Wild Hunt (19 page)

N
ate had kept to the back alleys, but he’d been moving out toward the edge of the city. That much I could tell just from a cursory touch on his scent. He hadn’t cared too much about traffic either, judging by how his trail weaved across the roads.
That would be a pisser, wouldn’t it?
I thought I heard Janssen say.
You reach him, and he’s roadkill on Route 128.

That wouldn’t happen. I wouldn’t let that happen. I focused, zeroing in on Nate’s trail…there. Over the Market Street bridge, over the Massachusetts Turnpike (and oh, Nate knew his tricks; that constant flow could disrupt a scent as easily as a stream of running water), then west—west past the markers the Fiana had once set to track anyone who left the city…

My feet hurt with every jolt on the pavement, and yet I was grinning. I’ve never been a marathon runner—one of my friends from high school was into it these days, and what she’d described sounded like nothing I ever wanted to try—but there was something about this ceaseless motion that felt right.

On the heels of that thought came a memory: the path from Mount Auburn, the road that had taken me halfway across the city in a flash. It wasn’t a safe path, I knew, and something about its presence here felt
wrong. It wasn’t supposed to be this accessible…but I could still use it.

Don’t
, Skelling’s voice whispered behind me.
That’s not your path
.

I bared my teeth, scaring a jogger. “I don’t have to own it to use it,” I snapped, and took that half step sideways, into the unreality that was far too close to the physical world.

The world shrank and flattened, becoming only me and the hunt, me and the scent, me and the fact of running. I moved in long, easy steps now, the silver ground passing unregarded under my feet as if its only duty were to be where I needed it to be. Buildings and streets and hills faded, unimportant to the point of insubstantiality. Like the space behind mirrors, the unreality of a reflection cast on water, where I ran did not exist and yet was no less useful for all that.

This way.

Nate’s scent was so bright it should have been written in red letters three feet high. He hadn’t bothered to hide it, as any animal would have done; he’d just fled. I could taste the adrenaline in his system, even if I didn’t know where it came from or why it was written on his scent so plainly.

This way.

In the back of my mind, as if obscured by layers and layers of gauze, the visceral memory of pain lingered, a throb in the skin of my hand, along the abraded flesh of my calf, in my knotted muscles. But here there was no pain.

I exhaled, dismissing it all, including the lack of air passing over my lips. There was no such thing as running too far.

This way…

But the memory wouldn’t quite go away, even if the pain was long since past. And Skelling too, in the dream and on the tower. He’d known this path, had understood it well enough to open a way for me. But he hadn’t used it, though he’d wanted to.

Skelling wanted it. You’ll want it too.
The ghosts of Mount Auburn hadn’t been so wrong after all.

This way,
called the hunt. But I turned aside, just a moment, just long enough to see the world around me.

A world in shadow.

I gasped, choked on the emptiness that served as air here, and stumbled over my own feet as I tried to stop.
Nate, I was trying to find Nate. I wasn’t just following the hunt
. Abruptly the world slid back into focus as that other space spat me out like a drop of water from melted wax.

I doubled over, panting and staring at the ground under my feet. Bare ground, thick with tufts of grass and pine needles, soft enough to squish under the toe of my left sneaker.
At least I’m not in the middle of a highway,
I thought, and the laugh that followed it wasn’t quite a sob.

I straightened up, one hand on my neck, and exhaled slowly. A high stand of pine trees stood on my left, source of the needles now underfoot, and to my right stretched a silvery lake, shimmering in the day’s heat. At the water’s edge was a thin strip of sand and gravel, the kind of beach that didn’t deserve the name anywhere outside New England. In the middle stood a white sign with peeling letters:
FOR YOUR SAFETY, DIVING IN THE QUARRY IS PROHIBITED
.

Quarry. Ha. Weren’t hounds supposed to find a different kind of quarry? I shook my head, grimacing, then froze as someone gasped and whispered behind me.

I turned to see two girls a few years older than Katie staring at me. One wore a T-shirt proclaiming
PROPERTY OF CAMP WATHAWACKET
; the other’s shirt bore an imbecilically cute cartoon cat. Both of them shut up and took a step back. “Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” said Cartoon Cat.

“You came out of
nowhere
!” said Wathawacket.

Well, that told me something about what had happened. “Yeah,” I said, glancing out at the quarry. The sun was low in the sky—about six o’clock? Seven?

I’d been running for
eight hours
? Oh, that couldn’t be.

Not my path
, I remembered. Hell. I should probably make sure that it was still the right century. “I got lost hiking. What’s the closest town?”

“Assawompset,” Wathawacket volunteered. “Only we’re not by the lake, it’s that way and the town’s further—”

Cartoon Cat yanked on her shirt. “Shh!”

“Is that in Massachusetts?” Crap. Eight hours, assume a speed of four miles per hour, only I couldn’t really assume that…Was it outside Interstate 495? I didn’t know what was outside the Hub. Moose, probably. And Worcester.

Wathawacket nodded. “This is private property,” Cartoon Cat said, trying for as much authority as she could in a shirt like that. “The whole camp’s private.”

Summer camp. Well, that explained the kids. At least I was still in Massachusetts. And with any luck, I hadn’t outrun Nate.

Yes. There was his scent, still as fresh and as brilliant as when I’d stepped out of his apartment. Would he know I was looking for him? “Either of you see a man with brown hair, a little taller than me, looks like a scarecrow who’s missed a few meals?”

“I could ask the counselors,” said Wathawacket.

Cartoon Cat glared at her. “Don’t
talk
to her!” she stage-whispered.

I looked away from them, two fingers pressed to the spot between my brows. Now that I had an idea of where I was, the scents were slowly beginning to come together. On one side of me were smells of cooking and kids, probably the camp itself. Nate’s scent was on the other side. He’d be staying away from people.

A chill settled over me as the thought formed. I still couldn’t quite analyze everything my nose told me, but that didn’t mean I didn’t trust it. For whatever reason, Nate would not want to be around people.

“Forget it,” I said, and started walking. All the exhaustion and pain of my earlier run had returned, and
my legs felt slow and heavy. I paused about ten yards down the shore. “Stay in the camp,” I called over my shoulder. “It might not be safe out here.”

That’d probably scare them more than was strictly necessary, but if it kept them out of harm’s way, all the better. And I wasn’t yet sure what I would find.

I walked along the side of the quarry, picking my way over outcroppings too regular to be natural. Nate was here—I could scent him, but there was still something off about what I was sensing. Why had he come here anyway? For the view?

That was ridiculous. But as I clambered over boulders and edged along banks, the thought kept coming back to me. The quarry was a beautiful place, after all, not the kind of thing you’d expect from an abandoned pit left to fill up with water…lucky campers, they probably had it all to themselves for part of the year…You’d think there’d be more lakeside homes, given how fast waterfront property usually gets bought up…

Maybe there was a reason Nate had come here, one that didn’t have anything to do with rational thought. Maybe this place had its own magic. The thought jostled something loose—something about Skelling? Woodfin, he’d mentioned a quarry, hadn’t he, or had he been talking about his own work…

I swung under a leaning birch onto a ledge of white stone, then dropped to the sand beside it. There was only a scrap of a beach here, maybe enough for one picnic blanket and a cooler, but it was the sort of place I could imagine spending a quiet afternoon, just lying in the sun, doing nothing, listening to the slow lap of waves. No one would ever find me, here in this little sheltered inlet.

My mouth was suddenly dry—how long had it been since I’d had a drink? I rummaged in the backpack, coming up with only a half-empty plastic bottle. The water in it was flat and tasteless, without any of the crisp clarity of the quarry, and I bent to refill the
bottle at the water’s edge. Some remnant of wilderness lore—or maybe just my mother’s voice saying
Don’t drink that, you don’t know where it’s been
—kept me from drinking right away. Instead I stashed the bottle in the pack and shook the water off my hands, savoring the coolness of it. The clothes on my back seemed to crawl with sweat and grime, and for a moment it seemed like the most natural thing to strip and wade into the quarry, wash off what I could, duck my head under the water…

If I hadn’t just stepped out of one unnatural space, I might not have noticed the spell. There hadn’t been any scent, no crackle as something latched on to me, no echo of a border crossed. But I was familiar with aversion wards, the persistent way that one’s mind would slide off something. This was similar to an attraction ward, on such a subliminal level that it snuck into one’s brain without even having to touch conscious thought.

Well, I might not be a magician, but there were a few things I did know. I took out my utility knife, unfolded the dullest blade, and jammed it between the stones at my feet. “Turn, and turn about,” I said, and made a sign in the air that Deke had taught me a long time ago. “Show yourself.”

It wasn’t even a spell, just a simple thing that minor adepts do on a regular basis—like throwing salt over your left shoulder or touching wood or repeating whatever it was you’d been doing when the Sox pitcher struck out that last guy. I’d done it partly to distract myself, remind myself that I was being enspelled. So I didn’t expect the response I got.

The surface of the quarry went glassy and still, save for a fizz at my feet, where the barest edge of the water brushed the knife blade. I stepped back as the foam at my feet subsided, then started up again, this time further out in the water, creating four points of white.

The water rose up beneath those points in a column.
It wasn’t like a fountain or jet; there was no force pushing up the surface of the quarry. Instead there was a continuous downward aspect to it, as if this were part of a waterfall, a stream falling from above, and all that was visible of the source was a bright spot in the air, a spot that slowly resolved itself into the skull of a deer, white bone and antlers bleached by the sun, endlessly pouring water.

Was there some trace of a human shape within it? A hint of shoulders, hands, something beyond the bone and water? One minute there seemed to be one, like a human wearing a mask, and the next it was only elemental shapes with no trace of humanity. I couldn’t quite be sure, and the hollow bone eyes staring at me distracted me further. When it spoke, the sound came from the water by my feet rather than the manifestation. “
I…yes, I. I answer.”

I edged back from the water, unwilling to get even the tips of my shoes wet. “Could you ease up on—” Damn, would this thing even understand idiomatic language? “—undo the attraction ward you’ve set up? It’s very distracting.”

The skull turned, and the water eddied around it. “
You don’t want to stay?”

“No,” I said. “Thank you, no.” Hell. What was I supposed to say after that? Sorry for waking you up?

The spirit—what could I call it? Naiad? Undine? Nixie? All of those presupposed some kind of sentience, and I couldn’t yet believe that there was one behind those empty sockets. It couldn’t have been as young as it seemed; anything coherent enough to unify something even as small as this quarry had to be old. All lakes, streams, springs and rivers had individual spirits—that was part of what made water so hard to magic. But sometimes one in a body of water was more distinct or more powerful than the others: there were lakes that had specific guardians, rivers that spoke with one voice. A unity, of sorts, deeper than the
cobbled-together nature of the cemetery amalgam, and one that took time. Guardian spirits took centuries to develop, to find their own individual voice.

There shouldn’t have been one for a quarry that wasn’t more than a century old.

Its tone turned caressing, soothing, a clumsy attempt to recapture the seductive nature of the ward. “
This place is loved. You would be welcomed if you stayed.”

I shivered, but managed a gracious nod. “I don’t doubt it. But don’t put a glamour on me. I don’t like it.”

The skull finally nodded, then leaned forward on its column, as if trying to get a better look. “
You are hunting,”
it said, and something about the way it said
hunting
made it seem hungrier, like an alcoholic who’s just seen a six-pack at a friend’s house. “
I can tell you where it is.”
It rippled, and the water across the quarry shivered once, as if in reply. “
The one you’re looking for. I can bring him to you.”

“I don’t think so.” If I couldn’t find Nate after all this, I didn’t deserve to find him.

“It would be no great fee—only return here, swim in these waters and wait on this shore. This will be a haven for you and your children.
”

It was a superficially reasonable request. But something about it gave me the chills. This spirit maintained its strength not through worship, but through the love of place that it encouraged. In some ways it was the opposite of the genius loci of the Gardner; that drew its strength from the deep love that Mrs. Gardner had infused into it while she lived, while this drew on a constant supply of love for a place, for memories. “No,” I said. “Thank you, no.”