Soul Hunt (6 page)

I held up my free hand, still spotted with blood. “Herne. Diana. Gwyn. Come and hear me.” The air went heavy and thick, like a lead blanket had dropped over us. And at the back of it—

“Evie!”

—at the back of it, slow and heavy like a fuse burning, the scent of magic.

I could have cried for the return of scent—even this minimal touch of my usual senses was like the first few glimmers of light after imprisonment. Instead, the last name still ringing in my mouth, I looked up. Nate pointed across the plaza. “Looks like Vinny’s back for more.”

Crap.
I turned to see a man in shirtsleeves and a loosened tie—but this man was shorter than Vinny had been, and thinner. He wore a Phantom of the Opera mask, gleaming white under the lights, and the eyeholes of the mask remained dark as he turned to face us. “Okay. Don’t leave the circle, but let me do
the talking. If we’re lucky he’ll just take a piss and move on—”

I stopped. Beyond the man, at the next cross street, a woman in a black bustier over a shiny cheap polyester dress emerged. She wore a red sequined mask that didn’t quite match the rest of her clothes, and she too was facing us. Another flicker of movement caught my eye: someone walking toward us without breaking stride or slowing, dressed in the blue button-down shirt that was the unofficial uniform of men in the financial district, with a full-face rubber mask of JFK.

“Oh, shit,” I muttered.

“You mentioned getting attention,” Nate murmured, and I turned to look where he pointed: more people in costume, including a little kid in foil armor with the visor down, descending the stairs from the T entrance. “I think we’ve got it.”

“If it helps,” I managed, “you can think of them as conduits. Manifestations, rather than the real thing. If the real thing were here—well, the world couldn’t take that.”

Nate came to stand beside me. “It doesn’t help,” he said after a moment.

“No, not really.” More figures followed, one by one, left and right. Maybe fifty, I thought, then rejected it; maybe a hundred people, all in costume. Were they illusions wearing the faces of others, or real people, ridden by whatever entity had chosen them for this? I glanced at the rank of children who’d moved to the front, some in those plastic smock-costumes that were the last resort of tired parents, and shivered. I hoped it wasn’t the latter; this was the sort of magic that should not come close to children.

I crumpled Sarah’s list of names against my leg. The last few stragglers—a ninja, a guy in a hockey mask, and a woman in what could only be described as a Little Red Riding Crop costume—joined the silent, waiting assembly. It should have been ridiculous, but that intent hush pushed it over into the uncanny.

“I am Genevieve Scelan,” I announced. “Called Hound. I have something of yours.”

“Hound,” said one of them, a man in a dinner suit with a brilliant green mask, and the others took up the word. “Hounds.” Their eyes focused on me, and abruptly the pressure increased, till my vision darkened—or maybe that was just their attention darkening the world. The attention of the dark half of the year, of the stub of midwinter, the nights drawing in and the cries in the heavens, old chaos woken from a sleep of centuries. I staggered and fell to one knee, and at the back of my throat, I tasted ice again.
Not now,
I thought, trying to catch my breath.

“No!” Nate pushed me away from the edge. His shoulders heaved, and I caught a trace of his scent changing, altering along the lines of his curse.

Oh, that wouldn’t be good right now. You don’t put prey in front of hunters. Nor do you put a rival in front of them. I caught at Nate’s hand, willing it to stay human, willing him to stay who he was. “I’m okay,” I whispered. “Don’t—I’ll be okay.”

He glanced at me, and for a moment it was his curse looking back, unwilling to hear me. But Nate was, or had been, very good at controlling himself before this all started. He nodded to me, and his hand closed around mine.

Bit by slow bit, I recovered some ground. I was Evie, I reminded myself. I was the Hound. I had seen gods, had even helped to kill the mortal prison of one. I had summoned up the dead of an entire cemetery. I had outrun the pack these entities commanded, the pack that now milled around in my head. I had chased my prey through the underground and over water—

I got my feet under me, gripped Nate’s hand more tightly, and pulled myself upright.

—and
that
had been just in the last few months. “As you say,” I acknowledged, panting a little. “Hound, in the flesh. I have something to return to you.”

The dozens of masked faces watched me, expressionless. “Return,” they said at last.

I hesitated. Here was where I hadn’t quite thought things through. I had thought that the hunters, all or some of them, would just take the damned Horn away from me. There were enough powerful entities before me that they should have been able to do so.

One of the children in the front—this one in a bunny suit, as if the riding entity had tried to make it as uncanny as possible—spoke. “You must give it,” he said, and though the voice was that of a child, the undertone was a woman’s, old and cracked. “You have won it fairly in battle. Even crippled and halved as you are, I cannot take it from you.”

The part of me that has never, never liked bowing to anyone did the mental equivalent of jumping up and down with both middle fingers raised.
Ha, so there’s something a human can do that you can’t! Up yours, ineffable divinity!
The rest of me was starting to panic. What was I supposed to do?

I touched the knot of scar tissue. How did I give up something that had become part of me? And did I even want to? The thought shuddered through me like lightning coming to ground. I mean, yes, I had spent the day nauseated by the Hounds’ taste for blood, and they were not a safe thing for a human to have. But over the last few weeks, there had been days when the only thing I was sure of was the chorus of the Hounds in my head, their everpresent breath of winter. And today, I’d lost my sense of smell. Even now, even after that first breath of fireworks, I could feel that impression fading. The Hounds were monsters, creatures that were so far from humanity that words like “monster” didn’t even apply, but they could hunt. By giving them up, I might be giving up the only chance I had to hunt again.

I let go of Nate’s hand. No. I couldn’t let myself think like that. Gagging, I forced myself to remember the taste of Foster’s blood (the Hounds sighed in remembered appreciation) and stepped to the edge of
the circle. An image flashed into my head, a memory of the night by the quarry when I had bargained something away in exchange for Nate’s life, when the Wild Hunt had passed from Patrick Huston to me. Huston had kept the horn sealed away in his own long-dead flesh, infecting the Gabriel Hounds with a kind of mortality, which was the only reason I’d been able to stand against them at all. I remembered him putting his hand to his throat, tearing the flesh there …

I touched my own throat. Cold blood made the skin slippery, but I could feel something … “This is probably going to get gross.”

Nate’s grip on my arm tightened, but a puff of breath crystallized over my shoulder: a laugh, and very much the laugh of a man struck by his father’s berserker curse. “Gross I can handle.”

“Good.” I stroked the scar one last time, finding the notch I’d made, then dug into the skin, my broken and ragged nails making first divots and then crescents of pain. I did my best not to scream—I don’t think you’re allowed to scream when you’re the one doing the hurting—and tore the scar free, a patch of ragged flesh coming with it. I started to gag—which hurt worse—then stopped, raising my hand. I held only a plain, bone white horn the length of my hand, its dark leather baldric hanging over my knuckles. The pain in my throat deadened, as if someone had slapped Novocain on it, and when I raised my head I felt the flex of raw skin there. New skin—like what you get before a blister has fully healed, the sensitive, thin skin of a burn.

Nate’s hand on my arm was so tight it hurt. I tilted back my head, showing him the patch of new skin, and a little bit of color returned to his face. He slowly let go of my arm. The air seemed to shiver, and the Gabriel Hounds, echoes only in shadow, sat curled at my feet, tensed as if awaiting only a nod to go streaking after their prey.

You don’t have to give it back,
one of them said, jaw dropping open to reveal teeth the color of old blood.

Another stirred, pressing up against my legs. You can keep it a while longer. It won’t make a difference, in the end.

We like
you,
said a third, and the look it gave me might have been called puppy-dog eyes if it had been on anything smaller than a tiger and not so capable of crushing my skull in its jaws.
You gave us your blood. You make a good Hound. We are honored to be carried by you.

“Thanks,” I said. “It’s an honor to know you think so.” I glanced out at the assembled masked horde. “But that’s not going to make a difference, is it? If they ask you to tear out my throat, you’ll do it.”

With glee. The answer came quickly, without hesitation or shame. But we would sing your name after your death, and your blood would be a taste we carried into the end of days.

“Well, that’s comforting. I suppose.” They said that you didn’t truly die until everyone who remembered you was dead. Did it count if what they remembered was how good you tasted?

You don’t have to give it up, the first insisted again.

“I know,” I murmured. Even though I feared them, I knew them for kin, along that strange alignment that made me a Hound like them. And they were right.

I needed to hunt. But I wouldn’t use them for it. Even if it meant I would be hunting blind from now on.

I tossed the Horn out across the plaza. It curved over their heads, then hung at the apex of the arc, unmoving. For a moment the air around it seemed glassy, like a reflection, and then with a sound like glass breaking and a scent of burnt mercury so powerful it broke through my fog, the Horn shattered.

Nate looked away with a curse, blinking fast, and I caught my breath, unwilling to acknowledge even to myself how much I wanted to snatch it back. Not least because I was now certain I was alone in my head.

When I opened my eyes again, the Hounds were gone, and the assembled revelers were stirring, some
even muttering to each other. “This has been used,” a man in a hockey mask said, his voice shifting from chorus to chord and back, like a soundtrack coming out of synchronization. “You dared to use this.”

“I did,” I said, meeting his empty gaze. “And I did so without permission or leave.”

“She did it for me,” Nate broke in. “On my account.”

The mask shifted to face him, and his words cut off in a hiss of indrawn breath. I knew what he was feeling now: the pressure of attention from a couple of hundred entities, some of whom were dead, some who were still vital, all in natural conflict and artificial concord in this one moment. “It doesn’t matter why I did it,” I said, feeling the shudders run through him. “It was my decision alone.”

“Only because you were trying to help me,” Nate managed, a note of exasperation still clear under the strain. He shook himself, a gesture that didn’t quite match with his human bones, and stood with his feet braced. “She had to do it.”

One of the children—a boy in a pirate’s costume, with a big jeweled eyepatch pasted onto the mask—cocked his head to the side. “You,” he murmured, as if amused. “Little wolf, little madman. You will not go ignored.”

“Dammit,” I muttered, but I held on to him, propping him up as much as giving comfort. “You just can’t stay out of it, can you?”

He shook his head, and I didn’t have to look at him to know he was grinning, baring his teeth in a grimace that was as much defiance as amusement.

The assembled horde regarded me again. “No one may call on our hunt without our leave,” a woman in a cat mask said.

“And you called on all of us,” said a man in what looked like Japanese formal armor.

“And we have your name,” added a third—this one a bronze-skinned man bare to the waist, wearing a feather mask more suited to Mardi Gras. “All of us have a claim on you now, Hound. Crippled and halved
as you are, we still have that claim, and we intend to call it due.”

I nodded, but inside my stomach froze up. This wasn’t just a matter of offending one spirit. I’d offended all of them, even the ones who hadn’t deigned to send a representative, and now every one of them had a lien on my soul.

Another breeze drifted over us, yanking on my hair like an importunate toddler. “Midwinter,” they said in concord, and that single word seemed to resonate through the ground, crystallizing the air around it. “We will come for you at midwinter. You will be our prey.”

I caught my breath, stung by it even though I’d known something like this must have been coming. Nate moved closer to me, his natural warmth stolen away by the promise of winter that surrounded us. “You mean—” he began.

“If I can escape you,” I said hesitantly, trying to feel out the edges of this sentence.

The ones closest to me turned their heads to the side, and for a moment I had the sense of the Gabriel Hounds arrayed around me again, only this time we were on opposite sides. “You do not understand,” said the closest, a man in top hat, tails, and a Mexican wrestler’s mask. “You will be prey. We will hunt. So it is, now and forever, till the end.”

“You mean you’ll kill her,” Nate said.

The boy pirate shook his head. “No. We will always hunt her. That is how we hunt. That is what it is to usurp our power. She will be our prey as long as the Hunt lasts.” He looked at me again, the eyepatch glittering, then, as one, the gathered crowd turned their backs on us.

A wind swept across the plaza, tasting of frost and exorcising the heaviness of their attention. One by one, the crowd dispersed, some of the figures slowing as they reached the edges of the plaza and the anima that had ridden them here dissipated.

Midwinter.

Nate let out his breath in an exhalation that no longer turned into ice on the air. The encroaching frost was gone, but the air remained chill and dry, tasting of old leaves and fire. “Evie—”