Soul Hunt (26 page)

I stopped at the door, not quite turning to face her. “Nate? Shouldn’t. Why?”

“He called about twenty minutes ago, wanted to know if I could take care of Katie for a bit. Didn’t say why. I figured you were off together or something, but if you’re playing harbor patrol with Deke, then that can’t be it.”

I closed my eyes. Somewhere back in my apartment, his blood was still draining out of my clothes; somewhere in the back twenty behind Venetia’s house, the knife I’d failed to use still lay in the grass. But what Nate did now, he had to do on his own. I could trust him to do that. “Doesn’t ring any bells.”

“You two aren’t fighting, are you?”

“Sarah, drop it. Please. It’s—” I glanced back over my shoulder at her. “It’s a little hard to explain, and I have to be at the harbor in a bit.”

“You’ll tell me later?”

“I’ll tell you everything.”

There are parts of the waterfront that are flourishing. Those parts are all well away from Fort Point Channel, and most of them smell a little better. (Boston Harbor’s a lot cleaner than it used to be, but there’s no amount of cleaning that will make a harbor other than what it is. Fish are fish, and low tide is low tide; you don’t get rid of those smells by making the water clean.)

The fog had turned this part of the harbor into a ghost of itself, but the house remained a dull blot on the water. A light moved back and forth in the windows, no more than a stray gleam. Someone was home, all right. I tried to catch a scent, but Deke had set his wards well. I shifted, feeling my shoulder holster settle into place.

There was a walkway out to the house, nothing more than a line of boards that swooped and sagged alarmingly in the middle. I glanced over my shoulder—no cops nearby, and no one out on the bridge—and scrambled over the fence and onto the walkway.

Which was a lot higher up than I’d expected.

Tides, I told myself, staring down at the yawning gap between the rotting boards and the water below, gleaming with oil from the boats further down the channel. That was the problem. It hadn’t looked so far before because the tide was in. But now, there had to be at least ten feet between me and the water. And not just the water: pilings and junk and any number of ragged edges.

Well, shit. Time to hope this thing was a lot more steady than it looked.

The boards didn’t just creak. They groaned, like a long-suffering parent reminded of the sins of their
offspring, and a few of them sagged under my feet. When I looked down, trying to make sense of the gray against gray, the rotting planks versus the slightly less rotten, all I could see were the pilings in the water far, far below, sticking up like carelessly arranged spears, some of them slimy with mold and moss.

A board shifted under my foot, and I stumbled forward, catching my toe against the next one. The walkway screeched and splintered, and I pitched forward onto the little ridge between porch and door. I hung there for a moment, rotting wood jammed between ribs and pelvis, trying to remember how to breathe.

Something shifted inside the house—not the creak of old wood, but the motion of someone changing position, and I thought I heard a chuckle. “Yeah, laugh it up, Deke,” I muttered, and pulled myself up, wincing at the bruises.

The door was locked. Of course. But the window next to it had been smashed so thoroughly that not even the frame was left, leaving it a gaping pit in the wall. Gaping pit would do, though. I eased myself around the side of the house, shuffling one foot in front of the other to keep from tipping off the scrap of a porch, and clung to the wall as I swung one leg up and into the window. “Deke,” I said, panting a little more than I wanted to admit, “I don’t care where you go from here, but you’re going to give me a ride to shore, all right? Because I am not going back out that way again.”

I swung both feet over the edge and into the house. Deke’s smell was so heavy in this room that it might as well have had his name painted outside; he’d made this place his own. More than that, the stink of old oil and tarpaper blotted out even the smell of the harbor.

Too late I recognized the scent that wasn’t woodchuck and smoke; too late I heard the click of a gun’s safety going off. “Both hands in the air, and no sudden movements, Evie,” said Rena.

I
spun, flattening myself against the wall. Rena stood by a huge, corroded machine, something that almost looked like a Looney Toons factory second with chains as thick as my legs now lying slack where once they’d passed through the wall. An electric lantern atop it threw acid shadows across the rust and detritus. The daylight didn’t seem to want to come past the windows, hovering outside with the fog, and the lantern’s light painted Rena’s face with a harsh brilliance. She wasn’t in uniform—that was something at least—but her gun was out and pointed at me.

At the other side of the room, huddled up against the wall, sat Deke. He didn’t even look up, just rocked slightly, staring at a point on the floor where the floorboards ended.

“Rena, what are
you
doing here?”

“I wish I could ask you the same, Evie.” She nodded to Deke. “But I got a pretty good idea already.”

“What are you—” I stopped. “That was you, on the phone with Deke. This morning.”

She nodded.

“Don’t you need, I don’t know, an actual warrant for a wiretap like that?”

“Not if he’s got the phone on loudspeaker and I’m standing right there.” She drew a deep breath, not taking her eyes from me. “And you’re his contact.”

“Contact? Oh, Jesus.” I could have laughed, except Rena still had her gun out, and though she knew enough not to put her finger on the trigger unless she wanted to shoot someone, I knew she was fast enough to do so before I could react. “Seriously, Rena—”

“‘I have what you want, and without some kind of guarantee, I can promise you won’t get it,’” she quoted. “I thought you didn’t much care for extortion, but it’s not the first time I’ve been wrong about you.”

“Extortion, my ass!” But I could feel my face reddening, and not just because she’d skirted a little too close to the truth. “This was a legit job, and I just wanted to be sure I was going to get paid.”

“Then you won’t mind showing me the contract for it.” Rena waited, and this time I had to look away. “Thought so.”

“It’s still not—” I stopped myself. “Okay. Deke probably misunderstood what you were asking. This was just a business meeting, and even if it’s technically off the books, there’s nothing illegal about it.”

“Maybe.” She risked a glance at Deke. “I’m not saying I trust his word. But even if you’re right about this, I’d like to know what you’re doing with a known arsonist.”

“Arson—goddammit, Deke.” He cringed at that, and the smell in the air turned a little more rank. “Christ. Can I—look, I just want to see if he’s all right. Okay?”

Rena hesitated, then nodded. I picked my way across the broken floor to him, very aware of her eyes on me. “Deke, are you okay?” He didn’t answer, or even look up. I tried putting a hand on his shoulder—that was usually enough to get him to flinch away—and he only blinked. “Deke, where’s Roger? Is he here? For God’s sake, what’s wrong with you?”

His lips parted, and an unintelligible whisper passed them. I leaned closer, and he shivered. “I’m scared, Hound.”

“I don’t blame you. Rena, what the hell have you done to him?”

“I didn’t do anything. He sat down the minute we got out here and he’s been like that since.”

I got to my feet. There wasn’t much in the way of an intact floor, but there was enough space in front of Deke for me to stand between them. “Then why is Deke so scared he’s practically shitting himself?”

“You’d have to ask him that,” Rena said levelly.

Like that was going to do much good right now. “Deke’s harmless, Rena. Yes, he’s kind of a pyro, but he’s never started anything big. Worst he’s ever done is burn some trash. That’s not nearly enough to bring you out here.”

“You may want to think about what you’re saying,” Rena said. “Especially if you’re going to defend him.”

“Given the choice between the person with a gun and the weak little guy in the corner, yeah, I think I know who I’d defend,” I snapped. “Besides, what do you care? You gonna read me my Miranda rights?”

Rena was silent a moment. The lantern flickered, and for a second the white glare of the fog outside seemed to press closer, changing her expression even as she remained still.

An idea started to rise in the back of my mind. “Where’s Foster?”

That was it. Rena blinked, and for just a fraction of a second, her scent was no longer the block of blue ice that it was when she put on that badge, but something pricklier, like broken glass. “Does it matter?”

“It should. He’s your partner, right? Shouldn’t he be your backup in case one skinny bike messenger and a half-baked pyromaniac decide to get violent? Or maybe you didn’t want him here.” I took a step closer, rethought it as the boards creaked, and moved to my left instead. “Maybe this isn’t as official as I thought.”

Now Rena’s hands shifted—her index finger moving closer to the trigger. Crap. “If I did come
alone,” she said, “and there’s no guarantee that I did, let’s say I had a hunch about who’d show up when Deke met with his boss—”

“Boss? Deke doesn’t have a boss. None of us do; you know that, Rena.” I pressed one hand to the back of my head, trying to stave off headache and panic both. “I don’t have time for this. Look, let me finish this exchange—” let me get out from under the damn death sentence, “—and we’ll talk. I’ll tell you everything right down to the ground, you want it that way. But not right now.”

I held my hands out further, trying to demonstrate that I really had nothing to hide. Unfortunately, that had the wrong effect entirely—my jacket opened a little too far, and I saw Rena’s eyes flick to the shoulder holster that wasn’t quite out of view. Shit.

“God damn you, Evie,” she snapped. Whatever chance I’d had, it was now gone. “I was really, really hoping you wouldn’t be part of this. I guess I should have known—”

“No. No, that was—Rena, I swear to God I’m telling the truth.”

“There’s no way I can believe you,” she said, and I knew it was true. I’d left too much out in our dealings in the past, left her in the dark too often. At the time I’d thought it was for her own good, that telling her more about the undercurrent would only drag her into it—it had done that to Nate, hadn’t it?—but as it turned out I’d just been laying another stone on the road to hell.

I closed my eyes. “No,” I said. “There isn’t any way I can convince you either. But I’ll tell you the truth anyway, and then you can tell me whether I’m under arrest. Okay? If so, I’ll go quietly. Just—can we not go back along the boardwalk? I hated walking over that.”

The corner of Rena’s lips turned up just slightly, but she nodded—then shifted the gun to point at Deke as he got to his feet, wringing his hands. “No,” he stage-whispered. “No, she won’t understand.”

“Goddammit, Deke, I’m in it and I don’t understand.” I lowered my hands. “Okay, Rena. What happened is this: I got myself in some trouble.
Bruja
trouble, and big. Enough that I got scared.”
Blood in the water,
I thought, remembering the Hounds’ assessment of me. “The short way to put it is that it’s a curse. Deke, here, has a friend—the one with the boat, the guy who owned it before it caught fire. And no, I didn’t know him when we talked before. But now I do, and he—Roger—knows someone who says she can remove that curse, if I do something for her.” I glanced at Deke, ashamed of what else I had to say. “Only I got spooked and thought I could get a little more for the job. I wanted to … to see if she’d lift another curse as well. That’s why I said all that on the phone. I was, shit, I guess it
was
extortion after all.”

Deke’s hands twisted as if he was trying to scrub something off them. “You didn’t have to. She said, she said she’d get it back for you. From the quarry. Roger told me, he told me about the child—”

“There was no child, Deke, okay? And Roger had no business telling you that.” I sighed and glanced back at Rena, whose expression had gone from stoic disbelief to outright shock. “That was Dina’s first offer,” I told her. “She—she told me I’d been pregnant. And that a, an embodiment of the … Goddammit. A nixie, call it that. It had stolen the child.” Christ, it sounded even worse telling Rena like this. At any moment I expected her to point and laugh, or at the very least give up on me entirely.

Instead she blinked and lowered the gun. “You’re kidding.” I shook my head. “You’re not kidding.”

“No. And look, that whole part doesn’t matter, okay? What matters is that I said yes, and I found this for her.”

I reached into my coat for the sunstone, too late remembering the gun, but Rena didn’t move. My fingers slid over the sunstone, and for a moment I could barely see—Deke’s fear, so huge and shapeless, loomed
up like a tumor on an X-ray, and all I could perceive was that miasma of dread. He hadn’t been kidding about being scared.

But more than that, I saw Rena, grayed out, her face made of stone, her hands perpetually frozen around the gun. Which made it even stranger when she snapped the safety back on and holstered it. “Okay. Okay, Evie, you can shut up now.”

I started to protest, then stopped as the words became clear. “What?”

“You’re an idiot—I’ll believe that till the day I die—and you really should have checked with me before carrying a firearm, and I think there’s a lot more to this story, but I’ll believe you for now.” She edged around a gap in the boards and reached forward to clasp my shoulder for balance.

“Seriously?” What had I said? I closed my hand around the sunstone, trying to ignore the stink of abject terror now coming off Deke—what in God’s name did he have to be scared of, we were both on his side—and tried to look like I’d expected it.

It didn’t work; Rena didn’t do anything so obvious as smile, but the corners of her eyes crinkled. “Okay. Here’s the situation as I see it. This guy—” a nod toward Deke, who flinched even though she was a yard away, “—got caught setting a fire at a psychic’s. Not so different from the other vandalisms lately. So we thought he might have something to do with the rest.”