Authors: Margaret Ronald
He nodded, absently, his brows furrowed. “Yeah … You said the quarry spirit stole a possibility?”
“As close as I can figure. Severed, now. I no longer have any connection to it.” Thank God.
“No. You don’t.” He drummed his fingers against the porch railing in a quick cadence, one-two-three,
one-two-three, the same way he did when he was working late at night. “I think … I have to think about this for a little.” He leaned down and kissed me, one slow solid touch of his lips on mine. “See you.”
“See you,” I echoed, and before I could change my mind I walked back to Sarah’s beat-up car and got in.
Halfway home I realized I’d left my messenger bag in Venetia’s parlor. One more thing to write off.
I touched the sunstone. At least I had what I’d come for.
I
got in so late that not even the all-night restaurants had customers, late enough that I could find a parking spot close to my office (which never, ever happens). A heavy fog had rolled in off the harbor, and even as far inland as I was, the ends of my street were bright with reflected light from the fog. The little fountain at the door burbled at me as I got in, and I set the sunstone on it before I locked up.
I dumped my clothes, jacket and all, in the sink and ran cold water over them, then let them soak while I stood in the shower under the hottest water my building’s aging heater could produce. (Over the din, I could faintly hear Mrs. Heppelwhite banging on the floor above; the woman claimed to be deaf as a post, but her hearing was suspiciously sharp if you were either doing something gossipworthy or running water through the pipes that went past her bedroom at ass o’clock in the morning.) When I got out, I moved the sodden clothes from the sink into a bucket and poured detergent on top of that. I was moving on autopilot, following my mother’s reactions, the same clean-up-what-you-can response that she’d had to any crisis. You took care of the mess at hand, and then you faced the worst of it.
The worst of it, from what I could see when I got
out of the bathroom, was the sunstone, still sitting on the brink of the fountain, its greasy gray matching the pseudoconcrete of the basin. It was the sort of thing that blended in with its surroundings; it didn’t seem any more out of place here than it had on the banks of the Quabbin or, for that matter, in a rotting leather bag dredged up from the depths.
Deke wasn’t answering his phone. I left a message for him to call me as soon as possible, then took a quick assessment of the office. It wasn’t warded, not since someone had used those wards to monitor me, but neither was it out in the open. I didn’t think anyone would come looking for the sunstone.
Well. No one living, anyway. If Meda wanted me, she could haunt me like any other ghost. And she’d have to wait till I got some sleep.
I unfolded my futon, dragged a couple of blankets onto it, then sat cross-legged in the center, holding the sunstone. It didn’t smell of magic, from what I could tell. It didn’t really have much of a scent—just the lingering connection to Dina’s, like a painting faded in the sun. The waters of the Swift River had worn away most of what made this part of Dina. Only when she was close—only when Roger brought her to Boston—would it even begin to react, making that tension something to sustain her.
The part of the undercurrent that dealt with other spirits, entities that weren’t close to human—what Roger called “alliances”—was one I did not like venturing into, and not just because it had bitten me. Some of them, the ones the Fiana had dealt with, or the lingering ghosts, they were fine. Others, though … Humanity isn’t a monolithic good; we can be very petty and vicious, capable of calculated betrayal or even just ignoring the rules. Bring human and divine together, and sometimes the divine would teach the human to transcend those flaws. And sometimes the divine would latch on to them like a three-year-old psychopath with a flamethrower.
Even when both sides retain their selves, contact changes the spirit. Look at the Morrigan, chained to the Fiana so long that she was reduced to seeking help through me and in the end chose to die instead of rise again. Look at the Gabriel Hounds, who through their association with a dead man had gained a shred of mortality (and what they’d taken from their time with me, I didn’t even want to know).
This stone, though … I remembered the pictures fading behind Venetia, the silver in Katie’s eyes.
Fear,
I thought hazily,
the link is fear.
Venetia was scared of losing those she loved, the way that Angela was lost, the way that her friends had gone on … and Katie, she was afraid of what she saw, how she saw … and Nate was scared of himself, not just his curse but his own capacity for anger.
There was something in that. Seeing fear. Something about what Dina was, or perhaps what she’d been reduced to by the theft of the stone. Only there had to be more to it, and to Meda’s plea: Be not thief but murderer.
I shook my head, and the room seemed to wobble as I did so. I couldn’t do that. Not even for the woman who’d led me to the stone. But I could maybe use the stone as leverage, make Dina do more than I’d asked originally. I switched off the light and lay curled up, one hand around the sunstone, trying not to think about anything beyond the noise of the fountain.
When I got up—really late, but this was a Sunday and the chance of Tania calling me in was if not zero then very damn close—the fog hadn’t cleared. “What is this,” I muttered, staring out at the dimmed view of the street, “San Francisco?” We didn’t get fog like this in Boston. Not usually, anyway.
I tried Deke’s number without much hope, but he did pick up. “Hello who is this,” he said, the words flat and without pause or inflection.
“Deke, this is the Hound. I found what your friend’s looking for.”
“Already? Oh, that’s … No, that’s good. Yes. Good.”
Great. What planet was Deke on today? “You remember, right?”
“Oh yes.” A long pause. If I listened close, I thought I could hear a voice on the other end, too low for me to make out much beyond the murmur of speech. “Yes,” he said finally. “Yes, we do.”
“Where’s Roger?”
“No!” Almost a yelp, that. “No, you don’t have to worry about him. Please.”
“Okay …” I took a deep breath. “I want to talk to you both before we go to Dina. I want some assurance that I’ll get what was promised me.”
“We can talk about this later,” Deke said wearily. His voice sounded distant now, as if he was holding the phone away from his ear.
“No, Deke, we need to talk about this now. I’m sorry, but—” I sighed, turning the stone over in my hand, thinking about Deke by the grill, turning the fire back and forth. “I have what you want, and without some kind of guarantee, I can promise you won’t get it. Okay? There’s—I want to know that you’ll hold up your end of the bargain, and then we’ll talk about payment.”
“Payment?”
“Yes.” The stone had warmed in my hand, and I set it back down. “Like I said, I have what you want. We might need to do some renegotiating.”
If Dina wants this thing so badly,
I thought,
then she can lift two curses instead of one.
“Now, when can we meet?”
Another long pause with the indistinct murmur of voices, back and forth. One of them was definitely Deke’s. The other sounded too light to be Roger. Too soft, as well; I couldn’t imagine Roger speaking in anything resembling an inside voice. Dina, maybe? That was worrying. “Two hours,” Deke said finally. “Give me two hours. I didn’t think you’d be so quick.”
I permitted myself a smile at that. “Hey, chalk it up
to my general awesomeness. But I’m not happy about carting this thing around.”
“Two hours. Meet me where you met me before. At the house.”
“Okay.” I paused. “Deke, are you okay? Is there something—” Hell, how do you ask “are you being coerced” without tipping off whoever might be listening?
Deke interrupted me, sounding a little peevish. “All’s well. We’ll do what you ask, okay? We’ll even talk payment. Just—just be there in two hours.”
“If you say so.” I clicked my phone shut and tucked it away, tossing the sunstone hand to hand. After some thought, I zipped it into the inner pocket of my jacket (the lighter one, less effective for the weather, but since the other was now hanging up and drying I had little choice). Better to keep it with me.
I thought for a moment about just trusting Deke, going out to the house in a show of good intentions. It might earn me some brownie points, and it would have been a more ethical thing to do—I still couldn’t believe I was entertaining the thought of extorting anything from such a wet rag as Deke—but this wasn’t just about making nice. This was my life at stake, and Nate’s sanity. If I could get Dina to lift both curses at once, that’d be worth any number of excuses I had to make later.
Trust was a worthy cause. But it would also get you killed in the undercurrent. I unlocked the second drawer of my desk and took out my gun. Deke would understand, I told myself, checking the ammo. And I’d try not to scare him.
The fog lifted slightly as I drove Sarah’s car inland to Allston, my bike bungeed to the back (I had no intention of waiting for the T today). The Goddess Garden had minimal Sunday hours; Sarah had claimed in the past that they were in place just to establish her pagan cred. I parked a block away, dug in the glove compartment until I came up with an out-of-date map of
Boston, then walked my bike over to give her the keys.
I came in just as she was ringing up a stack of books and a pack of Gryphon Blend Incense Sticks for an older woman in a headscarf and black turtleneck, and Sarah immediately turned on her smile to demonstrate her usual charm to any new customer. Her eyes widened as soon as she saw me, and I could see her swallowing her words down. I stopped at the door, the jangling bells right next to my ear, while Sarah hurriedly made change and handed the woman her purchases (“and we’ll be having a sale next week, so stop by!”) then watched with a frozen smile until her customer left. “What the hell happened to you?” she snapped as soon as the door jangled closed again.
“What do you mean?” I glanced over my shoulder, then down at myself—I hadn’t forgotten to put on pants or something like that, had I? And I knew I’d washed all the blood off … “I parked the car down on Cambridge Ave.—it’s filled up and everything.”
“No, you—” She came out from behind the counter and, to my surprise, pulled one of the shop curtains closed. “Screw the car, Evie. You look like the unseelie host itself just dropped by for cocktail hour and you didn’t have enough weenies on sticks.”
I stared at her for a long moment. “You’ve been waiting forever to use that expression, haven’t you?”
“No. Maybe. It doesn’t matter. What does is that you look both like death warmed over and—” She stopped and stood up on tiptoe to look into my face. “Well, like something caught fire in you. What happened?”
“Went swimming.” I managed a grin, and Sarah blew a tendril of hair out of her face. “No, seriously, Sarah, I found what I was looking for. Not just the information, but everything. I just need to get it to Deke, and then, well, we’ll see from there. That’s part of why I’m here.”
“Deke, huh.” She tweaked the curtain back and
glanced out into the street. “Haven’t heard from him lately.”
“He’s been busy. Sarah, what’s up with the curtain and the hush-hush bit? No one’s going to care if I’m visiting.”
“That’s what I thought a week ago. Now, though …” She shook her head. “There was another fire, this time at the argentium in Brookline. And a pair of shadowcatchers down by the Charles got their drain raided by someone who knew to smash every locus. Things are getting bad, Evie.”
“Shit.” Now I could put a name to the feeling I’d had when I entered the city: dread. This wasn’t the reasonable fear that the Gabriel Hounds sowed in their wake, nor the anger that plain sparring would produce. This was something else entirely, something paralyzing.
But the water this morning hadn’t smelled of corpses, and the sunstone was with me, out of the Quabbin. If the tension between it and Dina was what had been affecting Boston’s undercurrent, shivering along their exposed nerves like firedamp affecting a canary, then I’d put a stop to it already. It just needed time to take. “Have the cops been by?” I asked.
“Yeah. And yes, the skinny Latina chick was one of them. You’re not going to be able to avoid her forever.”
“Goddammit.” I ran my fingers through my hair, still damp from the fog. “It’ll get better,” I said, though I had only hope to base that on. Sarah didn’t quite roll her eyes, but it was close. “Look, I need a favor. I have this—this sunstone that I’m returning to someone.”
“Part of a job?”
“Sort of. Not really one on the books.”
Sarah’s eyes narrowed. “How off-the-books are we talking here, Evie.”
“Well, this is a little different. And a little more urgent. See, I really—I need Deke’s partner to hold
up her end of the bargain, and I know she wants this badly.”
“Bad enough that she might just forget to pay you?”
“Something like that.” I took out Sarah’s metro map of Boston and unfolded it, pointing to the harbor bridge. “I’m going to meet Deke here in about an hour. If I don’t call you, say, half an hour after that, can you, I don’t know, put in a nine-one-one call or something else to get the cops out there? Tell them you saw a drug deal taking place or some terrorists or something.”
“You’d sic the cops on Deke? Evil woman.”
“He’s scared enough of them that I figure he’ll deal if he knows there’s a time limit. And I can get out of it. Really, don’t worry. Just call if I don’t, okay?”
Sarah took the map and gave me a sour look. “Like I need to get in trouble for making a false report … fine. I’ll think of something.”
“You’re a lifesaver, Sarah. And don’t worry about the rest of it; as soon as this is taken care of, we’ll be able to fix it together. Working for the community, right?” I took her hand and pressed her keys into it.
Sarah shook her head, but the first stirrings of a smile were there. She retreated to the counter, then paused. “Does Nate have anything to do with this?”