Soul Hunt (12 page)

Her lips twisted. “That’s always the case.”

“No, I mean—” Christ, I’d even said as much to Katie yesterday. How did most magicians work? By getting loci. How did they get loci? By stealing pieces of people’s souls.

And what happened to the people whose souls had been stolen?

Tania, perhaps seeing what I did even if she’d mistaken it for something else, patted my hand, then returned to her desk, unearthed a time sheet, and
handed it to me. “Genevieve, if I needed all Mercury’s boys to be on an even keel the whole time, I’d have no employees left. But that doesn’t mean I don’t mind when you go off the rails. So get yourself cleaned up—I don’t care what you have to do for it, just do—and try to remember that you can rely on someone else.”

“I will.” I’d have to, to break this.

There’s a difference, however, between knowing that something is wrong and being able to do something about it. Doubly so when the problem is all in your head—and by that I don’t mean that it’s not real. I’ve seen magics work that had effects only in someone’s head—some
geisa,
for example, did nothing but make their targets obsess over one particular task, and some hauntings only took place in people’s nightmares. You want to tell me the bloodshed that came out of those magics wasn’t real?

Somehow I made it to the Common after my shift. The evenings were earlier now, and the first few streetlights had begun to come on as I arrived at Park Street. A few of the downtown retailers had jumped the gun and were swapping out pumpkins with Santas, and the remnants of some rally were draining away from the street in front of the State House. I ignored them in favor of the Common itself. Solid ground, the center of the city, the place where I should have felt most at home.

And I did, in a way. I hooked up my bike to a convenient rack, glanced at a couple of the newer bikes with envy, and walked on. A big fountain stood at this part of the Common, one that had been dry for years, and around it lingered a few clusters of people: college kids waiting for one last friend to join them, tourists squinting at a map of the city, homeless men arguing with each other. I sank down onto the rim of it, fumbling for my phone. Sarah, I had to call Sarah—she had some idea of what was wrong with me, or at least I could explain it to her once I’d apologized—

“Hey! See, I told you, I saw she’d be here, look!”
The rasp of a voice was one I knew, though I’d rarely heard it this cheerful. Deke wasn’t cheerful as a rule; seers rarely are. I raised my head—the color had drained from the world again, really not good—and focused on the little figure vaulting the fence from the grass, and the big man behind him.

Deke scurried up to me. “Hound? Hound, I got a job for you. A good one, too. I can pay, or Roger can pay, and so can his partner. What was it you said, you can tell her what she lost? More?”

“Can’t do it,” I started to say, but Deke wasn’t listening.

A shadow fell over me, no cooler than the air but somehow stiller. “I don’t think she’s in much shape to help us, Cam,” Roger rumbled.

“She can too—she can find anything, right, Hound? I told you, we have a real treasure here in Boston, we’re not just the scatterdust we were—”

“I believe you. But look at her. Really look.” Roger knelt down next to me and put two fingers under my chin. I instinctively winced away from him, and he nodded. “How long has it been?”

I started to tell him to fuck off, that it was none of his business and that besides I didn’t know what he was talking about, but just then I looked down at his other hand. He was scratching an arc into the dirt at the base of the fountain, a segment of a circle marked with lines and shapes and letters in several scripts. If I was recognizing it right, it was part of a Gebelin circle. I’d seen one too many adepts attempt smalltime summonings with a similar circle, outfitted to the nines, and then lose all their loci and power without even getting any real answers. But this circle was different; the lettering around it was in different scripts—Cyrillic, Greek, something that looked like Urdu, and a rounded, simple hand that should have been English but kept sliding away from my eyes.

Roger hadn’t just learned to draw a Gebelin circle, he’d improved on it. “You’re an adept,” I said.

“That what they’re calling it? Yeah, all right. How long?”

I thought back to the last time I’d tasted ice water and stone that hadn’t come from nowhere, to the abandoned and filled-in stone quarry and its nascent spirit. To the spirit that had caught Nate, even if only for a moment, and given him back to me. For a price. “A little over two months.”

“And you’re still walking? Damn.” He stood up and murmured quietly to Deke for a moment. “Okay, let’s get this straight. I am doing this out of sheer curiosity, and you are under no obligation because of it. Got it?”

I raised my head. “Doing what?”

Deke scampered off to the edge of this little plaza and eyed the trash cans as if judging them. Roger, meanwhile, scuffed the heel of his boot over the Gebelin arc and redrew it with the toe, only a segment this time and turned inside out. “Well, you don’t have many options, do you? You’ve sustained a soulwound as bad as anyone who stayed too long near a shadowcatcher’s net. Normally I’d say rah-rah, let’s go back and get it, dive in guns blazing, but you’re in no shape to do that. And the other ways of breaking it involve staying nine days and nights surrounded by iron, and you don’t have time to do that.”

No. No, I didn’t. I got to my feet and glanced back at Deke, who was busily dragging another trash can to the edge of the plaza. “Soulwounds heal,” I managed. “You recover from them eventually.”

“Yours isn’t healing. Whatever got its hooks into you hasn’t drawn them back out.” He paused as he drew another segment on the far side, eyeing me with furrowed brow. (Which made it a little difficult to take him seriously; he looked like a long white caterpillar had settled in above his eyes.) “Makes me wonder if it took something else … no, you’d be in worse shape.”

“Hard to imagine that,” I muttered. “But look—you can’t do this, here, out in the middle of everywhere—”

“Rather we hid it away somewhere?” Roger grinned at me, and I remembered with chagrin a very similar conversation I’d had out here with a member of the Fiana, a man who’d been trying to draw me into his net. Only that time, I’d been the one unafraid of working out in the open. “No, like I said, this is just an experiment. And the experiment in question,” he added as Deke nodded to him, “is how long it takes to get arrested.
Now.”

Deke dropped a match into the first trash can, and sodden as it must have been after yesterday, it still caught fire. The segment of a circle Roger had drawn flickered, and though I could have easily written it off as an optical illusion from the fire, I knew better.
Get out,
I thought,
get out, you know better than to let someone encircle you even if they mean well—

But at that moment two things happened: a dull, cramping pain sank into my stomach, and the first traces of fireworks scent touched my nose. Somewhere, the quarry still had hold of me, but I had my talent—I was my talent, I could make it through.

Deke lit another can, and across the Common I heard a shout from a cop. We didn’t have much time. Nearby, the few people who’d remained in the circle of trash cans were looking around as well, some blinking as if they’d just heard a wake-up call, some patting their pockets as if they’d lost something. A severance circle, I realized, and smiled; Roger didn’t do things by half measures.

Which was a good thing, because this cramp wasn’t going away. I sat back down, hard, on the lip of the fountain, and curled up tight, arms wrapped around my belly as if holding myself together. The taste of ice water filled my mouth, and I swallowed it back down, refusing to vomit.

The quarry spirit had taken part of me, I finally acknowledged. It had taken part of my soul, my reflection, my sight—and it had kept taking. That was what had caused the grayouts, the fog over my talent,
the lethargy. I made myself let go, got to my feet, and tipped my head back. More fire, now, ringing me in four points, and if the cops hadn’t shown up yet then they sure as hell would in a moment.

For just a second I heard a cry, a high wail that was no more than possibility. I drew a deep, shuddering breath, tipped my head back—

—and yelled a stream of curses at the sky.

Roger guffawed, and I thought I heard Deke yelp, but those were lost in the snap of something parting, some strain finally broken, some thick invisible membrane breaking around me. And with it came a rush of scent, the patterns of the world reestablishing themselves.

Yes, I thought, and closed my eyes, reveling in the sense of—not wholeness; even with my imperfect understanding of the world I could tell that something had been severed—but sufficiency. I might be injured, but I was no longer fettered—and most important of all, I was myself again.

I opened my eyes and to my surprise, the first person to meet them wasn’t Deke or Roger (who, I now knew from scent, were standing to my left just outside the circle), but one of the historical tour guides who shepherd packs of visitors around the Common: a small black woman in period dress, her white skirts glimmering in the streetlights, her hair up under a bonnet. She gave me a small, tight nod as if she approved of my choice of profanity. I grinned at her, then turned to Roger. “Thank you.”

“Ah, that’s much better. I much prefer talking with people who are all here.” He glanced at the sky, then at his watch, and frowned. “Even if it’s cost me a little time. Come on, Cam, I gotta get back or she’ll have my hide.”

“Wait.” I stepped down from the fountain, marveling at how easy it was to walk again, how clear everything seemed once more. “What can I do to thank you?”

“Thank me? For what? No, no, you just got caught up in an experiment. No debt on either side.” Deke grabbed his sleeve and whispered urgently, but Roger shook his head. “No need to bother her with that. Talk to you later, Hound.”

Deke, crestfallen, waved at me but followed along in his friend’s wake. I stretched, reveling in how good everything felt, then glanced back for the tour guide. She was gone, of course.

By the time I let myself into Nate’s place, Katie was already asleep (or at least her light was out; if she was like me, she’d have learned to read with a flashlight under the covers) and Nate was on the couch with a new stack of midterms in front of him. “Hey,” he said, looking up. “You all right?”

“Yes.” I smiled and settled in next to him. “Yes, I am. For the first time in a long while.”

“Good. That’s good.” He put an arm around me absently. “Aunt Venice called; she wanted to know if you could track something down for her.”

“No discounts for your family,” I said, trying to make sense of the papers in front of him. Higher math was not my specialty, even at those points where it intersected magic. Especially not those.

“And Sarah called. She wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“Crap. I pissed her off. And Katie. I should apologize … I’ll do it in the morning.” I leaned against his shoulder, but the tension in his muscles had nothing to do with the phone calls. “What’s wrong?”

Abruptly Nate dropped his pen and pulled me close, so close I damn near had trouble drawing breath. I squawked, but the way he held on to me wasn’t so much possessive as desperate, as if I were a lifejacket in a storm. “You can’t go,” he said into my shoulder. “At midwinter. You can’t go.”

“I don’t want to,” I said, and reached up to touch his hair, early gray and brown sliding through my fingers.
“I’ll figure something out—I’m sure I can, somehow. But I have to do this on my own. Nate, you can’t save me from this.”

He was silent a moment, then loosened his hold and sat back, though he still didn’t quite meet my eyes. “I nearly attacked someone today. I … I was thinking about you, about the Hunt, about how damn powerless I am, and suddenly this argument I was having with one of the other TAs just seemed so fucking stupid in comparison. I nearly—” He touched his cheek, then his lips, as if reassuring himself that they were still in the right place. “It’s the first time it’s happened like that. And I thought, what if you’re not there? You keep me in check, Evie. I know where my limits are, with you. If you’re gone—”

I put my hand up, stopping him, then cupped it around his cheek. “You’re only just now noticing? It’s a curse, after all. It’s not meant to make you a productive member of society.”

He exhaled, a short, bitter breath that was somewhere between a laugh and self-inflicted contempt. “I’ll trust your word on it. I have trouble trusting my own …” He looked back at me. “They have noticed,” he said. “Not … not anything explicit, but my students, my advisor, the other TAs … they know something’s different. And they’re a little scared of me. Whenever it gets close I can feel the pressure in the back of my head, and I think they see it too. They back down.”

I shrugged. “Must be nice.”

“No. They look at me … they look at me the way people looked at my father.”

I nodded at that. His father had tried the same intimidation on me, only there was too much of the hound in me to react the way he’d wanted. “Nate, trust me on this. You’re not your curse.”

“I trust you,” he said, softly enough that I didn’t quite think I’d imagined it. “But I want it gone.”

“Then we’ll find a way to get rid of it before I go.” I
stopped, realizing what I’d said. Nate’s eyes met mine, and to keep from talking more I kissed him quick. “There are ways,” I said. “Your father got rid of it, after all—there’s the wolfskin he hit you with—”

“Long gone, I’m afraid. He took it back.”

“Well, there are other ways. Maybe nothing so simple as a usual cursebreaking, but there are fissures, places where it’s not as strong. We’ll find a way. Okay? Trust me.”

“I do trust you,” he whispered, and sighed against me. “More than I can say.”

I rested against his shoulder a moment. “So what were you arguing about?”

“What? Oh … the TA. Possibility theory. It’s a little difficult to explain; it’s the counterintuitive parts of higher maths, which is why it was a problem.”