Wild Hunt (17 page)

I smiled and rose to my feet, sensing the world
around me both as sight and scent together. The hunt was on.

Through the streets, left and right, then a straight shot down Tremont. It wasn’t quite leading to Newton, though I had the sense there were several directions it could go, depending on the timing of the path—whether I was following him from this place or the route he took to get here. If I wanted, I could probably follow one of the offshoots back to the park…I shook my head. Maybe later. This trace of the scent was strong enough now.

The streets began to fill with early Saturday-morning shoppers and tour groups. I frowned as, ahead of me, a bus full of seniors disembarked at the Symphony, probably for a noon concert. This was all getting a little too close to the way I’d come. He hadn’t come straight from my house, had he? Or had he gone there afterward…the scent was too fragmented for me to even figure out his direction.

I thought of how Abigail had just shown up out of nowhere, and decided that wards or no, I probably needed a burglar alarm.

But the trail missed the first turn toward my apartment, and I breathed a sigh of relief, only to find the trail attenuating even further. What traces I could pick up of the cloaking scent—and there weren’t many, not even a fragment of the rotten scent that had preceded it—were becoming more and more unreachable, as if they were receding behind a mirror. I paused as I reached the Fenway and swore; almost gone.
Not yet, please not yet.

No use. I got two blocks past the Museum of Fine Arts, only to find that wild, dry-leaved scent dying in one last burst, as if it had only seen the light for a brief moment before being hidden again. I turned in place, searching for any last hint—only to come up against a wall, both literally and figuratively.

The building to my left rose up in a forbidding mass of brick and tile. Two stone lions stared up at me from
shin-level, and above the door an inscription proclaimed
C’est Mon Plaisir.

This Is My Pleasure
, I translated with the little French I remembered from high school. And despite the medley of scents of the Fenway, the museums and colleges and informal dorms leaking scent like Berklee leaked music, this building had no scent. It stood like a safe-deposit vault, forbidding and enigmatic.

Why had this trail led me here, of all places? To the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum?

T
he Gardner Museum was built to resemble a Venetian palazzo. Think for a moment about the differences between Venice and Boston and you’ll see part of the problem. This is not to say that it was totally impractical; in fact, from the outside the Gardner looks more like an institutional building, maybe a college rec hall, than anything else. In some ways it’s a good symbol of Old Boston: gray and bleak on the outside, full of marvels once you get in. Or so I’d been told; I’d never ventured inside.

I couldn’t tell you why; I’d just never really noticed the place, and since getting involved in the undercurrent, I’d had even more of a blind spot. It didn’t really show up on my radar. For one thing, based on what I’d heard of Isabella Stewart Gardner, she sounded far too sane to be an adept. Boston had its own history of eccentrics, and she didn’t even come close to the top of the list there. For another, magic in Boston had been very carefully controlled for nigh on a century, and the people who controlled it were not ones who ran in her social circle. Let the spiritualists do as they liked; when it came to control, Boston’s undercurrent was well in the hands of the lower classes.

Although, now that I was here and looking at the building—and noting that it didn’t really have much
of a scent, at least not one it allowed to escape its walls—I wondered about that. If she’d known about the undercurrent, she might have built her stronghold here as a way of making a statement, like putting a statue in the middle of enemy territory. You didn’t need to be an adept to do that; you just needed guts. And from everything I’d heard about Gardner, she had that.

Maybe the Fiana hadn’t liked that assertion. Maybe that was why, when there had been a theft from the Gardner some years back, none of the paintings had ever been found. The Fiana might not have pulled strings there, but they’d had their hands on enough to do so easily. That was a stretch…but right now, I was willing to entertain the idea that Gardner hadn’t been as ignorant about the undercurrent as I’d thought.

I’d never been inside. I’d never even come close to it before, and its aggressive I’m-not-here stance on the magical level had sunk it further below my notice. But now, with that fragmentary scent dissolving just steps from its door, I found my interest sharpening.

A friendly volunteer took my money at the front desk and handed me a little clip to fasten onto my clothes. There was something off about the scent in the little anteroom—enough that it could give me a headache if I stayed there too long. Something about being neither one place nor another…I shook my head, trying to shake the feeling that I’d just stepped out of Boston, and walked into the museum proper.

Scent hit me like the floor hits a drunk. I stumbled at the threshold and caught myself against the wall, barely seeing anything before me. The security guard jumped to attention. “Miss? Miss, are you all right?”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. There was too much to deal with—sensory overload on every level, not just through my talent, had swamped any responses. I slumped against the cool stone, staring.

The building that was such a drab block on the
outside held a garden within. An atrium four stories high looked down onto green grass and running water, fountains and sculpture and tiles side by side as if strewn by some titanic hand. Sunlight filtered down in a cool glow, free of the painful heat of the outside air. Arched windows looked down from every story, and tiles and stones of a dozen different kinds notched the walls between them, a winged bull next to Moorish peacocks, Roman dolphins below.

I had thought it silly to try to make an Italian palazzo in Boston. Gardner hadn’t done that. She’d brought Europe, a square of it, and surrounded it with a palazzo to remind it of what it was. Beyond these walls, the world changed and corroded; here, Isabella Stewart Gardner had preserved four stories’ worth of beauty from time, drawing her line in the sand and saying this far and no farther, this was what she protected.

And the scent—even though I couldn’t stop staring, the majority of the input screaming through my skull was scent. There were thousands of scents, thousands upon thousands, all clamoring for attention. Normally I disliked museums because of the way all the scents were muffled, stuffed behind glass, and here, yes, the physical scents were quiet. But the rest—incense, silk, oil of a hundred kinds, oil
paints
of a hundred kinds, stone competing with stone—I hadn’t realized stone could have so many different scents, but now it was obvious how the sandstone of a carved lion differed from the marble of a sarcophagus…My head spun, trying to make sense of everything that my nose caught.

But beyond that, because so many of the items had been left out and not sealed away, because the museum itself was a sealed entity, the scents had all blended together into one great confection. I fumbled for a metaphor to encompass it and could only come up with inadequate, pedestrian ones: a stew pot, a pressure
cooker, locking in all the different things Gardner had found and merging them into a greater whole. Magic, yes, there were loci here and more than loci, but that trace of fireworks scent was only a single note in the symphony.

The security guard was still talking, still asking if I was all right, reaching for his radio. Sight seemed like such a pale sense in the wake of everything else. I could go mad here, I realized dimly. I could spend days without moving, just reveling in the scents, and no one would ever be able to coax me out of it.

Something flickered out of the corner of my eye: a shadow, a long robe or coat.
And what good would it do if you got lost here
? a man’s voice asked in the back of my head, and I smiled, acknowledging his point. If I did that, I’d never get to hunt again. I closed my eyes against the beauty, closed my mind against the scent, and exhaled slowly. “Sorry,” I said aloud. “Just a little dizzy.”

When I opened my eyes, the guard was watching me—not with pity or confusion, as I’d thought, but a sort of amused sympathy. “This is your first time in here, isn’t it?”

I nodded.

“It takes some of us like that.” He smiled proudly, gazing out at the atrium.

“Yes. Yes, I can see that. Thank you.” I managed a smile, and if he didn’t quite believe I was harmless, he at least wasn’t going to throw me out just yet.

How was I going to find the scent of the silhouette—never mind that I seemed to have lost what trail it had—in this place? Needle in a haystack didn’t even come close; needle in a sewing shop, maybe. I walked down the long stone hall that led to an arch and a painting of a dancer in mid-flourish, lit so that she seemed about to step off the canvas. In this place, she very well might. I pinched the bridge of my nose and tried to ignore the insistent scent of a nearby stone
basin that still carried chrism in its aura, like a priest who’d long since left his pulpit. Too many distractions, too many small, incidental scents.

Maybe it was because of the chaos, but when Skelling stirred beside me, I noticed it immediately. He wasn’t quite leaving me, but he seemed to be drawn somewhere, pulled as if by an invisible leash.
Appropriate metaphor
, I thought, and followed him past the atrium and its perpetual fall of water. Up the stairs, past a tapestry that smelled of old silk and songs half-remembered, over tiled steps smoothed by age and travelers’ feet. Past several of those travelers as well: a school group listening dutifully as their guide spoke in French, several older couples, a young man sketching the delicate structure of a silver ostrich. Skelling moved through them as if they weren’t there—to him, they weren’t—and I followed, weaving my way through the people.

Up another set of stairs and through a door flanked by pillars, into a room where a rose window shed warm light across a red tiled floor. Cabinets and caskets lined the walls, offering a collection of icons and miniatures to the air with only a rope to separate them from any onlookers, and a long table held a number of aging books and reliquaries. Gilded angels gazed down on ghost and woman alike, and a tall blonde woman in a security uniform straightened up at the far end of the room.

I tried to look inconsequential as I began a circuit around the room. The guard’s gaze unfocused, becoming that I’m-not-looking-at-you-but-you-better-believe-I-see-you expression I knew well from Rena. I drifted over to the arched windows that surrounded that inner courtyard. Skelling faded, becoming less of the autonomous blankness and more an echo.

The blur of scent began to separate out in the back of my mind, becoming less of a monolithic entity and more of a choir. I circled the table, examining but not touching each book: Eighteenth century, but kept in a
wine cellar for ages; fifteenth century, and with a lock that someone had wisely left broken; a silver bull’s head on a staff, from who knew when; nineteenth century, but as elaborate as any on the table and with some nasty gunpowder scent wreathing it…I’d hate to be the one to catalogue that, you’d have headaches and nightmares for months…

Unraveling scents is, for me, like putting together a monumental puzzle—although I suppose taking one apart would be a more apt metaphor. This was a tangle, a snarl of trails against the rioting background of the Gardner itself, the olfactory equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting projected over a screaming paisley pattern. If I’d had to just look at it, it would have given me a headache in no time flat.

But I didn’t have to look. All I had to do was find the one important thread. I smiled and raised my head, trying to separate the scents. Past the fresh trails of yesterday, still luminous in the quiet air, through to the ones of days before. Here the traces I followed stopped bearing any relation to real scent and became the metaphorical elements that my talent treated as scent. The strangeness of the different objects in this room began to emerge at this level: I wasn’t used to scenting objects that were more than a few hundred years old. And Mrs. Gardner had brought over enough of Europe that I was in way, way over my head.

I loved it. I turned slowly in place, on some level aware that I was swiftly losing all credibility with the security guard. But compared to the wealth of scent that surrounded me, that was a minimal distraction.

It wasn’t like paisley and Jackson Pollock, I realized. The pattern of scent here was closer to a pointillist painting than the usual tangled Book of Kells knotwork I visualized. Instead of the endless weave of minute detail making up a greater whole, this was a pattern made of self-contained spots, all the separate bits of the museum coming together in a great choral shout.

I tried to pull my mind back to my work. Was that something? Not an actual trail, because I’d have latched on to that in a heartbeat, but a…flicker. Like a layer of glass positioned in just the right way, or a heat ripple in the air without the heat—a distortion, somehow, throwing off the patterns but not a pattern in itself. A
Mad
magazine fold-in, I thought, and stifled a giggle.

The guard cleared her throat meaningfully, and I had just enough self-preservation instinct left to snap out of it and open my eyes. I’d crossed the room—well, yes, I could dimly remember that—and stopped in front of a low glass-fronted cabinet, one hand raised as if to open it. No, I realized, lowering that hand and glancing guiltily over my shoulder at the guard—not to open it, but to reach on top of it. I stepped back a pace and squinted into the cabinet.

Several silver teapots, each on its own etched tray, a shallow Chinese dish next to a framed watercolor of a pair of dancers in masks…and a slightly discolored square on the shelf, about as wide as the length of my forearm. Something had been removed, something that had been here for a while. It didn’t have the exact mark of that dry-leaf scent that I’d followed here, but it was close.

“Skelling
,” a low, refined contralto murmured in my ear. “
I expected you ages ago. What on earth kept you?
”

I jumped back and spun around. There was no one behind me, only the icons and sculptures and a full-length painting of a woman in black, a pattern behind her head like a medieval halo. She didn’t move—of course not, she was only paint—but for a moment I had the distinct sense that she’d only just jumped back into place.

“Excuse me,” another woman’s voice said, this one crisp and controlled. I turned to see two people standing a little ahead of the security guard: a slender Indian
man in a suit jacket a size too large and a woman not much older than me with her hair up in a bun tight enough to use as the core of a baseball. She lifted her nose slightly as I met her eyes. “May I ask what you are doing?”

“I’m not—I was only—” I stopped. Abigail had been savaged, I thought, and whatever had done that to her had come from here. From this very room. I was not about to be intimidated by propriety.

I glanced at the door with the pillars. No one coming in, no one else in the room. The security guard tensed as I walked closer to the two curators. “What’s been stolen from this room?” I asked.

Even though I’d kept my voice down, the question seemed to bounce off the tiles and window to settle into the center of the room, large and uncomfortable. The Indian man went gray, and the severe woman’s eyes flashed. “Nothing’s been stolen! Where on earth did you get the idea—”

“Please. I don’t have time to talk this out of you. Something’s missing from this room, and I need to know what it is.”

“There is
nothing
—” Her voice rose, and she pressed her lips together as if hearing it for the first time. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

“Are you her boss?” I turned to the man. A fraction of a smile—this woman has a boss?—touched his lips, but he shook his head. “May I speak to the person in charge?”

He shook his head. “Sylvia and I are the people to talk to today.”

“Today?” I thought about the call I’d first heard while sleeping on Nate’s couch, the first inkling I’d had that someone had loosed a hunt on Boston. “I take it someone’s out?”

“He’s sick,” Sylvia snapped.

“Dog attack?” They exchanged a glance. “Look. Something was—is missing from here. I’ll bet you any
thing it was taken two nights ago.” The same night I summoned the dead…
no, don’t think about that
. “And someone was badly hurt in the process.”