Soul Hunt Read Free Page A

the decks, and with it came a last billow of smoke and oil scent. The stink of dead fireworks hit me like a cosh to the back of the head, and I stumbled out into light, losing my grip on Tessie and collapsing straight into the puddled water on deck.

Two

    I came out of it propped up against what felt like a piling and with the feeling that something was missing. It didn’t help that the first thing that met my eyes seemed to be a two-headed, human-sized cat talking to a blue rock. I squinted, tried to shake my head, then winced as my brain banged against the inside of my skull. Someone had put a dry blanket over my shoulders, and I pulled it up one-handed, rubbing it over my head until my hair stood up in spikes. That was one advantage to having short hair these days; with the braid I’d lost a few months back, I’d have been cold for hours.
    “Of course she was here,” a woman’s voice said, high and clipped and with that edge that meant her patience was about to run out. Sarah. “I’d asked her to keep an eye out for any sort of trouble like this—Evie’s always out and about, so it makes sense to have her on point and alert. I don’t know why you see this as a problem.” Sarah, lying her ass off.
    I dragged the blanket off my head and into my lap and rubbed my eyes until they decided to function. The two-headed cat-thing was still there, but it was now revealed as Sarah, wearing a bright green coat and a cat-mask, the latter pushed up over her face so that it was out of her way. She must have come straight from her shop, the Goddess Garden, without bothering to ditch her Halloween gear.
    How had she known to get out here so fast? I hadn’t called, and Tessie certainly wouldn’t have bothered.
    Tessie. I pushed aside the blanket and got to my feet, digging my fingers into the piling to keep myself steady. I was on the dock, facing the water now, and from here I could tell two things: one, that yacht couldn’t have been legally moored so close to those two boats, and two, that wouldn’t matter anymore because there wasn’t much of a yacht left. The fiberglass hull was cracked and charred, the deck no more than blackened boards, and the—whatever you call that little steering part near the front, over the hatch where I’d gone in for Tessie—was a melted lump of slag. Smoke still rose off the wreckage in damp black wisps, forlorn as the severed, ashy rigging, and a couple of firefighters stood on the dock, arguing over whether to go on board or not.
    I didn’t see Tessie immediately, but there was an ambulance not so far away. If I’d made it off the boat, then she must have too, right? I closed my eyes and tried to get a sense of the trail, since that at least would tell me which way she’d gone, then stopped.
    I couldn’t scent anything.
    A chill coiled in my chest. No. No, I couldn’t have lost my talent, it was the only thing that I knew I could rely on, it was the one thing that made me who I was. I swallowed down my panic and concentrated, hoping that I’d just been mistaken.
    After a moment—a moment like groping blindly through an unfamiliar room for a light switch that might not even be there—I realized that I wasn’t quite lost. But the scents that I was so used to following, the patterns that I as Hound could discern, were distant, as if behind a thick blanket of fog. Tessie’s mantle of diesel fuel and makeup hung in the air, but to get a hold on it, I had to concentrate hard, shutting out everything else. Even the smoke, which was still so omnipresent that my clothes stank of it, was muffled.
    I shuddered and opened my eyes. The grayouts, I was getting used to; the bad mornings where itwas difficult to even decide to get out of bed, I could handle. But this—my talent, the one constant I’d always depended on, fading just like everything else—this, I couldn’t stand.
    “And furthermore,” Sarah said behind me, “I think it’s unconscionable that you’re giving such a hard