Wild Hunt Read Free

and started to look behind me, then thought better of it. Yuen, noting my reaction, nodded.
    His daughter carried a small ceramic jar about the size of a large coffee mug to her father and set it in his waiting hands. Unconsciously, she wiped her hands on her slacks.
    I motioned to the jar. “What is that?”
    Yuen turned it around in his hands. It was unadorned, plain unglazed stoneware sealed with wax, and it made me ill. There was something both pitiful and disgusting about it, like a baby rat. “It’s a jar,” his daughter translated. “You tell me what’s inside.”
    Yuen said something further—either Have a look or Catch or whatever the Chinese equivalent was—and tossed the jar at me. His daughter cried out, a second too late. I jumped backward to catch it, fumbled as the skin of the jar seemed to warp under my fingers, and caught it a second time, bracing it between my fore-arms and stomach. The touch shivered across my skin like ripples from a stone. When I looked up, Yuen’s daughter’s head was bent, and she glared at her father’s hands.
    I let out a slow breath. “Yuen, you pick the weirdest times for tests like this.”
    He smiled, but it didn’t touch his eyes. “You tell me,” he repeated.
    I turned the jar over in my hands, rolling it between my palms. It was lighter than I’d assumed, light enough that it had to be either empty or packed with something like feathers. I held it to my nose and sniffed, then scratched at the rope seal with one ragged fingernail.
    “Don’t open it,” Yuen and his daughter said together, each in a different language. Some things don’t need translation to be clear.
    “I don’t need to,” I said. “It’s not an antique, and not Chinese. Local clay, I’d say from New Hampshire. There’s something mixed in the clay, ivy maybe. Hard to say, since it was fired quite a while ago…” I shook it, gently, and watched their reactions out of the corner of my eye. Yuen’s daughter winced, but Yuen himself didn’t let a flicker cross his face. “It used to be in your shop, but it hasn’t been for some years. Five at least. You moved it…you’d had it on the shelf behind the counter, next to the stone turtle.”
    At that Yuen raised his eyebrows, impressed. I smiled, but honestly I was a little weirded out. Not by the jar—well, not so much—but by how much I could tell about it. This time last year, I wouldn’t have been able to discern so much about a static object without a good hour’s concentration.
    The trouble with having a blood-magic like mine is that sometimes it gets a little stronger than you’d like.
    “As for what’s inside it…” Nothing. I wasn’t getting anything from the rest of the jar; it was just blank, like static or white noise. I turned it over again, trying to find meaning in its gritty, unmarked surface.
    There. Like a spider scuttling out and over my fingers, the scent of it shivered across my senses. The smell of something not just rotted but frozen in that state of rot, with a horrible awareness about it, a gelid sentience like the idiot response of an anemone. I gagged and wanted to spit, but some things you don’t do in a nice house.
    Yuen nodded. “So you do sense what’s in it. Good. Please give it back.”
    His daughter came forward. I set the jar in her hands, noting the careful stillness that came over her the moment her fingers touched it. She didn’t like it any more than I did. “What’s in there?” I asked softly, speaking to her rather than Yuen.
    But it was Yuen who answered, and his words she translated. “A mistake. A failure. An act of hubris.” He took the jar from his daughter and cradled it on his chest like a reliquary. “My father.”
    I glanced from father to daughter, confused by the generational switch. “Your—”
    “Please listen carefully, Hound. You can sense the…ghost…of my father—” ghost was in English, the word out of place and somehow incorrect in either language,