Wild Hunt by Margaret Ronald Page A

wife directed a small army of movers, screaming like a drill sergeant at any who got out of line. I locked up my bike and edged past the truck, scrapingmy butt against the wall, and headed down the steps to the Three Cranes.
    A couple of movers who’d escaped from above worked on strapping what looked like Saran Wrap around a rack of boxes, and a third tested the weight of a crate before setting it down and shaking his head. Most of the assorted jars and tanks on the racks had been boxed up, and the ceiling looked a lot higher now that it didn’t have bundles of unnamable plants strung up to dry. I realized I was crouching, not out of habit but as a reaction to the weird openness above me; the unexpected space made me feel unnaturally vulnerable. It smelled of dust in here, dust kicked up after many years, and that was enough to hide most other scents from me.
    At the far end of the shop, where Yuen had held his informal court, a woman in a pin-striped suit and an older man in black bent together over a glass case. He pointed at something inside, and she nodded, speaking too quietly for me to hear.
    “Hi,” I said, then stopped, recognizing Elizabeth Yuen’s muted scent before I made the connection between her and this sharp young woman. She’d cut her long black hair into a bob, and the suit, while it looked good on her, was a far cry from her earlier traditional white clothes. She didn’t look like anyone’s daughter now. “Miss—” I tried, uncertain how to address her.
    The old man stood up, laying his hands on the case as if protecting it from a blow. Elizabeth turned to see me and nodded. “Hound.” She gestured to me. “This is the one I was telling you about. When you didn’t show, we had to make other arrangements, and she had to take your place.”
    “You couldn’t even wait a day?” the old man asked. He was shorter than me, with that stooped look some people get as they grow older. What was left of his hair was a white-gray fuzz from one ear to the other, and liver spots dotted his already-dark skin. I could catch a little of his scent through the dust: oil of some kind, notunpleasant, and a furry undertone to it that for some reason reminded me of weak coffee in paper cups.
    “No, we couldn’t,” Elizabeth said, searching through the papers on the desk.
    “Hm,” said the old man. He produced a pair of glasses from his breast pocket and put them on. “How’d she do?”
    “Um,” I said, and took a flyer from my bag, hoping that it would draw some attention. Well, how do you interrupt people who seem determined to talk about you like you’re not there?
    “Well enough, on short notice.” High praise , I thought, then kicked myself for it. This woman’s father had died the other day; I had no cause to be getting snotty with her.
    The man looked me up and down, eyes narrowed, as if either committing my features to memory or checking them against a list. “What’s her name?”
    “Scelan,” I said. “Genevieve Scelan. And yours?”
    “This is Reverend James Woodfin,” Yuen’s daughter said. Woodfin’s expression softened a little, and he smiled at her. “You brought your weapon?”
    “I—what?” I glanced back at the movers. “No, that’s not why I’m here. It’s this—there’s a meeting, and I thought you might be interested in it.”
    Elizabeth took the flyer out of my hand, gave it a glance, and shook her head. “Idiots.”
    “It’s all right,” Woodfin said. “I can work with the specs you gave me.”
    Specs? I caught the flyer as Elizabeth was about to toss it away. “Mind telling me what’s going on?”
    Elizabeth glanced at me as if surprised to find me still there. “He’ll be handling the last of the obligations my father incurred. I’m discharging my debts, Hound,” she added as she tugged the flyer from my hand and folded it in half. “I did say I would.”
    “But my weapon—” This was an iffy subject for me these days. While the gun I had on