Wild Hunt (25 page)

And with them, the alignment they followed, the path that Skelling had told me was not mine. But I was the Hound of hounds. There was no road closed to me. And on this path nothing—nothing—could ever catch me.

T
here is no world outside the hunt. You can leap fences, trample fields, mow down everything in your path, but none of that will matter, because none of that is part of the hunt. Maybe after, you’ll have regrets, perhaps even make resolutions that next time it’ll be different. But no matter how binding those decisions are in the world outside, within the hunt there is only the quarry and the hunters, the pursued and the pursuer.

I knew this space now. This world out of the world, the space in which the Wild Hunt ran, only barely congruent to reality. You could be damned into this place, forever so at odds with the world of flesh and wood and stone that to even brush against it once more would reduce you to dust.

This wasn’t my world. This was only a pathway, a shortcut any cur could follow if she knew the way. My place was the world of real scent, of sunlight so bright it made you sneeze, of the baked smell of asphalt before a storm. But I could use this world, perhaps in the way that Skelling had longed to, and the part of me that wasn’t quite human reveled in it. With me, Skelling—finally letting go, allowing himself to run on the path he had so long shunned—bared his teeth in a feral grin.

There wasn’t any pain here. Pain was a thing of electricity screaming down a web of neurons and meat; here there was nothing but the long howl of the Gabriel Hounds. They were somewhere on this track, wavering between one world and the other, but I couldn’t tell where—I was still too human for that.

I had one advantage, though. I knew where Nate would go. When the impulses of rational thought run out, you work on instinct, and when that happens, you don’t care whether the instinct is true or implanted. Both of us had lingered near the quarry, and the guardian spirit there would have put the same imprint on his subconscious that it had on mine: here was a safe place.

Even monsters sometimes knew the right thing to do.

Just ahead of me was the scent of water and bone; I slid out of the half-world—

—and caught a handful of cold rain right in the face. I gasped, choked, and stumbled backward, into ankle-deep water. I’d run right into the storm.

I turned in a circle, trying to see through the first fringes of rain. This wasn’t the part of the quarry I’d seen last time; this was a narrow strip of gravel that could have been either a beach or a driveway. On either side of me, green-stained outcroppings of stone rose up, to ragged edges from which kids probably risked their necks diving. Black skies roiled above me, and the birch trees on the shore shrilled in the wind. There weren’t even any friendly Girl Scouts to tell me where I’d landed this time. I tried to catch my breath and got a mouthful of rain instead.

I hesitated, the sentence
You dumbass, Evie
, expanding to fill all available thought. I’d miscalculated; Nate had run somewhere else, or worse, he hadn’t had the strength to run far and I’d overshot him, the Gabble Retchets were pulling the flesh off his bones even now while I stood waiting for them to show up—

Lightning cracked from one side of the sky to the other, and below the following thunder I caught a
sound I shouldn’t have been able to hear: the crackle of branches ahead of me.

A gray shape burst through the trees. “Nate!” I yelled, and though his eyes were wide and white all around, he saw me and knew me. “Get in the water and stay there!” I ran to the shore, away from him. Whether he followed my advice was his call now; I just had to invent a distraction.

I yanked out my pocketknife and fumbled with the catch. If the Gabble Retchets really were hounds, if the kinship I had with them went both ways, then I could risk one thing: I knew what distracted me in the middle of a hunt.

For the barest fraction of a second, the trees at the edge of the water stilled as if drawing breath, independent of the tempest around us—and in that moment the rain paused, like a strongman before his last lift. Then the storm broke in full, and the Wild Hunt came hallooing through the trees.

They were blinding white, with ears so red they might have been dipped in blood; they were soot black with golden eyes, they were hounds of shadow; they were none of these, but holes torn in the world, ravenous and howling with the force of the first chaos. Regardless of what form the first Abigail Huston had forced onto the Harlequin Horn, the creatures it summoned were hounds only by default. The thought came to me that if humans had created dogs, if we had shaped them out of wolves and made them part of our lives, we had only been imitating this shape and taming it into something understandable. These creatures went beyond hounds as much as my talent went beyond scent; this old chaos had only the palest reflection in reality.

And the part of me that was hound dragged me forward a step, closer to the pack. “No!” I shouted, and dragged the knife across my forearm so that blood followed it in a brain-numbing rush. “Here!”

It wasn’t a virgin sacrifice, but it was red blood,
heavy with iron scent. The pack checked as one and paused, sniffing the rain-lashed air. I held out my hand as if offering it to a puppy, and so aligned were we on that road I’d used to follow them that I scented my own blood, and salivated for it.

The Gabble Retchet closest to me bayed, a cry that should have come with its own pack of demons, and charged me. I turned and ran, leading them up into the trees, away from Nate. Great. I’d successfully distracted them, now what?

I got nothing
, responded the part of my brain that had come up with the brilliant plan in the first place.

I swung myself up onto the closest outcropping and risked a glance backward. Not all of the Gabriel Hounds had followed me; two lingered at the shore, either less easily distracted or—no, one was hungrily lapping at the puddle where I’d stood, blood and rainwater smearing its half-present muzzle. I cursed, slipped on the rocks, and dragged myself upright just ahead of the closest hound. Vaulting over a fallen birch, I skirted a marshy spot where a stream flowed into the quarry, grabbing branch after branch to pull myself up the slope. My arm shrilled with pain every time a branch glanced against it, and the rainwater on it seemed to fizz like peroxide. But the bright ribbon of blood kept flowing, and the scent filled my nose and mouth, sickeningly powerful.

At the top of the hill, a final thicket of blueberry bushes dragged at my shirt, then gave way to slick stone and empty air. I stumbled and pinwheeled backward, landing on my ass against the bare stone, right where hill turned to ledge. In the storm’s dimness, I could barely distinguish the mottled gray of stone from the rain-swept gray of the water fifteen feet below. I hadn’t gotten away from the quarry; I’d circled it like a dog on a leash.

The howl of wind behind me died, and that was enough to tell me that the Wild Hunt had caught me, and now there was nowhere to run.

But another sound split that emptiness, a scream like a demonic chain saw. I lurched back to my feet, staring down at the beach I’d left.

No sign of Nate—but of the two hounds that had lingered, one rolled on the sand, clawing at its muzzle and making a noise that for any canine other than one of the Gabriel Hounds would have been a whimper. The timbre of its cry altered, shifting into something new the way that Nate’s skin shifted, the way that loyalties shift, and the howl it ended on turned my bones to ice.

That
was the cry of the Wild Hunt. Not the half-assed, leashed thing that Patrick and his imperfect mastery of the horn could command. This was chaos itself, and it screamed for blood.

But not my blood. The hound turned and caught its companion by the throat, snarling like a thing possessed—no, more like a monster let free. I caught my breath, then ducked as a Gabriel Hound behind me leaped.

Blood, it had to be the blood
, I thought, as I rolled out of the way. I’d thought to use it as a distraction, but something about it had broken Patrick’s hold on that hound—was it because I was a hound too, and more, one whom no bindings could hold? Or was it just the trick of blood given freely, of a gift with no bargain behind it? I came up into a crouch, my sneakers sliding over the stone. Did it even matter which, so long as it worked?

All this took no more than a few seconds: the howl and the leap and the fierce, fragile hope that formed in its wake. The next hound charged me, but I didn’t get out of the way. Instead I rocked back as if to catch it, jamming my bleeding forearm against its muzzle. “Here!” I yelled for the second time. “Have it! Take it!”

Teeth like vicious thorns sank into my flesh. I screamed, the sound blending with the cries of the hounds. Muscle tore under its fangs; for a moment I knew that this thing could just as easily rip my arm off
at the shoulder as it could rip out a mouthful of flesh. The hound’s eye, so close to mine I could have spat in it, burned with baleful hunger—and then, like a lens opening, shifted into something that looked back out at me and understood, understood my role and its role and the sham of a Hunt into which it had been called.

It was no less horrible for that. Sentience, wisdom, knowledge—none of these things matter when it comes to the fundamentally
other
nature of the Wild Hunt. I knew it, and it recognized me in turn, and it was no less horrible for that knowledge.

It let go, red streaming from its jaws, and howled. Its brothers regarded it uncertainly, and it took the opportunity to seize one by the muzzle and throw it down into the bloody smear on the rocks. I couldn’t stop to watch; the first hound to attack me had recovered, and now advanced on me, slavering and ignoring its fellows as if they no longer existed.

Instinct, or something older, still had a hand on my soul, and I dragged myself to my feet, hissing as my mauled arm banged against my side. The hound charged, and I danced aside like a clumsy bullfighter, catching the thing around what passed for its neck. Then I wrenched the hound’s head up, using my weight rather than any strength in my hands. The resulting
snap
vibrated down the length of my spine.

The hound shuddered and went still, and the change in it wasn’t from living thing to corpse—I’d learned how that feels, and it’s not a memory that leaves you—but rather from one kind of object to another. These were monsters for gods and heroes to kill, the definition of implacability. There was no life in it, there never had been, at least not the sort of life I should have been able to take. But in spite of everything, in spite of the wholeness of the Harlequin Horn, these hounds were not the full embodiment of the Wild Hunt, not so long as they were compelled rather than called. The veneer of purpose Patrick Huston had im
posed on them was cracking, and those cracks were enough for mortality to catch hold.

Six hounds remained—two that had tasted my blood, a third writhing on the bloody stone, and another crawling up from the beach, licking red and sand from its jaws. The last two, still under Patrick’s compulsion, bared their teeth and charged. Their brothers were on them in a heartbeat, grabbing them by the throat and tossing them down, growling in a way that could almost be words.
Sharing
, I thought as I got to my feet,
like prisoners passing around the keys to their cells
. None of the freed hounds wanted to leave its pack-mates; even the one that now forced its brother’s nose into churned red mud did so in order to free it. I staggered to the second knot of hounds, to the last one that hadn’t been freed, then pressed my lacerated forearm against the hound’s muzzle in a vile sacrament.

I really, really hoped that the old saw about dogs’ mouths being cleaner than humans’ still held in this case.

Lightning flared above us, too far away to illuminate more than the clouds, and I just had time to draw breath before the thunder followed. “Well,” I said, and laid my unbloodied hand on the head of the hound closest to me. “Truce, then?”

It rolled one eye toward me. “
With us
?” The words were poorly spoken, and not even properly words at all. But they were understandable, and just that was enough to make me shiver. “
Never. We are no more yours than we were his.”

“Yeah, well, you’re no longer his. I’ll take that.” I got to my feet, looking down at the beach, trying to see where Nate had gone, whether he’d had the sense to stay out of the way.

At the back of my mind, I caught the blind-spot sense of Skelling’s presence, the cool buzz of emptiness. I turned to face the quarry and saw the rain open up like curtains pulled away from a stage.

He walked through smelling of rain, not violent thunderstorm rain but the chill icy rain of a March morning, of November spiting winter with its nails. And with him came the trace of fireworks and the lingering sweet stink of a corpse, noticeable only in his passing and never his presence. The white cliffs cracked under his feet, as if they couldn’t stand his step. And though the rain continued to lash down, obscuring everything but this space on bare stone, he still retained that immaculate composure, so similar to his sister’s.

He’s dead,
I hoped.
He won’t react as quickly—he’ll see only what he expects.
But Patrick’s eyes as he glanced around—his frown as he took in the blood even now washing away—were as alert as any living man’s. “Not what I expected, certainly,” he murmured as he turned those colorless eyes on me. “Why should your blood be special, Scelan?”

“I’m the Hound,” I told him, as I’d told his sister, but inside, my stomach turned over. This wasn’t just a ghost wrapped in meat; this was an adversary entirely cognizant of his surroundings. And one who not only held the Harlequin Horn, but had enough magical skill to keep himself in this undeath for years. “I thought you knew that.”

“And hounds do tend to form packs. Hm.” He nudged the fallen Gabble Retchet with his foot, and even though I’d been the one to kill it, I went scarlet with rage. A hound’s body should be covered in oak leaves and crowned, carried by its fellows to the next world, where it would wait for the Hunt to be called again, not poked at by some jumped-up corpse.

The Gabriel Hounds milled on either side of me, their growls so deep they were almost subsonic. I shifted in place, the same growl making its way through my teeth. I reached out and stroked the hound nearest me at the base of its skull. The fur there was thick and spiky, like pine needles bunched together. “If I ask you to kill him,” I said, “will you?”