Wild Hunt (10 page)

The babble merged around that one voice. “—lost anything left outside to their jaws—”

“—daughter saw them in their courses, never right again—”

“—whistlers, all seven of them, always for death—”

“—hurled—”

“—wretch
—”

The voices swelled to deafening, and the shadows spun themselves into a pillar as high as the tower. I turned in place, trying to see a way out, groping for the words of a dismissal, even though by now that would be about as useful as a paper shield.

All sound ceased, and when the dead spoke again, it was no longer as an amalgam, but with a single united purpose. “
You can’t have it.
”

“I don’t want it,” I shouted back, and the wind carried my words away. “I don’t even know what it is!”

“Liar!
” At the back of its scream, I could hear the grinding whine of granite wearing down. These stones would be eroded the next time I saw them. If I saw them again. “You want it, you need it like a lion needs a pride, like a bitch needs a pack. You’re just like Skelling. He wanted it, you’ll want it too.”

“Skelling?” The name slipped out before I could stop myself.

The mottled darkness halted, and that sudden stillness was more frightening than anything before. Somewhere on the far side of the hill, back where buses ran and people lived without the dead intruding, a dog began barking hysterically. “Skelling,” the voices said, savoring the name, and the pillar began to revolve again, slowly and with a dreadful purpose.

Shit. Saltwater and hope weren’t going to be any good against this.

“We know you now,” it whispered. “Skelling. Hound. Bitch.” The air around me went bone dry, so dry my eyes almost crackled, and I choked. “Bitch!” the amalgam screamed. “You’ll steal it, you’ll take it as Huston did, as her son did, as Huston did!
Bitch!
”

I staggered and dropped to one knee. How far could I get? Even if they had the wrong name, they had a link to me—how long till I left a footprint, till the ghosts grabbed hold of my shadow?

The aversion ward. That might help, even for only a second. I dragged myself to the edge of the stairs, but someone was there before me. A shape rose up from the gaping blackness of the stairwell, a man in a robe or a long coat, no more than a shadow against shadows. A snarl cut through the amalgam’s screaming like a sword through a snake. I scrambled back on all fours, but the shadow turned away from me, toward
the amalgam. “Go,” said a man’s voice by my ear. “If you have any pity, bring it back safe and return it.”

“Who—” I said, though I was already moving, edging through the thin envelope of breathable air that clung to the dark shape. “Abigail?”

“She’s buried far too deep, girl. Some sins may not be forgiven.” The shadow turned, just enough that the light of the half-moon above limned features that weren’t there. I caught a glimpse of blue eyes and a red mustache…“Don’t let it happen again,” he said, and pointed west.

Where he pointed a path gleamed, silver and unreal above the treetops. The amalgam roared again, screaming
Skelling
and
Gabriel
and
Wretch
in a chorus of the damned. I lurched to my feet and reached out. My left arm broke the circle first, and pain shot up it with a sizzle. I clamped my teeth over a howl, vaulted the railing, and ran—

—and
ran.

I
stumbled to a stop, and the world slammed back into place around me. Too much, too fast; I tried another step and missed my footing, landing with one knee on gravel and the other in gooseshit.

The faint thump of music I’d heard from the tower was now a steady thrum, and I could hear voices over it, the chatter and call of a party in full swing. I drew a few gasping breaths, choking on the dampness in the air. My left hand throbbed, and I held it up, hissing as the glow of streetlights hit it. The skin looked red and chapped, cracked open in places, and though the damage didn’t seem to be more than skin deep, skin deep still hurt a hell of a lot. I tucked my hand under my other arm, gritting my teeth, and rocked to my feet, then stared at the ground. Gravel? Gooseshit?

Where the hell was I?

The obvious answer was not the one I wanted to believe first. But there it was: the bright lights that were no part of Mount Auburn, the kiosk emblazoned
BOSTON KAYAKS
to my left, the glow of a party beyond and, faintly, the flare of police lights as they made their way toward that same party. I wasn’t in the cemetery any more, unless they’d radically changed their policies. At last I turned to see the slow current of water, the Charles River murmuring to itself, and beyond
that—well beyond that—the hills of Mount Auburn Cemetery. The sky overhead had turned opaque, mist dissipating into cloud cover.

I had the river at my back, and I wasn’t on the Cambridge side of it. I’d crossed the Charles, putting running water between me and the dead.

Had I just blacked out? In a rational universe, I ought to have run out of the tower (or, if I really had jumped over the railing like that, broken all my bones on the hill below). In a rational universe, I could assume that I’d just erased the journey in my head. But I couldn’t assume that in the undercurrent.

What I did remember was the path, unrolling before me like a shadow. No—more slippery than a shadow, the sense of a road that wasn’t mine but that I could use, a toll road perhaps, and someone who’d set my feet on it—

For a moment I thought I saw the flap of a duster in the corner of my eye, a long coat drifting in no breeze. Of course there was nothing when I turned to look—only a lingering absence at the edge of my vision, a persistent blind spot at the limits of perception. “Shit,” I whispered, and as if in response, a burst of laughter echoed across the park.

I tried opening and closing my left hand. It still worked, at least, even if it stung like blazes. With the pain came the realization that the only reason the amalgam hadn’t hurt me more was because the interval between when I left the circle and when I stepped onto the road (the road that I was very determinedly not thinking about) had only been a split second. In the circle, I’d been safe. I could have waited it out, huddled down while the amalgam screamed itself into forgetfulness, even dismissed the second ghost that had found its way up into the tower. But I’d panicked, and I’d been shown a way out. And I’d taken it.

I’d gone long enough claiming to myself that I wasn’t a magician, that because I didn’t have the neu
roses or the loci or the desperate need to be fucking with the laws of the universe, I could stand apart from them. But when it came to taking magic’s easy path, I was as much a part of it as any gibbering adept in his mother’s attic.

Maybe Janssen had a point. I recoiled from the thought as if it were venom coated, but it wouldn’t go away.

I turned my back on the river, on the implications of what I’d done consciously and unconsciously, and pulled out my phone. I didn’t even need to look as I dialed. “Hey,” I said as soon as Nate picked up. “It’s Evie.”

“Evie? Are you all right?”

Okay, so I wasn’t so good at hiding the quaver in my voice. “Yeah, yes, I’m fine.” My left hand twinged, and I pressed it tighter under my right arm. “Can I—look, can I come see you?”

“What? Of course.”

“I’m just—” I stopped myself before my voice broke.

“That bad, huh?” Nate started to say something more, then yawned, a real jaw-cracker that I could hear even over the line. “Sorry. Yes, come on over. Katie’s asleep, and I’ll be up grading papers for a while. We’re not getting the Sox games over here, though.”

I managed a shaky laugh. “Doesn’t matter.”

He whistled. “It really
is
that bad, then. Take care on the way over, Evie.”

“I will.” I clicked my phone shut, then glanced back at the hill. The blind spot followed me, a gap in my senses.

It started to rain just as I reached their apartment, a sticky unpleasant rain that didn’t cool anything down and tasted faintly of gasoline. Nate and Katie lived on the top floor of an aging triple-decker, the kind that you find all over Allston, and a light was on as I approached. The main door had been propped open with
a copy of
Omega Numerology
. Nate’s, of course; skewering really dumb math was a hobby he’d picked up over the last few months. He probably hadn’t wanted me to wake Katie with the buzzer. I tucked the book under my arm and closed the door behind me.

The stairwell leading up was cramped and crooked, and when I knocked on their door I got no response. The door was open, though, and I slipped inside. “Nate?”

No answer. The light I’d seen from the street was from a desk lamp by the sofa, both of which faced a big window. Nate’s apartment was the kind meant for college students, two bedrooms plus a common room plus a closet-sized kitchen. But Nate had turned what would usually be a place for two futons and a papasan into a pair of informal studies, one desk piled high with papers, the other half-height and with one of Katie’s schoolbooks propped open on it. They didn’t have a TV, but there was a stack of Disney DVDs, half of them with library stickers, beside an aging laptop.

The empty door to the kitchen showed only darkness, and the doors to both bedrooms were closed. For a moment I wondered whether Nate had just gone off to bed, or if he’d stepped out to get something, but then I heard a long, slow sigh.

I peered over the edge of the sofa. Nate lay on his side, one arm crooked around to make a pillow for his head. A pencil lay in his other hand, and the stack of papers in front of his chest now bore a long scrawl over the top as a result. He shifted a little in his sleep, mouth twisting as if he were trying out different smiles, and sighed again.

I edged around the side of the couch and moved the stack of papers to the floor. He didn’t even wake up when I sat down next to him.

He deserved better than this. He deserved better than a lot of what he’d gotten—a cramped apartment with roaches in the bathroom sink, three tutoring jobs
for rich kids who’d grow up to be good stockbrokers like their daddies, an advisor from hell, and a job that from what I’d seen consisted of getting yelled at. It wasn’t that he’d given up on himself, but he’d made a decision to be a parent to his little sister first, and it was slowly killing him.

I’d hoped to have some time to talk, maybe ask for reassurance that I wasn’t what Janssen said. But the man didn’t get enough sleep, and right now I couldn’t grudge him the rest.

I touched his shoulder, then, not quite believing what I was doing, shifted until I had curled up on the couch next to him, my left hand stretched out in front of me so it dangled off the edge.
Just for a moment
, I told myself.
You don’t deserve anything more than that. Just for a moment
.

Nate’s body radiated heat almost to the point of being uncomfortable. His right hand crept around my waist and stayed there, still holding the pencil, and he murmured unintelligibly into my ear before sighing a third time and bumping the back of my head with his nose.

It was enough. I gazed across the room to the dark window reflecting Nate’s worklight, across Katie’s toys and books scattered over the floor, then closed my eyes. It was enough. Just for a moment longer.

I should have known better than to think anything like that.

I count it a good night when I can’t remember my dreams; usually, anything bad enough to break through to my conscious mind isn’t something I want to have in my head. But tonight, when the day should have receded into exhaustion and dreamless sleep, I couldn’t escape this one fragment, pulling me from dream into something else.

I dreamed a sound, a long, ringing sound like a bell struck far away, like a train coming over the moun
tains, and that sound caught the dreaming me by the scruff of the neck and dropped me in another direction.
Time
, it called,
time to run, time to do what you’ve always wanted to do, time for the culmination of all your desires.

In the dream I made the connection between this call and the tower: this was what Skelling (whoever he was) had wanted and yes, I wanted it too, hungered for it with teeth and claws and sinews. My lips twitched back from my teeth in a canine grin, and I tasted the call as well as heard it, tasted it like fresh coffee or spilled blood. I
needed
to follow, to the point where it was no longer need but truth.

I rolled off the sofa, dropped to a crouch, and ran to the door. If I could just get outside, I knew, I knew I could get to them and then it would be all right. But for some reason I couldn’t make my hands remember how to undo the locks. I whimpered—it was like hearing a party in the next room, the best party of your life, and knowing that everyone there would welcome you with raised glasses and applause if you could just get there—and clawed at the door.

It was the clawing that did it. Not the locks—I still didn’t have enough motor control to figure those out—but Nate’s door was paneled with a couple of cheap blocks of wood, screwed into place so the landlord would have something to fix the deadbolts onto. Splinters dug into my abused left hand, tiny spikes of pain like caltrops.

I swore and jerked back—and the dream fell away like a cut curtain.
What the hell?
I thought, blinking myself awake. I was standing in front of Nate’s door, splinters stuck in my hand, but there wasn’t any sound beyond the drone of late-night traffic outside. “Sleep-walking?” I muttered aloud. “That’s a new one.”

Something clattered and crashed to the floor behind me. I turned to see the sofa empty and papers scattered, one of the chairs knocked askew, still rocking
from the blow. “Nate?” I said, my voice coming out as a squeak.

Another crash came from the kitchen, and this time I recognized the timbre of it: a pan falling to the floor. I paused at the doorless entry to the kitchen, squinting into the darkness. “Nate, it’s me. It’s Evie.”

“Go away!” he snarled, and my eyes finally adjusted. He was crouched against the far door, the one that led down the back stair. His eyes gleamed in the faint light from the living room, and his scent—

For a very brief moment, no more than half a second, I thought Janssen had gotten in and was standing somewhere I couldn’t see, pulling the same looming trick he’d done under the bridge. I caught my breath and put a hand to my throat, suddenly very aware of how vulnerable it was. “Nate, it’s okay,” I said, but there was so little conviction in my voice that I wouldn’t have believed me either.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

Okay, that’s never the response you want when you’re trying to be reassuring. “I called you. Don’t you remember? You even propped the front door open for me.”

The shadow that was Nate didn’t move. Something seemed off about his eyes—the gleam had gone when he shifted position, out of the light—but that wasn’t the only thing wrong, and that I couldn’t put a name to it didn’t help matters. “I don’t need your help with this,” he growled, setting the hairs at the back of my neck pinging to alertness. “Go away. I can handle this without you.”

“For fuck’s sake, Nate, this isn’t about you! I came over not because I thought you needed help, but because
I
needed
you
!”

There was a long silence, and I replayed my words in my head.
Crap
.

“Oh,” Nate said, and it was recognizably him now, sheepish and a little surprised. He unfolded from his crouch, his shadow slowly becoming something I could
identify as human. One hand reached out, fumbling along the wall as if unsure what it was, then found the light switch and snapped it on. Both of us winced away from the glare. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“It’s okay.” I squinted at him. The lights were bright, but they threw heavy shadows, and right now he looked haggard, as if he’d spent the intervening hours—three o’clock by the microwave—actually grading papers rather than succumbing to sleep.

He managed a smile. “I meant to stay awake.”

I shrugged. “I should have gone when I saw you were asleep.”

He frowned, scratching the back of his head. “It wasn’t that. I had this dream, and I guess…I reacted badly to it. It happens sometimes.”

His demeanor said that this was no big deal, that I shouldn’t bother with it. But he’d been scared—yes, scared, that was one part of the change in his scent, though it wasn’t the one that had triggered that momentary dread in me. And then there had been my dream…“What kind of dream?” I asked. “Maybe there was an ambulance, maybe the same siren woke us both.”

Nate shook his head. “No. It wasn’t a siren. I remember hearing this noise, and I just…It was like those nightmares where something nameless is chasing you.” He exhaled slowly, picked up a fallen pan, and set it back down where it had fallen before looking over at me, suddenly hopeful. “What about you—do you ever have dreams like that?”

I hesitated. I knew that hope—the hope of having someone to connect with, on one point if nothing else—and I wanted to let Nate know that he wasn’t crazy, that it was all right. But I couldn’t lie to him. “Not quite,” I admitted, taking a step into the kitchen. “I dreamed I was going to…to chase something down.” And I’d gone to the front door, hungering to join that chase, while Nate had tried to get away from it.

Nate stared at me for a moment, and his eyes went wide. “
Katie
,” he said, and pushed past me to the living room.