Mercury Retrograde (13 page)

He touched her wet cheek with the back of his fingers. He bent and kissed her cold lips. They tasted of the soft salt of the pool and a tang of acid, bright as lemons.

“I will be back.”

He turned and waded back to the shore. The coyote watched him with narrowed eyes.

“Stay here and watch her,” Gabe said.

The coyote's suspicious gaze followed him as he walked from the chamber. He stared out at his mistress floating in the black pond and lay down like a dog at the foot of a bed.

“Good dog.”

Gabe strode into the darkness.

If the Stella Camera couldn't help, there was only one thing that he was certain would: the blood of the right side of the basilisk.

And he would wake all the Hanged Men to get it.

 

E
verything hurt.

Even places without nerves ached. Her toenails hurt, the joints in her body, the lining of her lungs . . . even the hair on her head ached like a bad case of road rash soaked in hydrogen peroxide.

She'd tried to hold her breath when she ran from the snake, running as fast as she'd ever run in her life, but she'd tripped on a rock and taken in a small, involuntary breath. That tiny bit of air burned, rushing into her lungs like fire. And then there was darkness.

She felt heavy in this darkness, like a stone at the bottom of the sea. She could hear the trickle of deep water filtering through stone and the echo of that drip. There was no wind, no sounds of animals or birds—­just that hollow sound of water's persistence.

Shivering, Petra opened her eyes. She was lying on cold ground, her fingers wound in Sig's fur. He turned and licked her cheek with his warm tongue. He made a face and rubbed his tongue on the roof of his mouth, as if she tasted bad.

She struggled to sit and gather her bearings. It was dark all around her, dark in the way that only the world underground can be dark. A diffuse light emanated from a cavern roof overhead, shining with dim phosphorescence in stringy clusters. It reminded her of the Waitomo Glowworm Caves in New Zealand, starry filaments of chandeliers gleaming with a blue sheen above her.

As her eyes adjusted, she could make out what looked like streets—­bricked streets worming away in the dark, coming together from five directions to form a single point. She ran her fingers over the brick. It felt old, centuries-­old cracked clay, and it seemed that each one was carved with symbols. Her fingers felt oddly sticky, and they seemed to smear into the brick.

She bent closer to get a look. Her gold pendant spilled from her collar, scraping the brick. She squinted at triangles and stars—­some of them she recognized from her research as alchemical symbols for earth, air, fire, and water. But the rest of the script was foreign to her.

“You shouldn't be here.”

A voice echoed from over her right shoulder, and she jumped.

A man in a white cloak stood over her, carrying a lantern. He unshielded the lantern, letting its golden light spill over Petra and the bricks. He removed his hood, and Petra found herself staring into a familiar lined face.

“Dad?”

He knelt beside her, and she flung her arms around his neck. “I've been looking for you!”

He embraced her with bony fingers, then held her at arm's length, frowning. His hazel eyes were clear and present, not cloudy and distant as they were in the nursing home. His buzzed-­off hair had grown past his shoulders and was tied back in a knot. He was not who he had been in the physical world, but he seemed so much more extant in this black here and now.

“Is that why you're here—­looking for me?” He looked at her as if she'd done something monumentally stupid, like that time she'd blown up the back side of the carport playing with her chemistry set when she was eleven.

“I . . .” she looked around at the converging dark paths. “I think I might have fucked up.”

“Yes. I think you might have fucked up, too.”

Sig sat on his rump, tongue lolling from his mouth. It seemed that he agreed.

Her dad reached out to pet Sig, and Sig allowed it, making an awful face of contentment as her father rubbed his golden ear.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“We're at the Umbilicus Mundus—­the navel of the world. It's the gate to the underworld.”

“The underworld?”

“This is where all roads meet. You must have really been fucking up topside to get here.”

She made a face at her father. “It wasn't on purpose!” She winced at the sound of her voice. It sounded like she was thirteen again.

“Clearly not.” Her father untied his cloak and wrapped it around her shoulders.

“Dad!” She flinched back.

Her father's head and hands were flesh, but the rest of him wasn't . . . he was bone. Pure white bone, bleached as if he'd been a corpse lying in the sun for hundreds of years.

Sig squinted at him and cocked his head.

“Yes, I'm naked.” He sighed.

“Ew. That's just . . . bizarre.” She didn't want to think about what it meant for her, psychologically, that she was clearly hallucinating her father as a skeleton. It disconcerted her almost as much as falling back into speaking to him as if he was her parent and she were a cranky teenager.

“I don't always get to pick the form I get in the underworld. Not that you're doing much better.” He gestured at her.

She looked down and bit back a retort. She was covered in goo. Black goo, like crude oil. When she rubbed her hands together, it seemed like her hands were smaller than before, as if some of her flesh had rubbed away with it.

“Oh. Yeah. Maybe not.”

“You're stuck in an alchemical process. Dissolution. What happened to you?” He took her hand in his and squinted, poking at the ooze. “Are you following in your old man's footsteps and fucking around with the wrong alchemy texts? Which ones? Not Melchoir. Tell me you're not reading Melchoir. He was full of so much shit . . .”

“No. No, I am not fucking around with any alchemy texts!” Petra rubbed the bridge of her nose with her free hand, only to feel her fingertips pushing into the cartilage. She pulled her fingers away, and they come back with a string of tar. She tried to flip it off, but it wouldn't detach from her middle finger. “I was chasing a snake and inhaled some of its breath. Which, apparently, is pretty toxic.”

“A snake?” Her father sat upright, bones rattling. “What kind of snake?”

“A huge snake. About thirty feet long. Green, with a yellow crest . . .”

“And yellow eyes! Yes, yes!” Her father became excited. He picked up a pebble and began to draw on the brick. He drew a fair likeness of the snake in white, with its feathered crest and slitted eyes. “You met the basilisk.”

“Don't look so enthused.”

“The basilisk is amazing. Well . . .” He looked her over again. “Well, she's amazing from a distance. At least a quarter-­mile upwind. With binoculars.”

She lifted her gooey hands in surrender. “Lesson learned.”

“The basilisk represents transformation and dissolution. She's poison, but she's also the key to eternal life. Blood from the right side of the basilisk yields eternal life, and the left side is Medusa's blood, certain death.”

“Mmmkay. So is it—­she—­is one of Lascaris's leftovers?”

“Probably. I did a fair amount of looking for her back in the day. But I suspected she was buried too deep for me to reach her, sleeping.”

“She's a subterranean creature?”

“That's my guess.”

“I wonder if the earthquakes woke her up. We've had some weird seismic activity lately.”

“Could be. Or she might have woken up on her own to lay eggs.”

She stared at her father. “Are you shitting me? There's more than one?”

He shrugged, a motion that made his humerus clatter against his scapula. “Why not?”

“Awesome.” She rested her head in her hands, forgetting that she was apparently made of goo in this spiritual plane. She made a face and pulled her sticky hands away. Sig made no move to wash her face again. She wasn't sure what to do with her hands, and they dripped on the symbols of the brick.

“What is this stuff?” she asked.

“The bricks tell the story of the Emerald Tablet, the first alchemical text. It was rumored to have been a gift to humanity from Thoth himself. In painstaking detail, it goes through all seven alchemical processes: calcination, dissolution, separation, conjugation, fermentation, distillation, and coagulation. I've been working on translating them from the source material, trying to learn the processes firsthand.” His fingers brushed the brick with a bit of possessiveness.

“But that's really the least of your worries.” Her father pointed to her. “You've got to solve
that
problem before you chase down any more snakes or further your alchemical education.”

“No kidding.” She let her hands dangle in her lap. “What do I do?”

“Not sure,” her dad admitted.

“What do you mean, you're not sure?”

“I don't know
everything
.” He crossed his arm bones across his ribs with a grating sound. Sig had sneaked up beside him and took a test bite of his fibula.

“Sig, that's rude,” Petra said. Not that Miss Manners had written a newspaper column on it, but she was quite sure that was rude, on any plane of existence.

“Listen to me.” Her father took her gluey hands in his. “All I can do is share what I know about alchemy, and you'll have to make your own decisions. I screwed up, not too far from where you are now. I don't want you to get stuck here. Like me.”

“What do you mean, you screwed up?”

“I got stuck in my own phase. The separation stage, the third stage of alchemy. I was trying to isolate the Alzheimer's, to get it out of my brain. Things went wrong, and . . . this is the only way that I can keep my wits. Here.” His hand sketched the underworld.

“I'm sorry, Dad.”

“I know. And I'm sorry, too . . . for everything that happened when I left. But listen . . . we don't have time for that now. You have to use what I did as knowledge to help you move on. You've got to get through dissolution and into separation. That's the next stage.”

“So.” She took a deep breath and looked around her, at the bricks and the roads into darkness. “I can't stay here.”

“No. You've got to pick a road. Find a symbol that speaks to you. Bring it back here. That's your best hope.”

“Is that what you did? In this place?”

He nodded. His smile was wan. “And I picked wrong.”

She climbed to her feet. “Are you coming with me?”

“I can't. I can't influence your decision. Just . . .” He shook his head. “I took bad advice, and I got stuck.”

“Stroud. He gave you the bad advice.”

“Yes. And I'm ashamed of that. Just . . . just follow your heart, kiddo.” His hazel eyes shone.

Petra kissed him on the receding hairline above his forehead, the way she had so many times before in the nursing home. This time, she left behind a tar-­like smudge. He handed her his lantern.

Squaring her shoulders, she faced the paths.

Sig stood beside her, wagging his tail, nose working at the dank smells in the darkness.

She peered at each path. She didn't have an intuitive bone in her body. She had no idea how to follow her heart. The darkness was impenetrable, and no path looked any better than any other.

She dug into her pocket for the Venificus Locus.

“That's cheating,” her dad said. “The underworld is about weighing your heart, not the logical stuff.”

“I don't care if it's cheating, Dad. I want out.”

She found the Locus and held it up to the bluish light. The goo on her hands slipped into the channel around the grooves, clogging it.

“Damn.”

“Told you.”

She resisted the urge to stick her tongue out at him.

The right-­hand path was closest. That was as good as any. She struck off down the tunnel.

Behind her, her father made a
harrumphing
sound.

The lantern cast a golden light along the walls of the tunnel. It reminded her a bit of the tunnels beneath the Lunaria in the Hanged Men's subterranean domain. The floor of the tunnel was smooth underfoot, as if it had been trod by many feet before her. Maybe that was a good sign.

Or not.

The tunnel opened into a round chamber. She lifted her lantern high as she spotted a glimmer of something in the center of the floor.

It was a cluster of rock quartz about as big as her skull. A lovely specimen. She knelt and lifted the lantern high over it. Shadows shifted in the flickering light within the facets of the quartz. It had surprising clarity for a cluster, with well-­formed symmetrical facets and beautiful ghost inclusions within.

This must be it. She was a geologist—­surely there must be a metaphorical rock in the center of her chest.

She reached down for it, but a voice stopped her.

“I wouldn't do that.”

She glanced up, as a figure detached from the shadows gathered around the ceiling. It fluttered down by her feet.

She blinked. It was a great blue heron. But it was talking to her in a familiar voice: Frankie's voice.

“Frankie?”

“Don't look so shocked.” The heron cocked his head and looked at her. Sig sidled around to take an experimental nip, and the heron slapped him with a massive grey-­blue wing.

“Is this how you get around in the spirit world?”

The heron ruffled his feathers. “Sometimes. It gets me where I need to go. At least, it gets me around a lot faster than the toad suit does.”

Petra rubbed her sticky fingers against her temple. The spirit world was giving her one helluva headache. Her brain did not process symbolism well. “What are you doing here?”

“I'm here to tell you that things aren't always as they seem.”

“Oh. So quoth the talking heron. Are you sober in the spirit world?”

The heron shook his feathers. His wingspan was impressive, nearly five feet across, and he wasn't even really stretching. “I'm
always
sober in the spirit world,” he sneered.

“My dad says that I need to take this rock and bring it to the center of the underworld, the umbilicus.”

The heron snaked his head down and stared at the quartz. “Look carefully.” His dark eyes were reflected hundreds of times in the backlit quartz.

Petra got down on hands and knees and squinted at it. She looked deeply within, saw the normal ghosts and reflections moving in it. It seemed stable. Real. She reached for it . . .