Dark Alchemy (10 page)

“I like men,” Petra said. “But I don't want to date.”

“Understood.” Maria seemed to make a conscious effort not to look at the scar on Petra's arm, exposed by her rolled-­up sleeves. “There's a whole lot of macho posturing that seems to happen around here. All the men think they're cowboys.”

“I'm getting that feeling.” Petra groaned. “Mike Hollander has been hanging around. I think he can't decide if I'm a damsel in distress or not.”

Maria chortled. “Mike and I used to date.”

“Oh. Erf. Is this awkward?”

“Not at all. Mike is a nice guy. He's just a bit too much for me in that whole caretaking role. He really wants to settle down and have a bunch of kids and take them all to Boy Scout camp. You can trust him, though, if you decided to go out with him.”

“Eh. I'm not really in the market for the white picket fence right now.”

“Just be clear when you friendzone him. He'll take it fine.”

“I would like for Mike to be in the friendzone.” Petra scrubbed at a bowl vigorously. “How did you guys wind up . . . uh . . . not together?”

“A lot of it was his wanting to ride in on the white horse and rescue me from dealing with crazies in my line of work. Wanting me to move off the reservation and to someplace he thought was safer. And he really didn't get the whole woo-­woo thing.”

“With Frankie?”

“And me, I guess. I think that I'm fairly spiritual, in my own way. But Mike is definitely a guy who believes only what he sees. He loves nature, and so do I. But he doesn't feel that there's any kind of spiritual force behind that. He thinks that, when he dies, that's the end, and he's gonna be worm food.”

“I could see where that might be an issue.”

Maria shrugged, slinging the dish towel over her shoulder. “He's a good guy. Sort of uptight. He can't leave it at work, and I hate being told what to do.”

Petra grinned. “I get that.”

“Which isn't to say that I would object to you guys dating . . .”

“Friendzone, definitely.”

Maria laughed. “Make no promises. See how it works out. Like I said, he's not a bad guy.”

They finished the kitchen cleanup, and Petra went out to the porch. Frankie was still slumped in the porch swing, his hat covering his face. Sig was sitting in his lap, also asleep.

Petra gingerly sat beside them, trying to figure out a way to ease the coyote from the old man's arms without waking him.

“That's a fine friend you've found.”

Petra blinked. Frankie was awake. His hat moved as he talked.

“I think he'll be a good friend, too.”

Frankie pushed his hat back and stroked Sig's ears. Petra noticed that his wrinkly fingers were very long and tapered, the nails oval. “He's very loyal. He won't lead you wrong.”

“Lead me where?”

“Anywhere. This world, the spirit world. Have you ever gone on a spirit journey?”

“Ah, no. I have my hands full with this world.”

Frankie reached into his shirt for a pipe, tapping some tobacco into it and lighting it. The smoke smelled like sweetgrass, and reminded Petra of her father, for a moment. Frankie shook his head, smiling.

“What's so funny?”

“The spirit world has much to teach you.” Frankie shifted Sig from his lap and stood, cracking the bones in his spine as he stretched. “Come for a walk with me. I want to show you something.” Frankie ambled down the steps and away from the house.

Petra hesitated. She had, after all, seen Frankie go off and nearly beat a guy to death on the street. But Sig sleepily waddled after Frankie, so Petra did the same. She caught up with him, puffing away, in a field of gold grass and tiny limestone pebbles that shifted underfoot. Sig zipped ahead, just his tail visible over the tassels of the grass. The sun felt warm on her face, and the smell of Frankie's smoke floated over her. She felt peaceful. If she was honest with herself, this was probably the first time she had since she'd come to Temperance.

Frankie followed a worn path out of the grass to a clearing, then sat down on a sandstone slab worn concave by what had to be centuries of asses sitting on it. The slab was the size of a toppled refrigerator, one of six ranged in an oval.

“Oh, wow,” she said.

Inside the rough-­hewn benches, water gathered in a swallet about the size of a small swimming pool, ringed by a bank of flat stones. The water moved and seethed, likely fed by an underground spring. It was a brilliant blue, more powerfully blue than the sky. Sig paced along the edge and stared at his reflection.

“This is beautiful,” Petra said. She knelt at the edge of the water, bracing her hands on the stone. The one she perched on was the size of a doorstep, the sandstone grains hot to the touch.

“It's an old spring. Been here for centuries.”

Petra could imagine it—­the rocks worn smooth from centuries of gossip and laundry. She scooped her hand in the water. It felt soft and warm, a little cloudy. Sig splashed in and dog-­paddled around the edge.

“It's a sacred place. The locals call it a name that means ‘The Eye of the Spirit.' ”

“I can see why.” The outline of the pool was vaguely eye-­shaped.

Frankie scooped his hands in the water and took a drink. “It's considered a sign of respect to drink from the spring. Offering the mouth of your spirit to the Spirit of All.”

Petra squinted at the water. The Technicolor blue was likely the result of some kind of funky bacteria or algae breeding beneath the surface. She glanced at Frankie, feeling the heaviness of his gaze upon her.

She sighed and cupped her hands. It was likely that there was nothing in it that couldn't be fixed by a round of antibiotics. She pulled the warm blue water to her lips and drank.

She expected it to taste like iron, salt, or some other mineral, but it had no such harsh taste. Instead, it was sweet. Almost like tea. Petra let it slide down the back of her throat, reached in for more. It seemed to quench some thirst she hadn't been aware that she'd had, a longing.

“The sweetwater,” Frankie said. He stretched out on his rock and pushed his hat back over his eyes, as if he intended to take a nap. “The sweetwater brings you to Spirit.”

Petra wiped her lips with the back of her hand. Her mouth buzzed, humming as if she were playing a harmonica. She leaned over the rock to peer into the water. Her reflection gazed up at her, looking fuzzy and pensive, hair dipping into the surface of the water. She felt suddenly dizzy. Her fingers clutched the sandstone edge, and her vision blurred. Her limbs felt leaden, full of sunshine. She tried to summon a feeling of alarm, but a blue buzz suffused her brain.

“The sweetwater,” Frankie said from what sounded like a great distance. “The sweetwater will bring you home.”

Petra pitched forward, into the waiting warm blue water.

 

Chapter Ten

Altered States

F
lying.

Air slid through the raven's feathers like fingers through water. His pinfeathers grasped the edge of a hot air current, turning him west. He felt weightless, like paper pushed on the downdrafts of the mountains, insubstantial and free.

Apart.

Away.

This high, this apart, there was no pain, only the push of wind against his chest and the scrape of it trickling down his throat. He climbed as high as he could, leaving the ranch behind like a speck of dust, a tiny scar on the land.

He moved away, instinctively chasing the sun. Nothing could hold him. No duty, no curses, no dusty oaths—­not even gravity. The bird imagined what it would be like to stay in this form, with all those years upon years of consciousness poured into a single weightless body. A body that could be undone in seconds by a hawk or an eagle or even an unlucky downdraft. In raven form, he was just as vulnerable as any other bird. For that time, being apart, being suspended between earth and sky . . . perhaps it would be worth it.

The wind pushed up from the south, lifting him higher. At this height, the drafts shredded into his wings. Below him, the smaller scattered sparrows were only dots. A vulture circled in an ever-­tightening spiral around something dead.

The raven let the air push him north, flattening his wings wide to a knifelike edge. He sailed like a kite, his shadow passing over ribbons of road and roofs of houses. When he'd split from the body, he'd given no thought to where he was going.

His eyes roamed over fields, pausing on the gem-­like blue of a tiny body of water. It was the most color in the landscape, like spilled antifreeze on a baked street. Seductive. He angled his head down, cupping his wings against the pull of the current.

Shiny.

As he swung down, he remembered it had been a long time since he'd been here. Even then, he'd come on wings. Never on two feet. This was not his territory.

A woman lay motionless in the pool, facedown. An old man gripped her shoulders while a coyote tried to slog out of the water, unable to get his hind legs over the stone ledge circling it. The coyote barked and snarled at the man, in the attitude of a dog defending a pup from a predator.

The man seemed dimly familiar. Trying to remember brought a twinge of pain to the raven's side. He knew, in some part of his vast memory jammed into a skull the size of a walnut, that this man had hurt him. But the woman . . .

The raven swooped down to get a closer look. Blond hair spread out in the pool, turning green in the unnatural water. A golden pendant shone at the surface of the water, tethered by a familiar chain around her neck.

Shiny.

He swooped down, into the chaos of the coyote splashing and howling. The old man, focused on the woman, tried to fight off the coyote.

The raven charged the man. Yelling, the old man swung at the raven, but the bird was too fast for him. He clawed at his enemy's face, drawing blood and curses. The raven fluttered away and reached toward the woman's throat. He'd forgotten his physical limitations; she was too heavy to lift when he was in this form. He pinwheeled back from the struggle with only the snapped chain of the pendant in his talons.

“Damn bird! Get away!”

Thinking that the old man was going to drown her, he dove again. But the man anticipated the attack and slapped at the raven, catching him midair. The blow was heavy against his chest, ringing through him like the time he'd struck a window in a storm. He landed in the dust, beak parted, panting, one wing outstretched.

The old man turned to the woman, reaching down for her.

The raven shrieked.

Grunting with effort, the old man pulled her to the lip of the pool. The woman lay on the sandstone with rivulets of turquoise water dripping from her body. The coyote managed to haul himself over the rock lip of the pool and stumble toward her before falling over, motionless.

The old man stood over the woman and began to unbutton his shirt. He threw his shirt to the ground, began to unzip his pants. His skin was as pale as a salt lick, mottled with the stripes of a sunburn where his sleeves ended.

The raven squawked at the top of his lungs, but was ignored. Gathering his energy for another strafing run, he took two hops in toward the old man, talons scraping in the dirt.

The old man finished stripping off his clothes, glanced down at the woman, then dove into the water.

The raven peered through the dust at him, uncomprehending.

Swift as an eel, the naked figure paddled several circuits in the water. He began to sing, off-­key and unintelligibly, splashing like a child to see the sun glitter on the droplets of water.

With trepidation, the raven picked up the shiny pendant and walked to the edge of the pool. The coyote remained where he'd fallen, tongue protruding from his mouth. The raven fluttered to the woman, lying on her back with her eyes closed. He pecked at the shirt button at her wrist, got no reaction. Summoning his courage, he hopped up to her chest, turned his head right and left to peer at her. The shiny necklace swung like a pendulum in his beak. As his talons clutched her collar, she made no move to shoo him away.

His beak held fast to the shiny. He wanted it, not just in the way birds love aluminum foil, gum wrappers, and bits of glass. This was beautiful, yet it was so much more than beautiful. The partitioned bits of his consciousness screamed that it was important.

He opened his beak and dropped the charm on the hollow of her throat. She didn't even flinch. Not then and not even when the old man rose out of the water and splashed at the raven.

The raven shrieked and scuttled off. He fluttered several yards away, to the bough of a contorted pine tree.

From his perch, he could do nothing but watch.

F
alling.

Petra braced herself for impact, feeling her gut tense and her hands splayed and thrusting out before her. The water engulfed her body with a muffled sucking sound. She clawed her way to the surface . . .

But the water was much deeper and darker than it appeared. She couldn't distinguish up from down; air bubbles floated in all directions, giving no hint as to where the surface lay. Diffuse blue light shimmered from both above and below.

She thrashed, lungs burning. She struck out first in one direction, then another. Forcing herself to pause, she tried to float and have faith that the remaining air in her lungs would pull her to the surface. But she simply hung in space, unmoving, suspended. Her necklace drifted, glinting, before her.

This is a stupid way to die, Petra thought. She was a strong swimmer, and had spent years out in the middle of a treacherous ocean. And now a puny spring threatened to be her undoing.

And it was not as if she didn't deserve to be undone. For all that had happened to poor Des, to die by fire in the ocean . . . this was no less than she truly deserved. That knowledge lay at the bottom of her chest like a stone.

Below, she spied a flicker of movement, a pale blur in the depths. She made out the shapes of what looked like paws swimming. The underside of a dog. Sig.

But that way felt like
down
. Like certain death.

She dove down, down. She reached for Sig, for the paws silently churning the water. Teeth claimed her sleeve, trying to drag her further under.

And she let it happen, let Sig haul her to the bottom . . . where she came back up with a gasp that scorched her lungs.

Sound came roaring back, foam and spray hissing at her. She struggled against Sig's teeth and toenails, kicking and fighting to reach land.

Petra crashed up against a rock, hauled herself up on the shore. Sig disentangled himself from her sleeves and flopped, dripping, beside her.

Her breath was a thin whistle as she surveyed her surroundings. She'd been thoroughly prepared to grab Frankie by his collar and shake him for pushing her in.

But Frankie was gone. And this was not the land she'd left, the Eye of the Spirit with the scrub desert spreading around her.

Water lapped against her body in shallow waves. Her fingers dug into silt, recognizing bits of milk quartz and obsidian in a detached way. She'd washed up on some riverbank shore, far from where she'd fallen in. The mountains loomed closer, blotting out part of the blue sky, while sea oats conspired, whispering, in the distance. She could make out a cerulean line of ocean beyond.

Impossible. An impossible landscape. She had never been here, though bits and pieces of it seemed as familiar as a dream, one that mashed up fragments of memory, pressing them impossibly close together.

She dragged herself beyond the rocks, her clothes hanging heavy on her shoulders. Sig trotted behind her. She tugged off her boots to empty them, wincing at a pain in her arm. This place sure
felt
real.

She looked at her right arm, turning it over, expecting to find a scrape from the rocks across the handprint scar on her flesh. But the scar was missing. She ran her fingers over where it should be. There was only a fresh scratch from the rocks. Beneath it, her skin was smooth and pale, as if nothing had ever happened.

Sig lowered his head to the edge of the water to drink. Petra touched her fingers to her lips, remembering. She'd drunk the water from the pool, the water full of that filthy blue algae. And it had probably made her sick. This was likely a dream, a hallucination brought on by some noxious microbes.

That was the best-­case scenario. The worst-­case scenario was that she'd gotten sick, fallen in the pool, and what she was experiencing now were the last dismal firings of her neurons as her body drowned.

“Damn it, Frankie.” Her hands balled into fists around her shoelaces.

Sig yipped beside her, chewing at a toenail.

“You're not real,” she told him. “You're just a projection of my oxygen-­starved brain cells. Or some kind of psychological hiccup.”

Sig wasn't impressed. He finished gnawing his dewclaw, stood up, and shook water all over her.

Petra swore. But she had to admit, her brain was pretty good at rendering the details. It felt like muddy water and smelled exactly like wet dog.

She considered her options. “I could sit here and wait for the hallucination to fade,” she told Sig. Really, it was like talking to herself, so what did it matter?

Sig cocked his head attentively, like a good superego should.

“Death or the effect of the hallucinogenic algae wearing off. One or the other.” Petra squinted at the sky. Funny. It was daylight, but she couldn't see the sun. So much for conventional navigation. “Though, I suppose that if I were dying, it would be over with quickly.”

Sig huffed.

“Don't snort at me. I don't believe in an afterlife.”

The coyote yawned.

“Great. Now, I'm arguing with myself.” Petra pinched the bridge of her nose. “This is giving me a helluva headache.”

Sig shook himself one more time, then took off, trotting down the muddy beach.

She gave him a dirty look he didn't bother to turn around and see. “Now you're leaving me?”

Sig flicked a speckled ear.

She gazed after him, at the staccato tracks he made in the silt.

But his were not the only tracks. There were footprints—­large footprints from a man's shoes—­tracking before him. Sig trotted along in their wake, smudging the edges.

Damn. She wasn't alone. Or maybe she was, and this was another psychological projection. She pulled on her waterlogged boots and clomped after Sig, kicking up thick clods of mud.

She followed him along the water's edge. The river churned beside her, a surreal turquoise that must have come from the spring somehow. Her boots smacked in the muck, and she struggled to keep up with Sig. His light paws seemed to float on the mud, leaving small indentations rather than the deep ruts she left.

Up ahead, she could make out the silhouette of a man, walking toward the seashore.

“Hey!” Petra yelled.

He seemed not to hear her, or if he did, he didn't acknowledge her. The man was dressed in a black coat, with grey hair tied over his shoulder. He followed the path of the river as it spilled out into the sea.

Petra followed, but she couldn't catch up. She slogged along the edge of the river, where sea oats began to take root in paler sand. Sig slunk behind the oats and growled at the man.

“Where are we?” she yelled. “Who are you?”

The man didn't turn. He walked down to the beach, where the river connected with the transparent water of a familiar ocean. Petra shaded her eyes. A plume of black smoke blossomed in the distance. The whitecaps were stained black with oil.

She finally reached the man, lungs burning from the exertion. Catching his sleeve, she forcibly turned him around. He looked at her, unblinking. His face was as deeply lined as a leaf, with brown eyes staring out at her.

She knew him.

She reached up to grasp his shoulders, shook him hard. A pendant identical to her own, the green lion devouring the sun, spilled from his open shirt collar.

“Dad,” she shouted over the din of the oily waves. “Dad, what are you doing here?”

She stared into his gold-­flecked eyes, gripping his arms as if her hands were claws. As she watched, those gold flecks expanded, took over. His irises shone gold, and spidery legs of gold leaf crept into his skin, like a contagion.

“Dad! It's me, Petra.”

But his gaze was vacant. The gold wound into his hair, twisted into his coat. It was hot, hot as molten metal. Petra tried to hold on to him, but the heat was too much. She released him and backed away as gold twitched through him. It crackled and buzzed like lightning.

Soon her father was completely rendered in gold. Like Midas, she thought, reaching out.

Where her fingers brushed his hand, a fissure formed. The crack splintered up his arm, like an earthquake.

“No . . .” she breathed, but was helpless to do anything but watch as the cracks ratcheted through the statue of her father, ripping into the gold flesh and gold bones. A finger, then an ear, fell to the sand.