Soul Hunt (9 page)

Katie wasn’t among them, nor was she in any of the little groups that walked out, talking among themselves (or, in one case, making robot noises). I waited till the roar died down a bit, then sighed and walked onto the school grounds.

Out onto the playground, past the gravel and the blacktop … good God, this brought back unwelcome
memories. I hadn’t thought images about the number of fights I’d gotten into in grade school, but just the scent of asphalt could bring that back in a heartbeat.

Strangely appropriate, too. I hadn’t even rounded the corner when I heard an outraged shriek followed by, “Take it back! Take it back!”

A cluster of three little girls stood by the swings, and as I approached, the one in a red-and-black coat launched herself at the one in pink, knocking her to the ground. Something bright and shiny went flying and landed with a clang against the swings, spilling water over the sand.

“Knock it off!” I yelled, running over to them.

The third girl shrank back into the bushes, hands curled tight in the sleeves of her duffel coat. I yanked the girl in red and black off the one in pink—then stopped as scent and sight intersected. Katie stared up at me, eyes wide, and when I moved closer she cringed away as if expecting me to hit her too. “Katie,” I said, then stopped.

“Make her take it back,” the girl I had by the shoulder sobbed. “She said my mom and dad are gonna split up, and it’s not true—”

I let go of her and glanced where the shiny thing had fallen. Sure enough, it was a little silver plate, maybe the only real silver thing Nate owned. Katie went red and, instead of getting up, curled so that she was hugging her knees. “You said that?” I asked softly.

Katie didn’t meet my eyes. “Carla hit her first,” the third girl said suddenly, maybe hoping to get out of trouble if she switched loyalties. The girl in red and black glared at her. “Well, you did.”

“Then don’t do it again.” I glanced at Carla, whose lower lip was still sticking out and trembling. “It’s not going to happen. No one can see the future. Remember that.” I pointed back toward the gates. “Go on home.”

They retreated, arguing as they went. I waited till they’d gone, then picked up the silver dish. At least I’d
had the decency to hide my shit when my mom caught me smoking up in my room. “Katie, you know better than this.”

Katie, still waiting for the next blow, looked up at me through her fringe of fluffy brown hair. She had the same eyes as her much older brother, wide and gray and guileless. “What do you mean?”

I spat in the center of the silver plate and drew a circle, then wiped it away. It wasn’t much of a banishment, more what adepts did as a form of housecleaning, but it would mute any echoes coming off the act of scrying. “Katie, what the hell did you think you were doing?”

“Nothing, now.” She got to her feet, wiping her nose.

“You scryed just for the sake of hurting her?”

“No! I mean, I didn’t know—” She bit her lip, hands curling into little fists. “She hit me first!”

“I bet she did. But that doesn’t mean you can fight back like this.” I sighed. “Katie, you shouldn’t even know how to do this. You’re too—goddammit, you just shouldn’t.” Age didn’t enter into it; dabbling in the undercurrent tended to result in someone getting swept under, and Katie was too good a kid for that to happen.

She mumbled something, still not looking at me.

“What was that?” Christ, I was starting to sound like my mother—well, not
my
mother, who’d been very silent on the subject of the undercurrent and practically begged me to do the same. But somebody’s mother.

“I said, Sarah taught me.”

“Sarah taught you.”

“Yeah.” She glanced up at me, her jaw tightening in what I was starting to recognize as a sign that she wasn’t about to give ground. “She said I needed a focus, so I could at least direct what I was seeing and not have it go all over the place. She said Danielle from the seer enclave told her since they couldn’t start teaching me—”

“Sarah taught you,” I repeated. Okay, there was some reason behind it, since Katie’s case of the Sight was the kind that could eventually prove a problem—ask any seer who’s stepped off the curb while seeing two weeks into the future. And the enclave had refused to tutor her, officially because they were full up but unofficially because being a seer didn’t make you a decent human being, and there were a few residents of the enclave who were better off away from small children.

But none of that meant anything if Katie was using magic so cavalierly. And Sarah was up to her eyeballs in the undercurrent these days, so her judgment wasn’t the best. “That covers how you did it. Mind telling me why?”

Katie opened her mouth, then closed it and stared down at the ground. “She was gonna hit me anyway,” she muttered. “She doesn’t like me—and it’s worse because I told her her witch costume was all wrong. She said she was a Salem witch, and her costume had all these little twinkly red bits at the bottom, like flames, you know? Only the Salem witches didn’t get burned. They got
pressed.”

There was a peculiar satisfaction in that last word that might have been amusing in other circumstances. “And that’s why you used your Sight.”

Katie shrank a little. I sighed, tucked the dish into my bag, and knelt beside her. “I wanted to get her back,” Katie whispered. “She—I thought if I did that, she’d stop bothering me.”

“You didn’t think to talk to Nate? Or your teacher? Or me?”

Katie shook her head. No, I guess she wouldn’t have. I hadn’t, at her age. Not that that had turned out well for me, either, which was why I remembered not just the smell of blacktop but the taste of it. Only this was more serious than elementary-school bullies, and the worst that could happen was a lot more than a broken nose behind the basketball court. Katie might
have her three fairy godmothers, but if the lesson she got from us was that magic was okay to wave around like this, then something had gone seriously wrong.

If she had someone watching over her, it might be better. Someone to walk her through the rough spots, show her not just the ropes of using magic but when not to use it, how to stay out of it, how to keep a part of yourself separate so that no matter how weird things got, you were more than a shadowcatcher on the corner scraping for bits of people’s souls. More than the Elect of the Revealed Golden Hoo-ha, whatever his name had once been. More than Deke, or Wheelwright, or Tessie.

And I wouldn’t be around to help her. The thought crashed in on me like an iceberg against a hull. I didn’t have years to teach her what I knew; I had two months. Less than that. And then I’d be—well, “dead” wasn’t quite the word for it. Eternally hunted. Absent.

“Okay, kid,” I said finally, and got to my feet. “Field trip time.”

“But I’m supposed to be going to Sarah’s—”

“I’ll call her. There’s someone I want you to meet.” I held out my hand. “Coming?”

She looked up at me. “You won’t tell Nate?”

“Don’t know yet.”

That got her. Katie trudged to my side, dragging her feet as only a little kid can.

The thought of Nate made me touch the silver dish through my bag. Katie had some reason for what she did; she believed it was because her Sight had failed that bad things had happened to her brother. Because she hadn’t seen it, she reasoned, she hadn’t kept Nate’s father from cursing him, or stopped the Hunt from coming after him. I knew better; the first was his father’s fault and no other’s, and the second was my own damn fault.

But I’d gotten him back. I rubbed at my stomach, where a chill like a block of frozen lake water settled and refused to dissipate. That was the important thing.

I had to focus on the important things these days.

We crossed over the old train yards on a footbridge painted with a brilliant blue eye. “Okay, Katie. The first thing you have to understand is that most magic doesn’t work the way you and I use it. That’s blood-magic, a hereditary thing.” I wasn’t entirely sure of the genetics, but “inborn” was close enough. “What most people do is use pieces of a person’s soul, severed off and turned into a … a kind of battery. Those are called loci, and they’re nasty.”

My voice must have wavered or something on that last word, because she gave me a skeptical look. “How do you take away part of someone’s soul?”

“Shadows. Blood. Sometimes it’s the same as a contract, sometimes it’s by usurping the natural order of things, sometimes it’s different. I knew someone who claimed to be able to siphon enough out of photographs … there are a lot of ways. The point is that when that’s the basis for magic, it causes problems.” And because most magicians were selfish people with all the altruism of a feral cat, they were usually pieces of other people’s souls.

Maybe a locus had belonged to a kid who’d taken a piece of candy from the nice but weird guy down the block and given up a piece of her soul in return; maybe someone who’d crossed a shadowcatcher’s net; maybe someone who’d even traded it voluntarily, not knowing the downsides. And there were downsides; you healed from a soulwound eventually, but the days before you healed were rough. You could kill someone that way, at least in theory, and most magicians were careful not to, since the loci would then lose their power. But a person left without color vision, or willpower, or just broken—magicians didn’t care about that, as long as their loci continued to be usable.

“Even you?” Katie asked.

I shook my head. “No. Not me.”

“Sarah?”

I hesitated there. No, Sarah didn’t use loci; she
stuck to the kind of minor stuff that drew on either goodwill or ritual, working within the natural laws rather than subverting them. But if Sarah was teaching Katie, I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to encourage her. “That’s a different matter. But the woman I’m taking you to meet doesn’t use loci either.”

We made our way across the rail yard and up into the neighborhoods that were a spark nicer than Katie’s. I stopped in front of a little house on a scrap of land, surrounded on either side by triple-deckers like the one Katie and Nate lived in. “We’re here.”

Katie blinked, and I could see her taking in the dilapidated but not ramshackle nature of the house, the weeds straggling over the rocky lawn and the fence whitewashed to a defiant glow, as if this one bulwark might hold off any of the encroaching decay. “It doesn’t look so bad,” she said.

“It’s not.” I knocked on the fence, then opened the gate and let the two of us in just as the front door opened. A young woman in a heavy parka, her brown hair streaming back from her face, tucked a pair of flattened tote bags under her arm. “Afternoon,” I called.

She jumped, clutching the bags to her chest, and turned to look at us. “Afternoon,” she answered, then paused. “Aren’t you—”

“Scelan.” I’d visited a few times, mostly back in the spring. Summer was less of a problem for Maryam; I made a mental note to come back in a few weeks and check on her. “I’m sorry, I should have called ahead of time. Is Maryam in?”

The girl hesitated, glancing behind her at the locked door. “She’s out back,” she said. “She’s been there since noon. Could you—would you keep an eye on her? I don’t expect any trouble, but I don’t like leaving her alone. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes, I swear.”

“Happy to.” I stepped away from the gate and motioned for Katie to make room. “Take your time.”

“Thanks.” The girl scurried past us and headed
down the way we’d come, her stride lengthening as she walked.

Katie watched her go. “Who’s she?”

“Maryam’s niece. Or perhaps a cousin; I can’t remember. She takes care of Maryam.” And she’d just left her aunt-or-cousin in the care of people she barely knew. I wasn’t sure how much I blamed her; long contact with someone so steeped in the undercurrent could do that to a person. “Maryam’s lucky to have her around,” I added, walking around the side of the house, toward the scrap of backyard.

“Why—” Katie stopped as we rounded the corner.

“This is why.” I let go of her hand and crouched next to a raised garden bed full of rounded gray stones. A middle-aged woman lay on the stones, arms out to the side as if embracing them, and though her face was turned to the side to give her room to breathe, the stones she lay on pressed hard into her face. She looked like a corpse—pale, unmoving, even the rise and fall of her chest slowed to a fraction of usual breath. I touched her sleeve, then her hand: warm, then cold. How she kept warm in all this was something I’d never learned.

Katie hadn’t moved from the corner, hands drawn up before her as if to ward off the sight. “What’s she doing?”

“Well.” I stood, dusted my hands off, and leaned against the back porch. “Maryam is a … well, the closest term is geomancer, and that’s still inaccurate. She doesn’t divine anything using stone, but the source and focus of her magic is the earth. Slow power, but strong, and certainly she’s had time to master it. She is the most powerful adept in the city.” Even when the Fiana had ruled the undercurrent of Boston, that had been the truth. I assumed that what kept her safe then was the same thing that kept her safe now: the stone magic she worked had no practical applications, and Maryam had no interest in practical applications to begin with.

“But what is she doing? She doesn’t—does she have to do it like this?”

I shrugged. “It’s a closed book to me, kid. I don’t know stone magic. I had her try to explain it to me once, and it all went right over my head. She believes this is the right way; isn’t that enough?” I sank my hands into my pockets. “As for what she’s doing, ever heard of the Bloody Bluff fault line?”

Katie shook her head, unable to look away from Maryam, prone and pleading with the stone below her.

“It doesn’t get as much press as the San Andreas, but it’s right below us. Runs along Boston, near Lexington. Maryam claims she’s holding it together, transferring some of its energy to other places, so that we don’t get a nine-point earthquake running down the Freedom Trail.”

Katie’s eyes widened, and she bent and put one hand flat on the ground as if testing to see how stable it was. “Has it worked?”

“Don’t know. There hasn’t been an earthquake here in a while, though, and I’ve heard we’re overdue for one.” I leaned back. “So you tell me. Is she an incredibly powerful adept, using her talent in the most altruistic way possible, devoting her life to preventing a catastrophe, or is she a crazy woman who talks to rocks?”