wound, yanked it so tight her lips went white, pulled it tighter still, then tied it off. “You can talk baseball later.”

“It’s not that.” I sighed and eased the pressure on the wound, and though the iron seep of blood still stung my nose, it wasn’t nearly as bad now. “Sarah, we’re over here. What the hell was all that about the Sox?”

“Wanted to make sure you were you.”

Rena let go of the belt, sighing. “I don’t blame her,” she added, and reached for something at her side: her gun, cast aside and still smelling of the shots fired.

“Rena, it’s just Sarah—”

“I know. This is useless anyway. I emptied it.” She hefted the gun and tried to put it away, hissing as her leg brushed mine. “When I saw what that thing could do—if it made me do that, I didn’t want it to have anything else it could turn against me.”

“What did it do?”

For a moment Rena met my eyes, then shook her head. “I don’t think I want to tell you that, Evie.”

Sarah had only gotten as far as the edge of the clearing, and she waved a hand in front of her as if either beckoning or waving us away. “Katie!” she called, and a gull responded mournfully, out somewhere to sea. “Katie!”

“She’s back with Alison,” I said, getting to my feet. “They’re both fine. We’ll get you back to them soon enough.”

“No, she’s not. Evie—” She took another step toward us, close enough that I could finally see her face clearly.

Sarah’s eyes were wide and blank, filmed over with a white that wasn’t the white of cataracts but of marble. I stifled a curse, and Rena made a gesture that wasn’t quite crossing herself. “You don’t understand,” Sarah whispered, those sightless eyes roving as if to discover my face. “Katie—she said we were in the wrong place, and I poured out the ink—”

“Hang on,” I said, and took Sarah by both hands. The touch seemed to calm her, and she drew a shuddering breath. “Dina’s run off—I can probably find her, but you two need to get somewhere safe.” I guided Sarah to Rena’s side, then took off my coat and slung it over Rena’s shoulders. “And you, you’re going into shock. Keep this.”

“Oh, fuck you, Evie.” Rena tried to sit up, then slumped against the wall. “There’s a ranger cabin nearby—there’s gotta be. I’ll get there and use their radio to call for backup.”

I’d seen better plans in fortune cookies. “No. You stay down—keep the goddamned coat—and I’ll go after that thing. You want to get more people shot?”

“That’s not the problem,” Sarah interrupted, her tone returning to its usual half lecture. “We had a stowaway. Well, you did, I knew she was there—”

I shook my head. “Later. Wait till we can get you to safety—” I paused, her words finally registering. “You’re not saying—”

“As a matter of fact, that is exactly what I am saying.” She looked around, as if her eyes might spontaneously repair themselves and reveal Katie standing safe and sound nearby. “She talked me into it—said Nate had a plan, and that she had to come with us.”

I remembered how careful Sarah had been in the boat, how she’d asked me not to watch her saying goodbye. “Goddammit, Sarah, she’s a child! How could you bring her out here!”

“Because she asked,” Sarah replied, her chin up and defiant. “And because I’m her teacher. And after I gave you so much crap for trying to get me to stay away, I
wasn’t about to do the same to her. Besides, it turned out she was right—when you got out onto Georges, she told me to stay. She said we were in the wrong place, that what would happen would be somewhere else. So I got out the ink—”

“Sarah, she’s nine goddamn years old! A nine-year-old shouldn’t know how to do this sort of thing!”

“She knows it already, it’s just a matter of—” Sarah stopped, took a deep breath, and shook her head. “We’ll have this conversation another time.”

“I sure hope so,” I muttered, and the peevish nature of the comment failed to disguise my real misgivings: that there might not be time, later, for us to have this conversation.

Sarah bowed her head a moment, then went on. “I had her look in the ink, and she directed me over here. Sam tied up at the dock, we got out, and that’s when I saw you.”