Free Soul Hunt by Margaret Ronald

wasn’t quite in my senses.
    The parties involved were a pair at the far end of the lobby, and they looked like something out of a bad improv skit. One was a middle-aged woman with her hair up in a perm that had gone limp some time ago, earrings so heavy they skimmed her shoulders, and a black velvet jacket over a white blouse and gypsy skirt. The other—the man she was berating—was a smallIndian man in a threadbare three-piece suit, holding his bowler hat between his hands as if it might shield him from her. They could have been any arguing couple—okay, any arguing strangely dressed couple—except that no one was looking at them. No one even came up close to them. As I walked from the elevator to the front desk, the two girls in casts headed straight for them, then veered around in a perfect arc, not even looking as their steps shifted.
    Had I had my talent in full strength, I’d have scented the fireworks-and-rain trace of magic, undoubtedly from an aversion ward of some kind. As it was, though, only the faintest tang of gunpowder made it through the fog, and every time I looked at them my eyes started to water.
    I thought seriously about just turning around, but this was a hospital, for God’s sake. There were limits.
    The two didn’t even look up as I approached, so secure were they in their ward. “Hey!” I said, and grabbed the man by his sleeve and the woman by the back of her coat. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
    The man gave a squeak, then looked up at me, eyes wide. I knew him: Byron Chatterji, one of the adepts that I’d even consider calling ethical. The man didn’t use any loci, or at least none that were based on bits of other people’s souls. He worked on a principle called “severance and return,” which, in his case, involved a complicated still out in an abandoned railway car in Medford. There was a lot of mumbo jumbo and mystical terminology for what he did, but what it came down to was that you really, really didn’t want to accept if he offered you a drink from his hip flask.
    The thing was, he was the last person I’d have expected to do something as stupid as putting up a ward in a hospital. Which left the woman, who twisted around in my grip to focus a spiteful glare on me. “What business is it of yours?” she snapped, her earrings swinging around like little scythe pendulums.
    “It’s the business of anyone who’s affected by that damn ward.”
And can notice it,
I added mentally, then paused. “Hang on, don’t I know you? Patricia Wheelwright, yes?” I’d done maybe one job for her, back when I was starting out, and since then the only thing I could remember about her was that Sarah really didn’t like her, for some reason.
    Wheelwright tugged her jacket free of my hand and brushed it off as if I’d left crumbs. “The name is Sosostris,” she returned ponderously. “What’s the matter, Hound? Let a few victories go to your head and you forget everyone’s profession?”
    Oh yes. That was why; Sarah had ranted to me for an hour about how Wheelwright had claimed that professional name (“and I bet you she’s never even read Eliot!” had been the gist of it, which honestly didn’t mean much to me). And the other reason was clear: Wheelwright was a scam artist, even lower than the likes of Chatterji. It’s a historied racket; you convince a mark that they’ve been cursed, then milk them for all they’re worth while “dispelling” the “curse.”
    And these were the people that Sarah was trying to unite into some coherent organization. Good luck with that.
    “I know yours well enough,” I said. “And you, Chatterji, what are you doing here? Both of you, for that matter. You know better than to waste yourselves hiding some plain bickering like this!”
    Wheelwright sniffed, but Chatterji just polished his bowler hat on his sleeve and smiled. “We—I have come in hopes of seeing Miss Troyes, yes? I had heard she was injured, and came to pay