Mercury Retrograde (16 page)

Maybe there wouldn't be something that wouldn't kill her in the last tunnel. Maybe it wouldn't be poisonous, or burning or . . . Stroud. Yeah, that would be good.

The last road led to a drier chamber. On the bare floor sat a birdcage that contained a single black raven. The raven stared at her with black eyes.

“Oh.”

She looked down at Sig, who was looking all smug. “I'm sorry, dude.”

Sig
harrumphed.
He wasn't going to let her forget this.

Gently, she picked up the birdcage. It was an old, chipped wire cage, the kind of thing you'd see in a catalog that sold shabby chic furniture and things covered in chalkboard paint. But the bird inside was very much alive, cocking its head and watching her as if she were something shiny.

“Let's give this a shot.”

She carried the birdcage back out to her father, set it on the floor between them. She felt a bit proud at having successfully brought back
something
, and she stood over it with her arms crossed.

“Well, that's interesting,” he said, peering at the birdcage.

“What's interesting about it? Other than the fact that I managed not to break it, and Sig didn't eat it?”

“The raven's symbolic of the fermentation stage of alchemy, the fifth stage. That's the stage where everything rots.”

“Okay. Is that good or bad, given our current predicament?”

Petra's dad wiggled his finger between the bars of the cage. The bird pecked at him. “Not sure. It's a more advanced stage than where you are now. So, it could be good. Or it could mean that you're well on your way to getting oozier. Come here.”

She stood before him, expecting some kind of magical ritual or at least a knighting of some kind.

“Stick out your tongue,” he ordered.

She did as she was told.

“Not like that. Say ‘
ahhhh
.' ”

“Ahhhhhhhh.”

He peered into her mouth, at her tongue, and shook his head.

“What?” she demanded.

“There's not enough. So little against so much poison.”

“Awesome.” Petra made a face. “Well, I ran out of roads. This is it.”

Her father nodded and placed the cage in the center of the crossroads, where the bricks had come together in a circle.

“Good luck, my dear,” her father said, his eyes crinkling.

“Wait.” She grabbed his wrist, trying to ignore the disconcertingly-­bony ulna under her fingers. “You're not coming with me?”

“I doubt there's enough magical juice in that cage to get both you and your coyote back intact. Hitchhikers would reduce your chances of success.” He lifted his hand to touch her sticky cheek. “There will be another way for me. Another time.”

The cage began to rattle, like a teakettle on a stove. The bird fluttered inside, agitated, as the cage turned in circles of its own accord. The door of the cage sprang open, and the bird flew out.

“Oh, shit!” Petra cried, reaching out to catch it.

But the raven had split into two birds, bleaching from inky-­black to white.

She glanced back, saw her father smile.

“Excellent, my dear. Most excellent.”

She'd never seen him look this proud of her before, and she was confused. She hadn't done anything, yet . . .

Light filled the chamber, bright as sun on ice. And it all faded to white—­her father, the cage, the cavern—­it all disappeared.

 

W
hen Petra opened her eyes, black sky stretched above her in a skylight cut in the earth. She could make out a handful of stars overhead, and a pale violet glow to the east.

She was cold, cold and heavy, and there was something stuck to her tongue that tasted like pine sap. She gagged, spat it out, and took a deep breath. Water lapped up around her chin.

A furious crashing and rain of water collapsed into her. Sig. He slathered her face with his tongue, dog-­paddling into her chest hard enough that her head nearly went under.

Hands gripped her collar and she gasped, slapping the water with her arms to regain her equilibrium.

And she found herself staring into familiar amber eyes, bright as coals.

“Gabe?” she sputtered. “Where are we?”

He smiled, scraping her wet hair back from her face. Jesus, it had been ages since she'd seen him smile. His arm supported her shoulders as they trod water, and he pointed up. “The Stella Camera.”

Her brow wrinkled. “Why are we here? What happened to the snake?”

“The basilisk is still free in Yellowstone.”

“And Phil and Meg?” she dreaded the answer. “Are they okay?”

Gabe shook his head. “They didn't survive.”

She shivered, hard enough to shake water from her hair into Sig's face. Sig circled them in the black water, yipping and making low conversational
mrrps
.

“Tell me what happened.”

“First, I need to see if the poison has worked through.”

Gabe swam them to shore, towing Petra in the crook of his elbow, Sig in the lead like a happy little flagship. Petra felt leaden and puffy at the same time, as if she'd taken one hell of a beating, and the swelling had started to rise. She stumbled up on the bank, and Gabe picked her up and carried her to a semicircle of rocks at the edge of the cave. Fire sputtered inside a galvanized steel bucket. Sig shook himself off in a shower of salt water that fizzled against the flames.

Petra gratefully extended her shaking hands to the warmth. She looked down at them as if they were a stranger's hands. Underneath the freckles, her skin was pale as curdled milk, and the blue of her veins pulsed oddly beneath, as if they were trying to push something away.

Gabe took her face in his hands. At first, she thought he meant to kiss her, and she lowered her eyes. But he turned her face right and left, tracing his fingers over the veins of her neck.

“Look up.” She did, and he peered intently into her eyes. “Look down.”

Her gaze fell to the salt crystal ground. He lifted each eyelid with his thumb.

“What are you looking for?”

“Signs that the venom has been defeated.” He lifted her hair off the back of her neck, resting his fingers there while his thumb took her pulse. “The basilisk's breath is legendary poison.”

“That must have been what killed those campers at Pelican Creek.” She envisioned that violet mottled skin of the little girl, the red, bloodshot eyes of her father.

“Yes.”

He knew. He
had
been spying on her. “So that was you . . . your raven there?”

“Yes. Open your mouth.”

She stuck her tongue out at him. He was exasperating, and he deserved it. The gesture seemed lost on him, or else he was ignoring it, while he examined her as if she were a piece of horseflesh at auction. He nodded, and she closed her mouth.

“Give me your feet.”

She struggled to sling her soggy feet in his direction, but numbness made her clumsy, and her boot laces flapped against the fire bucket with a bell-­like ring that made her wince.

Gabe took her feet and put them in his lap. He unlaced the boots and stripped off her socks. Petra stared at her feet. They looked like they'd gotten a good case of frostbite, black and bluish. She wiggled her toes, experimentally, just to see if she could. That much was a relief.

She shrieked and nearly kicked Gabe in the face when he drew his thumbnail down the arch of each foot to check her nerve reflexes.

“That's an improvement over where you were,” he said dryly.

She resisted the urge to stick her tongue out at him again, and pulled her legs back with her hands beneath her knees.

“I brought you some clothes,” Gabe said. He reached behind the bucket and handed her a canvas pack.

“Thank you.” She worked at the drawstring of the back with dead fingers, took two tries on the laces before he took it from her and opened it. She stared down at the glittering salt, embarrassed. She felt as helpless as a child.

Gabe reached for her again, and she thought he meant to check her pulse again. Instead, his fingers worked the buttons of her shirt.

“I can . . .” she began.

“Hush.”

She closed her eyes and let him pluck open the buttons of her shirt. He undressed her as tenderly as a lover would, his fingers hesitating over a broken vein or a bruise on her shoulder or calf. She was exhausted and tired of fighting. He dressed her in a soft flannel shirt that she guessed belonged to him, a pair of broken-­in jeans, and socks that felt like wool.

He wrapped a blanket around her shoulders, tucking it under her chin. Sig snuggled up against her thigh and put his wet head in her lap.

“Thank you,” she said, keeping her eyes shut.

“You're welcome.”

His voice sounded more distant. She opened her eyes.

He was dressing in the half-­darkness beyond the rocks. In glimmers of the firelight, she could make out the line of his shoulder and his thigh.

She looked away, aching and confused. In her lap, Sig grinned and shook, as if laughing hysterically at God-­knew-­what. She frowned at the coyote. If he had any bit of Coyote, the one with a capital “C” within him, he was certainly no stranger to the confusion of human and inhuman flesh.

Gabe returned to sit beside her at the fire, dressed in dry clothes. He offered her a canteen of water. She drank greedily, and it felt soothing on her swollen throat. It tasted vaguely of iron, not salt, and she was grateful for it. Water trickled down her chin, but she didn't care.

“So . . . what happened?” she asked softly, when she finally stopped for a breath, clumsily wiping her cheek with the back of her hand. “How did you happen to be right there, at that time?” She wanted to add:
Did your spying raven find me? How long have you been following me? That's completely creeper, especially for a guy who can't acknowledge my presence on the street.
But she bit it all off and waited for him to tell her.

Gabe stared at the fire and put a chunk of wood in the bucket. “We were following the basilisk. I kept . . . I kept seeing you on the trail.” He shook his head. “I couldn't remember who you were. I had the image in my head of you, you holding a gun on me. I kept seeing—­the Venificus Locus. And I had the feeling of it being pulled from me . . .” His fingers pressed his heart, where she had taken it from him.

“Below the Lunaria. I thought you were dead. You were hanging there . . . in pieces.” She shuddered.

He pulled away from her a few inches. “I wasn't . . . completely reintegrated. And I wouldn't have been able to, if you hadn't pulled the Locus out. Still probably am not. The tree is dying. That's why we're pursuing the basilisk.”

She wasn't going to let him retreat back into himself. She grabbed his wrist, clumsily, with her hand. He seemed to hesitate, then covered it with his hand.

“The basilisk has venom, but it also has the power of eternal life,” he continued. “Lascaris conjured it, back when his hold on Temperance was beginning to falter. He went to the spirit world, trapped it, and brought it back here to serve as his guardian. At that time, he had come under attack by some powerful interests of the town who suspected him of dabbling more in magic than business.”

“And was that part of your work—­as a Pinkerton agent sent to investigate him?” He had spoken of this before, and she wondered if he still remembered as much.

“I was more covert in my dealings with him. I worked myself into his social circle, and we became . . . well acquainted.”

“You were his friend.”

Gabe was silent for some time before he spoke again. “I was fascinated with him. He had a gift for connecting the impossible with the possible. He was so much more than the charlatans I'd seen before, the table-­tippers and the channelers of the dead. I did my best to disprove his work in my own mind, but I could not. He did amazing things, and I let myself be pulled into his orbit. He came to trust me, over time, and revealed many of his miracles to me.”

Petra shuddered. “Strange company you kept.”

“You were not the only one to think so. He also came under the scrutiny of the Church. A new priest had been sent to Temperance after the old one had died. Father Brennan was rumored to have studied as an exorcist, so you imagine that he might be . . . somewhat overly sensitive to such things. And Lascaris was never the type to successfully hold himself up as a morally righ­teous man. If you recall, Stroud traced his lineage back to a liaison with Lascaris and the town madam.”

“So he was easy pickings?”

“For a priest with a great deal of charisma, who could strike the fear of God into his congregation? He was certainly a target of interest. Father Brennan's sermons became heavy on the ills of womanizing and merits of stoning sorcerers.” He shrugged. “I forget most of it; I was barely able to sit still for half a sermon in that time.

“But Lascaris was convinced he had enemies. And he was not wrong. Aside from the skeptical investors I represented and the priest working on his own, there were some members of community who had witnessed strange things around his house. There was talk of ghost lights traveling up and down the roads, of women who he'd called on who had vanished. One of them was found later in a valley, with a cabbage where her head should have been.”

“That's . . . kinky?

“I never did figure that one out,” he admitted. “Nor did I determine exactly why he had a patch of pumpkins that bled when they were cut. I suspected that he was growing a homunculus, but . . . with him, one never knew.”

“Halloween at his house must have been something else.”

“Many of the rumors that surrounded him were just idle gossip and ignorance. But Lascaris got poisoned taking Communion, and was concerned enough to call upon a guardian afterward. That little incident took a great deal of his energy to resolve—­he stayed here, at the Stella Camera, for many days, to purge it from his system.”

“Which is why you brought me here.”

Gabe nodded. In the telling of the story, she had pressed her head against his shoulder, and she could hear the buzz that passed for a pulse in his chest. His right hand tucked the blanket more tightly under her chin. “Yours was a much more serious poisoning than the ordinary strychnine Lascaris had been dealt by the priest. But I hoped that it would work against the basilisk's poison.”

“The basilisk. It's a lot tougher than I imagined for a spirit-­world creature.” But it was here, and that gave her some distant hope that perhaps her father could eventually be drawn back.

“Lascaris brought it through with a great deal of trouble. Anything that moves from the spirit world into ours must have a vessel to contain it. It can be as simple as a mirror, or as complicated as a fresh corpse. For this creature, Lascaris began with an ordinary rattlesnake. But the creature's spirit was too large for such a small body. And it changed, evolved into what you saw today.”

“So, it
is
a snake?”

“It started out in this world in that shell, but it was never a simple snake. The basilisk and its ilk were said to have sprung from the blood of Medusa when Perseus decapitated her. I have no idea how far Lascaris had to travel into the spirit world to find such a creature in the first place. I saw it once at his house, sunning itself on his roof. Lascaris had a hard time convincing it to crawl down his chimney, away from casual passersby.”

Petra didn't want to imagine that creature curled up underneath the Airstream. Her trailer was perched on the land where Lascaris's house had once stood. She hoped that it didn't have a sentimental attachment to its old home.

“Lascaris ultimately found it to be too difficult to control. They had a standoff one summer, at Turbid Lake. The earth shook, and the creeks ran backward for many hours, until Lascaris emerged alone from his ordeal three days later. He went into seclusion for a month. I don't know if he was in mourning for the creature, or regenerating his energy.” He trailed off, his amber gaze settling on the dark glass of the salt pond.

“And you pursue it now because it can save the tree?” She imagined the snake slithering around in these tunnels, and shivered.

“The blood from the right side of the snake has the power of eternal life. And the left is poison of Medusa's blood, living death.”

“You want the blood for the tree.”

“I think it can restore it, just like it restored you.”

She blinked at him, remembering the taste of pine sap and copper on her tongue. She knew Gabe not to be especially prone to acts of altruism. He'd gone after the snake at great risk.

“You got the blood . . . and you gave it to me?”

He nodded and looked at her with his level amber gaze. “You're more important.”

“Gabe, I'm not . . .” There was nothing miraculous about her, not like the Hanged Men. She wasn't magical or undead or a living avatar of the power of alchemy. She was ordinary, and she had no understanding of why he would risk such a thing—­his world and the other men in it—­for her.

He reached for her cheek, and his touch on her jaw was like a feather.

A smile played on his lips. “Well, to be fair, I didn't know what side of the basilisk the blood had come from.”