Wild Hunt (27 page)

“I would have done anything—I was your damned decoy, I wanted to draw them away from you.” He laughed, soft and broken, and his hands moved over my neck and back. “You weren’t supposed to be my decoy.”

“Supposed to, my ass.” I took a long breath, slowly coming back into myself again and remembering that yes, I still hurt quite a lot. “One of these days, you and I have got to work out who’s saving whom and when.”

He laughed again, a real laugh this time, and though it hurt I held on tighter. “We’ll have to work out a schedule. I get Mondays and Fridays.” He sat back, still holding on to my shoulders, and his eyes widened as he finally noticed our entourage. “What—”

“They’re with me.” I unslung the horn and stared at it.

The Gabriel Hounds regarded it hungrily. “
Will you then command us, cousin?”
one asked, its jaws dropping open into a grin.

“Don’t particularly want to.”

“Then we run
free,” it said, and something about the way it said
free
made me want to find cover and stay there for a week. “
Our hunt does not end till we are called home
.”

Unbidden, an image of what this meant flowed into my head: a Hunt like no other, under no control, tearing anything it found to pieces, driving anyone unfortunate enough to see it insane. I shook my head.

“Evie—” Nate said. I looked at him, reached for his face, then grimaced as the motion pulled at the gnawed parts of my arm. He took my wrist and turned it over, wincing at the sight of it. “We can’t waste time here; we need to get you to a doctor.”

“And you. Didn’t you—did you hit your head, when you went off the cliff?” My voice broke at the end of the sentence, as I remembered that last crimson flare.

He reached back and touched the back of his head, as if to confirm it, then frowned. “I hit the water pretty hard, and I remember starting to panic, but after that—I don’t think so. I’d hurt more, if I had.”

Nothing? The quarry spirit must have done more for him than I’d thought; it had caught him, held him in an instant that had stretched out for the rest of us. I searched Nate’s eyes, trying to see any trace of bone, of water remaining in them. But it was dark, and he was hurt, and I was hurt.

Another hound—possibly the one who’d first lapped my blood from the sand, though it was getting impossible to tell them apart—joined the first. “
Wind the horn, even to call us off, and the Hunter will never forgive you.”

“The Hunter?” Nate asked, startled. I shook my head at him—they didn’t mean him, last names notwithstanding.

“He whose Hunt we are.”

Odin or Gwyn or even Hecate…
Sarah’s academic recitation came back to me, and my fingers flexed on the Horn, almost dropping it. Hell of an enemy to
make, and given that this wasn’t any one Wild Hunt, but all of them…

I didn’t have time for this.

“The only Hunter I care about,” I said, raising the Harlequin Horn, “is here.” And I put my lips to the horn.

It was a muted sound, not the cry Patrick had loosed from it, but a soft, questing call that wound about the trees and cushioned the lessening raindrops, a subtle leash, a web that gathered everything up—
olly olly oxen free
, everyone home now. The Gabriel Hounds murmured, a quiet doggy sound that could have come from, say, twenty Dobermans, and were gone like a shadow at nightfall. The horn flared in my grasp, its false diamond pattern blurring to a natural bone white, and was gone. I closed my hand on where it had been, then gasped at the sudden pain in my throat, wrenching and painful, as if one of the hounds had bitten me.

And the Wild Hunt came to its end.

I
t was early September before I finally got to try the coffee at the police station. One taste made me understand why Rena thought I was nuts for having this particular addiction, but it didn’t stop me from having two cups while I waited for her to see me.

I shivered, tugging at the ragged cuffs of my shirt, as I watched a parking-ticket victim argue with the officer on duty. I’d worn a long-sleeved shirt because I wanted to avoid questions about the bandages on my arm, but the air-conditioning in here was strong enough that I needed the extra layer. It just figured that during the hot spell it’d been pretty weak, but now that the summer had revolved on toward autumn the blowers were on full blast.

Rena emerged after about forty minutes, pausing at the door to talk to someone in the office behind her. I got to my feet as she approached. “How’s Foster?”

“Back at work,” she said. “Come on.”

I followed her outside and down the block to a scrap of greenway that passed for a park. “Here’s good,” Rena said, and settled down on a bench.

“You’re sure?” I glanced at the station, so close it seemed to be listening in.

“I’m sure.” She took a pack of toothpicks from her
hip pocket and uncapped it. Tea tree oil; I grimaced at the scent, but she didn’t notice. “So.”

“So.”

Rena took a microcassette recorder, the kind reporters used to use for interviews before everyone went digital, from another pocket and carefully set it on the bench between us. The tape in it had been marked over several times. She hit the
record
button. “You know Huston confessed.”

“I’d heard.” I’d had it from Katie, of all people, who apparently didn’t have the sense I’d thought she had. For whatever reason, she hadn’t stayed in Nate’s car or called Sarah. Instead she’d gone to the hospital, talked her way past the guard Rena had set, and met Abigail in the flesh. I didn’t know for certain what had happened then, but I remembered the way Abigail’s face had changed when she’d realized that Katie too was looking out for her brother. Maybe Abigail had asked her to scry one last time; maybe Katie had wanted to learn more about what her brother was up against. Or maybe she’d been able to convince Abigail what needed to be done, one scared little girl to another. She hadn’t told me, and I knew better than to ask. “Do you happen to know when that was?”

“Evening of the day we brought you in, soon as she woke up.” Rena flipped the toothpick case over in her fingers, watching it with a look of abstract concentration, as if the conversation were incidental to her sleight of hand. “Dictated it to a nurse, signed it, and practically slapped it into the officer’s hand.” She sucked on the pick a moment. “By the time Reilly and his partner showed up to question her, she was gone. Clot in her brain, or something. Reilly pressed for an autopsy, but he’s not going to get one.”

I nodded, thinking back to the quarry and to that last ghost, the image of Abigail sweeping in to catch her brother. Regardless of what the time on that confession said, I knew she’d been dead from that moment
on. The Hustons were good at lingering after death, and she’d certainly been one for family traditions.

I regretted now how I’d spoken to her, the accusations I’d made.

“I went to her funeral,” I said. Twenty minutes in the crematorium at Mount Auburn with a few people I knew from the undercurrent, most of whom were there out of curiosity. Her ashes had been interred in a little pit on a hill, overlooking a long, skinny lake, close to her great-great-grandmother’s ashes. Buried too deep for someone like me to ever dig up.

“I should think so,” Rena said.

I didn’t know what to say to that. A bus stopped at the corner to pick up an old man with a walker, then drove on, leaving a haze of exhaust in its wake.

“She claimed she’d set up Janssen’s murder—set it up days before it happened, mind you. Said she’d had someone come in to handle it, in case something happened to her, as revenge. And she confessed to a string of petty thefts as well. Enough to satisfy a few people.” Rena shifted the pick from one side of her mouth to the other. “She even gave us two of Janssen’s other aliases.”

I risked a sidelong glance at her. “That’s…good, right?”

Rena nodded. “Foster’s working on them now. Says he might find something.” She shook her hand once, listening to the rattle of the picks within the box, and gazed across the street. “My boss is saying it’s perfect. It’s not, no one’s quite buying the Janssen angle, but…yes, it does fill in the gaps.”

It did. Everything Abigail had said matched, every bit of evidence supported her confession…and every bit exonerated me, never quite by name, but always close enough that the lack of a name was damning on its own.

There’s such a thing as too perfect. Rena knew it. I’ve known it a long time.

“Michaels says he saw you at the hospital,” Rena added. “Maybe an hour after we talked.”

I pressed my fingers against the lumpy bandage under my sleeve. It still hurt, but it was healing, to the point where I could even manage on the beat-up loaner bike I was using these days. “I went to see her,” I admitted. “I wanted to make sure she was safe, so when I saw you had a guard on her I turned back.”

Rena nodded, but didn’t say anything.

I cleared my throat. “I don’t suppose I could convince you to turn that off?”

Rena glanced down at the recorder. She must have dug the creaky little thing out of storage; it was hardly the kind of modern police equipment I’d thought she had access to. Or maybe this was the sort of equipment you got when you and your partner got stuck with the rotten cases, the ones that had big
DEAD END
signs written all over them. “No,” she said after a moment. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Okay.” A kid on a scooter whizzed past, yelling at someone behind him; a woman pushing a stroller walked the other way. “Okay. Here’s what happened.”

I told her everything—Yuen and his daughter, and his father; Reverend Woodfin and his strange ministry out there by the quarry; how Abigail had come to see me, walking out of the hospital on her own strange alignment; how Patrick had been the one using the Harlequin Horn to kill Janssen and assault Foster and the Gardner staff and his own sister; how his dead man’s vendetta against Skelling and his plans for the horn had put the city in danger and threatened the release of something wholly unfathomable. Some of it Rena might have guessed already—Nate had gone in to give a statement about my whereabouts when Janssen was killed, and that had done a lot to paper over any official reasons to bring me in again for questioning. The only things I left out were the nature of Nate’s curse, because that secret wasn’t mine to tell, and the
spirit of the quarry itself. At the thought of the latter, a cold knot formed in my stomach, and my mouth was full of the taste of icy water.

“I haven’t brought the horn back to the Gardner,” I added, finally. “I just…I can’t. If you want, I’ll swear to it, but I can’t bring it back to them.” I didn’t want to explain why; the small, horn-shaped scar at my throat, just barely hidden by the collar of my shirt, was an unwelcome reminder already, and Rena’s credulity had been strained enough today.

Rena didn’t answer. The tape reached the end and clicked off, and she turned it over without speaking, setting it again in its spot between us. She spat the mangled toothpick out and scuffed it into the dirt.

“Rena?”

She drew a deep breath and let it out slowly, as if blowing smoke, then dragged another toothpick from its case. “I can’t do this, Evie.”

“Can’t do what?” It was the worst thing to say, but I couldn’t help myself.

“Can’t keep buying into all this
bruja
shit on your account. Not when it’s covering your tracks like this. Not when it’s always so convenient.” She shuddered and turned to face me. “How much of this could you have told me back when you were at the station?”

I made myself lay my hands flat on my thighs. “Most of it. Probably.”

“And how much could you have told me before then? Just by picking up the goddamn phone—” The toothpick she held snapped, and she stared at it as if it had bitten her. “No, Evie. I’m drawing the line and I’m drawing it here. I won’t cover for you anymore, and you won’t bring this
bruja
shit into my work. I don’t care how good a story you can spin; if it gets people torn to bits, I don’t want it.”

Her lips pressed tight into a thin, pale line. “It won’t go away,” I said finally. “It’ll still be there, whether I talk about it or not.”

“Yeah, maybe. But I won’t have to cover for it.” She stood up. “You can handle that shit. Keep it away from me.”

“I will,” I said. Rena glanced sharply at me, as if I’d said it as a challenge, but I’d meant it as a promise: if I could keep the undercurrent away from Rena, I would. She was too good to get tangled up in it.

You draw your lines. You protect what you can. But by drawing those lines, you automatically place people outside them. And now I was outside Rena’s lines, but she wasn’t outside mine. I’d protect her, if I could, even if only by keeping her ignorant.

“Okay,” she said, and swept up the recorder. “
Vaya con diablos
, Evie.”

“I expect I will.”

I watched her walk back to the station. She didn’t look back once.

September had moved in slowly, the last few hot spells spending themselves out in daylong rushes followed by slow, gentle storms. I headed for Nate’s through the start of one of these, ignoring the rain.

I locked up my bike—the new one, though “new” couldn’t really apply to such a beater—on the front porch of Nate’s building. The apartment was dark; tonight Katie was at Sarah’s, either learning more shreds of hedge-magic or, more likely, staying up watching movies with Alison. I locked the door behind me, turned on the light in the kitchen, and waited up on the couch for a while, reading.

“Reading” was a misnomer; I couldn’t concentrate on more than one sentence at a time, and so long minutes went by as I stared out the window, one hand running over the scar at my throat, trying to see a reflection. On the radio, the Sox creaked their way toward another postseason fumble, but I couldn’t bring myself to care enough to even turn it off.

Something clattered outside the kitchen window, followed by a faint scratch, and I got up from the
couch. “You could just change out there,” I said as I opened the window, careful not to look directly at him. “Opposable thumbs are useful for things like opening windows.”

A gray shadow slid past me. I waited a moment, trying not to hear the gristly sound of sinews rearranging, then turned to look. Nate was still fumbling with the ties on his robe. The robe was designed to look elegant, but for the first few minutes after his change, any clothes he wore always looked more like a bonnet on a panther: flimsy civilization over something uglier. The rest of the time it just looked like a bathrobe; Nate didn’t do elegant. “I’d have to leave it unlocked,” he said. “Besides, a naked guy on the fire escape would draw attention.”

“More attention than a wolf?” I shook my head. “Besides, this is Allston. You could claim it was a college prank.”

His smile turned to a grimace. “I’m going to brush my teeth.”

I went back to my book. Nate emerged from the bathroom, then leaned over my shoulder and stroked the back of my head. “From Sarah?”

I shook my head. “Woodfin. I asked him to send what he knew of the Harlequin Horn, and he contacted some friends. They might know something more about getting rid of this.” I tapped the scar, uncomfortably aware of how it tried to resonate when I did so.

“What happens if you do? I mean—those things had said he wouldn’t forgive you. The Hunter. Whoever he is.” I’d told him a little of what Abigail had said about the horn, that it wasn’t just one Hunt but all of them, and that as a result I’d probably ticked off a whole host of otherworldly figures. He hadn’t found it funny. But he hadn’t offered to help—which was good. What I knew of math and magic was pretty polarized; either they were incompatible (as in Sarah’s woo-woo work), or you got into serious brain-melting territory
fast. And despite evidence to the contrary, Nate did know better than to get himself into too much trouble. “Are you sure you want to give it back?”

“I signed a contract with Abigail.” To return it to its original owner. Whoever that was. “Even if she’s gone, that still holds. And besides, I want this thing off me. It’s…I keep wanting to use it, Nate.” Though I wouldn’t admit it to Nate—or to anyone—I kept hearing the Hunt, the call of the horn, the pack singing to me. And I wanted to listen.

“You won’t,” he said, and his hand closed on my shoulder, solid, centered, assured.

I wasn’t so sure.
I’m not up to it,
I thought of saying.
It might be too much.
I didn’t say anything, though. It was too late at night, and there were some things that, if brought up, precluded sleep.

For now, right here, I was all right. I turned a page, and Nate’s hand slid from my shoulder to my back, turning touch into caress. “Come to bed.”

“Soon.”

Nate was silent a moment, then circled the sofa and crouched to face me. “What’s up?”

Hell
. “I talked to Rena today.”

“Your friend with the police.”

Not anymore, not really. “Her partner’s recovering, and she’s all right, but…I kept secrets from her,” I said, finally. “She didn’t like that. And she’s not going to forgive me for it.”

Nate touched the back of my hand. “Either she’ll come around or she won’t. If you want to try to make up with her, I’ll help.”

“Not sure how you could,” I said, managing a smile. “But thanks.”

He stood, waited a moment, then sighed and headed toward his room. I folded the pages and looked out over them blankly, into the reflection above the street. It didn’t show my face, or even my shadow; the whole couch was one dark blot through which the first turning leaves of the tree across the way gleamed.

I’d lied to Nate. It wasn’t Rena that I was worried about. Well, I was, but I could live with what we’d worked out. I’d just keep an eye out for her, and try to keep the undercurrent away from her.