Soul Hunt Read online

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 hi
m 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—”

  “That gives me two months,” I said, and started across the plaza. The circle scuffed underfoot; any trace of blood was long gone, as was the mark on my throat. Inside, though, my brain was screaming midwinter! Midwinter! That’s less than two months—I’m not ready to be torn apart by the Gabriel Hounds, I’m not ready to die—if I’d known, if I’d known I never would have—

  No. I would have. And I had known. The Hounds had as much as warned me.

  Nate ran to catch up with me. “Two months isn’t enough, Evie.”

  “Yeah.” I paused at the edge of the plaza, listening for sound to creep back into the world. “I kind of wish I’d gone trick-or-treating with you now.”

  “Jesus.” He touched my arm, and I started to push him away—I couldn’t break down here, not out in the open, please—but just then the taste of ferns and ice surged up in the back of my throat, and with it came the gray edges encroaching on my vision. I tried to brace myself and lurched against Nate instead, then stayed there a moment, sick with the cold in my gut.

  I guess this was proof that the Horn hadn’t been causing these grayouts. Damn. And I’d just lost not only my last chance at a hunt, but my chance at a future beyond midwinter.

  “I—” I said, then, as my mouth filled with cold water, spat to the side. “Not now, okay? I can’t—can’t deal with this now.”

  His lips brushed my hair. “Not now,” he agreed, but his arms were still tight around me, as if he feared I’d run the second I had a chance.

  Four

  So what do you do when you know you’ve got two months before a grisly end? Sleep, apparently. Nate brought me back to my office, and I fell onto the futon-couch without bothering to unfold it into an actual bed. “No you don’t,” he said, put me in the chair behind my desk, and folded it out himself. By the time I realized that I probably ought to be helping him with the bedclothes, he’d already finished and was helping me back up.

  Sleep fell like lead wool around me, so heavy that I didn’t even run in my dreams as usual. I surfaced briefly when Nate’s cell phone alarm went off in the morning and he uncurled himself to get it, leaving a great cold empty spot all along my back. Usually I was the first one up—I had to be, with my schedule for Mercury Courier the way it was—but today the world ended right where my cocoon of blankets did. I heard the shower turn on, then sank back into shifting dreams of cold water over my head.

  When I woke again, Nate was fully dressed—damn, missed him naked, some automatic response in the back of my head muttered—and by the side of the bed. “I have to go,” he said, touching my face. “Are you going to be all right?”

  I blinked until he finally came into focus. There were so many things I could say to that—yes, for now, or maybe I just got a sentence of eternal punishment, why wouldn’t I be all right, or even just telling him not to worry. But I couldn’t even muster the will to be snarky about it. “Yeh,” I mumbled. “Mmkay. See you.”

  His brows drew together, that little worried line between them becoming deeper. “Evie.”

  “Mmfine. Go on. ‘ll take care of this.” I tucked my head further under the covers. “Mmfine.”

  His hand stayed warm against my cheek for a moment more, but even though he was no longer quite as beholden to his schedule as he once had been, there were times when he had to go. And now was one. “Come by any time,” he said, and pressed something into my hand. He was gone by the time I uncurled my hand to find what he’d slipped into it: a pair of keys on a curl of wire.

  It was probably a sign of how long it had been since I was in any sort of stable relationship that it took me so long to figure out what he’d given me, because my first thought was something along the lines of goddammit, now I gotta get to his place before his workday ends, or else he’ll be locked out. Once I realized, I turned red and dropped the keys onto my bedside table, a grin pulling at my lips. Okay. Okay, maybe I could manage this.

  My own alarm rang about ten minutes after he left, and when it went off, I slapped it away and just rolled over. Getting up took an effort of will, and once I was up it still took me five minutes to decide that yes, I wanted to shower and get dressed. Not even the unseasonably warm weather—something that normally would have been a blessing for a courier, this time of year—could make things better.

  By the time I was upright, dressed, and had decided that yes, I probably ought to eat as well, I’d missed my shift at Mercury. I started to call Tania, stopped, then dialed her assistant, who’s very good at organizing but whose response to customer service or any kind of courier dealings is to pass it on up the food chain. Tania would give me hell; her assistant would take a message and pass it up to Tania. Who would then give me two hells when I next saw her, but bothering about that just now felt outright impossible.

  Instead, I wrangled my bike outside, stared blankly at the street for a few minutes wondering if this was really where I wanted to be, then started out for Mass General.

  Tessie looked better and sounded worse than I’d expected. They’d moved her out of the ICU, but there were still an alarming number of machines hooked up to her, and a mask hanging over her face that she kept pushing away to talk to me. “Of course I had it worse,” she said, her voice a gargling rasp rather than its usual husky alto. “I was down there in the hold for, I don’t know, ten minutes? And that’s where the worst of the smo
ke was. You got maybe a breath of it; I had my lungs full.”

  She held the mask up again and took a deep breath. Even without my talent, the air here smelled frighteningly sterile, with that strange blank scent that compressed oxygen sometimes has. That was some mercy in how my talent had dimmed; the scents of hospitals are usually enough to raise my hackles and draw forth a lot of unpleasant memories. Now the fog was almost a blessing.

  Tessie took my expression for needless worry, and she waved a hand, strangely naked without its usual complement of jewelry. “Don’t let this thing fool you. It’s not the smoke inhalation that’s the problem; it’s that I haven’t been to a doctor in ages and now they can’t wait to get their needles in me.” She sighed theatrically, but it turned into a cough.

  “Why didn’t you get out?” I said, pulling over the one chair in the ward. It wasn’t a private room; a teenager with an IV and a handheld game was in the other bed, but he had his headphones turned up so loud I could hear the little tinkly music of the game he was playing.

  Tessie paused, then gave me a coy little smile and tugged on the tubes hooking her up to the monitors. “It’s a bit hard to get free of these, and after all, it’s been ages since I had so many men interested in me—”

  “No, I mean out of the boat. You were just standing there when I got in, and you couldn’t have gone far. And there didn’t seem to be anything else in the room with you.” My nose hadn’t been quite useless at that point, even with the smoke.

  Her gaze dropped to her lap, and she smoothed out the blankets. “Tell me you won’t let this get out.”

  I nodded to the jacked-in teenager. “And neither will he.”

  “This is so embarrassing … I was too scared.”

  “Of the fire?”

  Tessie shook her head. “No. Definitely not that, although given this—” she raised the mask and inhaled again, “—I probably should have been. It was just … look, do you ever have nightmares where you’re being watched, and if you move even a little it’ll see you fully and you won’t be able to get away?”