Soul Hunt Read Free Page B

time to someone who under any other circumstances would be considered a hero. Is it official policy to interrogate anyone who drags a friend out of a fire?”
    “That is not what we’re doing, ma’am,” another woman said, and my stomach turned over. I knew that voice. “And I think maybe you ought to let her speak for herself.”
    Crap. Not that I’d had any real chance of getting out of this anyway, but still … I turned around, leaning back against the piling again so that I was partly sitting on it. Sarah turned, pushing the cat mask a little further up her forehead, and the woman she was talking to—the one I’d misidentified as a blue rock, with perhaps some justification, tilted up her chin as she looked at me.
    Lieutenant—or whatever rank she now held—Rena Santesteban of the BPD. Just the last person I wanted to see, and I suspected I was the same for her.
    Sarah and Rena were, for a while, the closest things I had to friends, and a good example of why the periphery of the undercurrent is so unpredictable. You wouldn’t think to link the two of them together in any other circumstances, but both have brushed up against the nasties of the Boston undercurrent often enough that they know to stay out of the depths, and both of them have, on occasion, expressed impatience with me. And just at the moment, they wore remarkably similar expressions.
    That’s where any connection ended, though. Sarah dealt in fringy stuff, the edges of the undercurrent that were so powerless you couldn’t even move a handkerchief with them, and the New Age elements that even New Agers don’t buy. But beneath that façade offuzzy-headed optimism was a diamond-hard core of bullheaded idealism, with sprinkles on top.
    Case in point: faced with the fragmenting chaos that was the undercurrent without the Fiana in charge, Sarah’s approach had been to try to create a community watch, something for magicians and small-timers to be a part of so that they wouldn’t always have to watch their backs. In theory a good idea, in practice less so, and in reality about as easy as yoking ferrets to pull a sled. Sarah knew better than to dabble in the scary parts of magic—and she’d been scared away from the truly numinous aspects of it, a fact that I still shared some blame for—but she still believed that we could, in time, all pull together.
    Rena had gone the other way. Which was part of why we weren’t on good terms at the moment. “Miss Scelan,” she said, turning over a page in her notebook. “Can you tell me what happened here?”
    “Where’s Tessie?”
    “She’s all right,” Sarah said. “Smoke inhalation, but the EMTs said she’ll be okay. They’ve taken her to Mass General. Which is where you ought to be right now—”
    “I’m fine,” I said at the same time Rena said, “That can wait.” She shot me a narrow look and waited. “I’m fine,” I said again, very aware of just how not-fine I really was. “Tessie lives on the harbor, and she noticed the fire starting. I was nearby, so she picked me up for help. That’s about all there is to it.”
    “Evie, you don’t have to say anything,” Sarah began, putting herself between me and Rena. “I can have Alison here in ten minutes, and she’ll tell you that there’s no legal requirement for you to talk to the cops right now.”
    I shook my head. “Alison’s an environmental lawyer, Sarah. I don’t think it’s the same thing.”
    Sarah shrugged. “Doesn’t stop her from offering her opinion on everything else.” She got a faraway, goofy look in her eyes. Say whatever else you like aboutSarah, the woman’s a romantic of the beyond-hopeless variety when it comes to her girlfriend.
    Rena cleared her throat, still waiting. I put my hands on Sarah’s shoulders and carefully pushed her out of the way. “Sarah, go away. I can handle this. Go—I don’t know, go see what they’re up to.” I pointed to the far side of the street, where a few familiar