Mercury Retrograde (19 page)

Frankie and Maria, satisfied that she was as prepared as Temperance's meager resources allowed, had left. Sig had found a yellow finch feather stuck to the barbecue, and Maria was determined to braid it into Petra's hair. Some kind of omen or talisman for luck—­Petra hadn't really been listening, focusing on how to best cut the fiberglass insulation with the bread knife that she'd found in the kitchen drawer.

But she was ready now.

She was surrounded by all of the gear she'd assembled: bottles of lye tucked back into the cardboard beer containers, the potato cannon leaning up against the dented skin of the Airstream, and the fiberglass insulation stuffed into a plastic garbage bag. A collection of spears constructed from copper pipe, filed to sharp angles at the edges, was tied in a bundle beside her. She'd stuffed the ends with cotton, hoping that a lucky scratch could collect more of the basilisk's blood.

Sig sat beside her, watching the sky darken and the first pinpricks of stars glowing in the ceiling of the night. She rubbed the soft fur of his back, marveling at how it had changed from the coarse fur of a wild animal to the silky coat of a domestic one. The color was still the same—­gold ticked with black and grey—­but he felt different. He felt different under the fur, too. He had developed a satisfying layer of fat over his ribs and had filled out around his neck. He'd grown a few inches, and he seemed so much more than a pile of legs.

She wondered if she had changed that much. She glanced down at the scars on the insides of her arms. She felt different, inside and out. She'd moved beyond the loss of Des, and come to some understanding of the loss of her father. She understood why he'd done what he'd done: He'd gone looking for magic to cure his illness. As a teenager, she'd never have forgiven him for that. As an adult, she found that she could.

And then there was Gabe. He had given up the future of the Lunaria, and the future of the Hanged Men, for her. She felt unworthy. And she felt responsible for them, the way she'd felt responsible for Des. She couldn't let it turn out the way it had for Des: in flames and death.

And more than that, if she truly admitted it to herself—­she loved him. It wasn't the kind of love she'd had for Des, or for other men in her past. This was different. It was more than fascination, than curiosity. It was a trust, a faith that he was so much more unbreakable than Des. And an admiration for how he'd held on to his humanity for all this time. She wasn't a woman who fell often, but she knew the feeling of the ground when she hit it.

She'd become responsible for a whole lot in a short period of time. And she had to do the right thing. She looked down at Sig.

“For whatever it's worth, I want you to stay here. I love you, and I want you to be safe,” she said. “I can take your collar off, and if we don't come back, you can go back to doing coyote stuff.” It burned her throat to say it.

He laid his head on her knee. He was so much more than a pet; he was a guide, a lodestone. Sig seemed to know things that she didn't, details of the landscape of Temperance and the spirit world. He was a great big spirit poured into a tiny body.

She wrapped her arms around him. “Thank you, Sig.”

He slurped at her cheek, as if to say:
You're not going anywhere without me.

As the gold began to drain from the horizon, a pang of doubt twisted in her stomach. Would Gabe and the Hanged Men go after the basilisk on their own, leaving her behind out of some stupid sense of protectiveness or a desire to move less encumbered?

A dust plume curled in the distance, and she heard the faraway crunch of gravel. Her heart rose as trio of pickup trucks came into view on the gravel road. It was the Hanged Men—­nearly all of them. She counted fifteen of them, perched in the backs of the pickup beds. The trucks drove with no lights. Perhaps they had forgotten, or maybe they had given up on any semblance of attempting to be human for this night.

The first truck pulled up before the trailer. It was shiny new and red except for a dent in the bumper, and Gabe stepped out of the driver's side. He looked as if he was ready for war, in his oilskin, gloves, and a hat drawn low over his glowing eyes. Behind him, she could see the guns piled up in the back of the cab of the truck. Maybe that was why they were running without lights.

“Are you ready?”

“Yeah.” She picked up her bags of gear and crossed to the passenger side. Sig ran before her, sniffing at the truck vigorously.

“What's all that?” Gabe nodded at her gear.

“These are for you.” She handed him the bundle of spears. “They're copper. Copper is impervious to acid. There's fiberglass insulation and cotton stuffed in the tips, and it should be good enough to gather blood.”

“And the rest?” he asked, surveying her packs.

“A way to fight the basilisk. And maybe put it down, once you have what you need from it.” She paused, squinting at the moonlight reflected in the truck's hood. “That's Sal's truck.”

“Yeah.”

She couldn't imagine Sal giving permission for anyone to touch his truck, much less use it for a snake-­hunting expedition. She hopped into the cab, Sig bounding over her to sniff at the guns. “What happened to Sal?”

Gabe climbed into the truck and slammed the door. He cranked the engine, and she noticed that it smelled like something was burning. Not the truck—­the truck still had that new-­car smell. It was Gabe.

His mouth pressed into a grim slash. “It's best if you don't ask.”

 

T
here was batshit crazy, and then there were the Sisters of Serpens.

The Sisters had made camp around the edge of the snake's cave. They'd found a hillock slightly above the cave, between it and the forest, and had built a fire. Bel had said that the snake liked heat. Which sounded like a really awful idea to Cal, but maybe the snake was too full from its dinner of miscreant bros to bother with them. A ­couple hours after the first offering, something had churned below the surface of the mud, bubbling in a wave. It snatched the second body down beneath the surface like some kind of a fucking Loch Ness Monster, then vanished. The third body still floated, facedown, on the mud, like a forgotten doll in the gutter. Which was creepy as hell to look at.

Not that he could get away from it or anything. The one time he got up to take a piss in the woods, he could feel the mercury pounding behind his brain. Even though her back was turned, Bel kept him on a tight leash. He was chained to the campsite, just as surely as if they'd tied him up.

He sat morosely in soggy grass, his hands gripping his knees. He watched the Sisters build the fire, chattering among themselves in low whispers. Their excitement was palpable. A ­couple of them seemed stunned, sitting quietly and staring up at the sky or at the cave. A handful were jubilant, whispering prayers around toothy smiles. Bel was by herself, facing the cave, seeming to meditate.

“It's amazing, isn't it?” Dallas sat down beside him, offered him a granola bar.

Cal shook his head. He had no appetite. After a while, he muttered: “It's what you wanted, isn't it?”

“Yes!” Her eyes shone. “I just can't believe all this is really real.”

“You can't believe that there's a man-­eating giant snake down there?”

“I can't believe it came true!” She grinned. Dallas had a nice smile for a crazy person.

“I don't get it. Most ­people get their freak on for Jesus or something. What's the deal with the snake?”

“The snake is ancient, one of oldest allies of women. She is strength, she's renewal. She's medicine and mystery. Snakes guarded cattle and children, temples and priestesses in ancient Egypt. Wadjet was the Mother who defended all of Lower Egypt and its rulers. She was the Eye of the Moon, the Lady of Flame. Under her rule, there was peace.”

Dallas took a stick and drew in the soggy dirt. She drew a woman in profile, wearing a crown with a cobra on it.

“Over time, she was demonized. She was cast into the role of Medusa, the adversary. The serpent that tempted Eve. Women were cast as weak, and the snake as the personification of the devil. This is the philosophy that's held sway for hundreds of years. And it's time for it to change.”

Cal wasn't going to argue anthropology with her. He had no church to defend. “Well, be careful what you wish for, and all that.”

“You don't understand. The Great Mother rewards her followers. She will love us and protect us. You still have a chance.”

“A chance at what?” He picked at his boot laces. They were crusted with mud and a bit of dried blood.

“A chance to follow her. To prove yourself. To be safe.”

Cal stared at the ground. That was all he ever really wanted out of life. To feel safe. He'd done a whole lot of things to try to feel safe. He'd run away from home, and wound up under Stroud's roof. He sure as hell wasn't going to add worshipping a giant snake with a taste for human flesh to his list of bad decisions. That just seemed obvious.

A roar sounded in the distance. Dallas's head snapped around. The Sisters' bikes were parked at the bottom of the hill—­they were silent and silvery. The sound came from beyond them.

Bel unfolded herself from her meditation posture at the edge of the mud. Her spine rolled as if she'd grown a ­couple of extra vertebrae, and the tattoos on her arms twisted. Cal squinted—­was that his imagination? Her voice rang clear and loud over the encampment.

“Sisters! Prepare to defend your Mother!”

She reached to her belt for a knife.

“Oh, shit.” Cal groaned.

Headlamps streamed through the landscape. Five men on ATVs stopped at the edge of camp. They wore camouflage hunting clothes and had rifles and shotguns mounted to the racks on the backs of the four-­wheelers. A ­couple of them had video cameras—­something about them seemed too slick to be regular hunters.

Cal muttered to Dallas: “What's that thing about not bringing a knife to a gun fight?”

Bel strode toward the first vehicle.

“Greetings, ladies!” the rider bellowed. He was a big man, bearded and jovial-­seeming. His teeth were so white that it must hurt when air hit them.

“Are you lost?” Bel asked, cocking her head and parking her hand on her hip.

“I hope not. Name's Arthur.” He stuck out a meaty paw.

Bel stared at him, and the paw dropped. “What are you doing here?”

“We mean you ladies no harm. I'm the host of the
Mystery Trackers
television show. You probably have seen us on basic cable. We just got syndicated last season.”

Bel stared at him.

“We're the guys who reeled in the world's largest catfish,” Arthur supplied helpfully.

She continued to stare.

“Here. I've got pics on my phone. Somewhere.” He pulled out a brand-­new cell phone and began thumbing through the pictures. Arthur's charm was clearly getting him nowhere. “We're hot on the trail of that Yellowstone Worm, and thought we saw the trail leading here.”

“That's what you're calling her? The Yellowstone Worm?” Bel said quietly.

“Until we come up with something better. We were thinking ‘Campsite Creeper,' but that's already been used for a serial killer. We're also considering ‘The Cryptid Creature,' but we did something like that already with Bigfoot in the Pacific Northwest . . .”

Cal's heart pounded under his tongue. He wanted to shout out at the guy, to warn him and the other dudes to run like hell and not look back. He stood up and opened his mouth to yell . . .

. . . but Bel was faster. A knife glittered in her fist, and she plunged it into the man's camo-­covered gut.

The women swarmed into the field beyond. Gunshots rang out as the men grabbed their weapons. Dallas shoved Cal to the dirt, and he heard bellows and shouts. An engine started, then another. One of them must be making a run for it, and the women were giving chase.

Cal peered up. The big guy was rolling on the ground, being stomped by two of the Sisters. Two of the others were trading shots over the shrubbery.

Bel was gone.

Cal's gut lurched. If Bel was killed, who could keep the mercury in check?

And if she was gone . . . maybe he could run.

He climbed to his feet. He got exactly four steps before his feet were kicked out from under him, and Tria was standing on his neck. He gurgled and struggled, clawing at her booted ankle.

“Let him up, Tria. Bel won't like it if you hurt him.” Dallas was beside her, tugging Tria's arm.

“He was trying to escape. I saw him.” Tria's lip pulled back in a snarl.

“Bel wants him in one piece.”

Tria ground her heel into his Adam's apple, and Cal gurgled. He felt the mercury welling up within him. Bel must have gone too far away, too far away to control . . .

The mercury hissed up through his hands, soaking through his pores, wrapping around Tria's boot. She snarled and kicked at him, but the mercury held fast. It curled up her leg, spiraling up her thigh. Tria pulled out her knives and slashed at it, splitting droplets of silver and her own blood to the dirt. The mercury squeezed—­Cal could feel it—­and there was the sound of bones popping, like chicken bones gone down the garbage disposal.

“Cal, stop it!” Dallas shouted. Her arms were around Tria's waist, trying to support her, but the mercury crawled upward, constricting the woman's waist and lungs. Tria fell to the dirt, slashing and writhing with the mercury.

“I can't!” Cal howled. It was as if the mercury was an entity with its own mind, and it was determined to prove it. He tried to pull away, but the mercury clung to his arms in gooey strings. “Get away from it!”

Dallas scrambled back in horror.

The mercury wrapped around Tria's neck. He could feel through the mercury, as if it were his own fingers. The mercury began to compress. Cal tried to stop it, but he couldn't. The mercury squeezed so hard that Tria's face was beginning to turn red, then purple.

“It's going to kill her!” Cal howled. “Somebody help!”

Dallas rushed toward him, holding a branch like a baseball bat.

A gunshot echoed through the dark, and Dallas stopped. She looked down at a bloom of red blossoming on her T-­shirt.

She staggered and slugged him in the head. Everything in Cal's world went black.

H
e would not get away.

Bel opened the throttle of her motorcycle, plunging into the forest. The Triumph's engine roared, and the knobby tires chewed into the leaf-­strewn dirt. Bel was prepared: the Sisters' bikes were heavily modified to handle road and mud. One never knew when one might have to go into the backcountry to bury a body. It was just a shame she had to chase these cretins. Waste of gas.

The ATV the guy was riding, to her practiced eye, was a stock 110 four-­stroke engine. With the two heavy cameras on the back plus a guy around two hundred pounds—­it wasn't going above thirty-­five miles per hour on this uneven terrain, even if he got a cheetah to push.

Bel could see him ahead of her, a light bouncing in the forest of cottonwood trees. Behind her, the motorcycles of her sisters zinged musically. Her tires slashed through the leaves, spewing yellow fragments of debris and mud into the dark. A June bug slapped into her collarbone, and mosquitoes committed suicide on her headlight lens.

She zipped right and left around the trees, bending through the turns, catching him easily. He glanced back at her in panic. He was the camera guy—­he was unarmed and had no idea what to do with a pack of motorcycle chicks on his six.

Bel reached back into an open saddlebag, withdrawing a tire iron in her fist. She drew up beside him, just a bit past, then cast it out. She leaned left, braked and throttled to bank hard away. The tire iron slashed into the guy's chest, causing him to let go of the handlebars. The four-­wheeler swerved, caught the edge of a fallen log, and turned over.

Bel circled back, her engine buzzing in her ears. She cut to neutral, dismounted, and walked the Triumph back to where the ATV lay on its back, like a turtle in the road, illuminated by her headlamp.

The rider lay in the saffron leaves, gasping. The tire iron had done a nice job of breaking some ribs, and he rolled on the ground, clutching his midsection and moaning unintelligibly.

Two other Sisters rolled up to a stop, intensifying the circle of light around him.

“What do you want us to do with him, Bel?”

He couldn't be allowed to live. He might tell others about the Mother. “Put him out of his misery. Cover their tracks as best you can. Ditch the machines or hide them, and bring him back for an offering.”

The women nodded and began to tear through his packs. If there was any video evidence, they would destroy it. If there was anything there of use to them, they would take it. And the rest would likely wind up in the creek.

Bel climbed on her bike and headed back to the camp. Someone would eventually come looking for these monster hunters. There were more threats coming for the Mother. And she had to look to their own losses, find the best way to protect the Great Basilisk. Before, Bel and her sisters simply hit the road when trouble came sniffing too close. But now, they had another mission: to protect the Mother. And that would require an entirely new strategy, a new way of dealing with the world.

When she returned to camp, her heart sank. The Sisters were gathered around one of their own on the ground. Dallas had been shot.

The boy, Cal, was unconscious beside her. Tria stood over him with a tree branch, ready to whack him if he rose again. She wasn't putting any weight on her left leg, but she was determined not to show it.

Fool.

Bel knelt beside Dallas and pressed her hand to her fallen Sister's sweaty forehead. Dallas's breathing evened a bit, and Bel picked at her bloody shirt to assess the damage.

“How bad is it?” Dallas whispered.

“It's bad, honey.” She'd been shot beneath the ribs, and she'd lost too much blood. The dirt beneath her had grown red.

“I won't make it?” Her voice quavered.

“No, dear.” Bel put both her hands on Dallas's forehead. There was nothing she could do for the wound and the blood loss, but she could ease her pain. Hypnotic magic trickled from her fingers into Dallas's brow, dulling the sensation. Dallas's brown eyes dilated black, as if she'd spent the evening shooting heroin instead of bleeding out.

“You are a good soldier, Dallas.”

Dallas smiled, her lips pale as old bubble gum.

“Do you want me to take you to the Mother?”

“Yes.” She exhaled. “I want . . . I want to see
her
.”

Bel lifted Dallas into her arms, and turned toward the cave. She carried Dallas down the hillock, waded into the scalding mud with her burden. The mud slid over her knees, down her boots, as she approached the mouth of the cave. It steamed; she did not know if the Mother slept or woke.

“Mother, I have brought you one of your guardians, who has fought off interlopers sent to kill you.” Bel's voice echoed in the cave.

She took a deep breath and slogged inside. The mud thinned as she climbed up a slope and around a tunnel, into a hot sandstone cave that caused sweat to prickle out on her skin. Dallas was slippery in her arms, and Bel adjusted her grip. It was dark here, only dim light from the outside filtering in.