Soul Hunt Read Free

slid down the steps the graybeard had come up, trying to scent for Tessie—or anything, anything beyond the encroaching feeling in my own gut.
    This is bad.
A canine murmur settled around me, and for a moment I didn’t just feel the shifting of the Horn under my skin, I saw the Gabble Retchets, the hounds of the Wild Hunt flickering in and out of existence, their shapes never quite congruent with real space.
We knew you were foolish, that you could make bad bargains, but not that you would throw yourself into the fire so.
    “Like you care,” I said, pushing aside crates and charred boxes to reach the door.
    We do care,
another Hound said, brushing against
me as it paced past a fresh flame. You carry the Horn. We do not want it turned to ash.
    “Yeah, well, I’m not happy about carrying it either. You’ll get it back soon enough.” I was sweating under my courier gear, and the smoke—God, the smoke was going to kill me soon, and if it was bad for me, then how bad did Tessie have it? I turned in place, trying to scent her, or at the very least figure out where she’d come in with regards to where I was now. “For now I just need to find her.”
    We could hunt her for you.
    That turned the air cold, or maybe it was just the sweat on my skin freezing. “What?”
    We could hunt her. Sound the Horn, call us forth, and we will hunt her for you. The closest Hound, the one currently in the shape of a great ashen thing with bloodied ears, grinned up at me. It is what we are made for. Like you.
    That was not a comparison I cared to hear, now or later, but it didn’t change the pressure at my throat. I didn’t have to reach up to recognize that the scar had shifted, become a horn on a strap of leather slung round my shoulder, its weight light but insistent. I swallowed. “If I sent you to hunt her, you’d tear her throat out.”
    The Hound grinned wider.
Maybe not.
    Another snapped at the flames behind me. You have already sounded the Horn once, incurring the Hunter’s wrath. What is it to do so again?
    “More than I’m willing to do,” I snapped, and pushed past them, my hands encountering nothing but cool air and shadow as they swept through. Even that, though, was enough to both chill and preserve me. I kicked a sack out of the way to find another ladder leading down into the hold. “Listen, I’m no more happy with this than you are, okay?”
    The Hounds paused, fading.
Whatever gave you the impression that we were unhappy with you?
one asked, its head cocked to the side.
    And that right there was another thing I didn’t want to think about. Besides, there was Tessie, standing in the middle of a low-ceilinged, open room. This one was empty, stripped to the bare metal of the hull, and Tessie stood frozen in the middle of it, oblivious to the smoke curling around her head. I crouched and ran to her. “Tessie!”
    “It’s not here,” she said vaguely, staring off into the smoke. “I’d thought—”
    “Tessie, this boat’s going up, and you need to—dammit.” I caught her arm and pulled her down, so that her head was no longer wreathed in smoke.
    She blinked at me, the whites of her eyes gone yellow and watery. “Don’t,” she whispered, though I doubted she was actually addressing me. “They might be out there—if we stay still, they won’t see us—”
    “If we stay still we are going to end up well done. Or maybe brined, depending on whether this boat sinks first. Come
on!”
    She shuddered, staggered, then leaned heavily on me. It was enough of an assent; I pulled her arm over my shoulders and practically dragged her to the ladder. The Hounds were gone—well, technically, they were still with me, but at least they had the tact to remain silent—and the next room was thick with smoke. But cool daylight shone through the way I’d come in, and I dragged Tessie toward the upper ladder.
    We’d gotten maybe two steps from the top of the ladder before the first blast of water from the firehoses hit