Wild Hunt Read Online Free

“Er—didn’t he just tell you to keep those?”
    “Yes.” She poked at the fire with the wooden end of a match, then dropped the match into the flames as well. It didn’t smoke, and the fire itself smelled like the residue under a slaughterhouse. “But it’s my house now, and I won’t have things like that in it.”
    I glanced from her to the flames. Already the papers were gone, though the silk was taking more time to burn. “What were they?”
    “All you need to know about them, my father already told you.” She glanced sidelong at me. “‘Only the dead can kill the dead.’ I’m sorry you had to be the one to see this.”
    It wasn’t an apology. I understood her well enough. “Thank you,” I said, and picked up my courier bag, wincing from its drag on my muscles.
    At the door I turned back. “What will you do? I mean, the Three Cranes is kind of a fixture here. I could help, maybe—” Yuen’s daughter shook her head. “Elizabeth,” I said, then stopped. “I—I don’t think I even knew what your name was.”
    “You never cared before. What difference would it make now?” She turned her back on me, one hand on the jar that had held her grandfather’s corroded ghost. I nodded and let myself out, burning with shame at my own ignorance.

Two
    A n ambulance drove by as I left Chinatown—no sirens, no flashing lights. Maybe they knew not to hurry. I pulled over anyway and stood watching it disappear down the street.
    I used to be able to deal with these things better. I used to not care what happened in the undercurrent, so long as it left me unscathed. Life’s a lot simpler when you don’t pay attention. But lately the strict division I’d put in place between work and life had started to crumble. Maybe, despite my insistence to the contrary, it had never been all that strong to begin with, and the events of six weeks ago just cast that into stark relief.
    A hulking SUV lumbered by, kids yelling from the backseat. I shook my head and moved back out into the street, flipping off the guy behind me as I did so. Six weeks ago the Fiana, the organization of magicians who had once ruled Boston’s undercurrent, had come looking for me, and all my boundaries between work and life had evaporated. I’d found out what had happened to my first lover, been betrayed by a man I’d come to trust, discovered more about my talent than I’d ever wanted to know, and become the pawn of a goddess seeking freedom. Along the way, I’d destroyed the Fiana’s top men and their power base.
    The repercussions couldn’t just be written off lightly.Too many people got that spooked, closed-down look when they saw me these days, too many of my old contacts got really quiet when I was around, and I still had nightmares about a golden chain wrapped around my throat.
    But more important, two of my friends had been yanked headfirst into the deeps of the undercurrent. One, Sarah, had gotten involved knowing some of what she was doing, but that hadn’t kept her from getting hurt. And that made things more awkward between us, these days.
    The other…Nate had as much natural connection to magic as a seagull does to rugby. But because of me, his little sister had been kidnapped, and he himself had been enspelled, dragged under Fenway Park, and mauled in a magically, physically, and emotionally nasty fight. And after the whole thing was over, when I was a basket case, he’d helped me come back up to the world.
    And then he’d taken me to a Sox game. Damn.
    There were obligations, and then there were things that you couldn’t ever pay back, not fully. I hung a left on Charles Street and headed over the river, toward MIT. Another truck had gotten stuck under a bridge on Storrow Drive, and the drivers in the long stream of stopped traffic watched me zip past with envy. I envied them only a little; at least they had air-conditioning for August days like this.
    Not counting business trips, I’d been on the MIT campus only once