Wild Hunt (5 page)

It couldn’t be her scent. That was flat normal…no, not normal, but colorless, bloodless. I’d never known anyone to have a scent that made less of an impression on me. If it hadn’t been for the continued sparking scent from the fountain and the assorted trails of the office itself, I’d have thought I was catching a cold.

“What I’d like is to return the property to its rightful owner. But there’s an awful lot of different things in those chests, and I don’t know who the owner might be, or if they’re—if he’s even still reachable.” She laid her gloves over her purse, smoothed them flat, then clasped her hands over them. “I’d been told you had some…some amazing successes in finding items, and I wondered if you could turn that around and find an owner.”

It wasn’t her body language either. This wasn’t a learned approach, the way that some people who’d gone through nasty situations learned to hide themselves. This was something else. “What makes you think that some of your inheritance is stolen property?”

Abigail was silent a moment, staring at the edge of the desk. Even her eyes seemed washed out, and that shouldn’t have been possible with brown eyes. Finally she looked up at me. “Nightmares,” she said, clipping off the word.

And that was it. With that word her scent changed, a flash of real emotion as bright and fleeting as the glare off a blade. She was scared, scared enough that her fear could break through what I realized was a highly controlled mask, one that went deeper than just composure.

She was an adept.

I should know better to rely on sight rather than scent. But scent is such a nonverbal trigger that it’s hard to translate into words, and so if I have an idea,
it comes through as hunches or unconscious aversions long before I can say what it is or why. I exhaled slowly, and this time I noticed how Abigail tensed when I did so. She knew what I was looking for and how I was looking for it, which meant she knew about me. Which meant she wasn’t just a nice little old lady.

“Well,” I said, leaning back, “I can see why that would be a problem. Didn’t your wards keep them at bay?”

Abigail started, then straightened up, the twinkle gone. “No,” she said. “I don’t bother with wards against dreams. They’re impractical, and a waste of time and energy.”

I grinned. This was the real woman now, not the milquetoast of a moment ago. She still had the same bloodless scent, the same delicate care in how she moved, but now there was a center of stone to her mien. “I could say the same thing about wards in general. But then again, I’m no magician.”

“And I am, I suppose, by your lights.” Abigail sighed, a very grade-school-teacher sigh. In fact, she would not have looked out of place in a teachers’ lounge, right down to the cardigan and the little floral pin over her left breast. But while there were bags under her eyes, they didn’t have the ground-in look that most teachers’ had. These were more recent. “Fine. I should have come clean about that to begin with.”

I shrugged. “I can understand why you didn’t. People can react strangely, especially if they’re not aware of the undercurrent to begin with.”

Abigail mouthed the word
undercurrent
, as if testing it. Now that I was seeing her as a magician, a whole new set of implications slid into place. The excessive care she took with her clothes was a marked contrast to most adepts, who usually ended up so steeped in their magic that they couldn’t remember which end the pants went on. The exceptions tended to be both very fastidious and very powerful—but I didn’t get that sense from Abigail. She wasn’t small-
time, but she didn’t have the arrogant power that I associated with that kind of adept. (And let’s face it, most of them were male.)

“Even magicians have grandmothers,” Abigail said, folding her gloves one over the other. “My story still stands. And yes, the nightmares are even more of a problem for someone in my position. If you don’t do this sort of work, I’ll take my business elsewhere.”

“I never said I wouldn’t do it.” I opened my desk drawer and rummaged around for a contract. “Here. Take a look. There’s a list of work I won’t do on the second page.”

She took the contract and flipped the first page over. “Photography?”

“People wanting to catch their spouses cheating on them. There are enough PIs in the city who’ll do that for less.” Granted, I’d had to do a little of that sordid work when I was starting out, but then the undercurrent stuff had come in, and I’d swapped one flavor of sordid for another. “But yes, photography, intimidation, papers served, or bodyguard work. And I reserve the right to step away from the case if something starts going—”

I stopped. Just for a second, that sudden shift in Abigail’s scent had come and gone: the rank scent of adrenaline and terror, like a spatter of blood over her pale scent.

“Do you usually back out of cases?” she asked. Her voice—again calm and controlled as a teacher’s—broke into my thoughts. She was good, I thought; she might be scared, but she was used to hiding it.

“I haven’t much, lately.” It was part of why I was careful about what I took on; obligations wore on me, and I found it very hard to walk away from them.

“Good.” She took a fountain pen from her purse and uncapped it. Her nails were bitten to the quick, I saw, and beyond; at the tips of her fingers were little half-moons that barely deserved the term fingernails. It was the only thing out of place on her. “I’ll take care
of finding out which of the items is the problematic one, and I’ll have it to you in a couple of days.”

I reached out and slid the contract out from under her hand. “Whoa. I haven’t yet said yes, or set terms—”

“Two thousand per day,” she said without looking up. “Five thousand more on completion, and a down payment towards that before you begin work in earnest.”

Well. That was nice—that was several times my usual rate, and the work itself seemed simple enough that it could have been worthwhile in any case. I wasn’t hurting for money at the moment, but I’d been living paycheck to paycheck for so long that having any kind of cushion had its own appeal. “Hang on. How are you going to find out which thing’s been stolen?”

Abigail hesitated, then gave me a narrow look. I had to restrain my impulse to sit up straight and present my homework. “Since you’re acquainted with this sort of matter,” she said, using the same tone of voice as my mother did to describe toilet humor, “I suppose I can tell you. I’ll be calling up my great-great-grandmother and asking her directly.”

“Whoa.” I held up my hands. “Wait a minute.”

“Do let me finish. My great-great-grandmother is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, at the feet of Isabella Stewart Gardner. She owned the boxes, she knows what’s in them, and she should know where they came from. She’ll tell me what was stolen, and how to return it.”

“But you’re a blood relative,” I said. “And we’re talking necromancy now.”

Abigail shook her head. “That’s a very New Age term for it. Besides, my belief system precludes meaningful existence after death in the physical world.” I tilted my head to the side, and she sighed again. “You might as well describe talking to a portrait as holding a conversation.”

“Portraits can’t answer back. The dead can.”

“Don’t split hairs. Like talking to an answering machine, then, or the recorded response on an automatic call. Necromancy would mean actually contacting the spirit, while this is just…” She waved one hand dismissively. “Research among old effects.”

“Research or not, it’s still dangerous for a blood relative to do that kind of work.” Magic didn’t have many constants—it depended too much on the magician in question, the ritual or heredity or favors involved, and so on—but the one thing that affected pretty much every kind of magic was blood, in both the literal and metaphorical sense. Actual spilled blood would do strange things to a spell, and family ties could enable certain actions, which, since family members were aligned on that level of blood, could be good for some rituals but made possession or other complications a much more likely danger. “Can’t someone else do it for you?”

Abigail gave me an affronted look. “I’d rather not bring in anyone else. I’m not happy about this whole situation to begin with, and I’d rather not announce to the world that my great-great-grandmother owned stolen property.”

I drummed my fingers on my desk. “I could do it.”

She glanced up from the contract. “What?”

“I could do it. I know the basics of a graveyard ceremony, and I’m not a blood relative. It’ll be safer for me.”
And whatever it is that’s scaring you about it, you’ll have some breathing room.

“You’re not—” Abigail stared at me, one of her hands twisting against itself as if scrubbing something from the fingers. “You would do that?”

“I—”
Oh, crap
. I could tell this was a bad idea, but I was going to go ahead with it anyway. “Maybe. Or at least I might be able to find a way around it.” She gave me a skeptical look. “Boston’s undercurrent has been isolated for a while. There might be problems here that you wouldn’t run into elsewhere, and maybe some alternate avenues. Ones that wouldn’t endanger you. At
least let me look into some things first, before you do anything drastic.” Looking things up was easy enough. Maybe I could find some way to do this that didn’t involve either putting Abigail in certain danger or—as my first instinct had been—putting myself in her place.

Her mouth quirked into a sad smile, but she nodded. “I’ll write down what I was planning to do. You can tell me what elements should be cut out.” She flipped the contract over and began writing in a careful hand.

“Just give me a day or two. I’m sure we can find something that doesn’t involve the dead.” I waited till she was done, then countersigned the contract and ran it through the little machine that served as fax and printer and photocopier all in one. As an afterthought, I tucked one of Sarah’s flyers at the back of Abigail’s copy. What the hell; a slightly sane adept might be a good thing to have at this gathering.

“You don’t have to do this,” Abigail said again as I handed flyer and contract back to her. “I’m perfectly willing to begin on my own.”

“I don’t doubt it. But give me one day anyway, all right? You wouldn’t have gotten me to start work any earlier either way.” I paused. “What was your great-great-grandmother’s name?”

“Abigail Huston.” Abigail smiled tightly. “Like me.”

I
had just enough time to get to Sarah’s “community watch” gathering if I hurried. Trouble was, I didn’t want to hurry. I didn’t particularly want to be there at all. Abigail’s plans had left a bad taste in my mouth, even if I could find a way to work around them. I didn’t like the idea of jumping in to take the risk on my shoulders, but it was still preferable to letting her do it. And the whole situation, magic and guilt and all, made me that much less enthusiastic about spending my evening with another gaggle of magicians.

But I’d promised Sarah. And I’d as much as promised the same to Woodfin, so that he could get a look at my gun. Even if it meant I had to wear the crappyass batik jacket that was the only thing that hid my shoulder holster. I slid gun into holster (unloaded—I was not about to tempt fate that way), holster onto my back (where it sat nicely against the sweaty spot from today’s work), and jacket on top of that. I shouldn’t have felt like I was wearing a costume, but I did. Everything but the mask.

The office fan thrummed, and the fountain gurgled away at me, happily oblivious. “Fuck it,” I said finally, and turned over the stack of books, searching till I’d found the right one. “Sarah can wait,” I added, and
stuffed a slim volume into my bag. If a side trip could save my sanity, then a side trip it would be.

I can’t stand coffee shops. Don’t get me wrong: I love coffee, to the point where “love” is probably the wrong word. It’s more of a co-dependent relationship; if I leave, I regret it real fast. But I was raised to drink plain coffee, not the stuff with milk and sugar and whipped cream and jimmies on top. If I look at it objectively, I can almost see the point of it, but I’ll stick to my road tar, thank you very much.

Sarah says this explains a lot about my aesthetics. I’m pretty sure the last time she said it I told her to cram her aesthetics up her filter.

All this is a lengthy way of saying that it takes a lot to get me through the door of your basic coffee shop. Or at least it used to. These days, it seems like all it takes is Nate.

He was finishing up a tutoring session as I walked in. His student was a young black girl with her hair up in multiple pigtails and an expression of deep concentration, about as different from Chuckles the Angry Undergrad as possible. I waited until she’d closed her brick-thick textbook and left, then went over to Nate’s table. “You all set?”

“I’m almost done here,” he said without looking up. I waited a minute, and his pen stilled on the page before him as he connected voice and place. He blinked up at me, as if washing away a moment of sleep. “Evie?”

“If you’re almost done, then come on.” I picked up his bag and headed for the door.

He followed, scrambling for the last of his papers. “Everything all right?”

“Just come on.” I took him by the wrist and led him out the door, glaring at the barista just on principle.

Nate didn’t protest, and after a moment he caught up to me. I realized a little too late that I was no longer dragging him along and probably should let go of his
arm, but by that point I’d been holding on long enough that releasing him would have been obvious and silly.

I led him around a corner and into one of the little half-block parks that don’t show up on most Boston maps, that thrive or wither depending on who the neighbors are. I’d locked up my bike here, and I let go of Nate’s hand to dig a book out of my saddlebag. “Okay,” I said, flourishing the book at him. “Sigmund. Volsung saga, loads of other sagas, gets picked up by Wagner later on. Boinks his sister, sneaks off with their son, runs around with him in the forest for a while, gets turned into a wolf for a bit, then does something stupid and ends up killing the kid. In Wagner’s version he doesn’t even make it through the second opera before Siegfried the Idiot takes over. There’s a few other Sigmunds, but Sarah’s the go-to person for those kinds of myths. You want to talk to her.”

I handed him the book—not
Dictionary of Myth
, but one of the little ones that Sarah had foisted on me. Nate reached out and took it, looking from me to the book and back. “That’s what you wanted me for?”

No,
I thought.
I wanted you to remind me that I’m human and capable of making good decisions. I wanted to make sure you’re all right. I wanted to see you.
But if I said, “I needed to talk to you,” it would sound as if there was something life-threatening at stake instead of just my own mental state. Or at the very least I’d sound desperate.

“Mostly,” I said.

“Huh.” He gave me a sharp look, then opened the book and flipped through it. An old man with five pugs on their leashes, all snorting and panting, shuffled past, and Nate stepped out of their way, just a bit closer to me. He hadn’t shaved that morning, I noticed, and the last August sun picked out the gleam in the scruff along the line of his jaw. Absently, he licked his finger to turn the page.

I looked away, silently blessing my summer’s worth of sunburn. “So,” I said, and cleared my throat.

“Hm?” Red and blue ink streaked the middle finger of his hand.
He’s left-handed
, I thought, trying to concentrate on that irrelevancy in the face of the full-scale revolt my body was trying to pull on me. My cell rang, and I slapped at it, switching it off.

The book
, I told myself.
I just came out here to give him the book
. “So. Sigmund. Why did you want to know?”

A cloud descended over his expression, and he closed the book. For a moment he gazed at the cover, not really seeing anything, then shook his head. “Hell,” he said. “I got a letter—well, a lot of letters, over the past couple of weeks. From my father.”

I nodded, still gazing at his hands, then blinked. “Wait. What?”

Nate laughed without smiling. “That’s what
I
thought.”

I didn’t know much about Nate’s father, other than he got Nate’s mom pregnant when she was seventeen and promptly skipped town. Nate didn’t talk about him, hadn’t ever since I knew him. Because I’d also had an estranged dad, I knew how easy it was to create an imaginary father, one who was sympathetic and smart and very cool regardless of what you remembered of him in reality, who would always take your side in whatever argument you and your mom were having at the moment, and so on.

But those ideas fall away early, and from Nate’s expression, his illusions had dissolved a long time ago. “Jesus.” I shook myself, forcing away the disturbing awareness of his body. “What happened?”

Nate shrugged. “I don’t know. Nothing. He just started writing me letters. Not really harassing me, just writing, a lot. After what happened the…the first time I met him, I figured he wouldn’t want to cross paths again, but in the last few weeks I’ve been getting a lot of mail from him. And he keeps referring to something about ‘Sigmund,’ like I’m supposed to know what it means.” He rubbed at the corners of his
eyes, then glanced at me, trying to smile. “Somehow I don’t think the Volsungs play into it.”

I drew a deep breath and let it out. There were a lot of things I could say to him, and so many of them were the wrong thing to say. And none of this was made any easier by the sudden reminder that I hadn’t gotten further than second base in, oh, at least a year. Romance is for people with clear calendars.

“So does this make you Siegfried?” I finally asked. “Because I always thought he was a colossal prick, and you don’t seem the type.”

Nate smiled, and I knew I’d said the right thing, or at least not a horribly wrong one. “I hope not.”

“Yeah, well, if the Rhinemaidens start coming up out of the Charles, I’m blaming you first.” That won me another smile. “I’m not in touch with my father,” I said after a moment. “I mean, we know where we stand, and I figure if something big happened he’d contact me. But we haven’t really spoken since he called to apologize, a few years after Mom’s death.” Nate glanced at me, and I managed a smile. “Yeah. Shitty timing. But it still mattered that he got in touch that one time. Maybe it might be worth it for you to talk to your father. Even if it’s just this once.”

Nate didn’t answer. I thought about Abigail, about what she’d planned to do just to escape her own nightmares, about what I had offered to do in her place. And briefly, why I’d come out here, or the reason I’d told myself I had to see Nate. “Is that why you asked me?” I said after a moment. “Because I’m estranged from my father too?”

He shook his head. “I’m telling you because I can’t tell anyone else.”

Blame it on the hormones. Blame it on the way he’d looked at the Red Sox game, getting rained on and still yelling his heart out in perfect unison with me, blame it on my own issues. Whatever the reason, I reached out and touched him on the shoulder—nothing much,
I told myself, just the sort of thing one friend would do for another.

His body stilled under my touch, and he reached up to cover my hand with his own, relaxing for just a second. Then a shudder passed through him, and as quickly as he’d moved to yank Katie out of traffic, he stepped closer, close enough that even in the warm air I could feel the heat of his skin. I caught my breath, momentarily unable to hear anything over the blood rushing in my ears. For a moment I forgot this was Nate, forgot that we were friends, that it had always and only been friendship between us.

And then whatever damnable self-preservation instinct or Catholic guilt or whatever you wanted to call it spoke up in the back of my head:
the last man that made you feel like this tried to turn you into a thrall of the Fiana.

The thought dropped like a seed crystal into my mind, and I froze up. Nate sensed it, and with all the finality of a lock snapping shut, his scent changed, shutting him off behind that wall of iron. He let go of me and stepped back like a cat springing away from a firecracker. “Sorry. Um. I should go,” he said, not looking at me. “My advisor wanted a revised chapter by the end of the week—”

“Yeah.” I cleared my throat, trying to shake the buzzing from my ears. “Yeah, I have, um, a meeting to get to.”

He moved so that he stood with his back to the sun, and even in the low raking light, his face was hidden in shadow. So I couldn’t see the look in his gray eyes, only imagine it, only remember that weird shift in him that I’d seen on the banks of the Charles, that I had seen under Fenway when he lost control before. I hadn’t seen it this time, but I’d felt it—and I didn’t yet know what I thought of it. “I’ll. I’ll see you.”

Without another word, he turned and headed back the way we’d come. I sank onto the closest bench, my
legs feeling like they had turned to rubber.
Not now
, I told myself,
not now, not you, not Nate. He doesn’t deserve the kind of crap you could give him
.

If I’d wanted an example of what the undercurrent can do to ostensibly sane people, I wouldn’t have to look much further than the cluster of people down at the far end of Outlook Park. I’d taken the T down—no point in biking, not if I was going to have to hold my jacket shut the whole way—and climbed up one of the footpaths to the top of the hill, winding my way between the Brookline townhouses. Someone was having a cook-out; charcoal and hamburger scent wafted past on the evening air. I was the only one who seemed to notice.

“It’s like watching an elementary-school play implode,” Sarah muttered to me. She nodded to the magician currently in the center of the circle, who, in his attempt to explain the need for a unity of purpose among Boston adepts, had invoked the Templars and the Anasazi burial rites, and was now on the verge of a full-blown tangent about fluoridation. “You keep expecting the teacher to come out and nudge him off the stage.”

“So why the hell did you let him talk?” I glanced at the gathering of maybe thirty people, more than I had expected but less than Sarah had hoped for. A few of the scattered adepts (and charlatans, and practitioners, and even one or two really low-tier shadowcatchers) looked away as soon as I turned. I tugged at my jacket, trying to hide the telltale bulge of my gun.

“Because this is a communal effort, and we can’t just shunt aside the part of our community that doesn’t follow the same Western logic as the dominant culture.” Sarah nodded toward the far end of the circle. “And he’s got influence among a few of the Oak Square neo-chiromancers.”

“Sarah, just because there’s a significant wacko contingent in the undercurrent doesn’t mean you need to have wacko representation.”

She didn’t hear me. “Goddess wept, he’s starting in on the Grail crap…That’s it. I gotta go be the grown-up.” She hopped off the rock she’d been sitting on, dusted off her butt, and swept to the center of the circle. I glanced at the other adepts as she put a hand on the poor man’s shoulder and kindly steered him out of the way. Some of them were still listening; most of them had moved into the perpetual cat game of watch-me-watch-you that came so naturally to magicians of any stripe.

So far, Sarah had made her point in a number of different ways, most of which would have at least made a dent or provoked some kind of debate among normal people. But there hadn’t been any debate. There hadn’t been any argument. There had just been a group of magicians eyeing each other, listening politely, and ignoring what was said. Both of the men who’d come to see me the night before were there, and both looked a bit repentant when they saw me. I’d looked for Abigail, but she’d found something else to do, and frankly, I was glad she wasn’t here.

Sarah, for her part, could handle any amount of embarrassment without even blinking. Better, she wasn’t a magician, and under her cynical shell she was a squishy optimist. That was part of why I wasn’t too worried about her: if this crashed and burned, she’d find something else to renew her hope in humanity.

As for me…every time I turned my head, I caught a glimpse of someone else looking away. Too many people were watching me, and I was starting to sweat. I didn’t like being the focus of attention, especially not when I was carrying a weapon—I cursed Woodfin again for asking me to meet him here, and cursed myself for not protesting more. And as for the meeting itself, even though getting these adepts together at all was an accomplishment, I was starting to lose hope in Sarah’s vision.